“As you know, Louise, I have not been to a circus in many years, and I care nothing for them, but the old gentleman was anxious to go, and I didn’t see how I could get out of accompanying him,” said Grandpa Lundy, surveying his full plate.
“Not so, Louise! I’ve given up circuses and all that sort of thing. I don’t take any interest in them,” Uncle Bryan objected. “But Daniel would have been terribly disappointed if he didn’t see this circus, and I promised to go with him.”
Everyone at the table laughed.
“What a pair!” said Grandma Lundy with a smile and a shake of the head as she poured the strong, blackish-brown, scalding-hot tea.
Mazo and Caroline were also in a good mood today. After supper, while the older people played cards in the sitting room and the girls washed and dried the dishes, they kept giggling helplessly. They were planning to punish Gordon for confessing to them that he longed to meet an American girl named Lilly Stacy who had recently moved into the neighbourhood.
Still giggling, Mazo and Caroline got ready for Gordon’s regular evening visit.
Mazo put on a new sailor hat that Gordon had never seen. She put the hat on her head at a jaunty angle and then added a veil – something else Gordon had never seen her wear.
When the girls saw Gordon approaching, Mazo sat in a dim corner of the porch where the flowers and vines from a window box filled the air with their scent. She struck the pose of a well-travelled woman of the world.
As Gordon entered the porch, Caroline introduced him to the strange woman.
“Lillian, I should like you to meet our friend, Mr. McGrath,” said Caroline. “Gordon, meet Miss Stacy.”
The pretend Miss Stacy languidly gave Gordon a limp hand to shake. Gordon seated himself on the porch steps and politely conversed with Miss Stacy, who spoke with a refined American accent. Gordon gave Miss Stacy admiring looks that he had never given Mazo.
The quiet of the street, the scent of flowers, and the moonlight glimmering through the leaves were all very romantic. The trouble was that Mazo and Caroline dared not look at each other in case they began laughing.
After a decent interval, Miss Stacy said she must be going. Gordon at once offered to escort her home.
“I’ve been wanting so much to meet you, Mr. McGrath,” Miss Stacy cooed when she had Gordon to herself.
“I feel just the same about you,” Gordon sighed.
“I hope you’re not disappointed in me,” Miss Stacy twittered.
“Oh no,” Gordon protested. “I think you’re wonderful.”
Never had Gordon said anything like this to Mazo!
“You’re so different from any of the men I meet abroad,” murmured Miss Stacy.
Gordon bent to peer beneath the brim of Miss Stacy’s hat. He met the malicious glitter in Mazo’s eyes. Mazo burst out laughing. Caroline was laughing so hard that she had to support herself against a pillar of the porch. Gordon wheeled away and strode home.
The next day Gordon left for the Royal Military College without saying goodbye.
Mazo de la Roche in her early thirties with her father.
4
Breakdown
I have little patience with writers who declare that all their works are composed in an agony of spirit.
At noon on a hot July day, Mazo went with her father to look at Grandpa Lundy in his coffin in the back parlour. All the blinds were closed, so it was like a cool dark night in the house. Still, Mazo could see that there was nothing to be afraid of. Grandpa’s face was white as marble, but he was not suffering. Actually, he seemed about to smile.
“Poor Grandpa,” said Mazo’s father as he stood looking down into the coffin. Tears ran down his cheeks.
For six years, until 1900, Mazo and Caroline had enjoyed a well-balanced youth while they stayed in the Lundy household in Toronto. They had finished growing up. After the death of Grandfather Lundy in his Toronto home and his burial in the old Newmarket cemetery, the extended family slowly dispersed, for Will Roche was not a patriarchal man who could gather weaker beings around him and give them shelter and leadership for long periods.
Oh, at first they stayed together. Will Roche promptly relocated the whole family from out-of-the-way Parkdale to central, fashionable, and dignified Jarvis Street, where important families like the Masseys lived. But soon Will was on the move again, changing jobs and residences frequently. Grandma Lundy sought more permanent quarters with her daughter Eva, now Mrs. James Smith, and son Walter, now an eligible bachelor and a fledgling dentist. Bertie, Mazo, and Caroline followed Will to a long list of addresses in Toronto and vicinity that included 54 Wellington Street, Toronto; Richmond Hill P.O.; and 435 Indian Road, Port Credit.
The Port Credit address, twenty kilometres east of Toronto, was the home of G.A. Reid, a visual artist and a teacher at the Ontario School of Art in Toronto. The Roches stayed in Reid’s house several times while Reid was absent. While Caroline remained at home with Bertie, and became absorbed in domestic activities, Mazo attended classes at the School of Art and the University of Toronto.
Mazo was dreaming about going to Paris and becoming a book illustrator. Then suddenly she changed dreams. She thought she might like to become a book writer.
Mazo wanted to write a story and send it to a magazine. She had to do this in secret, so that if she were not successful, no one would know. Of course if she were successful, the family would have a lovely surprise.
Mazo’s story would be about French Canadians in the mythical village of St. Loo. She was French, wasn’t she? Anyway, her Roche ancestors had been French many generations before, as had Caroline’s Clement ancestors. And Will Roche quite often went on business to Montreal, Quebec.
Now, thought Mazo, how do you write a story?
You have to be in excruciating agony. Isn’t that how it goes? Half starved and living in a freezing cold attic.
Well, I’m not in such dire circumstances. And I just have a few hours to myself Unfortunately, I will have to write without starving or freezing.
Perhaps excruciating excitement will do. When writers close their eyes, they see shimmering visions of the truth. Don’t they?
Luckily nobody was home.
Mazo lay on the sofa in the living room. She tensed her body until it was rigid. She watched the pictures that passed through her mind. She rose from the sofa, went over to her paper and pencil, and wrote. Then she stretched herself on the sofa again. She tensed her body again. She watched the pictures in her mind again. And again she got up and wrote.
Mazo wrote her story in pencil. Then she copied it out carefully in pen and ink. She had no idea that it should be typed. Finally she put it in a big envelope and sent it to to a magazine called Munsey’s.
For weeks she was the first person to reach the front door when the postman delivered the mail. Then finally came a small envelope from Munsey’s. Enclosed was a cheque for fifty dollars. Her story had been accepted for publication!
Mazo finally revealed to her family what she had done. She took Caroline with her when she went to spend the money on a gift for Bertie. They chose an ornate lamp.
Mazo began to write another story. This time she did not keep her activity secret.
Many years later, when Mazo was an established writer, the pretended agony in which she had written her early stories seemed funny. But the real agony she had suffered as a young woman never seemed funny.
One day Mazo felt she had written an especially good story. This feeling was reinforced when Caroline and Bertie read the story and agreed with her. Mazo, full of confidence, mailed the story to Munsey’s.
She waited and waited. More weeks passed than usual. Did I forget to put postage on the envelope? Mazo wondered. Did the envelope get lost in the mail? Mazo could think about nothing but the missing manuscript. Sometimes the pavement and floors beneath her seemed to slope away as though into an abyss.
When Mazo went alone to see the medieval morality play Everyman, she suffered the same st
range sensation again. Again there was the abyss. She had been raised Protestant, but suddenly she went to a Catholic church – Saint Michaels Cathedral in Toronto – and knelt at all the stations of the cross. She seemed to be hoping for a miracle, but no miracle happened.
When Mazo returned home, she told her mother and Grandma Lundy what she had done. Grandma Lundy, still a staunch Methodist, glared at her scornfully.
Feeling exhausted, Mazo went upstairs and sat down on her bed. She was trembling all over. Her symptoms did not abate, so her family called the doctor. Mazo hated this doctor and could not talk to him. She felt he was jeering at her. Perhaps he was.
Mazo’s illness lasted several years, and for most of this time she couldn’t write. Indeed, she couldn’t do much of anything. She slept poorly at night. She frequently wept. She was extremely depressed. Yet the especially good story she had sent to Munsey’s had not been lost, and it was eventually published.
Her illness seems to have been psychosomatic: a so-called “mental” illness or “nervous breakdown.”
“I’m done for. I shall never be well again,” moaned Mazo when an uncle came to her room and asked how she was feeling. “I’m going to die. Like Grandpa died.”
Her uncle laughed angrily.
“You couldn’t die,” he said. “You couldn’t. Not even if you tried. There’s plenty of time for you to develop. You’re only beginning. What you need is a different doctor.”
Unfortunately a different doctor was not forthcoming. And perhaps no doctor in her own time and place could have helped her anyway. Had Mazo become severely depressed today, of course, most doctors would have prescribed a drug and arranged for her to receive therapy from a medical professional like a psychiatrist. But in Victorian and Edwardian Canada, no such help was available.
There are many possible reasons for Mazo’s emotional collapse. She turned twenty-one in 1900: a time when women’s roles were rigidly defined. A woman was expected to become a wife and mother. Period. Yet Mazo longed for a career as an artist – visual or literary – and she knew she could not have both a husband and a career, as one can today. The primitive contraceptives available one hundred years ago were not effective.
What’s more, Mazo lived in Canada, a colonial country where careers in the arts were difficult for men and almost impossible for women. Mazo would have been well aware that her chosen path was almost without precedent, and she would have doubted her ability to follow that path successfully. Mazo had no role models because there were no outstanding Canadian-born writers of the female sex when she was young.
Like Mazo, several other Canadian-born, female artists of her generation experienced periods of depression in young adulthood. Painter and writer Emily Carr, born in 1871, had a prolonged nervous breakdown when she was in her early thirties. Writer Lucy Maud Montgomery, born 1874, suffered from low spirits in her twenties and thirties while she lived with her grandmother. Even writer Gabrielle Roy, born thirty years after Mazo in 1909, was incapacitated for several years by intense melancholy while she was in her late twenties and beginning to write.
Other possible reasons for Mazo’s prolonged depression lie within her family. Mazo undoubtedly experienced conflicting feelings about her parents. She loved her father; yet she could see that Will Roche had failed to provide a permanent home and steady income for his dependents. Mazo loved her mother; yet she could see that Bertie (Lundy) Roche had been both physically and emotionally ill, not only unable but also unwilling to fulfil her duties as a wife and mother.
In one of the Jalna novels, an artistic character, Finch Whiteoak, a young pianist and composer, suffers a breakdown. In Whiteoaks of Jalna Finch falls into despair after he is ridiculed by his older brothers and sister for his interest in the arts. Only after Finch attempts suicide does his family rein in their persecution of the sensitive boy. Perhaps there are parallels between the fictional Finch and the real Mazo.
Mazo watched the tree outside her window while she rested at the Reids’ house. She enjoyed the wild beauty of Georgian Bay while she vacationed beside it by herself. She absorbed the friendliness of Lake Simcoe while she vacationed beside it with her family.
Bertie, who was stronger now than in the past, carried endless trays to Mazo’s room. Caroline held Mazo closely when the sleep-deprived woman felt overwhelmed by despair. Then, when Mazo was better, Caroline went for long walks with her and shared with her their ever-evolving, imagined world. Talking with her trusted cousin helped Mazo solve her emotional problems.
By the time Mazo moved to Acton, she was feeling better. In 1905, Will Roche bought an old hotel in Acton, renovated it, and renamed it the “Acton House.” He also moved his family into a house on Acton’s Main Street.
Mazo, a dark, dashing-looking woman wearing a red coat and leopard-skin furs, strode into the hotel. The evening meal was over, and the busy hours between seven and eleven were just commencing.
She stood still for a moment and took a deep breath. A rich smell of ale and spirits filled the air. A sustained flow of men’s voices came from all sides, sometimes ebbing to a low drone, sometimes swelling to a vigorous burst of laughter.
The door of the hotel opened behind her and several men passed by her and entered the bar. The noise increased, rose to a hubbub, then suddenly fell to a murmur accented by low laughs, the clink of glasses, the drawing of corks. The smell of dyes, the smell of the tannery, mingled with the smell of the bar. A blue cloud of tobacco smoke formed before her eyes. It floated in long level shreds that moved quiveringly together till they formed one mass that hung like a magic carpet in the hall.
“I must remember this,” said Mazo. Then she hurried into the kitchen to help wash the dinner dishes. The hotel was short-staffed tonight.
For the next four or five years, Mazo and Caroline were often seen out and about Acton in a two-wheeled cart pulled by a Shetland pony. The young women’s close association with a hotel, when the temperance movement was strong, did not prevent them from close association with the local aristocracy.
Mazo and Caroline probably met the Beardsmore family, owners of the local tannery, in church. The Beardsmores owned a grand home set in beautiful gardens behind high walls. Here they lived a very English life with nannies, governesses, and pony carts.
Caroline became engaged temporarily to one of the young Beardsmore men, so Mazo had a chance to observe Acton’s high life closely.
But Mazo did not take an interest in the top-drawer people only. In Acton, she also observed ordinary working people such as the waitresses who toiled in the hotel dining room and the factory workers who boarded at the hotel for an inexpensive rate.
“There came a great rush at dinner time,” wrote Mazo in a short story called “Canadian Ida and English Nell,” published in 1911. “Nell was set to fill dishes with cabbage, stewed tomatoes, and potatoes, the three for each order. At first she was much confused between the cook’s excited face and Edith’s rushing out, calling: ‘One on beef, rare! – Two on pork! – Beef, on a side! -Soup and fish for a traveller!’”
5
Screams
The years were long and the future stretched endlessly, it seemed, before us. We made no plans but took for granted that all would come out well.
“I have tried many things, but I know now that I was meant to be a farmer,” announced Will Roche one day to his family “I believe there is a great future in farming.”
In 1911 Mazo was thirty-two and her father was almost twice that age. Yet Will Roche had never been sick a day in his life. Strong and healthy, tall and handsome, Will was an optimist. Finally he had found his true vocation. Or so he thought.
Bertie, Mazo, and Caroline greeted Will’s announcement with delighted approval. The three women had enjoyed their lakeside vacations in the farming country of Innisfil Township during the summers, and now they looked forward to being close to nature all year round. Furthermore, the three women thought that Wills being a gentleman farmer would be much more prestigio
us than his being a hotel keeper. Oh my goodness! All those drunkards at the hotel bar! It was very difficult indeed to run a respectable establishment.
Caroline Clement at about age thirty-three with horse in Bronte.
Eagerly Mazo and Caroline joined Will in perusing advertisements for farms and going off to inspect the most promising properties. (Bertie stayed home. She trusted their judgment.) Soon they found the perfect farm about forty kilometres west of Toronto near the fishing village of Bronte on the shore of Lake Ontario.
Lake Ontario was not a “friendly” lake like Lake Simcoe. So Mazo remarked. It was “a great stretch of water – impersonal as a sea.” The huge lake was only about thirty metres from the front door of the house. Certainly the farm was picturesque.
There was not only a lake at the front but also a woods at the back. In the spring the woods would be filled with trilliums and violets. How lovely! There was also an old, wind-bent tree on the highest point of the bluff. How romantic! And there were almost thirty hectares of land. How enormous! There were fields for crops and pasturage. There were two fine orchards, one of apples and one of cherries. There were crops of all the small fruits ripening nicely.
Halton County, where Bronte was located, was a better growing area than York County, where Newmarket was located, or Simcoe County, where Innisfil Township was located. Halton County was within the eastern limits of Ontario’s Niagara fruit belt: one of the most moderate climates in Canada.
The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche Page 544