Emily's Quest (1927)

Chapter 12

I

"MAY 4, 19--

"One o'clock is a somewhat unearthly hour to be writing in a journal. The truth is, I've been undergoing a white night. I can't sleep and I'm tired of lying in the dark fancying things--unpleasant things--so I've lighted my candle and hunted up my old diary to 'write it out.'

"I've never written in this journal since the night I burned my book and fell downstairs--and died. Coming back to life to find everything changed and all things made new. And unfamiliar and dreadful. It seems a lifetime ago. As I turn over the pages and glance at those gay, light-hearted entries I wonder if they were really written by me, Emily Byrd Starr.

"Night is beautiful when you are happy--comforting when you are in grief--terrible when you are lonely and unhappy. And to-night I have been horribly lonely. Misery overwhelmed me. I seem never to be able to stop half-way in any emotion and when loneliness does seize hold on me it takes possession of me body and soul and wrings me in its blank pain until all strength and courage go out of me. To-night I am lonely--lonely. Love will not come to me--friendship is lost to me--most of all, as I verily feel, I cannot write. I have tried repeatedly and failed. The old creative fire seems to have burned out into ashes and I cannot rekindle it. All the evening I tried to write a story--a wooden thing in which wooden puppets moved when I jerked the strings. I finally tore it into a thousand pieces and felt that I did God service.

"These past weeks have been bitter ones. Dean has gone--where I know not. He has never written--never will, I suppose. Not to be getting letters from Dean when he is away seems strange and unnatural.

"And yet it is terribly sweet to be free once more.

"Ilse writes me that she is to be home for July and August. Also that Teddy will be, too. Perhaps this latter fact partly accounts for my white night. I want to run away before he comes.

"I have never answered the letter he wrote me after the sinking of the Flavian. I could not. I could not write of that. And if when he comes he speaks of it--I shall not be able to bear it. Will he guess that it is because I love him that I was able to set at naught the limitations of time and space to save him? I am ready to die of shame at thought of it. And at thought of what I said to Mrs. Kent. Yet somehow I have never been able to wish that unsaid. There was a strange relief in the stark honesty of it. I am not afraid she will ever tell him what I said. She would never have him know I cared if she could prevent it

"But I'd like to know how I am to get through the summer.

"There are times when I hate life. Other times again when I love it fiercely with an agonized realization of how beautiful it is--or might be--if--

"Before Dean went away he boarded up all the windows of the Disappointed House. I never go where I can see it. But I do see it for all that. Waiting there on its hill--waiting--dumb--blind. I have never taken my things out of it--which Aunt Elizabeth thinks a sure indication of insanity. And I don't think Dean did either. Nothing has been touched. Mona Lisa is still mocking in the gloom and Elizabeth Bas is tolerantly contemptuous of temperamental idiots and the Lady Giovanna understands it all. My dear little house! And it is never to be a home. I feel as I felt that evening years ago when I followed the rainbow--and lost it. 'There will be other rainbows' I said then. But will there be?"

II

"MAY 15, 19--

"This has been a lyric spring day--and a miracle has happened. It happened at dawn--when I was leaning out of my window, listening to a little, whispering, tricksy wind o' morning blowing out of Lofty John's bush. Suddenly--the flash came--again--after these long months of absence--my old, inexpressible glimpse of eternity. And all at once I knew I could write. I rushed to my desk and seized my pen. All the hours of early morning I wrote; and when I heard Cousin Jimmy going downstairs I flung down my pen and bowed my head over my desk in utter thankfulness that I could work again.