She wrote, “I have begun to feel myself one with my kind.” Maud always prided herself on her capability and intellect. Too often, she’d held herself aloof from the “common” folk around her. Now she knew that she could make serious blunders. Her engagement showed disastrously poor judgment. None of her breeding or wit had kept her from stumbling.
Maud was powerfully affected by the books she read that summer, and by one in particular. It was called The Love Letters of a Worldly Woman, and it put notions of sensuality and “earthly passions” in a new light. Maud had never thought about physical passion before — such things were too unladylike to discuss. She lived in a puritanical family. Maud’s future was closing in tightly around her. She felt “gloomy at present, bounded and narrowed in.” But she read with fascination about a woman who found freedom in something as taboo as sexuality.
At the same time, Maud experienced a growing curiosity about “things spiritual and eternal.” She began to see that her childhood ideas of religion had failed her. Even her vision of heaven, she realized, held little promise of replenishment. One’s choice seemed to be either eternal damnation or eternal boredom. Heaven, she decided, must be “dreadfully dull.” The Macneills were not given to deep theological discussions; Maud had nowhere to turn in her bewilderment.
That anxious summer and fall before her twenty-third birthday, Maud realized her old beliefs had fallen away, but nothing new had yet replaced them. She grew introspective. Friendships were few and far between. She had too much time to herself, brooding and daydreaming.
Till the long engagement was over, Maud struggled to find some useful way to pass the time. Once again, Grandfather Macneill blocked all her efforts to obtain a teaching position. He proposed that Maud should clerk at a store — a more useful and “womanly” employment. When she demurred, he refused to loan her his horse to travel to teaching interviews. In early October, just when all had begun to look hopeless, Maud received a last-minute invitation to teach at a small school in Lower Bedeque — again through the intervention and help of her fiancé, Edwin Simpson.
Maud eagerly seized on this escape. Edwin Simpson’s friend Alf Leard was leaving Lower Bedeque to study dentistry, and Maud stepped into his old teaching position. She also entered Alf’s friendly and welcoming home as a boarder. Alf Leard had a sister, Helen, just Maud’s age. The Leard homestead provided a refreshing change from the gloom of Belmont and her isolation in Cavendish. Maud entered a warm, convivial family home. Six of the Leard children still lived there — including Alf’s eldest brother, Herman, a highly-thought-of young man in Lower Bedeque, preparing to take over his father’s farm.
The Leard house combined the best qualities of her grandparents’ house and Aunt Annie’s happy home in Park Corner. The Leards were highly respected in the community, but not stuffy, nor especially intellectual. They enjoyed one another’s company, going together on outings, or staying home and making their own fun. They were fond of practical jokes and appreciated Maud’s ready wit and skill at storytelling. She felt at home immediately.
The only fly in the ointment was Maud’s hateful engagement to Edwin Simpson, which she had not yet summoned the courage to end. Lower Bedeque provided her with a welcome respite from her anxiety.
The town sat on the south shore of Prince Edward Island, facing the mainland of Canada, giving it the feel of being connected to the wider world. There, Edwin Simpson was out of sight and out of mind. Helen and Maud quickly became friends. Maud’s fourteen new students came from well-to-do farming families. She found teaching at Lower Bedeque easy and pleasant, with plenty of time left for socializing and for writing.
Several new publication opportunities came the young author’s way, many in Golden Days, which now accepted Maud’s poems and stories on a regular basis. She finally had a true literary home, as well as a comfortable, happy place to live.
Edwin continued to write faithfully to Maud. Maud dreaded Edwin’s long, sentimental letters, and looked on the task of writing back as a nearly impossible burden. But at least there was distance between them. That summer, Edwin had come to Cavendish for a visit. While he’d sat chattering away in the Macneill parlor, Maud excused herself and ran up to her room. She threw herself on her bed, crying, “I can never marry him — never, NEVER, NEVER!” Then she somehow pulled herself together, walked downstairs, and went on with the visit.
Lower Bedeque was too far for Edwin to drop by for casual calls. Maud kept herself almost frantically busy. The townsfolk of Lower Bedeque had welcomed their popular, pretty young schoolteacher with open arms. So had her hosts, the Leards — and before long, one of the Leards in particular.
When Maud first met the eldest son, Herman Leard, he seemed ordinary enough — under medium height and pleasant. Maud described Herman in her journal as “slight, rather dark, with magnetic blue eyes.” He did not strike her as being handsome — not at first. Herman Leard looked and acted younger than his twenty-seven years. He was easygoing and full of fun, qualities Maud always treasured in men — from her happy-go-lucky father to the still-mourned Will Pritchard. Herman drove Maud to Baptist meetings in Central Bedeque. They joked and chattered all the way there and back.
One moonlit night in November, they were making their usual drive home. Maud rode along sleepily. The stars were shining; the evening was calm and beautiful. They glided across snow. Herman said little. He suddenly drew his arm around Maud and laid her head gently down to rest on his shoulder. She made a move to protest but found herself pulled back into his embrace. Herman’s warm touch triggered an electric awakening of body and mind.
That moonlight ride, she later wrote, was the beginning of her “Year of Mad Passion.” Where Edwin’s caresses repulsed Maud, Herman’s slightest touch thrilled her. She felt happy and frightened, “voiceless, motionless.” This was dangerous territory, she realized, but she had been waiting all her life for such an experience, “indescribable and overwhelming.”
As soon as they reached the Leard house, Maud sprang from the buggy, running for her life. She vowed never to go near Herman again. Yet the very next evening he took her driving and put his arm around her again, drawing her warm and close. Touches turned to caresses, caresses to long kisses. Maud’s passionate nature leaped to life. Poor Edwin’s embraces had left her “cold as ice.” Herman’s first kiss “sent flame through every vein and fibre of my being.” With every passing day, Maud fell more deeply under the spell of this passion. Though she did not want to admit it, she was finally, hopelessly, head over heels in love.
Maud recorded in her journal all the logical reasons why it would never work out between her and this magnetic young farmer. Even if she ended the hateful connection with Edwin Simpson, her passion for Herman Leard “seemed little short of absolute madness.” He had no ambition beyond farming; he had little interest in literature or ideas. “Herman Leard was impossible, viewed as a husband.” Even his attractiveness counted against him — or so Maud tried to believe; Herman was “only a very nice, attractive young animal!”
She tried to dismiss his family as being beneath her, but the Leards were an intelligent, respected, and respectable farming family, leading citizens of Lower Bedeque, a place she liked very much. The family liked and appreciated Maud. She was crazy about Herman. What, then, was the real problem?
Maud kept a secret even from her journals, which she did not reveal in the “Year of Mad Passion” — or ever. It is the first clear instance in which her supposedly honest outpourings turn from fact to fiction. There was one important reason why Maud and Herman could not be together: he was already promised to another girl. Biographer Mary Rubio points out that Herman had been “going around” with the popular, good-looking local Ettie Schurman long before Maud came on the scene. Maud must have heard the rumors in Lower Bedeque. They were considered a perfect couple — much liked and widely admired in the close-knit community. It was understood that Ettie and Herman were soon to be married. All the while Maud was staying at th
e Leard house, Herman continued to squire Ettie around to church and social events.
People in Lower Bedeque gossiped that Maud made a spectacle of herself over Herman, much as poor lovesick Fulton Simpson had done over Maud — rushing from window to window whenever Herman left the house, straining to see who was with him and what time he returned. None of this earned a single word in her journals. The Herman-Ettie relationship casts a scathing light on the events of that year. Maud told herself — and therefore others — the love story she wanted to hear. Her journal reflects a whirlwind of tangled emotions: guilt and elation, excitement and dread. But the bald facts she left unrecorded.
In her journal, Maud presents herself as a young woman caught between two devoted suitors. The real facts were more complicated and less romantic. Maud and Herman both behaved badly, sneaking off behind the backs of their respective fiancés. And just when it seemed things couldn’t get worse, Edwin Simpson himself dropped by for an unannounced visit.
Edwin had earlier explained that he was unable to get away for the winter holidays. He’d sent Maud her Christmas present by mail — an engraved silver knife, which he crassly informed her had cost him “quite a pretty penny.” Maud was tucked away in her room in late December when Herman’s sister Helen came upstairs and asked, “Who do you suppose is in the sitting room?”
Maud knew with a sinking, “horrible presentiment”: it could only be the unwelcome Edwin Simpson. The Leards knew nothing of Maud’s secret betrothal. Edwin presented himself that night simply as Alf Leard’s school friend, so all of the Leards kept company together, little dreaming that Edwin had come to see Maud.
The sight of Herman Leard and Edwin Simpson sitting calmly side by side in the drawing room was more than Maud could stand. Had it happened in one of her books, she would have made great comedy of it. But in the thick of it, Maud lost her famous sense of humor. She bit her lips to keep from screaming.
Long after Edwin and the Leard family had gone to bed, Maud lay in the small room near Helen, feverish with despair. It was a hellish night. “There I was under the same roof with two men, one of whom I loved and could never marry, the other whom I had promised to marry but could never love! What I suffered that night between horror, shame and dread can never be told. Every dark passion in my nature seemed to have broken loose and run wild riot.”
Edwin left early to catch a boat. Maud vowed to herself that she would break the detested engagement before she set eyes on him again. Meanwhile the secret lovers, Maud and Herman, resumed their illicit assignations. They found every excuse to meet. Herman would creep close to where Maud was reading by the fire and hold her hand beneath the camouflage of her shawl, or lay her book down and take her in his arms, pressing his face to hers. Maud ran her fingers through his curly brown hair. They would kiss and “all heaven seemed to open in his kisses.” But later, alone in her room, she would burn with shame and confusion. Of course she confided in no one — not a relative, not a friend, certainly not Helen, who knew and liked her brother’s girl, Ettie.
Maud wrote in her journal at the time, “I have . . . in my make-up — the passionate Montgomery blood and the Puritan Macneill conscience. Neither is strong enough wholly to control the other. The Puritan conscience can’t prevent the hot blood from having its way . . . but it can poison all the pleasure and it does.”
Maud was never sure how much Herman understood her. She never knew how well he fathomed her heart. Surely he must have heard the rumors about her secret engagement to Edwin Simpson. Maud feared that Herman thought her nothing more than an “unprincipled flirt.”
Herman himself was capable of deep feeling, Maud was sure. If he was playing with fire, she noted, he himself had been burned in this experiment. For Maud, the memory of his deep kisses, the touch of his tousled hair under her fingers, was a precious, singular gift, she wrote more than twenty years later, that she would not “barter for anything save the lives of my children.” Without that year of wild passion, agonizing as it was, “all the rest of life seems grey and dowdy.” She could not ever entirely deny or refute it, or wish the painful memory away. She never felt more alive than in those hours spent in her lover’s arms. That was her glimpse of paradise, she felt. She never forgot it.
After Edwin’s unexpected visit, Herman stayed away from Maud for a few days. He gave her chocolates and books for Christmas with a simple “These are for you, Maud.” But on Christmas Eve, Herman asked if she would arrange to come downstairs with him. The next night, he came for the first time to her bedroom — ostensibly to deliver more books and chocolates. She sent him away after one impulsive, passionate kiss. But so began a pattern, almost a dance between them. The couple would keep away from each other for a few weeks, and then something would throw them together and they would end up secretly holding hands in the parlor or kissing in the privacy and darkness of her room, Herman’s arms around Maud.
Herman was still seeing Ettie all this time — a fact Maud leaves out of all her written confessions. Often he came to Maud after he had been out for the evening. One fateful night, he did not come in till nearly midnight. As usual, he brought her mail and a box of chocolates, his excuse for stopping by. Maud began chattering — she was terrified of the “electrical silences” that fell between them. But that night she found herself too exhausted to go on trying to make light conversation. Herman fell silent, too.
He slipped beside her and buried his face on her shoulder. She asked him to leave. He lifted his head and their eyes locked. At that instant she felt herself on the edge of a precipice. Then he said — she doesn’t record exactly what — a single sentence urging her forward. It was an invitation to disaster. Maud was young, she was Victorian, but she knew about women making love before marriage and about babies born out of wedlock. No small town in the world is so remote that it does not have its share of scandal. Maud finally lurched into action. She wept as she sent him away. “Herman — you ought to have gone long ago. Oh, go!” Even then, he stayed a moment longer, slipping onto the floor, on his knees, gazing at her. Then he kissed her and left.
Alone, she marveled at herself. Was this the proper schoolmistress, Maud Montgomery? Only a faint and hysterical no had stood between her and “dishonor.” Maud dreaded facing Herman the next morning — but he wisely said nothing. He kept his distance a few days more, then reappeared in her room late at night, asking to borrow a light for his lamp. They went right back to their old intimate ways — embracing, touching, Maud “smoothing his curly hair with a hand that he would snatch and kiss as if every kiss were his last.”
He came back again the following week. This time when she tried to send him away, he would not go. He looked at the clock, lay down beside her, and kissed her bare arm. Once again he made “the same request he had made before, veiled, half inaudible but unmistakable.” For one breathless moment, her “whole life reeled in the balance.”
One last time, Maud refused. It was not to save her virtue, she confessed, not from any moral sense — not even a fear of pregnancy or public shame. What held her back was “the fear of Herman Leard’s contempt.” If she yielded, he might despise her. She could risk anything but that.
Maud told Herman he “ought not to be here at all. Nobody ever was before. Now, Herman, go!”
This time he did not argue. He only murmured, “All right, dear. I’ll go.”
That night something finally broke between them. Herman may have realized that Maud was not a heartless, practiced flirt, that both were risking everything. He never came to her room again.
That spring, unexpected news from home changed everything all at once. Grandfather Alexander Macneill — Maud’s stubborn, irascible nemesis — had died suddenly in Cavendish. Maud received the news with shock. She had never felt close to her grandfather — she had often feared him, but he was an essential part of her childhood, and his absence was unimaginable. She rushed home to be with Grandmother Lucy Macneill. At this crisis in her family’s life, she put loyalty above lon
ging. It was exactly the decision that her fictional Anne would make, coming home to Green Gables to care for Marilla.
Alexander Macneill’s funeral was a large, solemn community event. It brought back to Maud memories of her mother’s funeral in that same parlor. Grandfather Macneill, so forbidding and fearsome to Maud, appeared gentler in death than he ever had in life. Maud felt a rush of affection for the man who had been the bane of her childhood. His sister, great-aunt Mary Lawson, the wondrous storyteller, had adored him, and through her remembrances Maud could imagine the promising, clever young man he once had been.
Grandfather Macneill’s death also revealed Grandmother Lucy Macneill’s vulnerability. In her seventies now, the frail woman could not manage the post office alone, her only source of income. What’s more, Grandfather’s will left his intentions unclear — and Grandmother Lucy’s position in her own house shaky.
Alexander Macneill had willed his farm to his estranged son, John, next door. Monies and household furnishings went to Grandmother Lucy Macneill. Uncle John quickly claimed the barns and horses. For the time being, it was assumed that Grandmother Macneill might stay in the house as long as she lived. But how long would the bullying Uncle John agree to this arrangement? And how could Grandmother Macneill withstand him if he began pressuring her to move out?
Maud knew that as long as she was in the picture, Lucy Macneill’s position in her own house held strong. Maud made her decision at once. She would leave Bedeque as soon as the teaching year ended, and come home to help her grandmother survive. Maud could help run the post office; she would assist with the housework and upkeep and all practical affairs. And she was ready and willing to stand up to the aggressive Uncle John.
Maud’s outsider status in the family was only confirmed by her grandfather’s will: Grandfather Alexander Macneill had left Maud nothing at all — not even a token gift of remembrance. If Grandmother Lucy Macneill depended on Maud for her continued existence, Maud also depended on her grandmother. Neither had anywhere else to go. Together, they could preserve the homestead and their own shaky independence.
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