Sunday, April 5 1903

Sunrise.

No snow on the ground.

Well, Miss Aylmer's play has gone off— not terribly badly, either. The Queen's College Society was quite put out at the lack of opportunities for sneering. But I have another story to tell, for I've been up all night with it. The night began in misadventure and ended— somewhat the better for it, and a good deal worse. Mysterious, aren't I! !

I'd planned at first to go with Lurch, but he was under the weather and colder to me lately anyhow, so May talked me into coming out to her cousin's house in Priest Pond for the night. Then I thought better of it, and told May I was going to stay in Shrews— I'd had two long rides out in the past four days and was feeling homebodyish. Then I planned to go back to Aunt Dan's with Tom after the play, but on the way there he said he'd been up all night last and needed to sleep, so I decided mid-performance to revert to my original plan and come back with May, whom I fully expected to meet coming off the stage as soon as it was over. All that makes me sound like quite the hopeless flitabout, but really— I only wanted to be with someone; an evening concert is so intoxicating that I feel I've wasted something if I go home after, and take all my music and my thoughts to bed with me. Well, and I'm a flitabout, but never mind.

I meant to tell May as soon as we got there, but she was already backstage and Tom and I had to find seats before the lights went out. In any case, May knew I'd told her I was going back with Tom, and Tom was sure I'd caught up with May, and they both left without me before I came back from the washroom.

I waited a few minutes around the door, feeling utterly stupid, and Emily came by with the S.H., all bruisey glow and crimson. It stung me to see them, Di, I don't mind saying it- for Emily who was so stiff and Murrayish in rehearsal, all but burst into flame on stage, and Ilse, in all other worlds ridiculous, is unmockably beautiful before an audience. They know as much, and wear their knowledge like so much glittering jewelry, turning where they stand so the light flashes on it. And I know as much. What could I do but congratulate them both?

The sickening thing is, they didn't need my praise— they didn't want it— but it would have been dishonest to withhold it. Not that either of them bothered to act like a human being about it in any case— the way Miss B.S. looked at me you'd have thought I'd handed her a dead bird on a plate instead of a compliment. And Ilse smirked and shook her bright hair like a spoiled child, and they walked past me with barely a word.

When it was clear May and Tom had both gone, I walked out under the moonlight, still anxious, still stupidly unwilling to go home. I walked up empty frost-hardened Main Street and around to the post office with its west wall full of advertisements, pouting bare-shouldered women with frost on them, smiling at nothing. Then I thought I would walk out to May's cousin's after all, for I wanted to be alone and I wanted someone to talk to, and I set off across the fields then and there, hardly thinking about the cold or my thin stockings or how far it was.

I had just turned out of town when who should pass by but Marsh, bridle in hand and a peculiar look on his face.

"Out for a walk," he said, in that flat brick-like way he has of laying a question down.

"I'm visiting May's family in Priest Pond," I said. "What are you doing out at this hour?"

Of course he didn't bother answering my question. "Priest Pond's far off," he said. "You need a ride?"

"I'm happier walking, thank you."

"Oughtn't walk by yourself."

"It's perfectly safe."

Now, I'd never thought a thing about walking at night, winter or summer- not that I'd done much walking over fields, mind. But the way he looked at me you would have thought I said the moon was a pig's potato. "It's no kind of safe to walk eight mile alone at ten o' clock at night," he said. "Let me get the trap and we'll get you there in half an hour."

Of course, that was too absurd. I think I said something then about the roads being frozen and his half-rotten trap ending up in a ditch, possibly including the near-certainty of both of us dying of exposure and our half-eaten corpses being found by a pack of grammar-school girls at some point in mid-June.

"Let me walk with you, then," he said, staunch as you please.

"Don't bother. I'm not going all that way tonight. I'll just go home."

And he set his hand on the sleeve of my coat.

Doesn't that sound like nothing in particular!

But it was as though he had riveted me to the ground. I felt as though Mark Delage Greaves were writing my internal monologue— all hideous swirls of purple and red, unworthy of the name of words. It was far worse than when I went riding with M. last winter and thought I wanted to be in love, though I guess it was a feeling of a similar kind. But I am not describing it properly, Diary, because you would lose all respect for me at once if I did. And you know full well what sort of thing I don't hesitate to set down. So we shall leave it at that.

He kept his hand on my arm- not holding it, just there, and in my head I could hear myself screaming to step back. But I just stood there, and didn't turn away, and after a long while he gave my arm a squeeze and looked down at me as if he were really about to move in for a kiss. And then I stepped back.

It was only then that I realized we were standing in the middle of a field— Geordie Red McKay's pasture, to be specific— and that anyone passing for a mile in either direction could have glanced over and seen us. But there was no one for miles, not even the rustle of animals. There was not even any wind. It felt as though the world had stopped the moment he put his hand against my coat. And then I saw that his gloves were thin, and the knuckles under them red through the loose knit. I felt such a strange pity for him— in all honesty, Diary, I wanted to take his hands in my hands and breathe on them, the way Mrs. Halloran used to when I was little and came in from the snow. It was all I could see in my head— taking his hands like that. But I didn't— I didn't touch him again. To tell the truth, I was afraid to. Instead I slipped off my fur muff and tried to hand it to him.

"Here," I said— or something like that only clumsier. "Put your hands in here."

But he wouldn't take it. At the time I thought he was just being solicitous, though perhaps he was simply loath to be seen wearing a woman's muff. I took it back but didn't put my hands in it- I stuffed them in the pockets of my coat. We walked the mile back to the post office barely looking at each other, and not speaking at all. My heart was pounding terribly; I don't know why. I know perfectly well why.

Just behind the post office he stopped suddenly, in front of one of those infantile smiling women who know the Ivory Soap secret to a happy marriage. There were icicles above us, deadly-looking spires shivering just above our heads. He stopped and said, Evie, and I could have kept walking home without looking back but I didn't. I stood where I was, only a few feet from him, with my poor shoes tottering on the ice, unable to move toward him or away. I knew what was going to happen and that I had to prevent it, and I knew that I was not going to prevent it, and he put his cold hand against my cold face and a wave of heat went through me like a bolt. I felt dead certain he was going to kiss me, but he didn't. He took his hand away and tucked it in the crook of his arm— to warm it, maybe— and he looked at me and then away.

"Can I see you again," he said.

"Of course, I'll see you in school," I said.

"I don't mean that. Will you come out riding with me again sometime."

There was a simple answer, no, but I couldn't make myself say it.

"I don't know," I said.

He put his hand on my sleeve again. He must have seen that I was upset by it. But he just looked at me, steady, and sort of sighed, as if he'd read it in a magazine somewhere that he was supposed to sigh.

"I'd like it if you would," he said. "Just a ride out once, once in a while. You're fine company, Evie."

"I should go home," I said. "These shoes. . ."

He didn't nod or look down. He could see how I was affected, that much was hideously obvious. It was as if he could see right through my skull to the awful fire. And I was shaken not only by my feelings, but at the utter ridiculousness of them. I can hear you clucking at the foolish hearts of young girls, but if you knew me, you would know this is precisely the sort of thing that doesn't happen to me. Skull Vice-President Lurch Mackenzie, handsome, clever, well-read— and what's a little lurchiness more or less between friends? —can tuck his arm around my waist, can kiss me a dozen times and tell me he's crazy for me— or, what is more likely these days, that I'm a heartless flirt for speaking to him in the first place; choose your poison— and I notice it roughly as much as I notice Mrs. Halloran brushing my back with the wool-duster. But let clumsy Marsh Orde put his chapped hand on the sleeve of my coat— and now, hours later, my head is still swarming with words so melodramatic I'm sure you'd never speak to me again if I set a single one of them down.

We parted ways at the stable and I tried not to think of it. On the hill at the crossroads, between home and the churchyard, I turned away from the road and hid myself behind an oak tree, barely able to keep my breath steady. What had happened? I didn't and don't dare analyze it overmuch. I looked up through the filigree of branches and sad frost-choked buds and saw the grey clouds closing over the moon, and I closed my eyes. The wind had begun again on the way up through town, and it howled around me and through the dry frozen grass, and I imagined I was lost, without a name or a family, that I had been born on that hill full-grown, with no knowledge of language or the world.

Foolish Ev. My feet were frozen numb when I got home, and Mrs. Halloran woke and scolded me for not being where I ought to be, and I called her a senseless fat old biddy hen and went to bed. I lay awake squeezing my poor bare feet and setting them against the hot-water bottle and squeezing them again, and then I lay awake in a storm of words, most of them meaningless, and feelings, all of them inappropriate to my station. Then the sun came up and I wrote this.

I suppose when the story hits Shrews. H.S. and I die of embarrassment, May will come up here before the funeral, ransacking my papers for confirmation of her thespic genius. Well, heaven forbid I disappoint the poor serpent: she didn't fall down and she didn't forget any of her lines— so there. (And if I do die of shame because an innocuous encounter was blown up by gossip into some sort of melodramatic fall from grace, May and Kate— and probably that little pink-faced Prep Anita Ball— are the ones to blame. No, don't look innocent at me, May, or I shall haunt you quite mercilessly!)