Page’s purchase of all of Maud’s rights in 1919 had been a good move: it now gave him plenty of money to continue funding lawsuits against her. In the post-war 1920s, her books enjoyed a surge in popularity. The early L. M. Montgomery titles owned by Page had the pre-war pastoral Prince Edward Island charm in them. By the end of 1914, Anne of Green Gables alone had been reprinted thirty-eight times. All the sequels that he had bought were also being reprinted. In 1920, Page—ever the skilful merchandiser—brought out a new edition, filled with pictures of the silent movie featuring film star Mary Miles Minter.
In the meantime, Page and his lawyer developed another devious scheme—they persuaded the courts to freeze Maud’s U.S. royalty payments (up to the total of $30,000) from Stokes. The argument was that if they won the libel judgment, the money would be there to pay them. Page’s motive was to strangle Maud’s income. Then he would have her where he wanted her— she would be without any funds to pay her substantial legal bills for fighting him. Any savings she had would soon be exhausted. Maud wrote: “There is no end to the deviltry the Pages will attempt and no end to the kinks in U.S. law that enable them to do it. It is an iniquitous law that allows a person’s property to be attached before a case is even tried” (January 5, 1924). But there was nothing she could do about it.
Poor John McClelland, Maud’s gentlemanly Canadian publisher, who was accustomed to civility, decency, and honesty, was horrified and not a little frightened by the wrath of Page. When Mr. McClelland himself had gone down to testify on her behalf he had become so addled on the stand that Maud and her lawyers doubted that he helped her case. Now, fretful about Page, McClelland told Maud that he was sending her the Canadian royalties in advance in case Page should try to “attach” them in Canada. This was the last straw for Maud: she did not think Canadian law would allow such a thing, and wrote McClelland (“who ought to know” she fumed on February 4, 1924) to find out for sure whether the Pages could reach up to Canada to attach her royalties.
Maud had one very tense week waiting for clarification from McClelland. He had bothered her for nothing: he found that the Page Company could not attach her royalties in Canada. But the fact that they believed that Page was urging a Canadian firm to act against them nevertheless lingered as a threat with both Maud and John McClelland. They feared that the lawyers might still come up with some other damaging plan.
Maud’s American publishers began to develop cold feet as well. Frederick Stokes thought Page outrageous and corrupt, but his firm was fed up with this costly fight. They were also afraid they might lose, given the fabled unpredictability of the courts. So once again Maud received a letter from her American attorneys suggesting she settle. She refused, knowing that if she capitulated because she was intimidated, she could not live with herself.
In October 1924, she received a blithe letter from the Page Company asking for her help in putting out a booklet on her life and career. “I can’t understand the psychology of those men,” she fumed. “Here they have been hounding me through the U.S. courts for years and at this very moment have a suit against me in New York—a mere ‘spite’ suit—and have tied up my royalties and have worried me half to death. And yet they coolly ask me to help them get up something solely for their own benefit and convenience—for I get nothing out of it” (October 30, 1924). Page knew his victim well. This was just another form of harassment, and it worried her out of more sleep. Maud was very alarmed about her husband’s mental health at this point, too.
The Pages continued to do very well with all their L. M. Montgomery titles. In April 1925, they gave an exclusive licence to George Harrap & Company of London, England, to supply eight of Maud’s works to the British market. They received $9,000 for this licence—and Maud nothing, since she no longer owned any rights. But she had to keep paying her own attorneys, and in May 1925, Rollins sent her another bill for $1,000, with a warning that he would be spending a lot more time on the case before it was over.
In October 1925, she heard that the New York libel case (the fourth lawsuit) had gone against the Pages, by a unanimous ruling. In December 1925, Frederick A. Stokes finally sent her the cheque for all her royalties that they had been forced to withhold.
The battle with the Page Company was not over, however.
Ewan’s lawsuit with Marshall Pickering
While Maud was battling Page in American courts, Ewan was drawn into a local lawsuit that was equally enervating. His troubles started in 1921, escalated into a court case in late 1922, and dragged on for a long time after that.
When the Macdonalds first moved to Leaskdale, cars were still a novelty; when villagers heard the noise of an approaching car, they ran to the window to watch. But by 1917, many in the village owned cars. In 1918, when Maud’s royalties came in at $45,725, she decided that the time had come to purchase a car, and that Ewan could assume the role of chauffeur for his family. She had wanted a car since her first ride in Lewis Page’s in Boston. So the Macdonald family purchased a five-passenger Chevrolet from Mr. Ivor Law in Zephyr, who had set up a business selling both cars and gas in that village. At age forty-eight, Ewan found himself learning how to drive, and a new world opened up to the Macdonalds.
Ewan was maladroit when it came to anything practical or mechanical. Still, he learned how to crank the car to start it, then hustle back to the driver’s seat very quickly to keep the motor from dying. His family grew accustomed to lurches when he tried to get the car moving forward without killing the motor. Like many other drivers at that time, he had trouble remembering that the car was not a horse, and if he needed to stop quickly, his first impulse was always to yank backwards on the steering wheel, as if he were holding the horse’s reins, and yell “Whoa! Whoa!” Some found this endearing, others found it funny, but his young sons found it very embarrassing. Since Maud never learned to drive, a car was the one place where Ewan felt superior to his talented wife. A drive often blew the cobwebs of Predestination and damnation out of his mind, making him feel the distinguished family man he had it in him to be.
Early automobiles were quite unpredictable objects. They sputtered, jerked, and died, and all too often their wheels or entire axles fell off while being driven. But there were few drivers on the dirt or gravel roads, and cars did not go very fast. At top speed, they might achieve a burst of thirty miles per hour. (Just ten years earlier, in 1911, the world’s speed record for an airplane was set by a U.S. Army aviator who went 106 miles in two hours and seven minutes.)
Ewan’s difficulties with his automobile had resulted in several minor accidents. Maud soon decided that their jumpy Chevrolet was inferior. On May 12, 1921, Ewan traded the Chevrolet for an elegant Gray-Dort touring car that they christened “Lady Jane Grey.”
A month after the purchase of the new car, the real trouble started. On June 12, 1921, after church on a fine bright Sunday in Zephyr, the Gray-Dort was loaded down—with Ewan, Maud, Chester, Stuart, parishioner Mrs. Jake Meyers, and her young daughter, all on their way to the Meyers’ house for tea. Ewan stopped at Ivor Law’s gas bar for fuel.
Zephyr was not much more than a crossroads, with Mr. Law’s establishment located in the middle of the little village. Unfortunately, the crossroad had a blind corner. After purchasing gas (something a minister should not have done on a Sunday, some might have said), Ewan looked to see if anyone was coming before he started onto the road again, but he didn’t take a second look—as usual, he was focused on moving the car forward before the motor sputtered and died. As they turned out into the road, Maud yelled for him to stop—a car was coming. Ewan did not hear her. “Lady Jane Grey” often jerked and died for no reason at all, but this time she took a lively lurch straight into the path of an oncoming car. There was a noisy crash. Fenders crumpled. Glass flew.
The driver of the other car, a Chevrolet, was Marshall Pickering, an elder in the Methodist Church. His wife, Sarah, had a cut on her face that produced much blood but proved superficial. No one in the Macdonalds’ heavier ca
r was at all injured, despite the fact that the impact had whirled their car around into the opposite direction. The Laws, who had witnessed the crash, ran to help.
When the dust settled, it was clear that both cars were damaged. “Lady Jane Grey” had a bent axle, smashed fender, and broken lamp-post (repairs costing fifty dollars). The Pickering Chevrolet, a lighter car, sustained eighty-five dollars in damage. Maud thought that they were equally to blame: Ewan for careless driving (pulling out without looking a second time), but Pickering for speeding. Moreover, Pickering had not been on his own side of the road, as he should have been. He also admitted that he had seen the Macdonald car before crashing into it. (He reasonably expected Ewan to stop, but Ewan instead pulled into the road.) Normally people drove in the middle of these old dirt roads unless someone else was coming. Then they moved over. Cars were so few that road signs weren’t yet necessary. There were some rules of the road, however, including that a driver should slow to twelve miles per hour and toot the horn before proceeding around a blind corner. And drivers were always supposed to look twice before proceeding onto a road. It indeed seemed that both drivers were at fault.
The day after the accident, Mrs. Ivor Law called the Macdonalds to tell them that Marshall Pickering had been taken to the hospital that morning for “stoppage of urine.” She noted that he had had several of these attacks before. In fact, he had had prostate trouble for a number of years, but had told people in the community that he had put off having the operation because his father had died as the result of a prostate operation (before antibiotics, patients often died from post-operative infections).
Ewan visited Mrs. Pickering to commiserate the next day. She made snappish remarks about Ewan’s bad driving, but she did not link her husband’s prostate trouble to the accident. Shortly after that, Ewan paid Marshall Pickering a courtesy call in the hospital where he was recovering from a successful operation. While there, Ewan met Pickering’s son Wellington, who, in the course of an amiable chat, told him that his dad had intended to have the operation the following week, and had written him four weeks ago to come home for the summer to look after the farm while he was recuperating.
Maud wrote in her diary a week later, on June 16, 1920: “Everywhere we go we have to talk of it [the accident] and explain. A hundred exaggerated reports have gone abroad concerning it.” But talk died down, Pickering recovered, and that was the end of the affair—or so everyone thought.
In early December, Maud reported having one of her “queer ‘symbolic’ dreams,” and this worried her. She dreamed that she had come home from a trip to find that Ewan had been hanged but had come back to life after being cut down (February 28, 1922). She thought this presaged trouble.
Some ten days later a letter came to Ewan from Pickering stating that the operation would not have been necessary had it not been for the accident, and that Ewan should pay $500 of the $1,000 it cost. This was one-third of Ewan’s yearly salary (which had risen to $1,500 in 1921) for his combined charge of two churches. But of course Pickering knew that Ewan’s wife was “rich”—her royalties had paid for the fancy Grey-Dort.
The Macdonalds were outraged, particularly by the demanding tone of Pickering’s letter. They knew that enlarged prostate glands were a problem that came on over time, not as the result of a single car accident, and they knew that he’d needed the operation well before the accident. However, Maud observed that “he didn’t know we knew that … not having heard his son’s conversation with Ewan. I suppose he thought it could ‘put it over us’ quite easily” (February 28, 1922).
The Macdonalds felt there would have been some justice in Pickering’s asking that they pay for his car repairs, for he’d already been in the road when they’d pulled in front of him. However, if he had been on his side of the road, the accident would not have taken place. Similarly, if he had slowed and beeped at the corner, as a driver was supposed to, then they would not have collided. But they balked over the medical bills.
Ewan wrote back to Pickering that they were both at fault for the accident and that it was therefore fair that they each pay their own expenses. He told Pickering that many people had heard him talk about his need for the operation before the crash. Maud observed: “Probably this put Pickering into the rage of a man who has tried to do a detestable thing and has been found out. He is a very conceited, arrogant, bumptious man who cannot brook contradiction in anything” (February 28, 1922). His wife (a third wife) she had already characterized, quite critically, as a “very ignorant, insolent, vulgar woman.” Maud does not soften the punches in her private diary—an understandable reaction, perhaps, for someone who always had to be impeccably polite in her public role as a minister’s wife.
The Macdonalds heard nothing more for over two months. On February 28, 1922, when they assumed that the matter was over, they were surprised to get a response. According to Maud, Marshall Pickering’s letter to Ewan Macdonald “raved … abusively through several very badly written and badly spelled pages,” saying that he had never been sick before, could prove by doctors that the accident had both caused his prostate problem and necessitated the ensuing operation, and demanding that Ewan pay $500 within the month or the matter would be “settled” in the courts. At the beginning and the end of the letter, he wrote boldly “Written Without Prejudice.” Clearly he had composed the letter himself—as the spelling and grammar revealed—but that he had consulted a lawyer was evident through his use of the specialized legal term.
Maud wrote: “I suppose he imagines that Ewan, being a minister, will submit to blackmail rather than be dragged into the worry and notoriety of a lawsuit. If so he does not know either of us. We will not be frightened into paying his bills.” Maud was still fighting her own lawsuits in the United States and the letter upset her. “Ewan never worries over anything—except eternal damnation—but I do.… Just as soon as one thing passes, or grows easier, something else comes” (February 28, 1922).
For once, Ewan did not dither over what to do: he flew into action. By April 2, 1922, he had met with a lawyer, Mr. McCullough of Toronto, who told them that if they could prove that Pickering had planned to have the operation before the accident, the case would be easy to win. Ewan would have to find witnesses to disprove Pickering’s statements in the letter.
On April 25, 1922, the Macdonalds received an official letter from Pickering’s lawyer, Mr. Willard W. Greig, of Uxbridge, demanding “$1,500 under threat of a writ.” Greig was a young lawyer at the beginning of his long and successful career in Uxbridge.43 The letter from Pickering’s lawyer gave Ewan a focus for action.
Galvanized into action, Ewan was tireless in his search for testimony to support his case. He saw himself as the victim of a greedy opportunist, and he wanted to believe, like his wife, that God favoured those who steadfastly fought injustice. Ewan covered immense amounts of ground looking for people to testify that Pickering had talked about his need for prostate surgery before the accident. He was quite successful: Marshall Pickering was a garrulous man who travelled far and wide in his car.
Ewan was very good at canvassing, and he showed ingenuity and excellent networking skills. People embraced the opportunity to talk to him because they welcomed a chance to hear more details about the accident. And when he went farther afield, everyone knew his wife was a celebrity. Interesting gossip was hard to come by, and tales of this affair had spread for many miles around, even as far as Kingston, Ontario.
Ewan’s manner was amiable and homespun but gentlemanly, so people welcomed him into their homes. Pickering, by contrast, was often arrogant: even in his own church, many people found his attention-seeking irritating. A well-dressed and handsome man, he was said to be too aware of the fine figure he cut. He had a habit of coming to church after the minister had started the sermon and tiptoeing ostentatiously up to his pew in the front, grimacing for comic effect as each step elicited creaky squeaks from the floor. Expecting the performance each Sunday, children giggled in expectation and par
ents gritted their teeth.
But whatever his faults, Pickering was also a substantial citizen. His family had been early settlers in the area, and he farmed one hundred acres right outside Zephyr. He had been on the building committee when the Methodist church was established, and he remained a significant force in its management. He was a great talker, a talented singer, and a cocky show-off—a quality the Macdonalds loathed. At age sixty-two, Marshall was still a vigorous man behind the wheel. He was much more alert than Ewan, who would be fifty-one in 1921. Whatever these personality differences added to the affair, in a rural community where lawsuits were exceedingly rare, the entire Leaskdale-Zephyr community and the surrounding counties were mesmerized by the spectacle of a public altercation between a Presbyterian “man of the cloth” and a well-to-do farmer who was a powerful force in the Methodist Church.
Maud was delighted to see Ewan rouse himself to action after the prolonged mental distress following his May 1919 breakdown. Relieved that he was taking up his cudgel against injustice, she was nevertheless skeptical. She had already had enough experience in the American courts to know how convincingly people could and would lie.
The stakes in this lawsuit kept rising. On September 25, 1922, the Macdonalds learned that Pickering was now suing them for $8,000: $1,000 for his operation; $5,000 for his sufferings, and $2,000 for his wife. Now there was a new charge: he alleged that Mrs. Pickering had developed “sugar diabetes” as the result of the accident. Old-timers interviewed in the 1980s said that Marshall Pickering was not a sophisticated man for all his “snap,” and they did not fault him for thinking that if he had stoppage of urine after an accident, there was a connection. Nor, they said, would he and his wife have understood what caused diabetes. She claimed she had had to keep her daughters home from paying jobs in order to keep house for her. Maud knew that a lawyer often sued for more than he hoped to get as a strategy for getting part of it, but the inflated amounts were still worrying, especially since Maud was already deeply concerned about her American lawsuits. The sum of $8,000 also stunned this rural community. One man gasped, to Maud’s delight: “Eight thousand!! It’s more than his whole damned carcass is worth, let alone his prostate gland” (October 1, 1922).
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