But, of course, Maud’s greater worry was Chester. He had taken smaller lodgings in Toronto after Luella moved out. Maud did not like him living alone, so she urged him to go back to Knox College in the fall when he started to article in law. But even if Chester had been willing, Knox College would not have allowed him back, given his reputation for stealing. He refused to return to dormitory living, and Luella stayed with her father in the fall, even after the weather cooled down. This confirmed to the community that something was seriously wrong with the marriage.
In early October 1934 there was one happy break for Maud. Murray Laird proposed to Marion Webb, and they were married. The wedding was very quiet, given that Murray’s father had recently died. The only witnesses were Mrs. Alfred Laird, mother of the groom, and Maud herself. Marion, unattended, wore a gown of blue silk, with a velvet hat, and she carried a bouquet of yellow roses and ferns. But even with this small group, Maud could hardly persuade Ewan to perform the ceremony. His on and off phobias were on again on the day of the wedding. Normally, Ewan was very fond of Marion: he loved to tease her because she blushed so easily. But even so, moments before the ceremony was to start, he declared that he was “under a doom.” Luckily he managed to get through the day, and nobody except Maud knew his state of mind.
Ewan was unable to preach in September and October, so Maud arranged for other preachers to come deliver Sunday sermons. Then, on October 12, 1934, Mr. Barraclough told Ewan that the church managers had met and decided to give him sick leave only until the end of December. That meant that he must resign at the end of the year if he was not well enough to resume preaching. With this added pressure, Ewan decided in November to visit his sisters on the Island. Maud was so exhausted by his ups and downs that she willingly acceded. With the disruption, she had been unable to finish Mistress Pat. Ewan rarely slept well, and each day he had new symptoms of imagined diseases, took spells of moaning or raving, or sat around in a dull and moody state. She was herself near the breaking point from the strain.
As soon as Ewan left, Maud could write again, putting all of her own emotions into the imaginary framework of a novel. It was completed at the end of 1934.
Mistress Pat (1935)
Mistress Pat continues the tale of Pat Gardiner and her love for her home, “Silver Bush,” which has been home to the Gardiners for generations. Maud details the rituals of daily life in the joyous family of Gardiners. Like Maud, Pat believes that when people laugh together, they become friends for life. But Pat’s home is under threat—the family is growing up, and the “change” that Pat so dreads threatens from several angles.
The home is given warmth and charm by the presence of rival storytellers: the Gardiners’ Irish maid, Judy Plum, and their hired hand, Tillytuck. The hostile elements in the community are embodied in the ever-present Binnie family, who wield considerable power through gossip. “What will the Binnies say?” is a refrain that always hovers in the Gardiners’ consciousness (as it had in Maud’s), and they must keep assuring themselves they don’t care.
Then, the unimaginable happens. Pat’s brother, Sid, who will inherit the farm, makes a foolish and precipitous marriage to May Binnie. Silver Bush is invaded by an alien presence, in the form of aggressive, coarse, and gossipy May, who has managed somehow to snag Pat’s brother. The Gardiners have always been drawn together by their shared experiences and stories, but May has no appreciation of such ties and sentiment. Silver Bush is just a house to her, and her proprietary presence spoils everyone’s happiness.
Mistress Pat is full of Maud’s literary mannerisms, and the book dwells, to the point of tedium, on the theme of hating change. But it is still a powerful book, perhaps because of Maud’s ability to embody the wrenching change undergone by the western world in the terrible alterations in the Gardiners’ private world. The most powerful symbol in the book is that of the Gardiner home catching fire—significantly, this happens while the family is at church. There is nothing they can do but to watch their home burn down. It ignites because May carelessly left a stove burning when they went to church. May, of course, feels no loss whatsoever now that she has destroyed Silver Bush, and she crassly looks forward to getting a new house in its place.
At the conclusion, Pat’s old friend, Hilary (“Jingle”) Gordon, now an accomplished architect, returns and proposes to Pat. Now that Pat’s beloved Silver Bush no longer exists, she is willing to marry and go away to a new home, one he has designed for her—and the book has the trademark happy ending.
—
This novel was finished in January 1935, about a year after Maud had begun it. It was dedicated to “Mr. and Mrs. Webb and their family,” whose own happy home was emptying as their children married and moved away. Maud’s life was under threat from many angles: the novel had been written during one of the most unhappy periods in her life. Some readers have found the novel unwholesome, complaining that Pat seems more neurotic than normal and sympathetic.
When Maud shipped Mistress Pat off in January 1935 to her American publishers, Stokes, they wrote accepting it within two weeks. But six weeks later, in mid-March, to her dismay, Hodder and Stoughton (her English publishers) refused it. This was a demoralizing and frightening rejection, stirring up the surprise and hurt she had felt when she had been paid a kill-fee for the Marigold stories after being commissioned to write them. Fortunately, by December 1935, she reported that another publisher in Britain, Harraps, had taken Mistress Pat.
The old secure world was gone, like Pat’s home and Norval’s mill. People were now watching with horror as Adolf Hitler became Führer in Germany, and the German Jews were stripped of their rights by the Nuremberg Race Laws. The infamous “Kristallnacht” was still three years away, but the wider world was ready to burn, and Maud’s readers quite understood Pat’s grief in watching helplessly while her beloved home—the symbol of peace, happiness, and security, burned to the ground.
This would be Maud’s last book written in Norval. The burning of Pat’s house was also an appropriate symbol for the end of her personal life in this idyllic village, which had initially promised so much joy.
Problems with Chester continued. In January, the Macdonalds learned that Mr. Bogart was fed up with Chester’s erratic performance. Chester was good at law when he put his mind to it, but all too often he simply did not show up for work, just as he had not shown up for classes. Ewan and Maud made a quick trip to Toronto to try to salvage the situation, and they managed to persuade Bogart to give Chester another try. Chester pleaded that headaches had kept him from going to work. This was a bad sign to Maud.
Something strange was going on, too, in the Old Tymers’ Association. This had always been completely Maud’s own production: she called the meetings; she selected and directed the one-act play, which made up half the program; and she guided other people in developing songs, recitations, and skits for the rest. But for some reason, the executive held a secret meeting, one to which Maud was not invited. One of the parishioners—Garfield McClure (now aged fifty)—orchestrated this.
Garfield McClure had always been a problem. Everyone would have conceded that he was an able man, but also an arrogant show-off who always sought the limelight. (This love of show would follow him to the grave: his elaborate tombstone in the Norval cemetery dwarfs all others.) At that time, he was chairman of the board of the church management, and Ewan had included Garfield in his private assessments of parishioners:
Garfield McClure: A conceited clown who would enter into the presence of royalty unabashed and think himself on the same level socially—one who never considers beforehand what his words may produce. One who expects everyone to toady to him—one who has wild ideas and expects everyone to fall in line with them. One who is not above uttering exaggerated flatteries and doing underhanded work. One who could do some good if he had less conceit and more common sense. One who spoils the little good he does by his silly conduct.
Since Garfield was Luella’s uncle (and was very fond of her),
he was furious at Chester’s treatment of her. According to Luella, her Uncle Garfield thought Ewan and Maud should have made Chester treat his wife and child better. Garfield was ready to make trouble for the Macdonalds.
In the Old Tyme Concert, Garfield had always been one of the performing stars (despite a tendency to clown his parts, which irritated many, particularly Maud). He apparently wanted to assume complete control of the organization, taking credit for its success. He called an organizational meeting, telling others he had called it without informing Maud “as a favour to her” because she was so busy with her sick husband. Of course, Maud found out about the secret meeting and learned that she had been deliberately excluded. She was enraged. To her delight, Garfield could not find a suitable play. She graciously provided one. Most of the members saw that he had orchestrated an insult to Maud. The event left a bad taste all around.
But there was far greater trouble brewing. Ewan’s salary in Norval had been in arrears throughout 1934. Then suddenly he was paid. The Macdonalds thought that a nice gesture, particularly given that Ewan had been too “sick” to perform his preaching duties. But Maud felt a continuing chill from the Norval parishioners—quite unlike the Union Church people, who were warm and demonstrative and always solicitous about his health. The Macdonalds were even more surprised when no one from Norval said they were happy to have Ewan back when he returned to the pulpit at Christmas. They would learn the reason eventually, but only when it was too late.
On February 14, Ewan went to a Session meeting and was broadsided by an attack. He was told that people “didn’t want to come to church because of him.” The elders who spoke out—Robert Reid (Luella’s father) was one of them—could offer no proof of this, but all of them, even those that the Macdonalds considered their friends, sat in silent concurrence. Ewan was so wounded by their allegations, true or untrue, that he felt he had to resign.
A day later, he went to Robert Reid’s home and asked directly for an explanation of the ill will shown at the Session meeting. Mr. Reid told him it was the result of “that letter.” Ewan then learned that a letter had been sent out to all parishes from Presbyterian headquarters with directions to keep ministers’ salaries from falling in arrears. As chairman of the board, Garfield McClure had felt chastised by the letter, and was sure that Ewan was the source of this complaint. Garfield had not recognized that the letter was a circular sent to every church, not a missive sent to rap specific knuckles at Norval.
Ewan explained the facts of the case, but he discovered that the truth made no difference to the general feeling of his board of management. Garfield McClure was on a personal vendetta to force Ewan’s resignation, and he had turned many of the Norval congregation against Ewan. He had whispered that Ewan had been too sick to work, but not too sick to complain about not being paid. People could plainly see that Ewan, sick though he might be, did go out in the car from time to time—to Toronto, to Glen Williams (to visits with the Barracloughs), and to chauffeur Maud to various engagements. Many Norval parishioners were already resentful of the Macdonalds’ close friendship with the Barracloughs. Ewan was also criticized for travelling to the Island for a “vacation” when he claimed to be too ill to preach. And since Maud had told everyone that Ewan’s troubles were physical, not mental, and they believed her, there was some justification for grumbling that if he could do so much travelling, then he could also preach.
The Norval people were of a mind that it was time for Ewan to move on and let them get a new pastor who would do his job. And, indeed, it was probably time for him to relocate or retire: church morale was down. Ewan was sixty-five, and he was finding it too stressful to perform as minister—after his humiliation over Chester’s behaviour. Still, the whole affair had been badly handled, and Garfield’s underhanded scheming had intensified the bad feeling.63 Ewan and Maud were profoundly hurt, but they held their heads high. They rightly suspected that Chester’s behaviour had played a big role in the community’s actions against them. Whatever the causes, there was no turning back.
Ironically, Ewan’s indignation at his treatment renewed him, and he started preaching vigorous sermons again. Righteous anger had dispelled his demons far better than Homewood’s expensive treatment. The word quickly went through the community that the elders had been wrong about the letter, and that Ewan had not complained about Norval being behind in payments. This softened people’s attitudes; Garfield and the men responsible for the misunderstanding slunk about attempting to clear themselves of blame. But as Maud noted, with her keen understanding of human nature, the Macdonalds were now resented by certain Norval parishioners precisely because those parishioners now knew they had treated their minister and his wife badly. Resignation was the only possible course of action.
Maud had always hoped that when the time came for Ewan to resign, in the normal course of events, they would buy a tract of land down by the Credit River and build their retirement home in Norval. She did not like living in cities, and she loved the beauty of Norval. She had liked almost all of the parishioners in both parishes before the blow-up. But now the insults she and Ewan had endured from some of them “stained backward” through her association with everyone. They must pack up and leave as quickly as possible.
Toronto would be their destination. Maud loved to visit relatives in Prince Edward Island, but it was never a consideration for retirement. Toronto was where her sons were studying and would start their professions. Maud had many literary friends in Toronto, as well as Nora. She hoped that in Ewan’s retirement—when she would be free of church work herself—she could employ her formidable organizational and speaking skills for the benefit of Canadian writers and Canadian literature. Now, with her boys nearly grown, she could concentrate fully on her own writing, and her own career in the literary world of Toronto. She began looking forward to the future.
William Arthur Deacon, now the influential Literary Editor of The Mail and Empire, had not changed his attitude towards her books. But she had received an important honour that spring—the invitation to become a member of the Literary and Artistic Institute of France, extremely rare for a foreigner.
The Macdonalds had to find somewhere to live in Toronto, quickly. Maud’s investments were still in bad shape, and she did not have enough ready cash to buy a home. She calculated that she could afford fifty dollars a month to rent a home, but the homes she saw at that price were very far below her standard. She hated all the parts of Toronto where the houses were “cheek by jowl” with each other, without space and trees. Then, good fortune intervened. She contacted an innovative realtor named A. E. LePage.
Albert Edward LePage had come into the fledgling real estate industry in 1913. He was a gifted and energetic salesman who catered to the rapidly expanding professional and business classes as Toronto spilled into the suburbs. He was instrumental in establishing the Toronto Real Estate Board and instituting a code of ethics. He was the first Toronto agent to professionalize the business of selling personal homes, devising ingenious ways that people who could not afford to buy a house outright could buy with a mortgage. Maud had found a saviour. Best of all, he was also from Prince Edward Island. Maud felt especial trust in him that was not misplaced.64
As it happened, a famous developer and architectural firm was just opening up an area on Toronto’s outermost western fringes called “Swansea.” On Riverside Drive, the road that Maud and Ewan took to Toronto, she had admired a new development of homes. She fell in love with the property at 210A Riverside Drive (now 210 Riverside Drive). It was listed at $14,000, far more than she could pay all at once.
LePage showed her how she could purchase it with a down payment of a few thousand dollars and a mortgage. She could pay the mortgage off later when some of her stocks rose or when her insurance policies paid dividends. As the agent for that house, LePage negotiated a reduced price of $12,500, and Maud bought the house of her dreams. Her neighbours would all be successful businessmen, entrepreneurs, and professionals. LePag
e himself lived down the street at 202 Riverside Drive. She could take the streetcar on nearby Bloor Street West and ride downtown on her own. With these negotiations in place, Maud wrote that she “felt like a new creature.” “Hope and encouragement flooded warmly over my bleak heart. Everything seemed changed.… I felt for the first time in a long while that it might be possible to go on with life graciously after all” (March 8, 1935).
The Toronto papers—no doubt contacted by LePage, who saw a good advertising opportunity—carried a picture of the home that Maud had bought, with a description of it.
Mrs. L. M. Montgomery, authoress of “Anne of Green Gables” and several other notable books, has just purchased 210A Riverside Drive, an attractive centre hall, old English type of home, designed by Home Smith & Co’s architectural department. It is located on a beautifully wooded ravine lot, 52 × 130 feet, overlooking the Humber River and contains seven large rooms and three bathrooms and a two-car heated garage. The sale was negotiated by A. E. LePage, realtor, who was born on Prince Edward Island where most of Mrs. Montgomery’s scenes in her books are laid. Morris Small was the builder of the house. It is understood that Mrs. Montgomery, who in private life is the wife of Rev. E. Macdonald, has just completed another book which will be out next fall and that a number of producers are negotiating with her for the screening of her stories.
Wrapping up their last six weeks in Norval was less painful for Maud now, with the prospect of a beautiful new home of her own. Luella and her baby would stay on with her father, and Chester and Stuart would live at home again. For all her frustration with Chester, Maud missed him a great deal.
Still, leaving Norval brought sadness. The Macdonalds hated to move away from the Barracloughs, who had been such good friends. Maud really liked many people in Ewan’s parishes and resented that everything had been spoiled by a few. More than anything, Maud loved the beautiful and quaint little village on the banks of the Credit River, where she could call her cats and then hear haunting echoes.
Lucy Maud Montgomery Page 56