For much of her life, Maud had endured the feeling that she lived in a house of cards, apt to blow down at any time. After a series of homes in which she had felt like a temporary resident, in 1929 she finally reported feeling more secure.
Ewan was now settled. He had smoothed the lingering divisions from Church Union in Norval, the more troubled of his two parishes. His good nature and kind manner dispelled the inevitable small frictions that arise in any church. He worked up his own sermons instead of using a book of prepared sermons, as some ministers did, and he delivered them extemporaneously from memory. He used his knowledge of Greek and Roman history to make them appeal to young people, who still remembered and praised his “interesting” sermons in the 1980s. Finally, he was doing well. By 1929, Maud began to hope that they could remain in Norval or Glen Williams after Ewan’s retirement. He was now fifty-nine. She was fifty-five.
Chester, age seventeen, was in his last year at St. Andrew’s in 1929, and would start university in the autumn of 1930. Stuart, fourteen and in his second year at St. Andrew’s, was leading his class. There were ongoing concerns with Chester, but Maud continued to hope that he would mature. Stuart, by contrast, was in every way a parent’s dream. He fit in with people of all ages, earned top marks, did well in sports, and was always “joyous” and a loving, sensitive son. With the settlement of the Page lawsuit, Maud had enough money to give her boys the best possible education, no matter what ill winds of chance might blow.
Her feeling of financial security now allowed her to do something mundane that she had needed to do for years: have all her teeth pulled. People still died occasionally because of the gas anaesthetic given by dentists, so few rushed blithely into such operations. Since childhood, Maud had suffered repeatedly from cavities, toothaches, and painful abscesses that burst and drained. Her infected teeth had made her prey to other kinds of health problems—her teeth were irregular, piled on top of each other in her very small mouth and jaw, and she had never been able to clean them properly.39She had known that the removal of her infected teeth would improve her general health, but the fear that she might die from the anaesthetic before she had provided for her sons’ education had kept her away from the dentist’s chair. The surgery proceeded smoothly. She stayed briefly to recuperate with Nora in Toronto, but soon returned home. A doctor in Georgetown made her a set of false teeth, and now she could smile in photographs, something she had never done before.
Maud wrote no entries in her journal on October 29, 1929, the “Black Tuesday” that led off the great stock market crash. In communities like Norval it was just another ordinary day—as ordinary as the June day in 1914 when Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. Maud spent it as usual, with her morning stint of writing on A Tangled Web. It is likely, in fact, that she did not even hear, at least for a time, about the pandemonium that erupted in the New York Stock Exchange on that day, and of the suicides of ruined speculators, said to have jumped out of windows. Even if she had, she would hardly have expected it to affect anyone’s life in the country villages of Ontario.
She was not a foolish speculator—the money she had just received from the Page settlement was hers. She was not investing money borrowed on the margin. When she invested it, she assumed that it would be safe. In November 1928, Maud had invested the $15,000 in the most promising place she knew, in the stock market. She did not know, of course, that the American economic guru, Roger Babson, a friend and neighbour of the Page and Coues families of Boston, had been predicting for some time that a stock market crash was coming, and when it came, it would be huge. Babson had advised his clients, his friends, and the subscribers to his “Babson’s Reports” to take their money out of speculative investments and put it in secure places. Those who heeded his advice weathered the crash of 1929 much better than others, and Page appears to have been one of them. Maud had no such advice: she invested her entire settlement in stocks right before the crash of 1929.
As 1929 drew to a close, Maud was reading of more bank failures. She remembered the crash of 1907, and how she had used a bank failure to cause Matthew’s sudden death in Anne of Green Gables.40 To add another dimension to her anxiety, Ewan was badly shaken up in a serious accident when the radial train he was on collided with a snowplow, and he was consigned to bed. By the end of 1929, she was complaining of headaches, insomnia, and “feelings of imprisonment.” As she ended her seventh journal, she wrote, gamely, that she hoped that 1930 could be “better than its advent promises” (December 21, 1929).
By January 2, 1930, she discovered that a company in which she had invested heavily was skipping its dividend payments. From that point on, bad news about her investments cascaded down on her. She watched in horror as her investments began to plummet. By the time the stock market meltdown was over, all the money she had received in recompense after a decade of enervating litigation with Lewis Page was reduced to a handful of bills. A $14,000 sum invested in Simpson’s was worth only $1,680 by April 1932, and by December 1932, only $840. Her $3,000 investment in a Toronto insurance company was completely lost. (In the late 1920s, the average yearly salary of an Ontario man was around $1,000.) By summer 1930, Maud was concerned enough about money that in her short letters to fans she asked them to recommend her books to others. By the end of 1932, she would be typing her own manuscripts again, for the first time since 1909. Her collapsed finances—so soon after she’d thought she was set up for life—took another toll on her nerves. Would her stocks rise in time to pay for her sons’ educations? At the same time that her own investments were skipping their dividends in 1930, or simply disappearing, the financial situation of farmers and businessmen everywhere worsened. Her beloved Park Corner farm relatives desperately needed cash.
Like the rest of the world, Maud was moving into an uncharted realm, without the old landmarks of stability found in faith, religion, and social mores. This sense of impending upheaval, of destruction of the old order, took powerful symbolic form in a fire that hit the little community of Norval that winter. On the night of January 28, 1930, the beautiful old stone gristmill that lay in the heart of Norval ignited, exploded, and then burned like a raging inferno, spewing sparks for miles around. By morning it was a pile of ashes. The huge mill lay in the middle of the town, straddling the Credit River, a landmark for over a century. As it burned, threatening to engulf the entire village, the fire could be seen for at least five miles above the little glen, and, according to a contemporary newspaper account, “ice and snow surrounding the burning building was melted and formed a stream around the ancient structure like a moat.” A fire brigade from Brampton, eight miles away, arrived just in time to confine the fire to the mill, saving the rest of the village.
The destruction of the mill hastened the demise of Norval. The mill was only partly covered by insurance, and it would have cost $100,000 to rebuild it, so it was abandoned. Mill families moved away to find other work, and all of the subsidiary local businesses suffered—the bank, grocery, bakery, candy shop, hairdresser. After the mill burned, the picturesque little Scottish glen of Norval was on its way to becoming just another one of Ontario’s disappearing villages.
The only truly impressive remaining structure in Norval was now the stately brick Presbyterian church, with the handsome manse next door. Successful farmers in the region would continue to support the church, but as a student of history, Maud saw that even the Church itself, as an institution, was in serious decline.
The beautiful old mill had given the town much of its picturesque character. Maud missed the little beacon that burned all night in its cupola; it had been the first welcoming light she had seen in Norval when they’d arrived. And she missed the three weathervanes on the three chimneys. They had looked to her, against the night sky, like little trolls from Norse mythology. Their disappearance seemed a sad portent in a world whose beacons of light were everywhere being extinguished.
Only two weeks after the mill’s burning, with people still reeling from the loss of their livelihood and landmark, Norval put on its annual Old Tyme Concert. People caught on the wheel of accelerating change could reverse time, at least for an evening: this year they celebrated the “life of the ancient village.” There was a terrible irony to the theme they had chosen.
Perhaps it was Ewan’s own sense of change and loss that partly motivated him to conceive and take on a major project: researching the history of his second charge, the Union Church of Glen Williams, which would celebrate its one-hundredth year as a congregation in 1933. The Presbyterian faith had drawn settlers into a cohesive congregation in 1833, and the Scottish stonemasons had finished the magnificent stone church in 1884. Doing something special to commemorate the centennial year was important to Ewan. The problem was that no one knew where to find the early records of the church. Somehow, with a historian’s instinct, he thought to look in a nearby community called the “Scotch Block,” where the congregation had initially worshipped in a small structure known as the “Boston Church.” He found enough records of the pre-1883 history of the congregation to fill in the early years from 1833 onward.
From that point on, Ewan was consumed with collecting materials, and visiting farmhouses to interview the older people in the congregation, happily believing that he would establish the church’s importance in history. Although he was a man of short-lived energy bursts, Ewan felt dedication to this—his—writing project. He carried it to fruition and was very proud of his accomplishment. The resulting thirty-six-page booklet was well done.41
Given that Ewan was Scottish, a reader cannot help but smile over the ambiguous characterization he offers of his predecessor: “Mr. Patterson was a good preacher and fearless debater. Like every Irishman he was warm in his sympathies and attached to his friends.” Was Patterson a beloved and colourful preacher, or was he an opinionated, hot-headed man who favoured the members of the congregation who had Irish or Scots-Irish ancestry? Mr. Patterson had been extremely learned, perhaps more so than Ewan, although the congregation judged Ewan’s sermons favourably. Ewan was said to “know his Greek and Roman history” very well, and to “have great intellectual insights into things.” He “could give a very perceptive discourse on just one Hebrew word. He went into the background to a lot of things, using ancient history to illustrate, and he didn’t just go on about stuff in the Bible,” said one of his parishioners in the 1980s. His sermons grew much livelier in this period when he had his own writing project.
No doubt Ewan hoped the booklet would strengthen his congregation by praising their long tradition of worshipping together through several generations. The names of the church’s founders were still in the congregation, names like Leslie, Stirratt, Henderson, Fraser, MacDonald, Reid, and McKane. But there were new names, too, for the church congregation grew through Ewan’s early tenure. His predecessor, the aforementioned Mr. Patterson, with his “warm” Irish sympathies, had presided over a very divisive Church Union vote in Norval, one that split and riled the entire community. People were glad to have the calm “peacemaker” that Ewan was.
Strangely, there is almost no mention of Ewan in Maud’s journals at all during this period, perhaps because he was happy and did not interfere with her life. She does not refer to Ewan’s working on the history booklet, nor does she say how much help, if any, she gave in the actual writing. But even if she did possibly polish portions of his work, the writing style is not hers, and certainly the project was one he proudly felt to be his.42
Ewan ended his history with a vision of hope that “the glories of the church of the future will be greater than that of even the present.” This was very different from Maud’s own vision of the future, and from her phrasing. Of the actual centennial celebration, held Monday May 28, 1933, Maud wrote wearily that it was celebrated in the same old way, with “old ministers preaching, special music, crowds of people …” She offered a jaded prophecy about the next centennial and forecast that even if the physical church structure itself might still be there in a hundred years, it would be inhabited by “owls and bats and wandering winds.” She added that if “Sunday services are held at all—they will not be held in little country churches. There will be just a few central churches in large cities and the services will be broadcast from them. Country people will sit in their homes, press a button and hear and see.”43Ewan’s view might be turned to the glories of the past, but Maud’s vision was of a spiritually impoverished future. Memories remained years later in Norval of her offhand remark made in a rare unguarded moment—a remark shocking to the women who heard it—that religion had become nothing more than a social club in this era.44
In the 1930s, Maud was nearly consumed by another inferno—the passion she had stirred in a young woman from a nearby town. It is one of the strangest episodes in her entire life.
Isabel Anderson had first introduced herself in a fan letter in 1926. She lived close by in the town of Acton, and she adored Maud’s novels. Maud drew the conclusion that the writer was a young girl with a precocious writing ability. The letter had extravagant phrasing in it, such as Anne and Diana might have written each other in their pre-adolescent fancies. Maud had written back warm, encouraging words. Soon more adoring letters arrived. Next, Maud was invited to have an evening meal with Isabel and her family.
To her surprise, Isabel was not a young girl but a thirty-four-year-old elementary school teacher. She lived with her mother and sister. Both of them were normal and pleasant, but Isabel had the strange intensity of an unbalanced personality. A fluent writer, she was dull and gauche in person. Maud felt alarmed. Gushing letters that were cute if written by a young girl were something else if written by a grown woman. Maud’s fears were well grounded: Isabel proved to be a different kind of fan, with a vengeance.
Maud had the novelist’s fascination with unusual characters, but Isabel was not a type she could identify. There were some superficial similarities between Isabel and herself: Isabel’s father had been the village postmaster, and Isabel herself was interested in writing poetry. Maud, having endured some very lonely periods in her own life, understood isolation. But there was no obvious reason for Isabel’s loneliness: she had a very nice mother, a friendly, talkative sister, relatives in the area, and a job as a teacher.
After their first meeting, Isabel pelted Maud with letters, presents, pleading invitations, and phone calls. Later, Isabel’s mother died and her sister escaped to be a missionary in the Canadian west. Isabel, already a social misfit, became even more estranged from other people, moved into a two-room apartment, and stepped up her pestering telephone calls. Maud felt sympathy for Isabel’s increasing psychological isolation, not to mention her lack of friends, hopes, and ambitions.
Isabel was no beauty, but she was at least as physically attractive as many other women who found mates. Something else seemed to be wrong. Then Maud received a letter from Isabel saying that she thought she was “losing her mind.” The only thing that would save her would be coming to the manse, and “sleeping with” Maud. By March 1, 1930, when Maud began writing Isabel into her journals, she was wavering between seeing Isabel as a lonely, neurotic young woman who merely wanted female friendship and seeing her as a woman sexually attracted to other women. Confused, Maud observed that the word “pervert” had been aired frequently in “certain malodorous works of fiction” (March 1, 1930).
Appalled by the thought of hosting Isabel, Maud wrote her that a friend was coming to visit so her spare room would be occupied, and that when the friend (Fannie Wise Mutch) left, Maud herself was going to the Island. That should have conveyed the message. It did not. As soon as Maud returned from the Island, Isabel continued her pleadings. No excuses worked. Isabel was entirely self-absorbed. At the end of February 1930, Isabel wrote Maud a “specially piteous letter.” Maud decided that she should feel compassion for her:
I had convinced myself that it was all nonsense to suppose Isabel a pervert. She was merely a lonely, neurotic girl who cherished a romantic adoration for me, thus filling a life that was otherwise piteously empty of everything that makes life worth living. And as such I wanted to help her if possible. (March 1, 1930)
Maud agreed to spend the night at Isabel’s home. Staying overnight and sharing beds with people was common when families were large and houses small, and especially before people had their own cars, allowing them to drive home at a late hour after a visit. Thus, Isabel’s request was not necessarily as strange as it might sound today.
The evening was a miserable one for Maud, as described in her journal entry of March 1, 1930. They ate with Isabel’s landlady and then retired to Isabel’s rooms. Maud found that Isabel was “as quiet, shy, restrained as—as— the simile will come into my mind—as a girl in the presence of her lover.” She had no conversational topics. At bedtime, Isabel announced, “I do not mean to sleep at all tonight. I mean to lie awake and revel in my happiness.” The bed they were to share was “fitted out like a bridal one—exquisite sheets, pillows, coverlet, blankets and puff—all evidently brand new and purchased for the occasion.” In spite of her misgivings, Maud slept well because she was tired, and in the morning she looked forward to her escape. “I was still inclined to think, in spite of Isabel’s queer speeches and queerer intensity of manner and personality that I had been utterly mistaken in my fears.”
Shortly after she returned home, however, she received a letter from Isabel, who had wept at the station when Maud left her. It read:
My Darling—
It really is quite delicious to write that I ought to be washing a few things but it is really too romantic a night. But the sweet incense of your presence still broods around me like a dream from which I am only half awake.
Darling, I love you so terribly, I do. I have a suspicion that if my chronic indisposition were accurately diagnosed much of it must be pronounced “love.” To say that I worship you is a most colourless statement of the fact. I can’t tell you how much I loved having you. You are just as pretty as ever you can be with your lovely long braids and your sweet, sweet face, and the blue dressing gown, and I adore you. I want you again. I simply cannot endure not to have you again soon. It sounds quite ungrateful, I know, but I am suffering all the agonies of being in love. I have derived some comfort from sleeping in the precise spot you occupied half hopeful that some of the dear warmth might still be found to linger. But I crave something tangible. I want to hold in my arms what is dearer than life to me—to lie “spoon fashion” all through a long long night— to cover your wee hands, your beautiful throat and every part of you with kisses. I’m just mad with love for you.
She concluded:
Perhaps tomorrow I shall be sorry I wrote this. But it is true … And after this shameless confession don’t you think I am a terrible creature? (March 1, 1930)
Maud certainly did. After reading the letter, she fled to the bathroom and scrubbed her hands with repulsion. She did not know what to do. It was hardly a situation to discuss with women in the church. She wrote in her journals that she was unable to discuss it even with Ewan, who would simply judge Isabel, rather ironically, as “out of her mind” (March 1, 1930).
Ewan had been in his right mind for nearly four years now, except for periods of minor depression, and for once, his response might have been more clear-headed than his wife’s. Maud was now afraid to cut Isabel out of her life for fear that she might become totally unhinged and create a public scandal. Maud also recalled her own loneliness and depressed state before marriage, and knew that part of being a minister’s wife was helping the lonely and sick. As a novelist and student of human behaviour, she was fascinated by Isabel’s weirdness, but totally repelled by the inappropriate words and actions.
Maud reacted as she always did under extreme stress: she began a long writing project in her journals that was largely mechanical. She assembled all the reviews of her novels that her clipping service had sent her and lined up all the contradictory statements about each novel. This must have taken days. Then she embarked on a more extended project of going through her other scrapbooks and boxes of memorabilia and commenting on these (March 1, 1930).
But no escape was to be found from Isabel. By the next summer she was sending Maud veiled hints of suicide. Maud suspected that this was just self-dramatization, but she also recognized that someone as disturbed as Isabel was unpredictable and might commit suicide. She remembered the Prince Edward Island papers that published all the graphic and gory details of suicides, speculating on motives and causes. Maud also had seen Ewan’s periodic mental problems, so serious that his doctor once warned her never to let him out of her sight lest he try to kill himself. Maud reflected tartly that Isabel was so miserable that she would be as well off dead as living (June 1, 1931). But she continued to worry, and in this case, felt cold terror imagining what people would say.
By this time Isabel possessed a sizeable cache of Maud’s letters, dating back several years. The thought of Isabel’s body being found with these letters on her breast and a suicide note saying she had killed herself because of Maud’s failure to love her was simply too appalling to contemplate. It would make national and possibly even international news. Maud thought, not unreasonably, that people would find her continuing to tolerate Isabel so bizarre that they would imagine that there truly was a scandal under the story.
Maud and Isabel became locked in an ongoing battle: Isabel trying to manipulate Maud, and Maud determined to keep her at arm’s length. Maud repeatedly wrote to Isabel, describing the kind of ordinary friendship she could give her. She forbade Isabel to write of “love.” This brought protests from Isabel:
I doubt you love anybody but your boys and your cat, and, I presume, your husband.… You love your cat; he knows it. You have a kiss—two kisses—for every creature in creation but not one speck of love for a hungry heart that has pleaded for it too long. You are like a lovely scintillating jewel whose radiant heart is cold and cruelly hard. (Isabel’s letter of February 8, described in Maud’s journal entry of February 11, 1932)
Isabel insisted that she was not a “freak” who turned to Maud to escape her own dreary life (as Maud had suggested). Isabel allowed that she needed to be “psychoanalyzed” and perhaps she should be “shot.” Then Isabel dramatized her own death in the letter:
To die for the love of L. M. Montgomery! That would invest me with glory and beauty and fame and I should have forever from the hearts of the world what I craved from you and you denied.
Maud’s response was a mixture of pity, scorn, and fear. She had already tried plain speaking, telling Isabel frankly that her cravings were “lesbian” and that she had lost her balance due to being “possessed.” As Maud should have known from her experience with Ewan in his spells, there was no reasoning with a mentally disturbed person. Isabel alternated between abusive and pathetic responses, in letters and phone calls. Maud, in an increasingly poor state of mind herself, described herself as “hag-ridden.”
The existence of homosexuality had come to world attention some thirty years earlier with the trial of Oscar Wilde in England, and his subsequent imprisonment for it. Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, an exploration of homosexuality, had set the world on its ear in 1928. Maud read everything on the topic that she could find in Toronto libraries and bookstores, including André Tridon’s Psychoanalysis and Love (1922), which included a chapter on “Unconscious Homo-sexualism.” Maud did not see homosexuality either as a crime or a sin; rather, she saw it as an attribute existing most likely from birth, beyond conscious control. However, whatever Isabel’s condition was, Maud regarded her an unbalanced, obnoxious pest whose persistent demands for “caresses” and “love” were disrupting her life.
One young woman who spent some time in the Macdonald house remembered Isabel vividly, and described how her visits to the manse annoyed Maud, particularly when Isabel merely appeared without invitation. Maud always scheduled her days, planning out every minute in advance, and an unexpected visitor could disrupt a whole day. One visit stood out in memory: Isabel had come to Norval without being invited, and Maud had to stop what she was doing. She took Isabel into the parlour with grim resignation, to make polite, brief, and very formal conversation, intending then to send her home.
In about fifteen minutes, Maud burst into the kitchen in a state of extreme agitation, saying in a shocked and disgusted voice, “She wants to hold hands with me!” Maud washed her hands compulsively several times, and paced around the kitchen. She said that she was “going to be sick,” and was so upset that it took some time for her to regain control of herself. After calming down, she returned to the living room, and said politely and smoothly to Isabel that Chester would now drive her home because she, Maud, had to get back to her work.
Nora was the only person Maud felt comfortable talking to regarding the ongoing situation with Isabel Anderson. Nora, like Maud, kept a diary. In their respective diaries, they each give an account of Isabel. Comparing their versions illuminates Isabel’s obsession with Maud, as well as her writerly interest in exploring an interesting psychological situation. Nora is more factual in her entry of August 12, 1932:
Eb and I drove to Maud’s the 12th and I came back yesterday [August 19]. Maud is a dear—with reservations … [the ellipsis points are Nora’s, and she does not explain, but she is likely referring to Maud’s occasional “grandness”]. The female pervert Isabelle [sic] Anderson visited Maud a whole day while I was there. Her ability for complete absence of all speech is phenomenal. How can Maud stand her? Is not even pretty …
Maud describes this same visit in her journals in August 20, 1932:
Nora and Ebbie came out. Eb camped out with the boys by the river and Nora and I went on a voyage to some magic shore beyond the world’s rim.… We joked—and talked beautiful nonsense—and did things just for the fun of doing them—and tried dozens of new recipes. And we laughed. Oh, how we laughed—and laughter as I have long been a stranger to.… And every evening after the supper dishes were finished, we walked four miles, in a lovely ecstatic freedom under a harvest moon, up the “town line road” to the station and back. I hadn’t believed there was anything like those walks left on earth. From the moment we found ourselves amid the moon-patterned shadows of that road every particle of care and worry seemed to be wiped out of our minds and souls as if by magic. Hope was then our friend again—we were no longer afraid of tomorrow.
Then she describes Isabel’s visit:
One day I had Isabel Anderson down. Nora was full of curiosity concerning her. I, on my side, had promised to have her down and had been dreading the martyrdom of a day spent alone with her. So I invited her to come … when I would have Nora to take the edge off her.… Isabel came on the bus. I suppose she had been looking forward to being alone with me, for a whole day and was bitterly disappointed on finding Nora here. For the first few minutes I really thought the girl was going to cry. At first Nora and I both tried to draw her out.… The most we could extract from her was a sulky yes or no. Nora and I finally reacted nervously and the spirit of perversity came upon us. We began to do what we had sworn we wouldn’t do—rag each other before Isabel.… Isabel sat and listened to the insults and reproaches we hurled at each other as if she couldn’t believe her ears. I’m sure it was a weird revelation to her of what friendship with me might be!! (August 20, 1932)
Maud goes on to say that the boys kept up the jests at dinnertime, after which Chester was deputed to drive Isabel home. Isabel went in smouldering silence. Through Nora’s visit, Maud was pulled enough back into normalcy that she could register real annoyance at Isabel’s rude behaviour.
I was simply very angry with Isabel. She had pleaded to be allowed to come down. I had asked her to come—given her the privilege of meeting one of my best friends, a brilliant woman of the world whom anyone should enjoy meeting. I had received her into the intimacy of my family circle. And all her thanks was this behaviour … (August 20, 1932)
Maud finishes her high-handed account of the visit with the comment that she would love to have given the bad-mannered, sulky “Miss Isabel” a good spanking. Isabel, however, was not to be put off. She soon wrote Maud again:
I love you so terribly.… My dear, don’t you see that I need you more often than your other friends. I hope you realize under my bland exterior an undercurrent of fierce resentment. Can’t I arouse in you the tiniest spark of pity for my languishing condition? (September 15, 1932)
Maud growled in her journal that she certainly did sense the resentment:
Although I have told her repeatedly that I cannot and will not tolerate physical caresses she coolly informs me that she is going to “save up” my kiss of greeting—a casual cool kiss I sometimes give her at meeting in the vain hope of satisfying her—by going without it until she can have twelve all at once! A regular Lesbian gorge. (September 15, 1932)
Isabel continued to bombard Maud with letters. Maud wrote her a bracing and patronizing letter on November 22, 1932, telling her that their communications must cease since Isabel would not be contented with “such measure of friendship as is possible between a woman of my age and experience and a girl of yours.”
You call this “love,” my dear. It is nothing of the sort. It is simply an obsession, as any psychiatrist would tell you. Their records are full of such cases, even to the wording of the letters, as you would realize if you had studied as many of them as I, in the pursuit of my profession, have done.… Some day you will suddenly awaken to the fact that you have recovered from it and are free once more. Then you will realize that this letter has been the truest kindness (November 22, 1932).
Maud growled in her journals that Isabel’s letters showed that she was more unhappy after the visits than before, so they did no good. Return mail brought a piteous letter from Isabel pleading that she not be cut off into the “darkness of despair.” Isabel promised to think of Maud only as a “friend and be sensible …” (December 1, 1932).
Next, Maud tried a new strategy, one most people would have tried much earlier: that of ignoring Isabel’s letters. Maud’s silence was shattered by two more letters from Isabel, to which Maud finally replied:
I am a woman of 58. At that age one does not form deep new friendships with anyone, even with those of one’s own generation … I have no time in my overcrowded life for more. (January 22, 1933)
Isabel fired back an intemperate, angry response:
I see plainly that I am nothing whatever to you.… You have never tried to understand me or my point of view. You are stubborn and dogmatic and selfish and, like a spoiled child, have said, “If you don’t play my game I won’t play.” … You would cry over the loss of a miserable cat and you would deliberately, ruthlessly, unnecessarily crush a human soul struggling against what I sometimes feel is the approach of death.… I haven’t enough spirit left to hate you but your unjust and ungracious treatment has left me only bitterness and contempt … (January 22, 1933)
This letter infuriated Maud, and she wrote a vigorous and sarcastic reply in her own journal to each point in Isabel’s letter. Maud felt sure that Isabel would never bother her again, given the insults in her last letter. “I am free at last, thank heaven.… The girl is not sane and I deserve all I have got for being fatuous enough to think I could help her or guide her back to normalcy” (January 22, 1933). But Maud was wrong. Isabel’s letters continued, sometimes piteous, sometimes abusive.
“I can’t set my foot on a writhing worm,” Maud would write about one of Isabel’s more grovelling letters on February 9, 1933, adding, “I can’t let a human being suffer so when I can prevent it. Am not I suffering hideously, with no one to comfort me and no prospect of any relief?” It was partly a measure of Maud’s own unsettled and depressed state of mind that she could not shake Isabel loose.
Isabel’s passionate crushes were not just on women. She later pursued both married and unmarried men. Maud mentioned Isabel’s name to another minister’s wife, and learned that Isabel had chased her husband until the wife put a stop to it (May 3, 1932). Another minister from the area told Maud that Isabel was a mental case, whatever her sexual proclivities (October 6, 1934). This made Maud feel somewhat better, but she still could not completely shake off her unbalanced fan.45
By 1930, Chester was ready to start university, at age eighteen. In her journals, Maud continued her ongoing narrative about children who disappoint their parents.
One of Maud’s best friends in the Prince of Wales College days was Mary Campbell, now Mary Campbell Beaton. Maud came from a culture that valued loyalty to friends and family even when that meant cover-ups, and in June 1930, a letter came from a Toronto lawyer asking Maud to put up $1,000 in bail for Sutherland Beaton, Mary Campbell Beaton’s son. Sutherland Beaton had come to Maud earlier with a lie that persuaded her to lend him $100— which she now knew he had no intention of repaying. This handsome and silver-tongued young man had a history of theft and forging cheques on the Island that Maud did not know about. His parents always made restitution to keep him out of jail. Now, having moved to Toronto where he was not known, Sutherland was up to his old tricks, and he had been caught red-handed by his employer.
The broken-hearted Mary Beaton spilled out the whole sad story of Sutherland’s ongoing crimes, and came up to Toronto for his trial. Maud, always loyal to old friends, went along with her to the courtroom to give moral support. Toronto newspapers described the grey-haired mother crying as her son stood in the dock, but they did not learn (fortunately for Maud) that disconsolate Mary was sitting beside a very famous friend. With restitution made, Sutherland, only nineteen, was put on probation for a year and released to his mother’s care. As Mary Beaton had to return to the Island, Maud was obliged to take responsibility for him until he found another position.
For three weeks, the handsome Sutherland stayed with the Macdonalds, driving about with Chester and another local young man, chasing the pretty girls in the community. Maud lived in terror that the parishioners would connect this young rapscallion with the newspaper story, and then blame her for allowing a convicted thief to squire their daughters about. Maud did not expect Sutherland to change his ways, and she was greatly relieved when he decamped for Toronto with the announcement that he had found a job. She suspected the job was a lie—which it was—but she was glad to be rid of him. Maud felt enormous pity for Mary Beaton’s heavy heart. And she no doubt shuddered privately, given her concerns over Chester.
This was Maud’s second experience with young men running afoul of the law. First there had been Leavitt, Ewan’s nephew, caught when he embezzled in Prince Edward Island. Disgraced, Leavitt had emigrated permanently to the United States. Now, here was Sutherland Beaton, an engaging young man who was also a pathological liar. Maud was getting a taste of what could happen when a beloved child went “bad.”
As for Chester, the maids grimly tolerated his messiness, laziness, and disrespectful behaviour, but they would not have voiced to Maud their other real reason for disliking him: that they could not leave any valuables or money in their room, or the items would disappear. It is not clear when Maud first discovered that he was stealing, but she had known for a long time that his word could not be trusted. Stuart simply avoided Chester now that they were older, and continued sleeping in his tent to avoid sharing a room with his brother.
The friction between Chester and his father intensified. Maud found herself in the role of a buffer between Chester and his father. She had no more control over Chester than Ewan did, yet she felt blamed for everything because of Ewan’s belief that it was a mother’s job to raise the children.
For Chester, morose and lonely, the summer of 1930 was particularly boring. He didn’t want a job, but even if he had, there was no work available during the Great Depression. With little to occupy his time, Chester pursued girls, making use of his parents’ car. He had never made lasting friends of his own sex, and now he turned to girls for comfort and attention—and more. The nicer girls in the community avoided him, but there was one local girl with a poor reputation who did often go driving into the country with him. Everyone in the community talked about this, and Maud was wild with anxiety.
One of his contemporaries, a young woman of about eighteen who had lived a stone’s throw from the manse, told me of a time when she was home alone during the day, and was suddenly surprised to find Chester in the house with her. He tried sweet-talking, without success; then he tried to catch her, and chased her around, telling her he would “never love anyone but her.” She was an athletic girl, and she managed to flee the house. After that, she kept the door locked whenever her parents were out.46
Finally, Chester started dating Luella Reid, a petite and plain-looking girl in the Norval church. The Reids lived out on a farm, and Luella was not privy to all the village gossip about Chester’s behaviour with other girls. Maud and Ewan were relieved because Luella was considered a “nice” girl. They hoped that as soon as Chester went off to the University of Toronto in the fall of 1930, he would buckle down to work, develop more social skills, mature in his interests—and put less focus on girls.
As soon as Chester had departed for university (where he took up residence in Knox College in the University of Toronto), and Stuart was back at St. Andrew’s, Maud started a month-long trip, travelling by train to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, in Western Canada. She wanted to go out west again for several reasons—to rekindle old friendships, to meet the rest of her father’s second family, and to see if she could retrieve some of the money lent to Irving Howatt, Stella Campbell’s old beau from Park Corner days.
Everywhere she went she also gave speeches to large audiences: at the Women’s Canadian Club and a reception in Saskatoon; at the Canadian Club in Prince Albert; at a school class and at the Press Club in Winnipeg. She visited Irv Howatt—whom she found “shabby as a singed cat”—and she saw it would be impossible to reclaim the $4,000 loan she had given him through Stella. It was enough to educate a son, she grumbled privately.
She travelled to her father’s grave and was profoundly moved:
There separated from me by a few feet of earth was what was left of father—of the outward man I knew. I might call to him but he would not answer. I felt so tenderly, preciously, dreadfully near to him. As if, under that sod, his great tired beautiful blue eyes had opened and were looking at me. (October 14, 1930)
Nearby was the grave of Will Pritchard—Laura’s brother—who had died very young, and to whose memory she would dedicate her last book, Anne of Ingleside, in 1939. He had been a very good comrade when she was sixteen. She assured the future readers of her journals that, “at that time sex meant nothing to my unawakened body,” and that she “never felt for him even the passion of sentiment which at that time I thought was love.… But I liked Will Pritchard better than any boy or man I have ever met in my life.” She recounts how she and Will used to “prowl about together” in the hills and bluffs outside Prince Albert (October 10, 1930); a reader may suspect that she is “protesting too much.”47 After Will’s death, a thin golden ring he had taken from her was returned to her (October 7, 1897), and she is said to have worn it on her little finger for the rest of her life.
Maud could hardly wait to return home after so many memories were stirred up in the west. Still, she wrote that the emotions had been “a wonderful agony.” Her gift of wings brought great highs: “It is wonderful to feel so deeply, even if the feeling be half pain. One lives when one feels like that. Its illumination casts a glow over life backward and forward and transfigures drab days and darkened paths” (October 12, 1930). Her description of this visit continues, showing how her life was affected by living with such a good memory. Every event and place in Maud’s childhood was “something that is of eternity, not of time” (October 12, 1930), because she did not—indeed, could not— forget it.
When Maud was a girl, the “lure of the west” had been strong. She would have stayed if the new Mrs. Montgomery had not driven her away. Her life, she speculated, would have been a different one: she would have written books, because she had to write, but she would have lived a different life and written different books.
Maud returned to new fears at home. When Chester had left for university in the fall of 1930, he had still been courting Luella Reid. Her father, Robert Reid, a successful but rather gruff farmer, was a leading elder in the Presbyterian Church. Maud was very fond of Luella’s mother, a refined and charming woman. Nevertheless, she thought Chester was far too young to get serious. The Macdonalds had hoped that the romance would cool off once Chester began university, but in the fall he had instead returned to visit Luella every weekend, neglecting his studies. They saw that Chester was still drifting, with little focus except on girls.
After Christmas, Maud’s worst fears materialized. Chester had chosen to study Mining-Engineering at the University of Toronto, something Maud thought very unsuitable for him. He had heard Nora Campbell’s husband, Ned, one of Canada’s top mining engineers, talk about their travels, and it sounded romantic. It was a difficult course of study, and anyone who worked in it needed to be active and fit. Chester was neither. He was “bone lazy,” overweight, and had no self-discipline or self-control. Would he keep up with his studies? The answer soon came.
On February 8, the Varsity Council on Delinquency at the University of Toronto wrote to Ewan and her, recommending that Chester withdraw from the university. Ewan and Maud immediately went into Toronto to talk to Chester’s professors, particularly Professor Herbert Haultain (1869–1961).48Haultain was a no-nonsense man who gave the distraught Macdonald parents little sympathy. They learned that Chester had been attending his classes only part of the time. Clearly, he had made a very bad impression on several professors in a program where the professors knew all their students by name and kept very close tabs on them.
Maud sensed that there was something else behind the advice to withdraw him. She felt that his professors were somehow prejudiced against him for more than they were willing to say, but she could not fathom it (or would not reveal her suspicions in her journals). Unsatisfied with the professors’ explanations, Maud insisted that he stay in school, despite the advice to withdraw him. He remained through the term, promising to mend his ways, but his mother knew too well what his promises were worth.
Maud kept up her own steady pace in public events throughout this dismal February, despite headaches that were increasing in severity. She did readings for the Canadian Authors Association, for the students at the Jarvis Collegiate in Toronto, for a concert in Preston, Ontario, and, for the first time in her life, she performed on the radio. For two weeks, she even took into her home the difficult thirteen-year-old daughter of a parishioner who was in the hospital for an operation.
Chester came home one weekend when the girl was with them. Maud reported later that the girl told a story about something that happened at their house, something too upsetting to confide to her diary. “I can’t go into details,” Maud wrote, berating the girl for “lying.” She added with unconscious irony, “There is not much use in trying to help that class of people. They are incapable of gratitude” (March 14, 1931).
Norval was shrinking rapidly as a result of the mill burning down. The bank closed in April 1931, and its depressed and distraught manager, Mr. Greenwood, died in July. Maud had called him the “best amateur actor” she had ever seen, and she felt his loss personally. He had starred in many of the plays that she had directed for the Presbyterian and Anglican churches. The radial railway also closed in 1931—partly a result of competition from automobiles—leaving her with no easy transportation to Toronto.
Ewan was so eager for Chester not to come home in the summer vacation that he himself went in to see Professor Haultain to plead Chester’s case in obtaining a summer placement in the Frood mine in Sudbury. Haultain had already told Chester that, given his poor record, there was no place for him, but Ewan could be very persuasive, and the end result was that Chester was given a summer job in the mine. At the end of April, Ewan and Maud drove the three hundred miles to Sudbury to take Chester to his first real job.
A few days later a letter came from Chester saying that he had been fired, but that his peers had intervened and he had been given a second chance to “prove himself.” On May 9, the Toronto newspapers published the university “pass lists.” Chester’s name was not included: he had failed his first year. It was not a question of ability, Maud knew: at St. Andrew’s, where he had applied himself at least part of the time, he had graduated with an average of 80 percent, with many favourable comments about his ability. On May 19, Chester suddenly arrived home from Sudbury, having made his way back on his own. He said that he had been fired, for good this time.
Chester had wasted a year’s worth of university fees, plus room and board, at a time of financial hardship. He would have to repeat the year. The professors already saw him as a slacker. On top of his academic failure—which spoke poorly for his future—Maud worried as always about what others “would think.” It would be a public humiliation with parishioners, with people in the other churches, and with family and friends in Toronto and on the Island. For a mother who had such high hopes for her talented sons, she was heartbroken. She had worked so hard to provide them with the kind of education that she had wanted for herself, and now Chester did not appreciate the opportunity she had given him.
And worse, Chester would be home all summer—fighting with his father and pursuing Luella, or other girls. Remarkably, Chester managed to convince his mother that he had been treated unfairly at the mine. Someone else might have wondered if Chester had simply taken stock of what would be expected of him—long hours of very hard, dirty work underground—and decided that the best course of action was to get himself fired.
Maud was demoralized, indignant, and feeling increasingly helpless. She felt too paralyzed to work on her next novel, Pat of Silver Bush, and turned instead to her journal, her only real confidant. Ewan had always had a prejudice against manual labour for his children, thinking it beneath those destined for the professional classes—except in this case, which connected to Chester’s future occupation. Nevertheless, he blamed Maud for Chester’s failure (which he had predicted). His repeated line to his wife was a frustrated, “I told ye so.”
Besides suffering from asthma and headaches, Maud was now bothered by a strange eczema on her neck and arms. By June, she complained of feeling “nervous unrest all the time.” Significantly, she shifted to writing in her diary about Macneill and Montgomery family history. It appears that this restored her self-esteem, her sense of coming from “good stock”—as if that might right Chester’s behaviour.
Throughout the fall that year (1931), the Macdonalds continued to watch Chester. He seemed more settled during his repeat year, but Maud knew that he could not be trusted to tell the truth about anything. However, Chester worked harder and got through the year, with a 73 percent, and good standing in his class.
He returned to the University of Toronto and his second year in Mining-Engineering, in September 1932. It was not long before he was slacking again, and visiting Luella too much. Ewan complained to Maud that Chester’s behaviour was unwise; the implication was that Maud herself should correct the problem. She grew as angry at Ewan as she was at Chester.
On February 1, 1933, unbeknownst to the Macdonalds, some twenty-three members of the Engineering Faculty Council met to discuss Chester’s performance and grades and unanimously voted to have him withdraw for the remainder of the term. The same day, seven members of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering’s Committee on Delinquents reviewed his case. The council stated that he “had failed in Field Work, Chemical Laboratory and Dynamic and Structural Geology.” Further reports of “delinquency” were also received from the departments of Engineering Drawing and Mineralogy, and “two petitions for consideration were read.” After prolonged discussion and consultation with Professor Haultain, they recommended to the council that he be directed to withdraw from the faculty, under the provisions of the Calendar, Clause No.1, that “No student will be permitted to remain in the University who persistently neglects academic work, or whose presence is deemed by the Council to be prejudicial to the interests of the University.”
On February 3, 1933, Chester received a letter, directing him to withdraw. Ewan immediately made an appointment to speak to Professor Haultain, who told him that Chester had failed four exams and had not been attending classes. Later Chester told his parents that he’d run into two of his professors who had told him that he had not failed in their courses. His transcript for that year shows that he received 45 percent in Field Work, 23 percent in Chemistry Laboratory, 13 percent in Mineralogy, and 33 in Dynamic and Structural Geology. He received 65, 53, 60, and 75 in the rest of his courses (Mining Laboratory, Inorganic Chemistry, Theory of Measurements, and Steam Engines, respectively). So it is true that he did not fail in several other courses. Wanting to think that her son had been badly treated, Maud decided that Haultain had lied to the Committee on Delinquents about Chester’s grades. The record, however, does not bear this out. Chester had failed in four courses, and the Engineering Council was clearly fed up with him and wanted him out of the program.
He returned home in February. The entire village could see that he was home, and since the newspapers carried “pass lists,” they already knew that he was in trouble again. Maud’s humiliation—and her injured pride—can be seen in a letter she wrote to a relative, on February 12, 1933: “Chester is home for the winter. The plain truth is that, as times are, Mr. Macdonald and I decided that we could not afford to keep both boys at college this year.” She goes on to explain that they thought at first they would keep Stuart home, but as Chester had been sick for three weeks in the past term, he had fallen behind in his work and was afraid he could not catch up, so she thought he was the one who should stay home. She adds an upbeat conclusion: “We must hope things will brighten up next year.”49
Maud’s upset, her anger over the money wasted on Chester, her worry about his future—these were capped by the receipt of an especially offensive letter from Isabel Anderson on February 6, 1933, announcing that she was coming down, not for a “visit,” but for an “interview.” She alluded sarcastically to Maud’s “overcrowded life” and obviously didn’t care whether Maud wanted to see her or not.
The Macdonalds had let Chester choose Engineering himself, but he had made “a mess of it.” Maud decided that he would do well in law. Since he had chosen science subjects at St. Andrew’s, he now lacked some of the necessary prerequisites for entry into a law course. He would have to go back and take the necessary high school courses: British and Canadian History, and French Grammar and Literature. Unwilling to go back to high school, he decided to study these courses at home.
Distressed as she was over Chester, Maud put on a good face on February 22, and performed in the Old Tyme Concert she organized each year. The next night she entertained all the men in the Church Session for dinner and wrote in her journal that she “gave them a better feed than some of them deserved.”
In spring Chester sat for his examinations at Georgetown High School, and passed. But the next step was unclear. To obtain a degree in law at that time, students were required to work in a practising lawyer’s office for two years, and then to attend Osgoode Hall for another three years. All the placements in law offices were already taken up with students who had sought them earlier. Finally, Maud found Chester a place with a young lawyer in Toronto named Ernest Bogart. She hoped that this would “take.”
In the summer of 1933, there was an unexpected death in Norval—Luella Reid’s mother. She went into the hospital in early July for what was then called “female surgery.” The surgery was routine, and Mrs. Reid came through the operation well, but soon a mounting fever indicated an infection, a serious hazard before antibiotics. She grew worse and died, but not before begging Maud to look after Luella as if she were her own daughter. Luella, who was then almost twenty-one, had been a premature baby and a delicate child, and her mother feared that, left in the care of her insensitive father, Luella would suffer from a lack of maternal guidance at a crucial time in her life. Maud liked Luella well enough, and promised, having no choice but to agree to her dying friend’s wish.
This promise was naturally complicated by Maud’s reservations about Luella as a potential wife for Chester, since they were seeing a great deal of each other. The Reids were a “good family,” descended from the same ancestors as Timothy Eaton, the man from the Glen Williams area who had founded Canada’s famous Eaton’s department store chain. But with Chester headed for a career in law, Maud believed he would need a socially adept wife. Luella did not have her mother’s gracious social manner (or her pretty face), and at any rate, Chester could not support a wife. Maud thought them both too young and inexperienced to choose a life-partner. Chester would have many years of study and training ahead. His parents were more worried about him now than they had ever been before.
Stuart had been completing his high school education at St. Andrew’s while Chester was struggling in the Mining-Engineering course. But as 1932 began, Stuart, who had been getting excellent marks and many prizes, now started faltering in his academic work. He was putting all his efforts into competitive gymnastics. When his parents had moved to the seemingly idyllic Norval in 1926, Stuart had been eleven years old and very small and slight for his age. Some local bullies had beaten him up because he was the “preacher’s son.” He’d told no one about this. Instead, he’d undertaken a rigorous regimen of body-building, and kept a wary eye out to evade the bullies until he got bigger and stronger and could defend himself. He had continued the regimen at St. Andrew’s, which had an excellent program in sports and gymnastics. He was small-boned like his mother, and, proving to be a superb gymnast, he diverted his attention to this sport.
In March 1932, when he was sixteen, Stuart competed for his school in the Junior Gymnastics Championship in Toronto, and he became the Junior Gymnastic Champion of Ontario. He redoubled his efforts to improve his grades, and in the next year they rose again. In autumn 1932 he began his last year at St. Andrew’s, and in spring 1933, he again won the province’s Junior Gymnastic Championship.
June 1933 brought Stuart’s graduation from St. Andrew’s. He led his class academically and won the Lieutenant-Governor’s Silver Medal. He also won the French Medal and tied for the prize in Latin. Stuart was as adept at language and writing as Chester was poor. In September, Stuart would compete again at the Canadian National Gymnastics Exhibition and win a gold medal, becoming the Junior Champion in Canada.
But by summer 1933, there was a cloud over Maud’s pride in Stuart. Like Chester, he had a girlfriend in Norval. Joy Laird was a pretty, bright, and sweet girl, but her parents did not meet Maud’s standards. In her journals, Maud called Joy’s father, Lewis Laird, the “black sheep of a respectable family,” “a drunken sot,” a “notorious bootlegger,” and a “thief” who “kicked and beat his wife when he was drunk and she did not bear all wrongs in silence but proclaimed them from the housetops.… She was a hardworking creature but came of a family in Glen Williams who were simply a bunch of crooks.” Maud dismissed Joy herself as “ignorant and shallow,” “boy-crazy,” and “no companion for my son” (November 30, 1936).
The Laird clan, early settlers in the area, were in fact very capable businessmen and craftsmen. For instance, all the carpentry in the Norval Presbyterian church, started in 1878, had been done by the Laird brothers. Lewis Laird, Joy’s thirty-nine-year-old father, was descended from these early Lairds, and his Laird relatives were pillars in the church. In 1933, Joy was sixteen and Stuart was eighteen. Stuart had been in elementary school when they came to Norval, and although he had been away at St. Andrew’s for secondary school, he had returned home during holidays and the summers, where he’d spent much time at the Credit River swimming hole. Over the years, Joy had progressed from being Stuart’s friend to being his “girl,” and he’d corresponded with her regularly while he was at St. Andrew’s. Maud had kept a very close watch on Stuart during the summers of his high school years. When he slept in his tent down by the river for all those summers, rather than share a bedroom with Chester, Maud made frequent trips down to the tent in the evenings to make sure Stuart was alone. These visitations, made on various pretexts, irritated him a great deal. At the end of his life, he still spoke of his annoyance at his mother’s lack of trust and her intrusiveness over Joy.
Maud expected Stuart to forget about Joy when he went off to university and met other girls. There was no possibility of Joy going to university; although she was very clever, her family did not have enough money to send her, especially during the Depression years. But as time passed, Stuart’s relationship with Joy seemed to be deepening rather than diminishing. In August, when Ewan took a much-needed vacation to PEI where he could stay with his sisters, Maud did not accompany him. She was keeping an eye on her boys.
In the autumn of 1933 Stuart began his education at the University of Toronto, intending to study medicine, something his mother had strongly encouraged—she hoped for a lawyer and a doctor. He went into residence at Knox College, as Chester had done before him. (Knox College, being affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, gave special rates to sons of ministers.) Stuart soon noticed that the other students in Knox treated him with watchful wariness. He would eventually learn the reason why: Chester’s reputation lingered. He had been known there, and to some extent on the wider campus, as a petty thief. (This reputation had likely reached the Engineering professors like Herbert Haultain.) Students’ possessions often disappeared when Chester was around. When he was short of pocket money, he’d remedied this by purloining books, watches, clothes, equipment, and any valuables that could be taken to one of several pawnshops—busy places in the Depression years.50Stuart did not want to upset his mother further so he did not tell her this. It is likely that Maud had already observed her own things disappearing, however, and suspected that Chester was the culprit. This could explain part of her earlier comment (July 2, 1932) that there were many problems with Chester.
By October 1933, both boys seemed settled in their respective studies in Toronto. Maud hoped that Chester would stick at law long enough to graduate, but she was rapidly losing hope of him ever using his potential. She wrote in her journals that “Stuart is all I have to live for now and if he fails me I am done” (September 26, 1933).
Maud spent much negative energy worrying about her sons’ romances during the Norval period. But in a strange twist, she had spent equal amounts of energy trying to encourage a match between Marion Webb, Myrtle’s daughter, and Murray Laird, who was also descended from the Laird clan, and whose father had also been a pillar in the church. She had promoted this romance when they first moved to Norval in 1926, only to see it fall apart. There were very few choices for Marion on the Island. Ambitious young men who would not inherit a family farm usually left. As a result, and for the same reasons, young women often left the Island too. And Maud, who by now hoped to retire in Norval, wanted family closer. Marion was her particular pet.
Back in 1930, Maud had brought Marion to Norval to promote the romance. Maud would gain a daughter, and be able to count on more visits from Island relatives for the rest of her life. Like so many other Islanders who had moved to the mainland, she tried to persuade friends to follow.
In this same period, there was another change of maids—a major upheaval in Maud’s life. The capable Mrs. Mason, who had been their maid since January 1927, announced in March 1931 that she was engaged to a man in Kitchener and was leaving. The search for a new maid started, and through contacts back at Leaskdale, Maud found another woman, Faye Thompson, who needed a position. Like Mrs. Mason, Mrs. Thompson had a small child. She was escaping an unhappy marriage, and she needed somewhere to go where she could take her young daughter, June, with her. Faye Thompson was trim, efficient, alert, and very competent, and Maud was pleased with her. For her part, Mrs. Thompson was delighted to get such a good position.
However, after an expensive engagement ring from her husband disappeared from her room, Mrs. Thompson learned that when Chester was home, she had to watch her possessions. Although she knew that the only person who could have taken it was Chester, Mrs. Thompson did not tell Maud. She did, however, mention this story to friends she made in the community.
The next year, 1932, Maud turned her mind to sorting out a serious family problem on the Island. The fate of the Campbell farm at her beloved Park Corner had been an ongoing concern since 1919 when the Spanish influenza killed George Campbell, leaving his widow to cope with running the farm and raising their large family alone. Maud had always provided money to cover the shortfalls, but after 1929 she had lost so much on her investments that she felt she could no longer subsidize the family, especially when she was facing the costs of educating two sons in the professions. Fortunately, by 1929 Ella’s sons were old enough to assume responsibility for the farm. But things had become a tangled mess at Park Corner, and Maud could not help dealing with the situation since she had so much money and love invested in the farm.
The farm had been in Maud’s Aunt Annie Macneill Campbell’s name when her son, George Campbell, died. After George’s death, Aunt Annie had made over ownership of the farm to George and Ella’s oldest son, Dan, stipulating that Dan be responsible for supporting his mother and younger siblings. But as Dan grew up, it was obvious that he had no interest in the farm. Dan was happy-go-lucky, not hard-working, disciplined, and thrifty, like his younger brother, Jim, who was both bright and independent. Since Jim didn’t want to work as his older brother’s hired man, he was thinking of leaving the farm to take a job in a Charlottetown bank. Dan, living in California with his Aunt Stella, was unwilling to come home, but he didn’t want to give up his inheritance, either. If neither son was willing to try to save the farm, Maud felt she was throwing money away trying to keep it in the family.
Heath Montgomery, one of Grandfather Montgomery’s sons, had been renting much of the farm, but he refused to do so in 1928 and again in 1931. It was a rundown, marginal farm and Maud knew that it could be saved only if Jim made an all-out commitment to it. He might be persuaded to do so if he was promised that the farm would become his if he succeeded. Ella consulted Maud, and Maud took on the problem of convincing Jim—and Dan—that this was the only way to keep the farm in the Campbell family.
Maud’s personal identity was tied up with the family ownership of the Campbell farm. Her Scottish ancestors had come to the new country so that they could own their own land, and to lose their “ancient heritage” after more than a century would have damaged her sense of being a member of the “landed aristocracy”—an old-world concept of great importance to her.
Maud took up her pen. In a letter dated March 7, 1932, she wrote Dan that he was not a farmer—everyone agreed to that. If he would not relinquish his title to the farm, it would have to be sold. If it was sold, she was going to call in her mortgages on it because she needed the money to put her sons through university. This would take most of the proceeds. Then, she continued, Ella and Dan’s younger siblings would have to be looked after—that was stipulated in the will that left the farm to him—and this would take the rest of the money. There would be little if anything left for him. He could either sell the farm under these conditions, or he could sign it over to his younger brother Jim, letting Jim, who had been living and working it already, try to make good on it. If Jim failed, then the farm would be sold, and the proceeds would be distributed as above.
Maud’s letter made it clear to Dan that he would get no money from the farm, no matter what happened. Maud knew that this would upset the grasping Stella, who had been billeting Dan, but Maud did not care. She had been astute enough to construct her many cash bailouts to the Campbells in the form of loans on the property, even if she expected to forgive the loans in the end. This now gave her leverage in forcing Dan to do the right thing for his mother and siblings. With Maud’s rhetorical screws turned tightly on him, Dan capitulated. Maud scraped together $700 in start-up money, and Jim, still in his teens, took over the farm, and did manage to keep it going.
Maud had sound business instincts. She resolved the mess at the Campbell farm brilliantly. However, she could not resolve her own anxieties and her own family’s problems. But what she could do was transmute them into fiction.