House of Dreams

by Liz Rosenberg

  Maud acted bravely on another front as well. A few days before the news of her grandfather’s death, she finally wrote to her cousin Edwin Simpson, begging release from their engagement. She made no excuses. She herself was entirely to blame, she wrote. She expected her fiancé to dismiss her with scorn.

  Instead, Edwin responded with a “frantic” twenty-page letter. He wondered if she had heard rumors about him, if his letters had been too tedious. It was a heartbroken and heartbreaking piece of writing. Edwin was uncharacteristically humble and emotional. Perhaps Maud would still change her mind, he insisted. He was too in love with her to give her up easily.

  Maud felt the irony of her position. With Herman, the secret lover she adored, she never knew where she stood. But Edwin Simpson truly loved her. If only she had “loved him as he loved me — or as I loved — the other man!” But Maud had suffered living in deception long enough. She had to face facts — and to get Edwin to accept them as well. Maud wrote again, begging Edwin for the pity she felt she little deserved, asking him to set her free.

  Edwin responded with another long letter, this one firmer and more legalistic. He would not release Maud from the engagement, he insisted, “without sufficient reason.” The fact that Maud declared she did not love him, could never care for him, and had come to feel their engagement a “hateful fetter” failed to provide enough clear evidence, apparently. Edwin proposed to set Maud free for a period of three years — but meanwhile they must continue to stay very close and to correspond. If after three years, Maud still felt she couldn’t love him, then he would consent to break off the engagement.

  Maud was horrified. She saw Edwin’s plan as a three-year prison sentence. She wrote a bitter and angry letter she regretted instantly, but she likened herself to a wild animal caught in a trap, “biting savagely at its captor’s hand.” Somehow she must make Edwin understand that he was well rid of her. Her wild letter worked. A few days later, Edwin sent back her photograph. A scant handful of apple blossoms came fluttering out of the envelope — a souvenir he had claimed on a day when Maud wore a spray of apple blossom in her hair. She was free.

  Herman Leard asked for a photograph to remember Maud by. He waylaid her in their usual places, trying to find her alone. The night before she left, he held her close and they passionately kissed good-bye. She could hardly bear to tear herself away. Her love for Herman proved to be messy, bewildering, exhausting, foolish — and eternal. She never forgot him. Heartsick, Maud felt her life was over — and more than half wished it was. Her season of great passion would never come again.

  Herman Leard stood among the others at the station the next morning to see her off. There was no time or place for a personal farewell. His slender figure was the last she saw receding at the platform.

  Maud could not have known when she rode away from Lower Bedeque that she would be trapped at home for most of the next thirteen years. If she had known, she might not have had the courage to begin. Maud spent a wretched first week in Cavendish, heartsick for Herman, missing Bedeque, which now seemed, in hindsight, a beautiful oasis in her lonely existence.

  Maud had returned to her childhood place only to feel trapped by old childhood roles. Her aging grandmother assumed Maud would live exactly as she herself did. Lucy Macneill had grown increasingly nervous and set in her ways. If she went to bed at nine o’clock, she expected her young granddaughter to go to bed at nine. If she bathed once a week, then Maud must only bathe once a week.

  Maud felt isolated, “a virtual stranger” in Cavendish — so many friends in her beloved old crowd were gone. She escaped, as always, into books and nature. She reread her old letters, burning many. She looked over her lighthearted journals from the past, marveling at how merry and easy her life had been.

  But her true apprenticeship as a writer also began during these difficult years. Without teaching, without the fetters of an unwanted engagement, without social distractions, Maud bent her full energies to writing. She knew how to work long hours. She was not afraid to fail — she was used to that now, too. She earned new literary successes to lift her spirits — letters of acceptance and invitations to send further work — and the writing itself was “a great comfort to me in these sad days.” Maud was back in her beloved upstairs summer suite of rooms, overlooking poplar and fir woods, fields of red clover. It may have been the only place in the world that could have healed her broken heart. “The house is still, the atmosphere one of dreams,” she wrote.

  Over the next two years, one harsh reality hit after another, a series of blows. In summer of 1899, a year after she had left Bedeque, she heard the shocking news that her magnetic, mysterious, vibrant young lover, Herman Leard, had died suddenly of influenza. Grandmother Macneill read about it in the local paper. Knowing nothing of Maud’s passionate history with Herman, the older woman mentioned it casually.

  Maud’s initial reaction in her journal was intense, wild, filled with raging sorrow. It was easier, she confessed, to think of him as dead, “mine, all mine in death, as he could never be in life, mine when no other woman could ever lie on his heart or kiss his lips.”

  All of Maud’s hidden jealousy burst out upon the news of Herman’s death. And of course it was Ettie Schurman whom everyone remembered at the funeral and afterwards. Ettie grieved for Herman long and truly. She planted blue forget-me-nots on his grave. All of Bedeque mourned Herman and pitied poor Ettie. Herman’s funeral was a large one. But Maud had no part in any of it. The newspaper announcement of his death went into Maud’s scrapbook. Maud had no photo to remember him by, so she cut a picture from a popular magazine of a dreamy-looking dark-haired young man in uniform she claimed was “as like him as if it had been his photograph.” As archival photographs of the real Herman reveal, the clipping barely resembled the young farmer at all.

  Now that Herman was in the spirit world, would he know how much Maud had adored him — how deeply he’d entered her heart? The thought terrified her, but nearly as unbearable was the thought that his ghost would sweep coldly by her, “as some chill, impersonal spirit.” Maud wished herself “lying in Herman’s arms, as cold in death as he.”

  For the rest of that year, Maud struggled without success to regain her composure. She tried to resume an old way of life that no longer fit a maturing young woman. Maud visited with relatives, joined the local sewing circle, attended pie socials, and involved herself with the Cavendish Literary Society — but what had been so dear to her as a child had lost its savor. She felt old and lonely, an outsider at the edge of spinsterhood. While her neighbors socialized, Maud fled to the woods. Other young people were wild for the new hobby of bicycling, but Maud took up photography. She wrote poems and stories, and read “like a book drunkard,” for she now selected the books for the Cavendish Lending Library.

  January of 1900 brought news of yet another, even more shocking death. This, too, would tip the balance of Maud’s existence. The telegram from Saskatchewan read simply: “Hugh J. Montgomery died today. Pneumonia. Peacefully happy and painless death.”

  Maud was stunned into silence by her father’s death. For most of her life, she had struggled without either parent nearby. Now Maud was fully an orphan. She could not write one word about her father’s death for six months. Even her ambition as an author seemed to die with Hugh John. Though he lived so far away, Maud had always taken comfort in the knowledge that her father was in the world somewhere, loving her, proud of her.

  She wrote, in lines no biographer has ever read without a terrible sense of pity and irony, “Have you left your ‘little Maudie’ all alone? That was not like you.” In truth, it was exactly what her father had been doing all her life.

  Maud was only twenty-five, but she had suffered deep losses: her young mother, her dear friend Will Pritchard, Grandfather Macneill, the longed-for yet inaccessible Herman Leard, and now her “darling father” as well. This final severing sank her into a lifeless grief for months — but it may have freed her as well. Maud knew beyond the sh
adow of a doubt that she must “henceforth face the world alone.”

  Words were her salvation, her business, and her hope. Little by little, her art returned to her. Maud took stock of herself with a cool eye. She tallied up her debits and her strengths. She had few financial resources — her late father had left her two hundred dollars, and she had another hundred in savings; she possessed a “scanty and superficial education” and just enough training to be a poorly paid teacher. “I have no influence of any kind in any quarter,” she declared frankly.

  But Maud was young and energetic. She loved life, for all its sorrows. She believed in herself, if no one else did. She had, she was sure, a “knack of scribbling.” Each year she had made a little more money by her pen. That year she had earned nearly one hundred dollars. It was not enough to get by — but financial independence was drawing closer. Maud had fierce energy. She had a gift, people said, for making things happen. She would face the future, she determined, with “an unquailing heart.”

  That summer an unlooked-for opportunity came her way. As an ambitious college student at Dalhousie, Maud had yearned for an entry into a newspaper career. Now, these many years later, an old acquaintance from Dalhousie wrote to Maud to say that the Halifax Echo, the city’s evening newspaper, was looking for a proofreader. Might Maud be interested?

  Maud would be paid five dollars a week — more than she had ever earned as a teacher. The temporary job could lead to better prospects. She and Grandmother Macneill agreed it was too good an opportunity to pass up. Maud arranged for her cousin Prescott to stay in the house with Grandmother while she was away.

  The prospect of leaving Cavendish rekindled Maud’s energy and made her “industrious and respectable” all summer. She “piped and danced to other people’s piping,” involving herself in every church activity, as well as dedicating herself to the gardening, cooking, baking, and domestic handicrafts her grandmother valued.

  Maud had found a regular audience in the publishers of juvenile fiction, in church-related magazines, and now she wrote her stories to order — not the kind she liked best, she admitted, “a rattling good, jolly one,” but those with morals tucked neatly inside. She added new magazines to her list of publications, and applied herself to please each editor in turn. Her output was prodigious, the hours long and late, but “Oh, I love my work!” she exulted.

  Maud came to Halifax for her interview in September, expecting to stay only a few days. Instead, she landed the newspaper position at once. Maud’s next-door cousin Prescott reluctantly agreed to keep his grandmother company for the winter.

  In busy Halifax — no all-caps this time — Maud struggled first with homesickness and then, as she had increasingly each year, with the depressions that plagued her every winter. Maud likely suffered from a condition now known as seasonal affective disorder. In her time, there was no name for the condition, no acknowledgment of its reality, and no treatment. Like clockwork, Maud’s mood would begin to darken in November, right around the time of her birthday, worsen with the onset of short winter days, and improve only when the sun and warmth returned in late May or June. She felt lethargic and exhausted in the winter, overwrought and restless in spring and summer. Her cyclical symptoms may have been one manifestation of her ongoing manic depression, guided strongly by the absence or presence of sunlight.

  But Maud had no time to sink into depression. She must make good in her new role as a newspaperwoman. Maud was the only woman on the Echo’s editorial staff. In addition to proofreading, Maud became a kind of verbal handywoman for the paper. She copyedited, answered the telephone, composed her own column, and covered all the society events — no obituaries allowed. “Evidently funerals have no place in society,” she noted tartly.

  Maud worked at an early form of publicity and promotion — clipping editorials from the morning paper and sending them out. She began interviewing local businesses, writing up puff pieces praising local stores. One pleased milliner sent Maud a complimentary new hat, which she accepted with delight. That “miracle,” as she described it, never repeated itself again.

  Maud’s column in the Echo was called “Around the Tea Table,” and published under the pen name Cynthia. It was a light catch all for everything from local tourist attractions to fashion trends and hobbies. When no society letters were forthcoming, it was Maud’s job to invent them — her least favorite job.

  Now and again the Echo ran a serial novel in the paper. One time it was “A Royal Betrothal,” a romance about the British royal family. When the end of the story got lost in the mail, Maud was ordered to create an ending. She protested that she knew very little about romance writing — or the royal family. The editor insisted. Maud was amused to hear two women on a train talking about how the story that had seemed to drag on forever quite suddenly came to a lively conclusion. From then on, whenever the newspaper ran into trouble with one of its serials, Maud stepped in to save the day.

  Maud still found time to write her own juvenile potboilers. She was not proud of the literary quality of this work, but it brought in more money than she was making on the newspaper. And now and again she still wrote what she considered “a fit and proper incarnation of the art I worship.”

  Maud moved around in bustling Halifax without feeling at home. She combated constant depression and homesickness. “There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a crowd,” she noted. Her bedroom view was always of dreary backyards. But, as usual, Maud fought back against the gloom. She rediscovered an old girlfriend from her college days. She became “chums” with a girl in the business office of the Echo. And when she had no choice, she set off alone on streetcars and long walks around Halifax. Maud attended her first Universalist Church service, which felt more like “a lecture and concert” than a religious event. Even her misadventures had a way of looking like fun in hindsight — and all was material for her art.

  Maud blossomed in this newfound freedom. She could think and write what she pleased, with no one to censor or contradict her. She poured her thoughts and observations into her journal. It’s there, in the pages of her journal, rather than in her juvenile potboilers, that one sees the author’s humor, sharp eye, and true descriptive genius emerging. The future king and queen of England, she noted, were unimpressive — the duke “an insignificant man with a red nose.” The duchess, she declared, “looks to be the best man of the two.”

  By May, Maud’s winter doldrums had passed. Her thoughts returned, as always, homeward to Prince Edward Island. Though Maud enjoyed her newspaper work, she had grown no fonder of crowded Halifax. And she heard that cousin Prescott and Grandmother Macneill were not getting along. Maud suspected her cousin of treating her grandmother shabbily. Once again, duty pulled her home. This time, Maud vowed not to leave as long as she could be of use to her grandmother. A woman of her word, Maud would prove faithful to the very end.

  On her return, Maud discovered that Uncle John had been pressuring Grandmother Macneill to give up the house. He hoped she could be farmed out to one of her other children, and that his son, Prescott, would take over the old homestead. When Grandmother Macneill and Maud resisted, Uncle John reacted with characteristic brutality. He cut them off completely.

  Though he lived next door, he would not lift a finger to help them. He seemed to take pleasure in creating obstacles to their happiness and comfort. His anger was relentless. He never again visited his mother till she lay on her deathbed — but he did a great deal to worry and trouble her till then.

  Maud provided whatever social life came into the old homestead. She kept herself and Grandmother Lucy active in the church. Maud cooked and cleaned, did the heavier chores that were considered “man’s work,” and helped run their post office. No one in the family offered to help, not even for a day. If the Macneills had hoped to weaken Maud’s resolve, they’d chosen the wrong woman. Maud only became more determined, and even the frail, elderly Lucy Macneill dug in her heels.

  Maud’s loyalty was immediately rewarded on
an important front. There were few of her old “kindred spirits” left in Cavendish. Maud’s childhood friend Penzie had grown up and away in tastes and interests, becoming a regular matron. Nearly all of Maud’s close female friends had married, and most male friends had left the island. But a new teacher named Nora Lefurgey arrived in town that fall. Nora was lively, intelligent, attractive, independent, and full of fun. Maud called her new friend “a positive God-send.” They were matched in everything, and that in itself in tiny Cavendish, Maud declared, had “a flavor of the miraculous.”

  In winter, Nora came to board at the Macneills’. Maud and Nora were both unmarried, handsome women in their mid-twenties — an age where others had begun looking upon them as hopeless spinsters. But they did not see themselves that way. They kept a joint journal together, filled with lighthearted teasing, sharp commentary, private jokes, and nonsense. They wrote about the few potential suitors in town, accusing each other of being in love with one or another of all the eligible men. It’s in this shared journal, in 1903, that we first read about Ewan Macdonald, the visiting minister to the Cavendish church. Maud noted that she’d gone alone to the Thursday night church meeting, since Nora had a cold. She wanted to take her own close look “at our new ‘supply.’ Who knows but that he is the ‘coming man,’” she wrote jokingly.

  “This morning we had a Highlander to preach for us and he was ‘chust lovely’ and all the girls got stuck on him. My heart pitty-patted so that I could hardly play the hymns. It’s weak yet so I shall stop short.”

  She also wrote her first impressions of the “chust lovely” new minister, but later scissored those pages from her journal and destroyed them. It’s safe to say that Ewan Macdonald struck Maud as no more than one of a dozen men lightly regarded, worth teasing about, and then moving quickly past.