Lucy Maud Montgomery

by Mary Henley Rubio

  As Maud herself knew all too well, winning a legal judgment and obtaining the payout were two separate matters. The Macdonalds felt rage and injustice after the judgment. But there was more fallout. When they read the Globe account of the trial, Ewan found himself identified as “husband of the novelist better known as L. M. Montgomery.” Ewan rarely took strong positions, but this time he set his foot down: since he himself did not have the money to pay the judgment, he informed Maud that he would not allow her to use a penny of her savings to pay it for him. He had been driving the car, not she, so the judgment was against him, not her. The car was registered in his name, not hers. Fortunately, Maud had always kept her money separate from Ewan’s, an unusual practice for a woman of that era. There was no legal recourse for Pickering, to his and Greig’s disappointment, for they could not extract money from Maud’s own bank account. Ewan’s Presbyterian congregations were likewise outraged by the judgment. They rallied behind him and arranged to pay his salary in advance so it could not be garnisheed.

  As so often happens with lawsuits, all participants would be losers. Pickering earned nothing but frustration. Rather than obtaining any money, Pickering had to lay out money himself to keep bringing Ewan to court over the next few years to testify that he, Ewan, was still unable to pay the judgment. Pickering knew that many villagers were snickering behind his back, and others in the community shunned him. They were unwilling to testify against him, but they knew that his condition had existed before the accident. Shortly after the trial was over, he himself developed diabetes, prompting Maud to comment wryly in her journals that it was enough to make one believe in “judgements from God.” Pickering died in 1930.

  The consequences of Riddell’s judgment followed the Macdonalds to their graves. Maud had hoped that winning would dispel Ewan’s feelings of “personal inadequacy.” When he did not win, despite working so hard, Ewan took it as one more sign that he was an outcast from God. Before long, he sank into depression again. After the trial, gloom began to hang on him, and his posture and manner gave it away. He needed medications once more. The cheerful, sweet man that Maud had married was again replaced by a sad, morose one.

  Maud’s equilibrium was also upset by the Pickering affair. The case had poisoned the community atmosphere. Still, she managed to write all of Emily of New Moon between August 1921 (two months after the accident) and February 15, 1922 (before the trial came up in court). She wrote, “I have had more intense pleasure in writing it than any of the others—not even excepting Green Gables” (February 15, 1922). One can only be amazed at her discipline, and be thankful that she found exhilaration in writing fiction.

  But as always in Maud’s life, more was going on than was visible on the surface. Years earlier, the entrance of Ewan Macdonald as a promising suitor had fuelled the creation of lovable “Anne.” Now, Maud put the same energy into Emily of New Moon that she had put into Anne of Green Gables, and felt the same intense pleasure in writing it. But it was not because of Ewan’s presence this time. Now, the attention and admiration from another man helped bring “Emily” into being. That man was the Reverend Edwin Smith, now called “Captain Smith,” a returning World War I war hero.

  CHAPTER 11

  Captain Edwin Smith

  In Maud’s ten volumes of personal journals, the name Edwin Smith appears only fourteen times, sometimes as a passing reference. He makes even fewer appearances in her scrapbooks. Yet in this period, he provides an interesting episode in the Macdonalds’ history, allowing us to speculate on complexities in Maud’s and Ewan’s relationship. To understand the especial significance of Smith’s very limited appearance in Maud’s journals—and his disproportionate impact on the Macdonalds’ life—we must loop back to the Island years, when Maud and Ewan were courting, and then leap forward again to 1919, when Edwin Smith re-entered the scene.

  Maud gives only a cursory history of Captain Smith in an entry of September 1919, when he seems to reappear out of nowhere. She jauntily tells us that she had first heard of him when he was the Presbyterian minister in the Kensington parish. She says that she had never met him before he preached at Ewan’s induction in Cavendish in 1903. She observes that he was then young, “lately married, very handsome and clever.” She attributes to her friend Fanny Wise the observation, “That man is too good looking to be a minister.”

  In 1919, Smith came to Leaskdale to see them. Maud observes that by this time Smith has had “adventures galore.” He is living in Oshawa, Ontario, with his family, working as an agent for the Imperial Life Insurance Company.

  I had expected to see a good deal of change in him. He is by now fifty years old. But he looks about 35. There is not a thread of gray in his thick black hair, not a line on his lean, handsome, almost boyish face, not a trace of stoop or stodginess in his slender upright figure.

  He entertained us brilliantly with his tales of adventure. He is certainly a rather universal genius, for he can preach, talk and write wonderfully well, is a Fellow of the R.A.S. of London, and is full of personal charm and magnetism.47

  Then, she adds:

  I rather think he lacks steadiness of purpose, with all his gifts, and so has been surpassed in his professional career by men who were far his inferiors in mental capacity.

  This last line about Smith is dated September 21, 1919, but we do not know when she actually wrote it. (There was always a time-lag between events and their being recorded in her journals. Maud’s procedure was to jot dated notes onto stray pieces of paper, and then, in the next stage, write them up into her formal “journal.” Sometimes there was another intermediate stage where she did a preliminary write-up into an informal account that could be recopied, particularly if the subject was “delicate.” At many points in her life, she was months, or years, behind in writing up events, as was the case here.) Maud’s editorial comment about Smith’s “lack of purpose” sounds strange in the context of their first reunion after an interlude of many years. However, the delay before this story of Smith’s return was actually transcribed may help account for this slightly incongruous comment. (She only started recopying her journals in 1919 and it took her a long time to move from the beginning in 1889 to 1919, so she could shape her entries with the benefit of some hindsight.)

  Edwin Smith is an enigma in Maud’s saga. He and Ewan were approximately the same age, and both were graduates from Pine Hill Seminary in Halifax (then a Presbyterian training school, now the ecumenical Atlantic School of Theology). Edwin graduated in 1897, and Ewan in 1903. Both men were Scottish in descent, and their careers ran along parallel courses as Presbyterian ministers on the Island, their paths crossing many, many times in church meetings, according to the PEI newspapers, which gave extensive coverage to ministers’ activities. But there was one major difference between their early careers: Smith’s was as dazzling as Ewan’s was undistinguished.

  Smith was from Merigomish, Nova Scotia, and had been educated at Pictou Academy (1887–89), Dalhousie College (1891–92), Manitoba College (1892–96), and at Pine Hill Seminary (1896–97). At a time when Master’s degrees were far more rare than Ph.D.s are today, he had taken his Master’s degree at Manitoba, writing a short but solid thesis on “Heredity.” He had then spent a year abroad in Britain, travelling and undertaking study at Oxford University. He started his preaching career at Shediac, New Brunswick, then moved to Kensington, PEI, where he came to Maud’s attention through newspaper articles and relatives’ accounts. When he preached at the induction service for Ewan Macdonald in Cavendish, Maud was not the only young, unmarried woman who noticed his good looks and buoyant carriage. But, sadly for them all, he had already married the pretty Grace Chambers of Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia, in 1897.

  Smith was spectacularly successful in the ministry in Prince Edward Island. A mesmerizing speaker, a charmer with his warm and outgoing personality, and an unusually dynamic man of action, he also had an uncommon knack of seizing opportunities for adventure. In early 1903, his adoring parishioners in
Kensington gave him a return train ticket to Vancouver and back—a first-class ticket, no less—so he could attend the Presbyterian Church’s General Assembly. From this trip, the enterprising Smith developed a lecture called “Canada: From Ocean to Ocean,” in which he lavishly praised and described the natural beauty of Canadian scenery, linking it all to God’s bounty. But Smith did more than speak. He illustrated this lecture with stereopticon views. The stereopticon was an exciting new technology at the time, when only a few people had cameras and there were few means to see pictures of other places in the world, except in expensive books, themselves a rare commodity.

  Talk of Smith’s narrative gifts spread fast around the Island—the Patriot called him “eloquent, forcible, and effective” (June 2, 1903). He travelled around the Island giving his illustrated lecture, showing the landscapes of the rest of Canada. The newspapers carried constant and glowing accounts of his shows. He was so newsworthy that in December 1903 the Guardian even reported as news that Smith had driven from Kensington to Charlottetown in “four and a half hours.” On December 21, 1903, his picture occupied the centre of page one in the Guardian, and the article there summarized his entire first sermon at Cardigan, where he had just moved. Newspapers claimed that he had been a brilliant student, a claim that was overstated.

  Smith was notable for more than his speaking ability, however. He was also an accomplished yachtsman, a fact that gave him dash and glamour. The Island newspapers dubbed him affectionately the “nautical clergyman.” He received province-wide attention when he purchased a new thirty-six-foot yacht called the Volunte before moving to Cardigan in 1903. During his years there, Smith continued sailing off the Island, lecturing about his travels (eventually charging admission to his lectures), and producing travel writing for various magazines.

  On the Island, before radio and television, Islanders read their newspapers eagerly and attentively. These newspapers reported everything that happened across the Island, whether it was important or inconsequential: who came off of the ships from Boston, who was staying in what hotel, who had visited whom, whose horse had bolted, who had been born, married, or died. They talked about what they read. Ministers were the most important people in a community, and religion and politics were always newsworthy items. There was competition for good ministers, and parishioners basked in reflected glory when their ministers made the news. The dashing Reverend Smith was so well known that The Daily Patriot even carried the item that there had been several bidders when he offered his cow, “Dainty Lass,” for sale in June 1905.

  But on January 20, 1906, the Examiner did the unexpected: it carried a short and sharply critical editorial piece on Smith’s popular lectures, saying that his “From Ocean to Ocean” talk was not in the “true interests of the Province” because it encouraged young people to depart by making the rest of Canada so appealing. Young Islanders had long been leaving the overcrowded province for advanced professional education, but now they were migrating permanently to the Canadian west. This loss of an educated, energetic young generation was becoming a serious political issue.

  Smith, always a good sailor, took measure of the wind and quickly adjusted his sails: he cleverly refocused his lectures from the beauty of Canada beyond the Island to the beauty within Prince Edward Island. This was timely and smart.

  The government of PEI had started organizing a campaign to promote tourism. Smith’s new lectures on Prince Edward Island were so successful that the Island’s Tourist and Development Association soon recruited him to speak about the Island’s beauties in the United States. The Daily Examiner and The Daily Patriot gave him big write-ups when he delivered a series of “illustrated lectures on P.E. Island in New York, Providence, Boston, and other Eastern cities.” He drew huge audiences. On June 23, 1907, the Examiner reported that the Island expected an influx of tourists after Smith’s lectures in the United States. The tourist board suggested that if the Americans “seeking the restful shade of rural P.E. Island” were “well received, accommodated, and pleased, they will come again.”

  Between 1903 and 1906, while Smith was getting so much Island newspaper attention with his travels, talks, and activities, Ewan was the minister at Cavendish and courting Maud (who was busy writing Anne of Green Gables). Ewan rarely made the papers.

  After some years at Cavendish, and buoyed by Maud’s affections, by 1905 Ewan felt the need to distinguish himself in some way, too. There were different paths to success in the ministry, and one was through further education. Ewan—who could not have hoped to compete with someone like Edwin Smith for sheer dazzle—chose the route of further study, making the decision to take a postgraduate course of study in Scotland. On August 20, 1906, the Patriot describes his send-off from Cavendish with the typical laudatory write-up in the newspaper. But as we have seen, the schooling in Glasgow was not a success. The same week that Ewan sent Maud the blank and unsigned postcard from Scotland (March 4, 1907), Maud and other Islanders were reading that Edwin Smith had just addressed over four thousand people in the United States, about the beauty of Prince Edward Island. “This [talk by Edwin Smith] is the greatest advertisement this Island has ever had in the great Republic,” the Patriot effused on March 6, 1907.

  Maud had also been very alert to the province’s desire to develop tourism in the 1903–1907 period, and she had sung its praises in her first novel, emphasizing its natural beauty. Between late 1906 and early 1907, she was quietly sending out Anne of Green Gables to publishers.

  Smith continued to draw extravagant media attention: on April 21, 1907, the Patriot bragged that he was one of the best speakers on the continent.

  The following day, April 22, 1907, the contract for Anne of Green Gables was being typed and mailed to Maud. She signed it on May 2, 1907. Maud and Edwin Smith seemed on parallel tracks to success and fame, towing their entire province behind them. Ewan, who was by then struggling to find a parish, was left behind in the dust.48

  On January 25, 1908, Smith’s second two-month speaking tour in the United States was announced; the Patriot published a handsome picture of him on the front page. Maud clipped it and pasted it into her scrapbook. On this same page in her scrapbook she placed a poem, with a maple leaf below it; Smith’s picture is directly beneath these two items. The poem, “Winter in Lovers’ Lane,” by Clinton Scollard, begins:

  In Lovers’ Lane ’tis winter now

  Will springtime never come again?

  The poem ends:

  Those tremulous trystings, are they done.—

  The meeting joy, the parting pain?

  Will hearts no more be wooed and won

  In memory haunted lover’s lane?

  Ah, wait till April’s bugle call

  Reigns, rich with rapture, up the glen.

  Till may once more her flower thrall

  Weave amorously—and then—and then!

  Although Maud pasted Smith’s picture in her scrapbook, she does not even mention him in her (recopied) diary of this period. However, the proximity of these three items—the poem about “Lovers’ Lane,” the maple leaf of patriotism49 and passion,50 and Smith’s picture all come together on one important page of her scrapbook: he is the man of a maiden’s dreams, he is famous for advertising the landscape of Prince Edward Island and Canada, the country of the maple leaf, and he is linked to the intimate Island lane that Maud most associated with romance, dreams, and awakening.

  While Smith had been off promoting Prince Edward Island tourism in the United States in the early months of 1908, the L. C. Page Company of Boston had been preparing to publish Anne of Green Gables. By June 1908, Maud’s little red-headed girl was launched as the Island’s greatest ambassador ever. Ewan’s courtship had figured prominently in the creation of little “Anne,” but Edwin Smith, whose eye had seen (and speeches had touted) the beauty of the Island so effectively, alerting Maud even more to the possibilities of speaking and writing evocatively about landscape, was also a fellow traveller in her imagination. They were
kindred spirits through their joint promotion of her beloved Island. It was, in the curious and complicated way that Maud’s affections worked, a creative ménage à trois.

  The rest is history: no fictional character has ever done for a province’s tourism what little “Anne” did for the Island. Smith’s public speaking skills initially promoted Island tourism, heightening Maud’s awareness of the romantic possibilities in its unique landscape, and then her literary skills embellished, in words, the enchanting picture of the Island. Maud’s “Anne” became the Island’s foremost tourist icon, first reinforcing, and then completely overtaking Smith’s efforts. Almost immediately after Anne’s publication, newspapers reported an influx of tourists in search of its heroine.

  This all should have thrilled Maud, who had been ambitious to write a “woman’s humble name” on the scrolls of fame. However, she focused on another worry. No longer facing a bleak, impoverished existence after Anne’s success in 1908, Maud now wondered if she had committed herself to an unwise engagement. She knew that Ewan had come into her life in its “loneliest hour” and had given her the affection she had needed to write in a positive state of mind, but in the ensuing period she had seen that Ewan was a man of disturbing limitations. His slump in Scotland had alarmed her. She could not help comparing him with a man like the dashing and already married Smith, whose success by that time only underlined Ewan’s failure to rise in the ecclesiastical world. It is no wonder that she herself suffered a nervous collapse after Anne was published, partly from the overwhelming public attention, but partly because of her ambivalence about the engagement.

  The Island was not quite ready for the influx of American tourists brought in by Smith’s speeches and by Maud’s book. Smith had urged the well-heeled millionaires to motor to the Island for their summer holidays in 1907 and 1908, but as soon as the tourists came en masse in their cars, neither the Islanders—nor their horses—liked these noisy newfangled contraptions. This heated up an issue simmering on the Island. Public opposition to automobiles grew more forceful as the belching and sputtering machines proliferated. Angry letters blitzed the newspapers, both pro and con them. The April 4, 1908, issue of the Patriot announced a bill to “prohibit the running of all motor vehicles upon the streets and roads of this province under a fine of $500 or 6 months in jail.” Five hundred dollars was a year’s salary—a very stiff fine.