"No. I just LOVE to write.”
"A better reason — but not enough — not enough. Tell me this — if you knew you would be poor as a church mouse all your life — if you knew you'd never have a line published — would you still go on writing — WOULD you?”
"Of course I would," said Emily disdainfully. "Why, I HAVE to write — I can't help it at times — I've just GOT to.”
"Oh — then I'd waste my breath giving advice at all. If it's IN you to climb you must — there are those who MUST lift their eyes to the hills — they can't breathe properly in the valleys. God help them if there's some weakness in them that prevents their climbing. You don't understand a word I'm saying — yet. But go on — climb! There, take your book and go home. Thirty years from now I will have a claim to distinction in the fact that Emily Byrd Starr was once a pupil of mine. Go — go — before I remember what a disrespectful baggage you are to write such stuff about me and be properly enraged.”
Emily went, still a bit scared but oddly exultant behind her fright. She was so happy that her happiness seemed to irradiate the world with its own splendour. All the sweet sounds of nature around her seemed like the broken words of her own delight. Mr Carpenter watched her out of sight from the old worn threshold.
"Wind — and flame — and sea!" he muttered. "Nature is always taking us by surprise. This child has — what I have never had and would have made any sacrifice to have. But 'the gods don't allow us to be in their debt' — she will pay for it — she will pay.”
At sunset Emily sat in the lookout room. It was flooded with soft splendour. Outside, in sky and trees, were delicate tintings and aerial sounds. Down in the garden Daffy was chasing dead leaves along the red walks. The sight of his sleek, striped sides, the grace of his movements, gave her pleasure — as did the beautiful, even, glossy furrows of the ploughed fields beyond the lane, and the first faint white star in the crystal-green sky.
The wind of the autumn night was blowing trumpets of fairyland on the hills; and over in Lofty John's bush was laughter — like the laughter of fauns. Ilse and Perry and Teddy were waiting there for her — they had made a tryst for a twilight romp. She would go to them — presently — not yet. She was so full of rapture that she must write it out before she went back from her world of dreams to the world of reality. Once she would have poured it into a letter to her father. She could no longer do that. But on the table before her lay a brand-new Jimmy-book. She pulled it towards her, took up her pen, and on its first virgin page she wrote, New moon, Blair water, P. E. island.
October 8th.
I am going to write a diary, that it may be published when I die.
THE END