Discovering Emily (5 page)

“Miss Carr, Mrs. Lewis, I'm so glad you could come,” said the tall, well-dressed woman who appeared behind the servant, holding her hands out to them. “And this must be young Emily.”

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Belleville,” Dede said, smiling at the woman. Then she turned to Emily and gave her a warning look. “Behave!” that look said.

“Please, come into the drawing room,” the woman said, directing them with a graceful wave of one hand. “The Smiths have been
so gracious in allowing me to display some of their paintings.”

Emily's mouth dropped open. The Smiths? She glowered at Dede. How could Dede let Emily get so excited and then give her the Smiths? Her first art exhibition, and it was already ruined. How could she possibly enjoy the paintings now?

Dede saw Emily's sour face and gave her a pinch. Feet dragging, Emily followed the ladies into the drawing room. At least the Smiths themselves weren't here, she told herself. Perhaps their paintings would be nicer than they were.

The Bellevilles' drawing room was larger and fancier than the Carrs'. Mrs. Belleville pointed out the many pieces of furniture that had come all the way from England.

“Please sit,” she said, helping Mrs. Lewis over to a large chair of polished wood and embroidered cushions.

“Of course,” she added, waving a hand at several paintings displayed on the walls
around them, “this is nothing like the real exhibitions of art Mr. Belleville and I attended when we were last in London. Our good friends in England were appalled to hear that Victoria has no galleries or artist societies.”

“Yes, such organizations are luxuries we do not yet have,” Dede said stiffly. “I'm sure they will come in time, but Victoria is still so new. There is more important work to attend to first — such as the creation of a women's Christian society.”

Emily scowled and turned her back on the women. If they'd come to look at the paintings, why weren't they looking at them? She walked over to a small water-color. She was determined not to like anything created by the Smiths, but her eyes roved hungrily over the painting. It was a soft delicate scene of a lake surrounded by trees. She had to admit the picture was pretty. She liked the feeling of sunlight on the green leaves. But the arrangement of lake and trees seemed too perfect to Emily. She remembered Mrs. Smith's high voice saying how the landscape in England and
France arranged itself into a composition so much better than the unruly wild scenery of British Columbia. The Smiths seemed to imply that only well-behaved landscapes could be painted, and that British Columbia was much too wild and disordered to interest any real artist. Emily bristled as she moved to the next painting.

Mrs. Belleville noticed her.

“That one was painted right here in British Columbia,” Mrs. Belleville said with pride.

The painting Emily was now looking at showed faraway mountains partly hidden behind thin wispy mist. In the foreground, a small house had been given a curved roof like an Eastern temple. It didn't look like any of the houses Emily had ever seen, and the mountains and mist didn't look familiar either. Nothing about the picture looked like it had been painted in Canada.

“The Smiths are such fine artists,” Mrs. Belleville was saying. “Victoria is lucky to have them compliment us with a visit.”

Emily turned away to hide her disgust. The Smiths' visit a compliment to Victoria?
Ha! The woman had obviously not heard the Smiths talk, and she hadn't noticed that they hadn't tried to paint what they saw here either. All they had painted were romantic imaginary landscapes.

An angry remark rose in Emily's throat, but she swallowed it. She might not like the Smiths or their impressions of Canada, but they did seem to know how to paint, and Emily didn't want to be sent out to sit in the buggy before she finished looking at all the paintings.

“There!” Dede said once she and Emily had returned home. “Now that you have seen real art perhaps you will keep your mouth shut about matters you know nothing about.”

Emily didn't say a word. Her mind was full of confusing thoughts. She seethed at the Smiths' snobbery, and their paintings had been disappointing, but Dede was right. The Smiths were real artists, and Emily wasn't. She would never be able to paint like they could. She didn't want to, she told herself. She wasn't interested in their phony, well-behaved landscapes. Despite all of this, seeing real paintings stirred something inside Emily — something that made
her want to race up the stairs to her easel, pick up her pencils and brushes and create something of her own.

She made herself climb slowly up the stairs to her room and not look at the easel that stood by the window. How simple and joyful it had been to do the sketch of Carlow, and how happy she had been to have art lessons. She wished she hadn't heard of the Smiths and their snobby painting ideas. Now she didn't know what to think. She imagined Carlow out in his kennel — his warm fur and comforting licks. At least there was nothing to be confused about where dogs were concerned. Sometimes it seemed they were the only things in her life Emily was sure about. No matter what, she still wanted a dog.

Emily had always wanted a dog of her own — a soft chubby puppy that would wag its tail and come to her whenever she called. It was almost December now. Her birthday was coming, and it had been a long time since Emily had last asked Father if she could have a puppy.

Emily put art out of her mind, and thought more and more about her birthday. On the first day of December she climbed out of bed into the chilly air and pulled out the basin of water that was kept under the bed. She dipped her hands in the icy water and splashed some onto her face. Father believed that children should wash with cold water every morning. If Emily skipped a morning wash, Father was sure to ask her about it.

Before breakfast the family gathered in the sitting room for their morning prayer. Father sat in his new wicker chair and reached for the small book of prayers that sat on the round table beside him. The others knelt on the floor in front of their own chairs while Father read the prayers. Emily liked to kneel in the bay window and bury her face in the windowseat cushion, but today Father asked her to kneel beside him. Emily knelt and ducked her head under one arm of the wicker chair. She'd much rather be by the window where she could sneak a peek outside now and again. Instead, she snuck a look at Tibby, the cat, who was curled up
behind Father's chair close to the warmth of the fireplace. Tibby was the only one who looked comfortable.

As Father prayed, the chair creaked and whispered as if it were trying to pray too.

Emily whispered a silent prayer of her own. “Please let me have a puppy. I don't care about its size or shape or color — just as long as it's a real live dog.”

When Father finally finished reading and leaned forward to reach for his bookmark, the chair squawked an “Amen” as grand as Father's. Tibby joined in with a loud meow. Emily smiled to herself. God had heard her prayer for sure.

“Oh dear,” said Mother, rising to her feet. “Father's chair has pinched Tibby's tail. Take her outside, Emily.”

As the thirteenth of December, Emily's eighth birthday, approached, Emily's hope for a puppy grew.

“I know something is coming for your birthday,” Dede told her in one of her better moods.

“Is it…?”

“Wait and see,” Dede said.

Emily wiggled with excitement. How could she wait? She needed to know — even just a hint.

“Does it start with a ‘d' or maybe with a ‘p'?” she asked.

“I think it does,” Dede said with a smile.

The day before Emily's birthday she couldn't help singing more loudly than
usual as she did her chores after school. She brought the chickens their food and checked for eggs in the hen house. She sang out greetings to the cow who stood near the barn waiting for Bong to come to her for the evening milking.

Dede appeared on the back porch.

“Hush, Emily,” she scolded. “That noise of yours will scare the neighbors!”

Emily took her excitement away from the house and out to the woodshed. She dug out a wooden box and dusted it off, hoping it would be the right size for her puppy. Then she went to the garbage pile where discarded items waited for the spring bonfire. She poked around until she found an old brush that Alice had thrown away a month ago. It still had a few bristles left and would do for a dog brush.

Emily carried her supplies back to the house. She waited until no one was around, then quickly smuggled them up to her bedroom and hid them under her bed. She found a knitted blanket that belonged to an old worn doll and placed it in the box under
the bed. Then she braided a collar out of blue and green cord and sewed on some hooks and eyes at varying distances, since she wasn't sure how big the dog would be. Now she was ready.

The morning of Emily's birthday arrived. Morning prayers seemed to take forever. “Hurry! Hurry!” Emily wanted to call out. “I want to see my puppy!” Finally, Father's chair squeaked its concluding “Amen!” Everyone took turns giving Emily a birthday kiss, and they all filed into the breakfast room. Emily hurried ahead, anxious and excited.

There on her plate was a flat flat parcel.

“Open it!” Lizzie and Alice urged her.

Emily looked around the room, but there was no other present. She began to untie the string of the flat parcel, her hands shaking.

“I'm glad to see, Emily, that you remembered your morning wash even on your birthday,” Father said, noticing Emily's hands.

Emily tried to smile, but her hands were not trembling from cold. The happy feeling

she'd woken with this morning had drained away. As the parcel wrapping fell to the floor, Emily tried not to cry.

The present was a framed picture of a little girl holding a dog in her arms. It was a pale and tiny copy of a painting like one of Miss Woods' prints — lifeless.

“She looks like you,” Alice pointed out.

“No, she isn't like me,” Emily said in a hard voice. “She has a dog.”

Emily went to the fireplace at the end of the room, pretending to warm her hands. She slipped the blue and green collar from her pinafore pocket and dropped it into the fire.

“I'm not hungry,” she said. “I'm going out to feed the chickens.”

That day took a long time to end. In the afternoon, Mother came and felt Emily's forehead and asked her if she was feeling sick. Emily shook her head and tried to smile for Mother.

Emily climbed into bed that night without saying her prayers. What good was it to pray for anything? What good was it to wish?

Although Emily had tried to put art out of her mind, she found that drawing helped to ease her disappointment about her birthday. When she stood at her easel, her pencil or paintbrush at work, she forgot about everything except the joy of what she was doing. She decided that it would be much better to keep the Smiths and what they stood for out of her mind, than to keep art out. She dove back into her drawing practice, filling more pages with noses, hands, feet and faces. As Christmas drew closer, she became further distracted by the preparations and growing excitement.

The day before Christmas, the Carr house
filled with the spicy smell of boiling plum pudding and the fresh fir scent of the Christmas tree. On Christmas Eve Father took Emily and her younger sisters into town to see the shops lit up. Every lamp-post had a fir tree tied to it, and the shop windows were decorated with mock snow made of cotton wool and sparkly dust. In the grocer's window was a Santa Claus grinding coffee. Bonbons, clusters of raisins, nuts, candied fruits and long peppermint candy sticks surrounded him. At the end of the food shops was Chinatown. Its dark streets held no Christmas decorations. Emily's father turned them around to head back to James Bay.

Before bed the children hung their stockings from the high mantelpiece in the breakfast room, and Dede read “ ‘ Twas the Night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…”

At the bottom of the stairs Emily peeked into the dark dining room and smelled the Christmas tree waiting there. She couldn't
see it, but she knew that it stood there, touching the ceiling and hanging heavy with presents ready for the morning. Up in her bedroom the air was chilly, and Emily dove under the covers next to Alice. She wiggled with excitement.

“Be still,” whispered Alice. “I want to sleep.”

Emily tried to keep still, but she tossed one way and then the other. How could she fall asleep when there were presents waiting? She tried not to think of the new set of paints she wanted or of the cuddly puppy she had longed for. She knew it wouldn't do any good to wish for them, but she couldn't help hoping that something special hung on the tree for her.

Morning finally came, and they were off to church. After church, Father went into the dining room to light the candles on the Christmas tree. Then he called everyone in, and they held hands around the tree to sing Christmas carols. Then, one by one, the presents were taken down from the tree and handed out. Emily held her breath
as she unwrapped each of her presents. Everything was practical, as usual: gloves from Dede, embroidered hankies from Alice and Lizzie, new black boots from Mother. No puppy. No art supplies.