Lucy Macneill’s death was followed five weeks later by the death of Tillie Macneill Houston. Maud felt this death, of unspecified causes, was suspicious. Just over a month after Lucy’s death and burial, Tillie contracted measles, recovered from them, and then suddenly died. Maud recorded in her journal that this was deeply disturbing, partly because of her fondness for Tillie, and partly because Tillie’s husband had made an unwanted pass at Maud some five years earlier. When repulsed by Maud, he had asked, “And what if I am not always married?” (February 9, 1911). Maud wondered with a shudder if Tillie had really died of natural causes, but she dismissed these doubts as best she could.
And now, her own future was looming. Too busy and disorientated to make journal entries, she kept notes, and later wrote up the course of events: “Now that poor grandmother had gone, there was no longer any reason for delaying my already long-deferred marriage and it was arranged that Ewan and I should be married early in July” (January 29, 1912). Preparations got underway.
Weddings at that time were held in homes, not churches. Maud had invitations printed and sent them to a small group of selected family and friends. She arranged for her wedding trousseau to be made in Montreal. Her cousin Frederica (“Frede”) Campbell came home for the wedding (she was studying at the Macdonald Institute in Montreal, where she was working towards a degree in household science). Frederica planned the wedding dinner. Frede photographed Maud in each of the outfits she would wear on her honeymoon in Scotland and England. No pictures were taken of Maud in her wedding gown, either then or later. (The dress has been restored and is available for viewing at her birthplace.) Maud’s gown was of what she described as white crêpe de soie with a chiffon tunic and pearl-bead trim. Her veil was tulle, with orange blossom wreath. Her bouquet was of white roses and lily of the valley. Ewan’s present to her was a necklace of amethysts and pearls.
Framing her future
Maud’s moods and thoughts through this time of upheaval can best be viewed through photographs that she herself staged. Since purchasing her first camera, Maud had been an avid amateur photographer. On June 25, 1903, and again eight years later, on May 24, 1911, she went to the seashore with her camera and a good friend: in 1903, the friend had been Nora Lefurgey, and in 1911, it was her cousin Stella Campbell. Each time, Maud carefully arranged a photograph of herself, framing herself in symbolic terms.
In 1903, the photograph was taken in the flush of her excitement a few days after Ewan (the “chust lovely” Highlander) had first preached in Cavendish on June 21, 1903. The second photograph was taken around May 24, 1911, some six weeks before her marriage to Ewan and her departure from the Island.97
In 1903, Maud and Nora had walked down to the shore to take each other’s picture on the rocks. Maud says that they stripped and put on their “bathing dresses.” Nora’s picture survives and she is fully clothed. For her own photograph, Maud is wearing a scanty diaphanous wrap that she later called an improvised “bathing costume.” It would hardly stay in place in the water, but the symbolism is subtle and ambiguous, carefully worked out for the picture-taking session.
Maud’s picture reveals and celebrates the sensual body, its curves, its desires. Her shrouded white figure is positioned before the mouth of the dark cave. Here the sea-nymph can tryst with her lover when he rises out of the sea. The contrast between white figure and black background provides drama. So does the angle: Maud is seen from behind, her face out of view while she looks out at the sea. The mystery question: What does she look for? Her lover? A ship to carry her away? The composition is carefully constructed: Maud’s body is full of triangles and peepholes, as mysterious as the cave itself.
Yet there is something virginal about her as she scans the horizon. The picture shows a woman capable of passion, but there is a certain spirituality about it. Maud’s averted gaze makes her inscrutable, elusive, unreadable. Imagine the effect, by contrast, if she turned her head and looked over her shoulder at the camera, with her head tilted submissively and seductively.… Or if her body were turned towards the camera, with her head tossed back.
Maud has carefully positioned herself in the 1903 picture as both a sexual woman and a spiritual being, and in both cases a female form of haunting beauty. She could be a nymph, mermaid, kelpie, part human, or part from the world of faerie. The photograph recalls Maud’s earlier description of herself as a blend of the passionate Montgomery blood and the Puritan Macneill conscience (April 8, 1898). Maud admitted that after they took this picture, she hid it away.98
On May 24, 1911, Maud staged the second photograph by the sea, a companion to the first. (See photos on this page.) In less than two weeks, she would be a married woman. She and Stella went down to the ocean. She sets the scene for this photograph in her diary:
Tonight.… I did what I dreamed of doing all through the years of childhood.… I have written before … of the charm New London Point always had for me, when I looked at it from Cavendish across New London Harbour—in childhood, when it was for me the end of the world and beyond it seas of faery—in youth when it was beautiful as an outpost of sea sunsets—and in later years when the revolving light bejewelled it every evening. It has always been my dream to walk out on it to the very tip and look off from there to the wide, ocean wastes beyond.
Tonight.… I climbed down the steep rocks by the aid of a ladder and walked out to the tip of the headland. On my right lay the harbour and away beyond it the misty Cavendish shore. To my left was a sunset sea, veiling itself in twilight shadows. Before me lay the open ocean, purple, murmurous, wind-visited, where the ships came and went on their blue pathway. Over me were early stars. The poignant beauty of it all cannot be put into words—the thoughts and feelings of my heart then cannot be expressed in symbols of earth. I seemed to be caught up into eternity. But the pang that came when I looked across to the distant homeland shore was of earth: and I was sad when I drove away, although my long dream had come true and brought to me all I had dreamed into it. (May 24, 1911)
This second picture of Maud shows none of the sexuality, the longing, the mystery of the other. She is no longer the young woman who yearns for romance, adventure, or even, possibly, a spiritual life in the mind. She has put the nymph-of-the-sea behind her, and the cave is gone.
She is a mature woman who will be a pillar of rectitude, discipline, strength, courage. Maud frames herself as a black silhouette against a white background, not as a white figure against a dark background. Her resolution is clear, despite the fact she is facing away from the camera. The feminine triangles of the nymph are replaced by an upright column of powerful woman; the diaphanous wrap has been replaced by a sombre encasement that obscures her sexuality (and her feelings of vulnerability). Her hat clamps down on her so there is no escape from her armour. This is a woman who has reined in her yearnings and put “duty” foremost.
Sadly, there is little sense of possibility in her horizon: there is only the image of a Maud who has literally “girded up her loins” and looks as formidable as a nun in black habit. Again, she looks into an unknown distance. This time, there is no sense of her world being a joyous, mysterious one. The picture is stark and stiff. She stands alone, poised for the future. There are no props like the cave to divert us, or tell a secondary story. She has on her walking clothes, and is ready to leave one life, one identity, for another. She has made up her mind: the Macneill conscience has won the struggle over the Montgomery hot blood.
There is a more subtle contrast, too: the 1903 nymph sat on a solid rock, but the Maud of 1911 stands on shifting sands. This artistic image represents her life from now on: she will stand alone on these shifting sands and resolutely face whatever is in the unknown future.
Maud says nothing in her journal entry about taking her camera, but the real reason for her walk out on the New London point seems to have been to take this haunting picture for posterity. She leaves it to us to interpret. She shows that she is earthbound, for better or worse, and the ocean is desc
ribed as one of “wastes” rather than a place to escape into the land of mythic kelpies and faerie. She is ready for marriage.
Marriage to Ewan Macdonald
Maud’s marriage to Ewan took place at noon on July 5, 1911, in the Campbell home at Park Corner, with the Reverend John Stirling as the officiant. The night before her wedding, Maud said that she cried herself to sleep. She recalled that threatening rain clouds showed in the morning, but they blew away. The Park Corner home was already renowned for its feasts. One elderly guest exclaimed, “Gad, they never had the like of this at Government House!” (May 23, 1911, in a retrospective entry dated January 1912). But Maud was unable to eat following the wedding. She described the day:
I had been feeling contented all the morning. I had gone through the ceremony and the congratulations unflustered and unregretful. And now, when it was all over and I found myself sitting there by my husband’s side—my husband!—I felt a sudden horrible onrush of rebellion and despair. I wanted to be free! I felt like a prisoner—a hopeless prisoner. Something in me—something wild and free and untamed—something that Ewan had not tamed—could never tame—something that did not acknowledge him as master—rose up in one frantic protest against the fetters which bound me. At that moment if I could have torn the wedding ring from my finger and so freed myself I would have done it! But it was too late—and the realization that it was too late fell over me like a black cloud of wretchedness. I sat at that gay bridal feast, in my white veil and orange blossoms, beside the man I had married—and I was as unhappy as I had ever been in my life. That mood passed. (May 23, 1911, in a retrospective entry of January 1912)
It is important to realize that she described her July 1911 wedding in a retrospective entry dated January 1912, but that Maud recopied her PEI journals into final form after 1919. We cannot know what was a genuine feeling at the time, and what is later reshaping. However, we do know that the pictures she took in 1903 and 1911 could not have been reshaped.
Perhaps somewhat ominously, Maud and Ewan followed a hearse part of the way en route during their departure from the Island, or so she wrote in her journal entry of September 1, 1919, when she thought back to that day and invested it with symbolic mood.
The 1911 honeymoon in Scotland and England
Now married, Maud and Ewan left the Island. Maud could look back on the first half of her life with great pride and a sense of accomplishment. She had been dealt hard lessons and challenges, and she had met them with courage and grace.
Maud began her life as “Mrs. Ewan Macdonald” by fulfilling her long-held dream of travelling to Britain, and particularly to Scotland and England. Her childhood had been filled with hearing her own relatives and other Scottish expatriates speak of their ancestral homeland as the “Old Country.” From her extensive reading of history, poetry, and fiction she imagined a landscape of romance and adventure amidst craggy mountains, cascading waterfalls, glens, inland lakes, and medieval castles. She planned a “literary tour” as so many others had done—from Samuel Johnson in the late eighteenth century to more recent Victorian tourists. Her marriage gave her a travelling companion, and her royalty income paid for a lengthy and expensive honeymoon.
Following the wedding, Maud and Ewan travelled to Summerside; they sailed the following morning on the Empress, a ferry piloted by Ewan’s uncle, Captain Cameron, to Pointe-du-Chêne, New Brunswick, where they boarded a train to Montreal. On July 8, 1911, they sailed on the White Star ocean liner, the Megantic, reaching Liverpool, England, nine days later. After a brief visit to Chester, England, they travelled by train to Glasgow, Scotland, the site of Ewan’s short-lived theological training.
Maud and Ewan undoubtedly had very different outlooks on the trip to Scotland. For her, Scotland was a romantic culture-scape with complex literary roots, as well as the ancestral seat of her titled forebears; for Ewan, there was a harsher, more ominous reality. His family had left the Highlands in desperate poverty, and in more recent memory his year at the Glasgow seminary had been overshadowed by a bewildering and enervating clinical depression. For him, Scotland undoubtedly embodied danger and defeat.
How painful was it for Ewan to return there? Maud wrote next to nothing about his presence—or his emotional state—during the trip. On this honeymoon, there was no travelling to the Isle of Skye, the ancestral seat of his Highland family and kinsmen. Instead, they visited her points of interest. While in Glasgow she described the thrill of seeing historical artifacts: a letter written by Sir William Wallace, and the cradle of Mary Queen of Scots. (Most Montgomeries had been Jacobite supporters, followers of the line of contenders for the monarchy, Mary Queen of Scots and Bonnie Prince Charlie: a romantic but doomed history, easier to romanticize from a distance than to have lived in reality.)
From Glasgow, they went up to Oban, and then sailed to the Island of Staffa to see “Fingal’s Cave,” itself a natural wonder of enormous pillars of black basalt. The cave is a long cavern into which the ocean flows, creating an otherworldly effect that gripped many travellers before and after Maud. They returned via the historically important island of Iona, where, among other things, Maud visited the grave of the Scottish King Duncan, who was murdered by the legendary figure Macbeth.
Their next trip was to Ayr to see the home of Robert Burns. Maud could claim a somewhat tenuous affinity with Burns through her nineteenth-century relative Hector Macneill, a friend of Burns. Burns’s poetry had rallied nationalism at home and throughout the Scottish diaspora, and, like so many Scots, Maud knew much of his poetry by heart. She visited his birthplace and the “old haunted kirk,” the scene of drunken Tam O’Shanter’s adventures. She viewed Burns artifacts, including a lock of his lovely “Highland Mary’s hair and the Bible they swore their troth on when they parted.” They walked his pathways, and over the stone “Auld Brig.”
A side trip up the Trossachs allowed Maud to see some Walter Scott territory, including Loch Katrine, the setting for Scott’s “The Lady of the Lake,” which, as previously noted, she could recite by memory. They went from there to Edinburgh (where Maud’s Uncle Leander had attended university), visiting Edinburgh Castle, Holyrood Palace, and other famous sites. Travelling next to Abbotsford, Walter Scott’s home, was one of the high points of her trip. She saw the immense library, his writing study, and the great hall where he kept a collection of old armour and swords from medieval times. Other artifacts were the crucifix that Mary Queen of Scots carried to her execution, a lock of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s hair, and Rob Roy’s original purse.
Another favourite author of Maud’s was J. M. Barrie, a novelist and playwright who had lived in Kirriemuir, a quaint little town that was the prototype for his “Thrums” novel settings. Although Barrie is best known today for his novel and play Peter Pan, Maud’s favourite works were his “Kailyard” novels, such as Sentimental Tommy, Tommy and Grizel, A Window in Thrums, and The Little Minister. These novels idealized Scottish country life, and Barrie’s treatment of this landscape is in many ways similar to her own romanticization of “Lovers’ Lane.” She walked through the “wild glens” of “Sentimental Tommy” and wrote that Tommy’s paths were “the very red of our own Island roads, and this made me feel very much at home in ‘the den.’ ”
They travelled on to Aberdeen, and from there to the battlefields of Culloden, where Bonnie Prince Charlie “made his last stand for the crown of his fathers.” They saw “Tomnahurich” (“hill of the fairies”) in Inverness, one of the world’s most magnificent and unusual cemeteries, shaped like a gigantic cone, with a road winding around it to the small plateau on top. The honeymoon continued down the Caledonian Canal to Fort William, and then by train to Edinburgh again. “All over Scotland,” she wrote her friend, Fannie Mutch, “wherever there were mountains, the everchanging effects of cloud and mist and sunshine on their lofty brows were wonderful. If I were to live near mountains for any length of time, I should become as fond of them as of the sea.”
Maud and Ewan then linked up with G
eorge Boyd MacMillan, the journalist in Alloa who had been her Scottish pen-pal since 1903. Engaged to be married, MacMillan brought along his fiancée, Miss Jean Allen, to sightsee with Ewan and Maud. Jean was younger than the three of them, and her conversation did not interest Maud. Maud and MacMillan, who had much in common, enjoyed talking extensively, and they walked and chatted together. Jean Allen was left to walk with Ewan, a dull conversationalist at the best of times.
The foursome was a disaster. Miss Allen became rude, pouty, and quarrelsome. Ewan helpfully suggested to Maud that Jean’s temper-tantrums might be caused by jealousy because Maud spent all her time talking with MacMillan. Eventually, after Maud and Ewan returned home, MacMillan and Jean Allen parted ways, and he remained a lifelong bachelor, but he and Maud exchanged letters and Christmas gifts for the rest of her life.
Maud was especially fascinated by the old town of Stirling, site of Stirling Castle (“the finest relic of its kind in Scotland”) and the Wallace Monument. “It was a steep climb to the top of it, but such a view as we had! … Beneath us, like a map, we saw half of Scotland, and every acre of ground on which we gazed was saturated with historic interest. We could see seven famous battle fields from where we stood.” They left Scotland via Berwick-upon-Tweed, Scott’s Marmion territory, and in this region they visited Flodden Field, Holy Island, and Norham Castle.
Maud’s honeymoon was not all joy: their sightseeing had stopped briefly several times because Maud was afflicted with medical problems. An ulcerating tooth gave her considerable discomfort, and she suffered from a painful case of “honeymoon” cystitis. Before antibiotics, such ailments could cause enormous misery.
The journey continued to England, with a trip to the Lake District (Wordsworth country), Haworth (Charlotte Brontë’s home), London (staying at the famous Russell Hotel), Kenilworth Castle, Warwick Castle, Shakespeare’s home, the Salisbury plains, Stonehenge, and Oxford. In England, they saw their first airplane ever.
Lucy Maud Montgomery Page 20