Yet at the end of Christmas Day, 1895, Maud declared that her holiday had been “pleasant, after all.” She had eaten a good dinner and spent a social evening in the parlor. Maud was honing her special genius — to make the most of any situation, and to find humor under the most trying circumstances. It was a gift she would pass along to her own young fictional heroines, and a resource that upheld her for years to come.
One piece of Cavendish holiday news seemed small at the time. Their old, loved Cavendish minister, Mr. Archibald, had accepted a position elsewhere and was leaving after eighteen years. Maud could not have known how important a new cleric might be to her own future. At the time she merely noted, “it will seem very strange to have another minister.”
Maud did well in her classes at Dalhousie, but not since studying under John Mustard had she felt so uninspired. Years later, she’d wish she had spent her precious year of freedom abroad. Still, Maud earned the highest grade on her Latin exam and placed Firsts and Seconds in all her other subjects — except English . . . which she failed! After that blow, she redoubled her efforts.
February 15, 1896, brought another wondrous first her way. Maud never forgot the date, for it marked a turning point in her writing life. For the first time ever, she was paid real money for her art. Maud earned five dollars — the equivalent of a week’s worth of piano lessons — for a single poem. She’d won a contest run by the Evening Mail, answering the question “Who has more patience, man or woman?” Maud’s answer, unsurprisingly, was woman — and she wrote her argument in verse, under the pen name Belinda Bluegrass.
Maud decided to spend those precious five dollars on something lasting, something that would remind her of her glorious achievement. She bought handsome bound volumes of poets Tennyson, Longfellow, Whittier, and Byron. A few days later she received another check from a Philadelphia magazine, Golden Days, for a short story. The budding writer felt delighted and encouraged — and rich!
The next two months brought a positive financial windfall. In March, Maud earned twelve dollars for a poem in The Youth’s Companion. This was especially gratifying, she gloated, because “The Companion only uses the best things.” A few days later Golden Days sent another three dollars for a poem called “The Apple Picking Time.”
Even her Cavendish relatives and neighbors could not dismiss these successes. Literary reputation meant nothing to those honest folk. But cash was indisputable. The timing could not have been better, since Maud’s experimental year at Dalhousie was drawing to an end. In April Maud took her last exam at Dalhousie — and, she exulted, “probably the last exam I shall ever take!”
By and large, though, the year at Dalhousie proved a failure. No journalism job came Maud’s way. Her ability to forge her own way in the world remained as shaky as ever. The only place to go was home. Maud left behind her cozy little room on the Third-and-a-Half floor and headed back to Cavendish — and an uncertain future.
Once again, Maud found herself at a disadvantage because she could not interview at schools in person. Grandfather Macneill would not help Maud in this foolishness of wanting to take on the man’s work of teaching. But Maud claimed a significant new supporter. It was her handsome, clever cousin Edwin Simpson, whom she had come to know a bit better during that year’s visits at Park Corner.
Edwin had inherited the good looks of the Simpson family, and most of the brains. He had saved enough from his teaching to go to university. Now he made inquiries at his old school on Maud’s behalf, and helped secure her his old teaching place at the Belmont community school, thirty miles from Cavendish.
Maud spent that summer with Grandmother and Grandfather Macneill. She was no longer a child — and her years of schooling were clearly over. Maud took long rambles through Lover’s Lane, and visited her old church, finding it strange not to see her old minister, Mr. Archibald, at the pulpit. Upstairs in her summer den, she reread old letters, including the love letters from Nate Lockhart, and “a strong longing swept over me to go back to those dear old merry days.”
A few of her childhood dreams were finally becoming reality. Maud received another five-dollar check from Golden Dreams for a short story. Neighbors and friends in Cavendish envied her “good luck,” but few realized “how many disappointments come to one success.” The young writer was beginning to recognize what a long, slow climb her Alpine path demanded.
Maud turned introspective that summer. She read philosophy and began to consider her own spiritual point of view. She dutifully went to church twice on Sundays, though she confided to her journal, “once is enough to go to church on any Sunday.” Her idea of a perfect Sabbath was to escape into “the heart of some great solemn wood.” There, she could commune with nature and “my own soul.” But she knew better than to preach her beliefs in Cavendish. “The local spinsters would die of horror,” she noted wryly.
In August, Maud set off for her teaching job in Belmont, a few miles from the home of cousin Edwin Simpson. She spent her first few nights in the Simpson household — Edwin had already left for college — observing the family. They proved a peculiar bunch. Edwin had three brothers: Fulton, a “perfect giant” with oversize hands and feet, Burton, and Alf, whom Maud found the least “Simpsony” of the bunch. There was also Edwin’s teenage sister, Sophy, whom Maud dismissed as “the most lifeless mortal I ever came across.” Luckily, Maud had her great-aunt Mary Lawson there for company and consolation. Aunt Mary declared that the Simpsons, having intermarried for years, were “too much of one breed.”
After a few uncomfortable days with the “Simpsony Simpsons,” Maud fled to board closer to her new school. The village of Belmont was picturesque, situated close to the Malpeque Bay. But her first glimpse of the people gave her a “creepy, crawly presentiment.”
The Belmont school was located on “the bleakest hill that could be picked out,” and student attendance was poor, with only sixteen “scrubby . . . urchins” present. The building was small and sparsely furnished; the stovepipe not yet installed. Maud arrived and found the children huddling around the cold stove, looking forlorn. Many were surprisingly backward in their studies, though one young woman, the well-to-do niece of a trustee, was preparing for Second Class work at Prince of Wales College and expected Maud to voluntarily help with all of these preparations.
Nor did Maud’s lodging situation help. Her new landlady, Mrs. Fraser, was a good cook and kept a clean house, but Maud’s room was barely bigger than a closet, and it was mercilessly cold. The wind whistled through the house. One morning, Maud woke to snow blanketing her pillow. The Belmont schoolhouse was little better, with a stove that worked fitfully. All Maud could think about, day and night, was how to get warm.
Maud escaped whenever possible to the Simpsons’ but soon found herself part of a bizarre love triangle. She liked her cousin Alf well enough, and was happy to go out visiting and on drives. Her large, sickly cousin Fulton, however, fell into a jealous rage if Maud went anywhere with his brother. As soon as Alf and Maud stepped outside, Fulton would rush to the window to watch their every move.
Maud hated to give up the Simpsons, but she was afraid of what Fulton might do next. He spied on her, his face pressed against the window. One of her own mother’s disappointed suitors, Maud remembered, had gone insane and hanged himself. Maud began to have trouble sleeping. Her only happy times were during rare visits out of town with old friends, or moments when she could sneak a little time alone with that wonderful storyteller, her great-aunt Mary Lawson.
In January Maud was permitted to move upstairs to a larger — and warmer — room at the Frasers’, heated with its own pipe. Basking in warmth, Maud felt “like a new creature.” That winter a visiting evangelist held revivals in Belmont every Sunday, and these, Maud granted, were welcome as entertainment against “the deadly monotony of life here.” The church was so packed that they ran out of places to sit, but at least Maud’s fanatical admirer, her cousin Fulton Simpson, had simmered down and now made a great show of snubb
ing Maud every chance he got.
Just when Maud thought she’d escaped the clutches of Simpsony love, she got a letter that startled her “more than any I ever received in my life.” It was from her handsome cousin Edwin Simpson, away at college. Maud and Edwin had corresponded a few times since he’d left. His letters were always long and newsy. This one followed the usual pattern, but suddenly, in the middle of the fifth page, Edwin made a declaration. Instead of telling her in person, he had to declare in a letter “what I now feel I must tell you. It is that I love you.”
Maud almost dropped the letter. She barely knew her cousin. They’d remained near strangers since their first meeting at Park Corner. When younger, Edwin Simpson had struck her as unbearably vain and self-satisfied. He was said to be a champion debater, a fine public speaker, and his family expected great things from him. But Edwin and Maud had hardly spent two days together — far less time than she’d spent with other young men who had courted her and been turned down without a moment’s hesitation.
Just when one would expect Maud to issue another swift refusal, she hesitated. That summer she had found her cousin Edwin improved from what he had once been. She judged him with an unusually cool head, given that he confessed to “an uncontrollable passion” for her. Edwin Simpson was good-looking, with his smooth dark hair and chiseled features; he was clever and well educated. Their background and tastes were similar.
Maud knew that her grandparents would disapprove. They had never cared for these Simpson relatives, and Grandfather Macneill was “rabid” against second cousins marrying. Worse still, Edwin was a Baptist — further insult to the Presbyterian Macneills. But “if I cared for him,” Maud concluded, it would all “be a very suitable arrangement.”
The catch, of course, was that Maud did not care for him. But she did not voice an absolute refusal. If Edwin pressed her for an immediate answer, Maud wrote back carefully, she would have to say no. But she might perhaps come to care for him if he were patient and willing to wait.
Edwin responded confidently. He refused her refusal. He wrote another long letter, announcing that he would wait and hope for a more positive answer. Apparently he considered himself quite a catch. Edwin had been named editor in chief of his college paper, and as a debater had been dubbed “a Hercules.” His current interest was in law, he declared, and he showed every sign of one day becoming a successful lawyer. He was clever, charming, determined, and loquacious.
Stuck in poky Belmont, Maud was as lonely as she’d ever been in her life. She had fewer prospects. The new teaching work was exhausting. True, Maud was gaining a little literary recognition. One wonderful day, two of her stories were accepted by two different magazines, and that “heartened” her considerably. Yet she also wrote in the journal she only half-jokingly called her “grumble book,” “Oh dear me, is life worth living?” Perhaps not, she concluded, when one felt as tired and worn out as she did.
Had Maud been less lonely, she might have paid more attention to her intuition. In those few days when she and Great-Aunt Mary Lawson had shared a room at the Simpsons’, they had gone over the family one by one. Clumsy, sickly Fulton Simpson was outright peculiar, as he’d proven in his nearly demented attachment. Alf, his brother, was pleasant enough company, but he didn’t dance — to Maud an “unpardonable sin.” The young sister was dull.
Edwin Simpson was the best of the bunch — which wasn’t saying much. He never knew when to stop bragging, or talking. He could not sit still, and his nervous tics drove Maud to distraction — he was always waving his hands, twitching, talking, and tapping his fingers. Edwin seemed to have improved in recent years, but Maud had not spent enough time with him to know if her cousin could make a possible partner.
By April Maud had come to one decision, at least: she would not return to Belmont the following year. “I hate Belmont,” she declared, and the people, with very few exceptions, were “perfect barbarians.” Her moods flipped from depression to hyperactivity. She was restless and nervous all that spring, and had trouble sleeping.
In the middle of April, a letter from Prince Albert brought heartbreaking news. Laura Pritchard’s brother — the precious, fun-loving, lively Will Pritchard — had died suddenly, of complications from influenza. Maud felt sick with grief. She could not believe it — her merry, gentle friend from Prince Albert, the kindred spirit, gone. In agony she reread Will’s last long letter to her. It felt like yesterday that they had carved their initials on an old poplar tree and walked together at twilight. Maud never admitted she had loved Will Pritchard, but thirty years after his death she had a dream that they were engaged. And when Laura Pritchard returned the little gold ring that Will had coaxed from Maud, Maud put it on her own finger and wore it till the day she died.
Maud was in a vulnerable, unsettled state of mind in the weeks that followed. When she returned to Belmont to finish the school year, Edwin Simpson showed up in person. Maud knew her grandparents would not approve. To them, this Baptist cousin would be as welcome a suitor “as if he had been a Mohammedan,” but Maud had decided that when she set eyes on Edwin, if she felt she could care for him, she would accept his proposal.
She next saw Edwin Simpson to the best possible advantage — he was up on the church platform, poised and admired, addressing the Sunday school when she entered. “He looked well — spoke well.” Edwin was attentive and kind, and on a moonlight walk home he urged his suit again, like a good lawyer in training. His timing was perfect. A few days earlier and Maud would have felt too unsure to answer. A few weeks later, she’d realize she “could never care for him.” Caught up in the romance of the moment, Maud said yes. Edwin kissed and thanked her.
Maud came home that evening feeling dazed. She trudged upstairs and sat a long time, dizzily staring into the dark. She was twenty-two years old. For the first time in her life, her future was secure. She felt neither happy nor unhappy, devoid of all emotion — surely not, she noted, the way a girl should feel “just parted from the man she had promised to marry.”
Over the next few days, Maud realized with a creeping “icy horror” that Edwin’s caresses did not merely leave her cold — they filled her with revulsion. Maud managed to put off wearing an engagement ring. Their engagement was to be a long and secret one. But her fiancé was not so easily tucked out of sight. She found evenings in Edwin’s company as agonizing as those she had once spent with the determined, dull John Mustard in Prince Albert. But now her feelings of distaste were mingled with self-disgust and remorse.
Everything Maud came to learn about her fiancé made matters worse. Edwin had led Maud to believe he was headed for a successful career in law. Now that their bond was assured, Edwin revealed his true career plans — to become a minister. A Baptist minister! Maud had always declared herself unfit for a clerical life. She knew that the role of minister’s wife would limit her in countless ways. Edwin offered grudgingly to give up his plans if Maud insisted, though it would be a great “inconvenience” to him. Maud quickly backed down. Edwin’s future career, at the moment, seemed the least of her problems.
By mid-June Maud’s stunned torpor had fizzled away. In place of numbness, she felt desperate. Maud did not love her fiancé. He irritated and disgusted her. Yet she was committed to marry the eager young man. How could she have made such an enormous mistake? She felt despairing, disoriented. “I am not Maud Montgomery at all.”
Belmont buzzed with gossip about the new couple. Maud parried the teasing mechanically, but with irritation. She could not bear to be reminded of the engagement. Yes, Edwin was “good, fine-looking and clever.” If their marriage consisted of nothing but intellectual conversations, she might be able to stand it. But anyphysical contact with Edwin felt harrowing.
Edwin’s restlessness and tics and endless talking made Maud want to scream. He tired and bored her, and even worse, he seemed totally unaware of her feelings. Edwin assumed that Maud must be as thrilled by their engagement as she should be. Every fiber of her trembled “wi
th a passion of revolt against my shackles.” Even the beauty of spring failed to comfort Maud. “A veil seems to have dropped between my soul and nature.” She went through the glorious June days without joy, energy, or hope. She could neither sleep nor eat. Each day was filled with increasing despair, and there was not a soul to whom she could confess her troubles.
Ending an engagement was no light matter in Maud’s world — it never is. But in her day and age, there were legal as well as social and ethical considerations. A jilted suitor had legal recourse. The scandal was highly public, and any girl who broke off an engagement would be forever branded as flighty and untrustworthy. Maud’s family and neighbors had always regarded her as “queer.” If she ended things with Edwin Simpson, she would only confirm their opinion. And what future prospects did she have but to shift from one poor teaching position to another, to creep from one rented room to the next?
Maud saw that spring of 1897 as a time of deep internal change. Till then, she believed she had led a relatively happy, carefree life. She had always felt buoyantly optimistic about her future. “Life looked to me fair and promising. . . . Now everything is changed and darkened.”
Maud suffered her first anxiety-driven “three o’clock in the mornings” that spring. She paced up and down in her room with clenched fists, unable to sleep, unable even to sit down, picturing Edwin thinking happily of her. In a world of “beauty and gladness,” she was a “blot of misery.” Maud longed for home, for Cavendish — there, she thought she could find some degree of peace and calm again. In the first “dark night of the soul” in Maud’s young life, her thoughts instinctively turned toward home.
Back home in Cavendish that summer, Maud felt neither happiness nor peace, but as if she had come through a tempering fire. Autumn brought a “solemn beauty” to Cavendish, and something of its solemnity descended to Maud. She felt older than her twenty-two years — no longer young, prideful, or carefree.
House of Dreams Page 8