Maud soon had another jolt. Stuart was an excellent swimmer, but in July 1928 he had a narrow escape in the river. The Norval dam broke and he and his friends were swept over onto the sharp rocks below. They were bruised, but no lives were lost. This was the second scare over Stuart and the river, and Maud began obsessing that something was going to happen to her one “good son,” as she began calling him. She felt that there would be a third catastrophe, just as Frede’s third illness had carried her away.
Soon after that, a truly terrible tragedy occurred in the village, emphasizing how quickly lives could be snuffed out. The Macdonalds’ neighbour, George Brown, had gone up to his farm with his children in the car, and he’d inexplicably driven directly in front of a radial railway train at the crossing. His three children—aged ten, eight, and five—were all killed by the collision, and the father was badly hurt. Stuart witnessed the entire tragedy and ran to help, but found only badly mangled bodies. The town was stunned and paralyzed.27
That summer the church had undertaken some construction on the manse to improve the bathroom. Ewan, preoccupied and inattentive at the best of times, fell headlong into the trench the workman had dug for the sewage system. He was shaken up, but not otherwise hurt. Ewan was frequently absent-minded (like the lovable Reverend Meredith in Rainbow Valley), and car accidents were becoming more common. Maud arranged for Chester to take driving lessons that summer. She wanted a second chauffeur in the family, and she hoped driving would help Chester to become more responsible.
To revive themselves, in early August the Macdonalds took a mini-vacation, motoring with the Barracloughs to Orillia, Muskoka, Cobalt, and North Bay, travelling on the new Ferguson Highway, and returning via Port Carling and Bala. It was a refreshing vacation, if short. Again, as in 1922, Maud lost herself in her reveries over the beauty of northern Ontario.
It was a sad day for Maud when Stuart left home in September 1928 to start secondary school at St. Andrew’s. He would turn thirteen on October 5, 1928. He had actually completed his grammar school a year earlier, but his mother had kept him at home for a full year, without anything to do, claiming that he was still too young for secondary school.28 In 1928, Maud wrote in her journals how she had been dreading Stuart’s departure:
Dear little Stuart. I have had him for thirteen beautiful years. And in all those years from the very night of his birth when he opened his big blue eyes and looked around the room as if he were two months instead of two hours old, he has never been anything but a joy and a delight and a comfort to me. I have never felt once ashamed of him—I have never had any reason to worry about him in regard to behavior or character. He has been the sunshine of the house and how I am going to live after he has gone I know not. (September 9, 1928)29
However, Maud’s life was far from empty when both boys were at St. Andrew’s. She continued working, as before, on activities for the Mission Band, the Missionary Auxiliary, the Ladies’ Aid, the Women’s Institutes, the Sunday School Teachers’ Meetings, the Young People’s Society meetings, and the drama programs for the Young People’s Society and the Olde Tyme Concert. She attended as many social events in Toronto’s literary world as she could manage. She kept daily notes for her journals, and wrote them up when she could steal a block of time. She maintained a voluminous correspondence. She spent a portion of each morning in writing—usually three hours—while her maid got on with the housework, cooking, and washing. She managed to read or reread favourite books every day.
For social evenings, the Macdonalds repeatedly visited the Barracloughs. Other visitors in the Macdonald home during the Norval period reported that they sometimes felt embarrassed for Ewan at the dinner table. His table manners were very poor, revealing his background. Nor could he hold up his end of polite dinner conversation. He tried to tell stories when company was present—stories being a key part of Maud’s idea of good dinner entertainment—but he had poor timing, rhythms, or formulas, and he usually mangled the punchline. This embarrassed his family, and a pained but tolerant look would come over Maud’s and the boys’ faces, as everyone prepared to laugh—albeit nervously—towards the end of the story. But for some reason, the dynamic with the Barracloughs was such that Ewan felt relaxed and valued there, and their home remained a haven for Ewan and Maud.
Stuart in sailor’s suit.
The Macdonald family after the move to Norval in 1925.
Captain and Mrs. Smith on left, the other Smiths, and a depressed Ewan, with Stuart and Chester.
Ewan around 1930.
Ethel Dennis (maid from August 1934 to March 1937).
Elsie Bushby (maid from January 1925 to June 1926).
Mrs. Faye Thompson (maid from April 1931 to August 1934, and again from March 1937 to June 1939) and daughter June, with Joy Laird’s mother, Josie (in light dress).
Mrs. Mason (maid from January 1927 to April 1931) and daughter Helen, with Stuart, Ewan, and Chester Macdonald.
Mrs. Lily Reid (maid from December 1912 to January 1916) with Chester Macdonald.
Edith Meyers (maid from January 1916 to December 1917) with Stuart Macdonald.
Lily Meyers (maid from March 1918 to February 1925).
Anita Webb (maid from July 1939 to early 1941)
The Union Presbyterian Church.
The Norval manse.
The spire of Norval’s Presbyterian Church, where Ewan was a minister, reflected in the Credit River.
Ewan with Ernest and Ida Barraclough of Glen Williams, Ontario.
CHAPTER 16
The final Emily book, Emily’s Quest, had been published in 1927. It was time to start another novel. Maud decided to expand the rejected Marigold stories into a novel, with Marigold Lesley as her new heroine. In June 1927, she began Magic for Marigold, and she finished it by October 1928.
Magic for Marigold (1929)
Marigold Lesley showed Maud making a conscious effort to modernize her heroines rather than to write out of her own experience, as she had with Anne and Emily. Marigold is born into a world where women can be successful medical doctors. In fact, Marigold’s life is saved by a very capable woman doctor after the “men-doctors” have given her up. The well-known Dr. Helen MacMurchy of Toronto likely provided a model. Politically active as a crusader for women’s and public health matters, she had a long and distinguished career as an author and doctor. She had also written an influential series of “little blue books” about child-raising and nutrition, published by the government.30
But besides a theory of child-rearing, Magic for Marigold presented an old-fashioned sense of mothering love. All her life, Maud had treasured the memory of Pensie’s mother, Mrs. Charles Macneill, coming into their bedroom, bending over the children, and saying (when she thought the little cousins were asleep): “Dear little children.” Maud echoes that line in Magic for Marigold.
The setting for Magic for Marigold is Prince Edward Island, but in fact the setting is drawn from both the Island and Ontario. The name “Lesley” paid honour to the many “Leslie” families in the Union congregation. Maud had dreamed up her new heroine as she sat at her Norval bedroom window and looked up at the “hill o’ pines” on Russells’ Hill: Marigold’s home was “Cloud o’ Spruce.” And later in the book, when the “lady-doctor” marries, she marries an adventurer and prospector returned from prospecting in the Klondike, as one of Maud’s friends had. For professional women to marry and continue in their profession was still unusual. But Maud wanted to show that she was moving with the times.
Lewis Page lawsuits resolved
Maud’s lawsuits with her former publisher, L. C. Page, were drawing to a close. Back in February 1926, her lawyer had seen a small opening after the fourth case was dismissed (a case in which Page had tried unsuccessfully to sue her for libel in the New York courts). Mr. Rollins suggested that Maud sue Page for the costs of this New York libel suit. This became the fifth legal action between her and Page. She won this round and collected $2,200 from the publisher. From this settlement in
July 1928, she had to pay her lawyers $1,200 for their services. But she had the satisfaction of finally extracting some blood out of Page, knowing how bitterly he would have hated to pay her.
In the same month (October 1928) that Maud completed Magic for Marigold, Rollins wrote that a favourable decision had finally been made in her Further Chronicles of Avonlea lawsuit, the one that had sought an injunction against Page’s publishing Further Chronicles. It had originally been filed in early 1920. The decision rendered in 1925 was: that the Page Company had violated its 1919 contract with Montgomery when it published the 1912 versions of the stories; that Page could publish no more of these books; and that the profits thus far were to be turned over to Maud, subject to Page recovering his costs for publishing the books. The last provision, of course, gave Page a significant loophole. And he had appealed the 1925 decision every step of the way, dragging the case on until 1928.
In 1925, when Page had first appealed the injunction and the accounting of the profits, the business of establishing profits had been remanded to the County Court for accounting. Then the haggling had begun. Page claimed every imaginable expense against the profits. He also argued that his firm should deduct $3,000 for having bought the stories from Maud in the first place, plus the excess profits’ tax they had paid in 1920 on them. And he claimed that 25 percent of the remaining profits had been paid to the United States government as tax. But things were coming to a close, as Page’s options diminished.
An auditor assigned to the case in February 1927 said that Page owed her nearly $16,000 profits for Further Chronicles of Avonlea after his costs were deducted. She was astonished—she knew that Further Chronicles was one of her weaker books. This gave her some idea of what the income from her books meant to the Page Company—and led her to suspect that Page had not figured her royalties honestly on the better books in the Anne series. She was too weary to feel joy over winning the suit, and she merely wondered if she would ever see the money he owed her. She correctly predicted that he would spin out his delaying tactics through appeals.
But Page’s game of intimidation and obstruction was playing itself out. She had already heard, on May 3, 1927, that George Page had retired from the firm, and a month later, on June 2, she heard that he was dead. Lewis’s unhappy brother was only fifty-five when he died “suddenly of a heart attack” on May 28, in his summer home in Sherburn, Massachusetts. Maud heard an unconfirmed report (from Margaret Marshall Saunders) that he had shot himself. She quipped in her journal that Providence had made a mistake in taking George instead of Lewis.31
Two days later, on June 4, Maud received a bizarre telegram from Lewis Page saying: “Since, as advised, you like a good fight, you will be interested in knowing that George Page was buried today.” Soon, she received a letter from Page with the same message, enclosing another copy of the telegram. All in all, she observed that she got three copies of the message, a baffling attempt to assign to her some responsibility for the death of George Page. In mid-June 1928, Mr. Rollins and Mr. McClelland both reported the gossip they had heard from a former Page salesman that Lewis Page had fought with his brother until George left the firm.
The story went that the fighting had worried Mrs. George Page (Mabel Hurd Page) until she had a mental breakdown. When George Page died, Lewis attended his brother’s funeral, but was reputed to have sat by himself. Maud puzzled over Lewis Page’s psychology—why would he send her, his most bitter legal antagonist, such inappropriate and inexplicable telegrams about family matters? Lewis Page was right in sensing that such messages would bedevil her.
But Maud’s day of triumph was coming. In the last week of October 1928, a fat letter came from her lawyer. By this time, the mere arrival of these letters spooked Maud. Sometimes she would wait several days to get up courage to slit open the envelope. However, this one brought the good news she had been hoping to hear for a decade. The lawsuits were all over. Rollins told her that he had “attached” Page’s property until he paid the judgment, and that the lawsuit had cost Page over a year’s profits. Rollins also reported that Page had acquired heavy gambling debts and that he had been forced to lay off people in his firm and require the remaining ones to work longer hours to compensate.
Maud wrote in her journal on October 22, 1928:
It is over! Over!! Over!!!
And——I——am—-free!
Of course, Page had a few parting shots. In late November 1928, he sent her another telegram: “Mrs George Page has lost her mind after her husband’s shocking death. She never recovered. She died yesterday.” This puzzled Maud all over again. She thought it a sign of Page’s mental imbalance. A more obvious explanation was merely that he had probably been drinking heavily when he sent her these telegrams.
Lewis Page had a phenomenal ability to get under people’s skin. In the process, he damaged his own business. New authors who heard of his reputation feared signing with him, and although his old best-selling titles continued to generate income, he shifted his focus to reviving out-of-print classics. Without the Wanamaker’s sales, his firm went downhill, although he hung onto it until the end of his life, and managed to die a well-to-do but not wealthy man. Even after his death in 1956, Page’s will reflected his vindictiveness. He skewered various members of his family, but left substantial sums to all the women who had worked for him and garnered his favour. According to Roger Straus and Robert Wohlforth, the women’s names were gleefully published in Boston, which caused local wags to joke that some women only found out who his other mistresses were when his will was probated.32
Page asked in his will to have only one thing inscribed on his grave: “Qui libros bonos edendos curavit” (Latin for “He took great care to publish good books”). Maud would have agreed with him on this point: he did make beautiful books. For her part, she would always regret that the man who had launched her career turned out to be such a scoundrel.
The battle against Page had brought Maud enormous strain for the eleven years between 1917 and 1928, keeping her constantly facing the possibility of complete financial ruin. L. C. Page was one of the foremost robber-barons in the publishing world, but he met a tough opponent in Maud. When her righteous indignation was fully aroused, she had found more courage than even she knew she had. And stamina, too: she managed to publish six novels during the duration of the five lawsuits and countersuits.
The $15,000 settlement cheque came on November 7, 1928 (it was originally for over $18,000, but Rollins had extracted his well-earned final fee of $3,000). Maud observed that she had paid out about $14,000 in lawyers’ fees over the years for the five lawsuits, so she really had netted only about $4,000 for all her trouble and worry after the various settlements were paid, “plus the satisfaction of thoroughly beating a man who tried to trick me. That second item, not the first, makes me feel that after all it was all worthwhile” (November 7, 1928).
Maud wrote in her journals that it was very handy to have that one big lump sum come in a lean year. She looked forward to investing it wisely so that it would pay for her children’s university education and “make things easier.”
Nora Lefurgy returns
In September 1928, a long-lost friend turned up: Nora Lefurgey, now Mrs. Edmund Campbell, re-emerged in Maud’s life after an absence of twenty-four years. Back in 1903, the gifted and vibrant Nora—then the Cavendish schoolteacher—had boarded with Maud and her grandmother. Nora shared Maud’s love of memorizing poetry and literary passages, as well as her love of nature. There was one very big difference, however: Nora did not have mood swings like Maud—she was unfailingly upbeat.
Nora had moved to Toronto so her two sons could attend high school there. Maud had known Nora’s husband, Edmund Campbell, back in Belmont, PEI, when she was twenty-two. He had gone on to take a B.A. and an M.A. in Engineering, and had become a distinguished Canadian mining-engineer. He and Nora had enjoyed their nomadic life, travelling to the Canadian north and the American south and west, and had recently returned from a
trip to western Canada. (Their stories of the Klondike inspired elements of Marigold.) Ed had now set up a consulting company in Toronto so that they could settle down and educate their remaining children.
Nora had already buried two of her four children: one had died at birth, and their only daughter had died of polio at age twelve. A third son, David, had survived polio, but was badly crippled and wore heavy iron leg braces. Their youngest son, Edward, known as “Ebbie,” had been untouched by bad luck, and both sons were now enrolled in Upper Canada College, an exclusive Toronto secondary school for boys. Even though Nora had experienced the tragic loss of two of her children and the crippling of a third, she was as vital a life-force as ever.
Nora and family came out to Norval to visit Maud for Thanksgiving dinner. Out of touch for nearly a quarter-century, they “clicked” as before, and fell into an afternoon of reminiscing. Maud had a real companion again, like Frede, someone with whom to exchange good stories, even though they lacked the bond of kinship. Nora was trustworthy, of equal intelligence and learning with Maud, and she was happy in her own life, yet impressed by Maud’s achievement and willing to acknowledge it. Nora’s supportive friendship would help bring stability to Maud’s life through the next decade.
In Prince Edward Island, Nora’s family had outclassed Maud’s—a detail left out of Maud’s journals, although of course Maud would have been keenly aware of it. Nora’s father, William Thomas Lefurgey, had been a parliamentary secretary; although he was a man of letters rather than a farmer, he also owned farmland in PEI. Nora was from French Huguenot stock—not Scottish—but her family was distinguished, and she had made a happy and successful marriage.
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