John Mustard soon took more than an academic interest in his bright, vivacious new student. She had poise and excellent manners; it was clear that she came from a cultured family, like his own. He started making regular visits to chat with his old schoolmate, Mary Ann, at the Montgomery home. Maud, who would turn sixteen on November 30, was approaching a marriageable age, and she saw the motive behind his visits. Full of ambition, she did not want a serious suitor—and certainly not Mr. Mustard.
In November she secretly sent a poem on the legend of PEI’s Cape Le Force to the Charlottetown Patriot. (This story was from her Grandfather Macneill’s oral repertoire, and, given his ongoing friction with Maud, he may have been more annoyed than proud to see that his enterprising granddaughter had poached his material.) On December 7, 1890, she wrote in her journal that it had been accepted for publication:
Well, this has really been the proudest day of my life! I feel at least three inches taller than I did yesterday.… Today when I came down, ready for Sunday School father came in with last night’s mail and among it a Patriot. I seized it with a beating heart and trembling finger and opened it.… The letters danced before my eyes and I felt a curious sensation of choking—for there in one of the columns was my poem! (December 7, 1890).
And she adds: “Mrs. Montgomery looks as if she considered the whole thing a personal insult to her and has never mentioned the poem at all.” At age sixteen, Maud saw that even a “chit” of a girl could become more powerful by taking up her pen.
With this personal success, life became more enjoyable. Mr. Mustard, the teacher and suitor, became a comic figure for her character-sketching. She encouraged him, perhaps as a cat plays with a mouse, to make good copy for her diary. By her account, Mr. Mustard’s best topics of conversation were Predestination and other dry points of theology. If he thought his knowledge would impress Maud, he was wrong. She scorned the doctrine of Predestination as medieval and outdated, and she had read too widely to accept narrow dogmas. “As for me,” she writes haughtily, “a million Mustards could never make me believe that God ordains any of his creatures to eternal torture for ‘his own good-will and pleasure’ “(April 6, 1891).
As Mr. Mustard intensified his attention, Maud found a new interest. A girl named Laura Pritchard became her best friend, and she had a brother named Will. Will had red hair, green eyes, and a crooked smile; he was relaxed, unpretentious, and funny. Maud had always been drawn to people with a sense of humour, like her Campbell cousins. Laura was equally fun-loving. The Pritchards had a large farm outside of town, but they stayed in town during the harsh winter. Laura attended a different school (the convent school) but they became fast friends anyway.
Maud’s easygoing repartee with her young friends may have annoyed Mr. Mustard. When Mr. Mustard spoke to her about her “haughty manner” of speaking back to him, she retaliated by giving him her excessively formal treatment: “I froze up and was as chilly as an iceberg to him all afternoon, while taking particular care to keep all the rules. I can tell you he found me ‘haughty’ with a vengeance!” she wrote in her journal (January 7, 1891).
In early 1891, Maud’s father inexplicably jumped from the Conservative Party of his father’s politics to the Liberal ticket, and ran for federal parliament. He lost his election bid, and she was heartily glad when the worry and excitement was over. The fact that Mrs. Montgomery had given birth in February to a colicky baby, Donald Bruce, who required constant walking, added to the general turmoil in the household.
Hugh John hired a new “servant girl” in March (a “breed,” Maud notes, reflecting the attitudes of her era). Maud’s stepmother gave this girl Maud’s room, putting Maud in the spare room. The hired girl left in a few days, complaining that Mrs. Montgomery was too cross. Not a gracious personality at the best of times, Mrs. Montgomery was also contending with a new baby, a child of two, a husband who was humiliated in his public defeat, and a resentful stepdaughter all under the same roof.
Maud then had to leave school to attend to the housework. She enshrined herself in her diary as a long-suffering victim. “I do not say a word, however, because it would make father feel so bad” (March 28, 1891). By this time, it was painfully evident that her father’s life did not revolve around her. By the end of April, she had missed two months of school to help out at home, a source of tremendous frustration and resentment. In her regular letters to Pensie, not once does she mention her father, except to comment that he is out or away.
With all these tensions, Maud began having the headaches—as though a tight band were constricting around her head—that were to plague her for the rest of her life. She also began the lifelong pattern of confiding to her journal that writing in it was the only comfort she had.
Even though she was no longer at school, she remained busy in the community: church and school concerts, Sunday school (which she taught), recitations (the local paper raved about her ability in elocution), and “frolics” such as tobogganing parties. These events were described in letters to Pensie; her grandparents probably heard everything she wrote second-hand. She went about, unsupervised and unchaperoned, on picnics and excursions, on drives in the country, and to dances in the nearby army barracks. Her grandparents would have been appalled that her father was exerting no supervision to protect her reputation, if not her virtue.
Yet, with all this freedom, Maud was not happy. In every letter she wrote home to Pensie, she complained about Prince Albert and described her longing for Cavendish. She had come west in 1890 hoping finally to find a happy home, with her father. Her jealous and pettish stepmother was eager to see the end of resentful young Maud, and Hugh John agreed that she would return to the Island.
Her grandparents in Cavendish must have thought she would at least be cured of her idolatry of her father. But Maud never acknowledged—either during or long after her trip to Prince Albert—that her father was weak and rather less than successful as a parent. Like Maud herself, Hugh John was presented as being constantly victimized by his wife. We will never know for sure if Mary Ann was as nasty as Maud made her, but as a literary creation, she is expertly pinned to the pages of Maud’s journal as the archetypal specimen of the wicked stepmother.
Maud’s writing was progressing splendidly. Her descriptive piece on Prince Albert, focusing in part on the native people, was published on June 18 by the Prince Albert Times and Saskatchewan Review. By age sixteen she was already a skilled writer, able to write to Pensie, her chum back home, in a naïve, simple style, yet easily able to elevate her tone for her newspaper audience:
The river is a sheet of silver … and on the opposite side the poplars sway eerily in the gathering gloom—all so weird and mysterious that one half expects to see a dusky warrior, clad in all his ancient panoply of war-paint and feathers, spring from their shadows.… [W]e look at the poor Indian now, clad in ragged garments … with a dirty blanket flung over his shoulder, as he shuffles through the busy streets …36
The piece drew great praise from her father and everyone else—except, of course, from Mary Ann, who was counting the days until Maud’s departure. For her own part, Maud could not wait to see the seashore, her “dear room,” Lovers’ Lane, the mackerel skies, the green fields—all now vested with romance and nostalgia. Better to be with strict grandparents who cared for her than with a father who was too busy for her and a stepmother who was truly hateful.
Her imminent departure forced Mr. Mustard’s hand; she puns in her journal that “Mustard actually mustered—oh, forgive the pun. It just made itself— up enough courage to put his fate to the test …” Maud’s journals record that he stammered out,
“Do you think, Miss Montgomery, that our friendship will ever develop into anything else?”
And his look and tone plainly revealed what he meant by “anything else.”
“I don’t see what it can develop into, Mr. Mustard.” (July 1, 1891)
And that romance was over. John Mustard was not to disappear from her life, howev
er.
The year had been a great disillusionment. But it provided fodder for fiction. Her sense of exploitation would be used in her later writing, most notably in Anne of Green Gables: Anne similarly encounters selfish people who want her as a servant. Maud’s experience with colicky baby Bruce would also be echoed when Anne saves a child. Her father may have served as partial model for the lovable and henpecked Matthew Cuthbert, afraid to talk back to his forceful sister Marilla. Maud had learned from her stepmother how to drop poisonous innuendoes. This, too, she added to her fictional arsenal.
Maud’s father’s weakness had inflicted the pain on her that most of her future literary heroines were to suffer from—a father’s absence or death. Maud claimed that her father fought back tears when she left Prince Albert—tears that she was sure reflected his love for her. But in reality she had lived under his roof for a year and had been disappointed many times over.
More shockingly, Hugh John allowed his sixteen-year-old daughter to travel across the continent without the protection of a chaperone. Respectable young women simply did not make such long journeys alone. An unaccompanied woman was at risk, both to her person and to her reputation, and one so young was particularly vulnerable. Maud’s unchaperoned return was an extraordinary breach of custom and propriety. Worse, it was downright unsafe.
Maud had to change trains at Regina and Winnipeg and to disembark at Fort William, find overnight accommodation on her own, and then catch a morning boat to Sault Ste. Marie, going through locks on the canal, and travel down the St. Mary River to Lake Huron. At Owen Sound, Ontario, on Georgian Bay, she caught a train for Toronto, transferred to another train to Smith’s Falls, and yet another on the short run to Ottawa. She spent overnights in rough little junctions along the way, in rowdy hotels with saloons that served the local brew to those who wanted relief from hard work, the bush, and the boredom of life in a primitive area. The disembarking of an unattended young female would have caught the eye of every sex-starved logger, unattached local, and drunken barfly. Maud was small, slight, and by now more shapely. No decent father would have allowed his sixteen-year-old daughter to make such a trip alone in that era. Why Hugh John permitted it, and why Senator Montgomery sanctioned it, defies understanding. If Maud felt hurt by the lapse in protocol, she did not say so. Given the mores of the time, however, she must have noticed the lack of concern, whether she could admit it or not. It was only another sign that she was not very much valued.
In Toronto, Maud called on the family of the wealthy William Mackenzie, Mary Ann’s uncle. No one had bothered to tell the Mackenzies that she might come, apparently; they were away, and she spent her five-hour wait between trains with the governess. When she arrived in Ottawa at five in the morning, her Grandfather Montgomery was not there to meet her: he had overslept. She took a streetcar to his hotel, only to find that by then he had gone to meet her. “He soon came back in a great flurry, bless his dear old heart, but calmed down when he saw me safe and sound.” One puzzles to think what danger he expected her to face at five in the morning in Ottawa that she might not have met some night in a rough hotel on her trip home.
After whisking her through the Parliament Buildings, the Library, and showing her a session of the Senate (where she found the debate on the 1890 census dull), Grandfather Montgomery dispatched her to Prince Edward Island. She had hoped to stay longer with him, and see more of Ottawa, but a sharp-eyed granddaughter underfoot apparently did not suit either his schedule or his lifestyle. Travelling this time with proper chaperones, she took the famous “Intercolonial” train through Montreal, Quebec City, and New Brunswick. She caught the train ferry and arrived at Summerside, PEI, mid-afternoon on September 5, 1891. Again, no one was there to meet her, and here her journal mentions surprise: “It did seem a rather chilly home-coming for there was not a face in all the crowd that I knew. Never mind—it was home and that was enough.”
After two hours waiting in the station, she took another brief train ride to the Kensington station; again, no one was there to meet her. Postal service in that era was both fast and reliable, and it is improbable that no one knew she was coming. Was her Grandfather Macneill vexed with her? Did no one care about her?
Maud’s independent spirit asserted itself. In spite of her year of desperate homesickness for Cavendish, she now hired a wagon team to take her to Park Corner, where she always felt welcome, important, and valued. She stayed three days with Aunt Annie and her Campbell cousins rather than returning to her grandparents’ house. The laughter at the Campbell house always helped cure bruised feelings. Perhaps she was also making a point with her Macneill grandparents: she was now a much freer agent, a young woman who made her own decisions.
She was ecstatic when she finally reached Cavendish. The description of her drive from Park Corner to Cavendish sounds like a model for Anne of Green Gables’ first entrance into Avonlea: “my excitement increased all the rest of the way as I gazed my eyes out at all the familiar spots until Uncle Crosby must have thought he had a crazy girl on his hands” (September 8, 1891).
It was, in the end, a joyous homecoming for a prodigal granddaughter. She came back with new status: as a girl who had travelled halfway across the continent in an era when many Islanders rarely travelled more than thirty miles from their birthplace. And even more important, she was now a writer who had published in papers in Prince Edward Island and the west. Her year had confirmed her goal of becoming a writer. She knew in her heart she could never count on her father, ever, although she always spoke of their undying affection for each other. She would either have to marry or make her own way in life. These were sobering realizations. She was now determined to get the education that she believed she needed to develop her writing talent.
Prince of Wales College and after (1892–1895)
Maud’s tight-fisted Grandfather Macneill had no intention of wasting money on further education for her. For one thing, he disapproved of “lady-teachers.” Also, it was generally accepted that women taught only until they married, so educating a young woman was a waste of money. Alexander Macneill had already tied up some of his cash reserves in providing a mortgage for the faltering farm of his daughter Annie’s husband, John Campbell, a lovable man who managed money poorly. And he would not be able to rely on his estranged son, John F., to look after him, either. In that era there was no social safety net: the records of Legislative Acts in Charlottetown authorized some relief money for destitute people, usually widows with young children, but this was rare. Churches and neighbours helped those who fell on hard times, but basically people had to look after themselves. Alexander Macneill knew it was prudent to hang on to his remaining cash reserves.
Maud’s aunts and uncles were not keen to see money spent on her, either. Alexander and Lucy had not educated their own daughters, so why should they educate a granddaughter? Money spent on Maud would be money others would not inherit. A year at Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown would cost seven dollars for rural students, and room and board would have to be added to that. (A teacher at that time was paid about thirty dollars a term.) And many people still believed that too much education was dangerous for women. The Charlottetown papers carried regular advertisements for patent medicines like Lydia Pinkham’s vegetable compound, which ensured that “the young girl is safe from the dangers of school years and prepared for a hearty womanhood.” These advertisements were placed cheek-by-jowl with news items on the front page. Because the format was no different, the ads looked like hard news.37
Maud saw that her only hope lay in getting help from her grandmother. In the fall of 1891, she mapped out her own course of independent study to prepare for the entrance exams to the college, while remaining informally involved with the Cavendish school, helping with concerts and giving public recitations. She stayed in Cavendish until February, studying hard. On February 13, 1892, her grandmother went up to Park Corner for a visit—a sudden trip for a woman who almost never left home. Three days later, Maud fou
nd herself installed at her Aunt Annie’s house, hired to give a quarter-year’s worth of music lessons to the Campbell children. What was behind all this? Was it necessary to separate Maud and her grandfather again? Or had Lucy arranged a way for Maud to earn money that would not antagonize her grandfather? It would not be surprising if Lucy Macneill had slipped her daughter Annie the money to pay Maud. Lucy was always practical: she had already paid to give Maud organ lessons, and now the benefits of those music lessons could be passed along to her other grandchildren at Park Corner, who were genuinely musical.
Whisked away from Cavendish, Maud spent three intensely happy months in the household of the “merry” Campbell cousins, all younger. In Uncle John at fifty-nine, Aunt Annie at forty-four, and the cousins, ages fifteen, thirteen, eleven, and nine, Maud gained the model for a happy family. Aunt Annie was a warm, affectionate woman who loved her sister Clara’s daughter, even though she disapproved of Maud’s preference for “scribbling” over housework. Across the road lived Grandfather Montgomery (then eighty-four, in the last year of his life) and his second wife, Louisa (age seventy-one). And there were more Montgomery cousins and relatives who lived in the surrounding area: Jim and Lewis McIntyre; Jim, Louise, and Russell Crosby; and Will Sutherland. There were also outings to visit Aunt Emily and Uncle John Montgomery in Malpeque. During this visit, she met another cousin, Edwin Simpson of Belmont.
Lucy Maud Montgomery Page 9