House of Dreams
On their departure from Park Corner, the wedding party found itself riding behind a hearse. They traveled as if part of the large funeral, mile after mile. Maud tried to laugh it off at the time, but later she came to think of it as a forbidding omen.
Maud barely mentions Ewan during their honeymoon, either in her journal or in long letters home. In a photograph taken on board ship during their honeymoon, Ewan Macdonald stands out from the other passengers. He looks taller, handsomer, slimmer, and more masculine, perhaps granted a few extra inches in height by his tall black minister’s hat. Still, he seems very much at the center of things, as one always imagines Maud to have been. He is turned slightly to face the others, and one can see his dimpled smile.
Maud’s book royalties paid for the honeymoon. The couple spent the first three months of their married life traveling through England and Scotland, a journey that had long been one of Maud’s dreams, to visit the Old Country. Maud’s initial reaction to Europe was characteristic. She felt “homesick — suddenly, wretchedly, unmitigatedly homesick!”
Maud kept comparing England — unfavorably — with Prince Edward Island. But at one castle she spied some unusual small blue flowers that had grown all over her grandmother’s yard in Cavendish. Surely, she marveled, Grandmother Lucy Macneill, who had been born and raised in England, brought those blue flowers to Canada and planted them in remembrance of her lost home.
England sparked other family connections, too. Maud had never forgotten the magical green-spotted china dogs from Grandfather Montgomery’s house in Park Corner — the ceramic dogs her father claimed had leaped onto the hearthrug at midnight. In England she found two pairs. The larger pair had gold spots and were so huge they wouldn’t fit on a mantelpiece; she decided these precious souvenirs would guard the hearth at their new manse. She bought both pairs and shipped them home.
Maud had arranged to meet her longtime pen pal George MacMillan in Scotland. There he would join them on their travels. It was an odd arrangement for a honeymoon, made even more awkward by the fact that MacMillan brought along his fiancée, an attractive young woman named Miss Jean Allen. Miss Allen, at age twenty, was by far the youngest member of the foursome. She was, according to Maud, a “very pretty girl,” with bright gold hair and a “simply exquisite” complexion. But she proved cranky and hard to please. Her personality was less dazzling than her looks, Maud quickly decided, noting Miss Allen’s only “stock in trade is her twenty-year-old freshness and charming complexion.”
Maud did not recognize her Scottish pen pal on sight. It was Ewan and MacMillan who spotted each other from their meeting years earlier in Glasgow. George MacMillan was a “slight, fair, nice-looking chap,” she wrote. Maud warmed to him at once. Years later she would joke about marrying MacMillan off to her dear cousin Bertie McIntyre. But most important, he was “one of the best conversationalists I have ever met.” When the four went off on excursions, Maud and MacMillan spent all their time in conversation while the lovely Miss Allen sulked and seethed.
Ewan mildly pointed out that Miss Allen probably felt left out while Maud and MacMillan were busily “absorbed in long literary discussions.” From then on, Maud made a point to walk with either Miss Allen or with Ewan, but nothing improved Miss Allen’s mood. She tried to prevent a rowing expedition, and when that failed, she stormed off alone. In the end, MacMillan did not marry the irritable Miss Allen but remained a bachelor all his life.
The newlyweds traveled on alone through the British Isles. They didn’t visit the Isle of Skye, the ancestral home of Ewan’s family. Nor did Maud seek out her own living Scottish relations. Instead they conducted a literary tour of Scotland, places connected with her favorite Scottish authors — Sir Walter Scott, the poet Robert Burns, and J. M. Barrie. The Scottish sky, she wrote, was nearly beautiful enough to make up for the absence of the sea.
The names on the shops gave Maud a “nice ‘at home’ feeling,” she said — all those Simpsons and Macneills. One day she and Ewan found a stand of spruce trees and pulled their own chew of the bittersweet gum. But the Old Country did not live up to her imagined ideal — nothing could. Prince Street in Edinburgh was not the street “of my dreams — the fairy avenue of gardens and statuary and palaces.”
It is easy to guess that this was not the honeymoon of her dreams, either, though Maud did not write about the intimate details of those first nights with her husband. Clearly, the “Mad Passion” was missing. Nor was Ewan a deeply kindred spirit. We know that Maud suffered from painful cystitis, known as the “honeymoon disease,” so it’s likely that she and Ewan were sexually active. But theirs was, from the start, a marriage of companionship rather than a meshing of souls.
Maud’s favorite romantic moment was sitting with Ewan at the edge of a quiet forest after they had parted ways from George MacMillan and Miss Allen. This was closer to her ideal, sitting in a wood overlooking the lake, apart from rest of the busy world, “in a little bit of ‘honeymooning’ in our green seclusion.”
One of the last stops was Dunwich, England, where Grandmother Macneill had lived till the age of twelve. Maud had expected to feel a mild interest in the place, but she was shocked by the depth of her response. “My emotion almost overpowered me. It seemed to me that grandmother and Aunt Margaret must be somewhere around, little laughing girls of twelve and fourteen . . . I was homesick — and yet I felt as if I had come home.”
After ten weeks away, Ewan and Maud were ready to begin their new lives in Ontario. Maud had made arrangements for work to be done at the manse in their absence. Sailing in September through rougher seas than on the outward-bound journey, she felt eager to “build my nest and gather my scattered household gods all about me.” For the first time in her life, Maud had a home of her own.
They arrived September 24, 1911, on a “damp murky autumn night,” and drove the seven miles home in darkness. It turned out that the manse was far from ready — it wasn’t even habitable. Other housing arrangements had to be made, and quickly. Ewan and Maud boarded with Mary and Lizzie Oxtoby, two elderly, eccentric spinster sisters “who would have delighted Dickens,” Maud wrote.
They did not delight Maud. The two old women were extremely curious about the new minister and his wife, and pried into their every move. The Macdonalds’ temporary bedroom was tiny and inconvenient, and the Oxtoby sisters were poor cooks. Lizzie Oxtoby laughed at everything. Maud declared that if you told Lizzie your father had hanged himself, your husband had gone mad, and your children burned to death, Lizzie still would have chuckled.
The village of Leaskdale was practically nonexistent, a mere ten or twelve houses in all. The Macdonalds lived near the blacksmith and the wheelwright. The manse, Maud wrote, was an “ugly L-shaped” pale brick, a style popular at the time in Ontario. Unfortunately for the large china dogs, the house did not have a hearth at all. Maud named the dogs Gog and Magog, after two fierce Biblical characters, and installed them on either side of her bookcase. The manse didn’t have an indoor bathroom or toilet, much to Maud’s dismay. But it was spacious, with room to grow: five bedrooms, a parlor, a dining room, a kitchen, and a library.
In one of the most touching scenes in Maud’s later novel Anne’s House of Dreams, Anne Shirley tears herself from her cozy seaside house of dreams and moves to a large house in town, close to where her husband, Gilbert, works. Anne’s housemaid Susan praises the new house as such “‘a fine, big one.’ ‘I hate big houses,’ sobbed Anne.”
Maud was living out this same scene. She mourned her lost Cavendish and Prince Edward Island. But she quickly charged in and took hold. As the minister’s wife, Maud found herself at the center of things. Though she initially wrote of Leaskdale, “There isn’t one interesting or really intelligent person in it,” she soon grew attached to the people and landscape. Some of her most peaceful years were spent in Leaskdale, creating community and family.
Ewan’s ministry was a double charge, with one church and the manse in Leaskdale, and the second church in
Zephyr, about eleven miles away. Of the two, Maud much preferred Leaskdale. Zephyr’s church was older, unattractive, and dimly lit. The people in Zephyr were poorer and less gracious. The road there was dangerous, often muddy and full of ruts. And because Zephyr was also home to a Methodist church, there were rancorous divisions in town that even the gentle Ewan could not smooth over.
The Leaskdale congregation held mostly well-to-do farmers. The day after the Macdonalds’ arrival, the church was packed, partly out of eagerness to hear the new minister, partly to greet his famous wife, the acclaimed author of Anne of Green Gables.
A few days later, John Mustard’s brother, of all people — it seemed she never could escape the Mustards — officiated at Ewan’s welcoming ceremony. By the oddest coincidence, Maud noted, she had “come to live in John Mustard’s old home.” John Mustard was now a distinguished minister in nearby Toronto, married and with a family. He was much admired, if not by Maud, then by the rest of the world.
The Leaskdale manse would never be entirely Maud’s own house, of course — it belonged to the church — but she could make it as beautiful as she pleased. She had the resources, the energy, and, for the first time in her life, no one to stand in her way. Maud was so eager to begin that the Macdonalds moved in before the manse was fully ready. Maud had the floors painted green instead of the usual gray. She put up her favorite fern-patterned wallpaper. In the library, shared with Ewan, she finally had room enough for all of her books.
Here they hung framed photographs of favorite places on Prince Edward Island, as well as copies of the paintings from her three book covers: Anne of Green Gables, Kilmeny of the Orchard, and The Story Girl. Their bedroom featured pearl-gray furniture and a bright red rug. Maud painted one bedroom pink and white, another bright blue. She created a sewing room on the landing, and a fourth and fifth bedroom were set up for storage and a maid’s quarters, respectively. In the parlor with the spotted china dogs, Maud proudly displayed her great-grandmother’s enormous heirloom jug, known simply as the Woolner jug. It made a handy conversation piece for visitors and guests.
The house was prettily situated with a lovely lawn and room for a garden. Behind the manse lay a lane that reminded Maud of her much-loved and forever-missed Lover’s Lane. She would go there for long walks whenever she could manage a spare hour for herself.
Before their marriage, Ewan had told his friends, “Yes, I understand the young lady is a writer,” but he assumed his wife’s life would be dedicated to his work, his happiness. After the marriage, Ewan tried to persuade Maud to publish under Mrs. Macdonald. Maud refused. There is no evidence that Ewan was a fan of Maud’s work. She later wrote, perhaps unfairly, that she wasn’t sure he’d ever read a single word she had written. She never dedicated a book to her husband.
As a minister’s wife, Maud lived in the public eye, always on call. She was in charge of keeping the household in order — the cooking, the cleaning, the washing, the ironing. She attended countless social and church events, and was regularly “at home” to the members of her husband’s congregation. This meant hours of visits filled with idle chat. Maud wished she could spend more time on her own, writing. She desperately missed her solitude. She wrote in exasperation to George MacMillan, “Those whom the gods wish to destroy they make ministers’ wives.”
Thanks to her writing income, the Macdonalds could afford household help. Maud insisted that the servants eat in the dining room with the family. Indeed, some of her closest relationships were with these helpers. Maud planned out meals and chores a week in advance, and each day had its particular tasks and menus. Maud prided herself on being a good cook and housekeeper. She loved to garden. Her handiwork in sewing and embroideries survives, in monograms and floral flourishes, elegant and accomplished. All in all, she found these early days in the new Leaskdale manse a busy and “exciting time.”
Maud also involved herself in the life of the congregation. Like her great-aunt Mary Lawson, she was a great storyteller, with a quick and ready wit. Her first “at homes” took place just a few days after she moved into the manse, and “thereafter on the afternoon and evening of Tuesday each week.”
Maud managed to make time for her own work — writing drafts by hand in the morning and typing in the afternoon. Then, tired though she might be, she must “dress and go out to tea in the evening ‘making small talk,’” taking care not to slight or neglect a soul. Sometimes she could barely keep her eyes open. Those unending pastoral visits, she declared, were “an invention of the devil himself.”
She also had church work waiting each time she visited the smaller, poorer church in Zephyr. Maud came to dread the eleven-mile journey there, with an icy wind sleeting across their faces in winter and an equally chilly welcome from the congregation. No matter where she and Ewan went to call for tea, they were always served the same dismal fare: cold pork and fried potatoes. She began to call the Thursdays on which she had to travel to Zephyr “Black Thursdays.”
She infinitely preferred her time with the youth group in Leaskdale. Maud enjoyed the company of young people, and the “young fry” admired Maud’s energy and good humor. Maud had a reputation for “making things go.” Soon she was organizing the kind of evenings of recitations, lively discussions, and entertainment she herself had craved as a girl. She joined the local reading club and taught a Sunday-school class at her husband’s church. More requests poured in from nearby communities, but Maud firmly turned down invitations elsewhere.
Her own writing was, she confided to her journal, “as truly ‘given’ to me as any missionary’s or minister’s.” Ewan would have been appalled by this declaration. He came to learn, often to his distress, that nothing on earth — not her duties as a minister’s wife, as a mother, or as a church member — would keep L. M. Montgomery from writing. Maud was well practiced in leading a double life; she had been doing it forever. Her imagined worlds and characters were as real to her as those around her. She “shut the door of [her] soul” to distractions and retreated “into a citadel of dear thoughts and beautiful imaginings.”
After that first year, Maud wrote to George MacMillan, “I like Leaskdale very much . . . I do not love it.” She tried to be tactful and kind, understanding her peculiar power and status as minister’s wife. She got along with most of the congregants. Still, she wrote, the inner “gates of my soul are barred against them. They do not have the key.” She’d have gladly exchanged all the scenery in Ontario, she declared, for one walk in Lover’s Lane at sunset.
Maud suffered no winter depression that first year, despite — or perhaps because of — the busyness of her days. She managed to write steadily, working on two new story collections. In October 1911, Maud wrote in her journal: “I am contented — I may say happy. There is an absolute happiness and a comparative happiness. Mine is the latter. After the unhappiness and worry of the past thirteen years this existence of mine seems to me a very happy one. I am — for the most part — content.”
Soon contentment turned to joy. At age thirty-seven, Maud worried that she had waited too long to have children. In November, she learned she was pregnant. The news filled her with elation. It seemed “so incredible — so wonderful — so utterly impossible as happening to me!”
In celebration, Maud took the final step toward making their house a home. She sent back to Prince Edward Island for her cat, Daffy, the sleek, aloof pet that even cat-hating Grandmother Macneill had loved. He was shipped in a wooden crate from Cavendish, and when the Macdonalds’ neighbors rode in with the precious cargo, they warned Maud to expect the worst. Not a sound came from inside the box. Poor Maud was sure that her cat was dead. She pried open the crate. Daffy daintily stepped out and kissed her — a rare display of affection — and then showed his dislike for travel by vanishing for the rest of the day.
Maud always kept at least one pet cat around. Even when she traveled, she took photographs of local cats. “The only true animal is a cat, and the only true cat is a gray cat,” she once
declared. She owned many cats in her lifetime, mostly gray ones, but striped cats and tabbies and black kittens made their way into her life as well. She autographed her books with a characteristic black cat drawn underneath her signature. Daffy was especially dear because of his connection to Prince Edward Island — “the only living link between me and the old life,” she wrote.
Maud had always been thin, and never especially strong. She worried about her ability to see this first pregnancy to term. Cousin Frede traveled to Leaskdale to be with Maud for the birth. Maud hired a professional nurse instead of using a midwife and arranged for a doctor to attend the birth as well.
Toward the end of her pregnancy, Maud had a frightening dream. In it, a black coffin was laid across her feet. She feared it meant that she or her child, or both, would die in childbirth. In 1912, this was not an unreasonable fear — infant and maternal mortality rates were high. Much later in her life, she would look back to that dark foreboding dream: her first son, the open coffin weighing her down. Her griefs and worries over this much-desired, cherished firstborn boy would one day prove nearly fatal indeed.
Chester Cameron Macdonald was born a little after noon on July 7, 1912, a healthy baby boy. It was an easy birth. The wonderful Frede was at Maud’s side — another blessing. What’s more, her cherished cousin stayed on to help with the new baby. Maud and Frede worked “in beautiful concord,” Maud noted, adding that she had at long last “the home I had dreamed of having.” The two women adored little “Punch,” as they nicknamed him. Chester was an easy baby that first year.
Maud and Frede delighted in all of Chester’s treasured firsts. His first word was “Wow!” Together they made up silly poems about him. Ewan was a proud father, but he left the daily rearing, the discipline, even the religious education of children to Maud. Her adoration for this newborn son “blent and twined with the inmost fibres of my being.” Maud grieved over each event that marked her firstborn’s growing up and away from her. She mourned when they shortened Chester’s long nightgowns, sighed over his first cup of milk, and cried the day he was weaned. But “motherhood is heaven,” she marveled. “It pays for all.”