House of Dreams

by Liz Rosenberg

  Maud started a new novel, Kilmeny of the Orchard, based on a story she had attempted earlier. It was her first book-length work about which she expressed serious misgivings. L. C. Page was pressuring her for another novel, and she was not ready to face another book about Anne. Instead, she doubled the length of Kilmeny of the Orchard — at that time called Una of the Garden — rewriting it all in just a month or two.

  Try as she might, Maud was unhappy with the results. She was sure the “padding” her publishers had demanded had weakened the book. She wished she hadn’t agreed to allow its publication at all — though later she would defend Kilmeny against critical attacks. For the first time, Maud’s work received negative reviews. One reviewer called it “a terrible specimen of the American novel of sentiment.” Another said that the main character was enough to bring on “a bilious headache.”

  The first volume of Maud’s journal ends on an ominous note that winter of 1910, though at least she was able to work again. She had begun the journal eager and forward-looking. Coming to the last pages gave her the opportunity to read retrospectively.

  “They have been in most respects a hard thirteen years,” Maud noted. Much had changed in those years — a few things for the better, she hastened to remind herself. She had won her treasured literary recognition, that childhood dream. Perhaps, she mused, she would not have fought quite so hard or climbed so high “lacking the spur of pain.”

  But still she longed, in her last entry in the journal, on February 7, 1910, for “a little happiness, just for a change.”

  The year 1910 did in fact bring few happy adventures for Maud. Her work was pulling her out into the world — and sometimes brought the world to her in unexpected ways. Earl Grey, the visiting governor general of Canada, sought her out. He was one of the first famous visitors to pay a call to Prince Edward Island on Maud’s behalf — but by no means the last. The illustrious visitor sat with Maud on the steps of a small white building, the two new acquaintances conversing about the surrounding beauty of the place.

  What the governor general failed to realize — and Maud knew all too well — was that they were sitting perched on the ladies’ outhouse steps. Each time a woman approached, she would spot the two luminaries and hurry away. Maud could barely avoid a fit of hysterical giggles, wondering helplessly if there might be some poor soul trapped inside the outhouse waiting for them to leave.

  That fall, Maud set out for her first trip to visit her publisher, L. C. Page & Company in Boston. She stayed at the opulent Brookline home of publisher Louis Page and his wife. The businessman Page had timed things just right. He urged Maud to sign a new contract for The Story Girl under the same ungenerous terms as the old contracts. Maud initially resisted.

  But finding herself a guest under her publisher’s roof, Maud felt she had to agree to renew the old terms. Louis, she wrote, was a “fascinating” character. He wined and dined his visiting author. Maud shopped at the elegant stores of Boston and rode in a motorcar for the first time. She witnessed her first lunar eclipse. She attended lavish parties and was feted, interviewed, and photographed. All this was heady stuff for a girl from a remote Canadian province.

  Maud’s visit coincided with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the New England Women’s Press Club. More than three hundred members attended, with several of America’s leading literary lights present. Maud stood in a receiving line for more than two hours. It was exhausting to thank women over and over for their compliments. Fame, she was discovering, could be hard work, too. But Maud was good at this aspect of being a writer, and a good sport. She was gracious and kind to each fan. The head of the event told Maud gratefully, “You have been our ‘great gun’ this evening.”

  An interview appeared in the Republic in November 1910 showing the impression Maud made on her new American audience. Though she was thirty-six years old, Maud appeared both younger and more delicate than she was.

  Miss Montgomery is short and slight, indeed of a form almost childishly small, though graceful and symmetrical. She has an oval face, with delicate aquiline features, bluish-gray eyes and an abundance of dark brown hair. Her pretty pink evening gown . . . accentuated her frail and youthful aspect.

  The Republic journalist compared Maud to the countrified young Charlotte Brontë, author of Jane Eyre, coming up from Yorkshire to visit London for the first time. Maud, the interviewer decided, must be similarly awestruck. But the Canadian author held her own. Maud’s startled interviewer began to see “a determined character, with positive convictions on the advantages of the secluded country life.” Maud was unwilling to play the role of the country ingenue; she firmly declined to write Anne’s love story and, when pressed, said she knew too little of college life to write about that, either.

  Louis Page himself was a fascinating character, but during this visit to Boston, Maud began to seriously distrust him. The young author had had her doubts about L. C. Page & Company for some time. “The feeling is instinctive,” she wrote, “and will not down.” Maud heard stories about her editor’s womanizing, his extravagance and ruthlessness. His way of dealing with female authors revealed a troubling mixture of flirtation and bullying.

  Maud regretted that she had allowed herself to be pressed into signing her Story Girl contract with its unfair long-term binding clause intact. She began to feel that, both in his business dealings and in his own personal life, Louis Page was not a man to trust. All in all, the visit to Boston was more eye-opening than restful.

  As always, Maud’s high times were fleeting. In lavish upper-crust Boston, Maud had a taste of the posh life. But back in Cavendish, reality claimed her at once. When she arrived at the train station, her cousin George Campbell picked her up in an old horse and buggy. “Sleet blew into her face the whole way home.”

  It was rare for Maud to make an extended visit away. Usually she could not leave home even for a day, no matter how short the distance or how pressing the cause. Grandmother Lucy Macneill, now in her late eighties, hated to let her granddaughter out of her sight. It was no use arguing. “One might as well talk to a pillar of granite.” When a poem of Maud’s was set to music and performed at the opera house in nearby Charlottetown, Maud missed the performance — and her own curtain call. As she wrote to pen pal Ephraim Weber, “The author couldn’t go. She had to stay home and wish she could.”

  In February of 1911, Maud was forced to travel into town to take care of a bad tooth. As she was leaving, her grandmother hobbled outside to say good-bye. “It struck me how very frail and old grandmother looked. She had dressed hurriedly and was consequently rather untidy. . . . But apart from that there was a look in her face that sent a chill to my heart.” All her life, Maud had experienced strange foretelling dreams and uncanny intuitions. She feared this was another such moment.

  Her premonition was so strong that Maud nearly sent the horses away. She rode to Charlottetown haunted by the look she had seen in the gray morning light. After her appointment, the Charlottetown Women’s Club threw a reception in Maud’s honor, but she was worried and distracted and hurried home over sleety roads only to find her grandmother “quite well and smiling” by a snug fire with her favorite cat, Daffy. Maud dismissed her own fears as foolishness.

  Less than two weeks later, Maud and her grandmother both came down with the flu. They were improving by early March, and their good friend Tillie McKenzie Houston came to pay a sympathy call. That night Maud cried herself to sleep. Once again she was haunted by a paralyzing dread. She kept murmuring over and over a line from Edgar Allan Poe: “At nightfall the tired body and dull brain went back to their rest.”

  As it turned out, that night would be the last she ever spent in her upstairs childhood sanctuary, her “white and peaceful nest.” The next day, Grandmother Macneill took a sudden turn for the worse, and Maud didn’t leave her side for several days. She slept downstairs, near her grandmother. They moved a bed into the sitting room, settling Grandmother Macneill close to the fireplace. The doctor came
— despite Grandmother’s protests — and gravely informed Maud that the old lady had pneumonia. At her age, such a serious illness “could have but one ending.” Friends and neighbors paid their last respects. Even grim Uncle John trudged next door for the first time in five years, to say good-bye to his dying mother. Maud watched him stumble away “with laggard step and bowed head like an old man.”

  Lucy Macneill passed away as quietly and uncomplainingly as she had lived. Maud had observed her grandmother fold her hands after doing the dishes, a gesture that struck her with its finality, folding them “forever after the work of almost eighty-seven years.” In death, those knotted, work-worn hands underwent a miraculous transformation. They looked “beautiful again in the consecration of death.” Her smile seemed to Maud both radiant and wise.

  But nothing else held still after Grandmother’s death. Maud was ordered out of the house immediately. She could stay just long enough to pack her things. For the first time in her life, she was literally homeless.

  Uncle John’s heart had softened enough to allow a final visit to his dying mother, but once the house was legally his, he turned his back on it forever. Rather than allow Maud to go on living there, he let the old homestead stand empty, then crumble into ruins before he finally tore it down in 1920.

  The Cavendish townsfolk put together a hasty farewell ceremony for Maud, as simple as it was heartfelt. Maud donated the farmhouse organ to the church whose yard housed her mother’s grave. Maud left Cavendish on a cold, windy day, closing the door of the old house behind her.

  She wrote,

  All the bitterness of death was in that moment — and it was repeated as we drove up through Cavendish and familiar scenes and beloved haunts disappeared one by one from view — the manse, the old trees that encircled home, the graveyard on the hill with its new red mound, the woods in which was Lover’s Lane — beautiful, unforgotten, unforgettable Lover’s Lane — the sea-shore, the pond, the houses of friends — all drifted finally out of sight. I had left Cavendish forever, save as a fitful visitor; and in leaving it felt that I was leaving the only place on earth my heart would ever truly love.

  Maud spent a few months at Park Corner, trying to recover and putting together her long-delayed wedding trousseau. Maud was still mourning Grandmother Lucy, whose absence in her life seemed “an impossible — an outrageous thing. . . . She had always been there.” That simple line — She had always been there — was as close to a loving eulogy as Maud could ever manage. Grandmother Lucy Macneill meant home, and with her death, Maud lost her essential touchstone.

  The future was rushing upon her. Ewan Macdonald had waited patiently for his bride for five years. Maud finally told her pen pal George MacMillan, “I expect to be married to the Rev. Mr. Macdonald.” MacMillan and Ewan had met years earlier while Ewan was in Scotland. Maud felt happy that MacMillan approved of her friend — without giving any clue at the time that the young minister was more than a casual acquaintance.

  She had expressed herself to MacMillan numerous times on the idea of marriage, and in these letters, one sees her paving the way to her own. She proposed that “for friendship there should be similarity; but for love there must be dissimilarity.” She and Herman had been very different — or so Maud maintained. Herman was quiet; Maud was a chatterbox. He was a simple farmer; she had higher ambitions. She saw herself as an intellectual, and Herman was not interested in ideas. Yet she had adored and desired him.

  She told MacMillan — while secretly engaged — “If two people have a mutual affection for each other, don’t bore each other, and are reasonably well mated in point of age and social position . . . their prospects of happiness together would be excellent.” Such a sensible match might lack the “highest upflashings” of the divine spark, she admitted, but added that if she ever did marry, “that is the base on which I shall found my marriage.”

  By summer of 1911, Maud no longer needed a husband in order to survive. She had earned financial independence and an international reputation. Her books were still selling well; she was, by any standard of the time, a wealthy woman. She could have afforded to buy a house of her own and to maintain it.

  She also had one last chance at that spark of passion and romance that year. With Ewan far away in Leaskdale, Ontario, Maud’s dashing cousin Oliver Macneill came to town and began to court her with determination and vigor. Oliver Macneill was a wealthy man. He was a handsome divorcé who, according to Maud’s journal, kindled that “devastating flame of the senses.” She felt drawn to him against her will, much as she’d been to Herman Leard.

  Oliver Macneill asked Maud to marry him — in fact, he offered her every kind of unorthodox arrangement. She could marry him for just a year and then be rid of him; she could live independently if she liked. Maud found herself teetering once more on a tempting precipice. But in the end, her feeling of loyalty and commitment to Ewan Macdonald won out. She sent Oliver packing, and vowed to “walk in Lover’s Lane with him no more.”

  None of this kept her moods from vacillating in those months leading up to the wedding. She was mourning her grandmother, her Cavendish friends, and her lost, never-to-be-forgotten home by the sea. She was tormented by memories of Lover’s Lane. “Not a day passes that I do not think of it.”

  And Maud was needled by yet another secret grief: her friend Tillie’s husband, Will Houston, had declared his passion for Maud shortly before Tillie’s death. Maud had been shocked and horrified. To her, Will and Tillie seemed an ideal couple and were two of her closest friends. Already tremulous on the eve of her marriage, this revelation made her even more anxious.

  Luckily, Maud was at merry Park Corner, “the wonder castle of my childhood,” surrounded by those who knew and loved her best. She spent hours discussing life and literature with her cousin Bertie. The house was full of happy memories. Here at the turn of the staircase was that place on the wall where they had measured their changing height, year after year.

  Her relatives at Park Corner were delighted by the arrival of Maud’s elegant trousseau. Maud had ordered clothing from Montreal — likely with cousin Frede’s advice. Maud pasted swatches of trousseau fabrics into her scrapbook: violet silk with lace trim, sprigged floral print with lilac pansies against a cream background. A cocoa-brown muslin and a black evening dress. Maud had worn black all that spring in mourning for her grandmother, but now she laid it aside with relief. Maud wrote, “Color is to me what music is to some. Everybody likes color; with me it is a passion.”

  In mid-June, Frede came home to Park Corner from Montreal for a joyful reunion. Together the cousins traveled to Cavendish — an easier visit home than Maud had anticipated. “It was all a sweet pleasure to be there again in that June beauty.” Cavendish, it seemed, could never lose its capacity to refresh and delight her.

  On Tuesday, July 4, 1911, the evening before the wedding, Ewan, the bridegroom himself, arrived from Ontario. That night, Maud did two things she had never expected to do on the eve of her wedding — she cried a little and then “slept soundly the rest of the night!” Why did she cry? she wondered. She was “content,” the bland word she used over and over regarding this marriage. The blandness hid a deeper loss: “I think I wept a lost dream — a dream that could never be fulfilled — a girl’s dream of the lover who should be her perfect mate, to whom she might splendidly give herself with no reservations. We all dream that dream. And when we surrender it unfulfilled we feel that something wild and sweet and unutterable has gone out of life!”

  Maud’s wedding day dawned cool and gray, promising rain. Maud wore a simple, soft-looking dress of ivory and silk crepe with touches of chiffon. There is no photograph of her wearing the gown, though the dress still survives, and a replica stands on display at her birthplace museum. From a modern perspective, Maud’s wedding gown is a simple day dress with soft ruffles around the neck and hem. Examined more closely, one sees the gleam of pearl beading on the tunic. The most eccentric part of her wedding trousseau was an elabora
te, high hat trimmed with all kinds of flowers. Maud posed with the hat in several photos, and it makes her look a foot taller at least.

  The wedding took place at noon in the front parlor of the Park Corner house. Maud’s friend and cousin Ella Campbell played on the organ “The Voice That Breathed O’er Eden” as the bride came downstairs on her uncle John Campbell’s arm. She carried a bouquet of white flowers — roses and lilies of the valley — and ferns. Around her neck she wore Ewan’s wedding gift, a pearl and amethyst necklace. She felt surprisingly calm.

  We know nothing about Ewan’s state of mind; in her descriptions of the wedding and the honeymoon, Maud barely mentions him. Very little of Ewan’s voice comes down to us in his own words. We know that he is supposed to have said drily, in response to some friend’s remark about Maud’s fame, “Yes, I understand the young lady is a writer.” The line, uttered before their marriage, sounds apologetic, as if he had learned that his fiancée collected oddities, and hoped she might outgrow it.

  Theirs was not the ideal wedding Maud had once imagined — she dreamed of an elopement deep in the woods, with trees forming a green cathedral overhead, and the two lovers declaring their vows in solitude. But the new bride declared herself, again, “content” with her simple ceremony.

  Cousin Frede concocted an elaborate wedding feast after the service. The instant Maud sat down to that wedding dinner, she “felt a sudden horrible inrush of rebellion and despair.” Reality hit swiftly and hard. Maud resisted a mad urge to tug off the wedding ring and run away. Instead she sat shrouded in her white veil, “a helpless prisoner,” staring down at her plate, “as unhappy as I have ever been in my life.” She could not eat a bite of Frede’s splendid dinner.