In 1916, Maud returned again to her character Anne — but with a new publisher. In Toronto, Maud had met with the editor of McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart, a Canadian publishing company. Not only did McClelland publish The Watchman, but Maud promised them her next novel, Anne’s House of Dreams. This was her darkest fiction yet, about the friendship between Anne and her mysterious neighbor, Leslie Moore. Leslie is trapped in a loveless marriage to a man paralyzed with physical and mental problems. In the end, she learns she has been married to a stranger masquerading as her fiancé — and is finally set free. The plot doubtless reflected some of Maud’s musings about her own troubled marriage. Ewan was not the man he had seemed either — but Maud would find no easy way out.
Writing, for Maud, was an act of preservation. “The world can never be the same again,” she confided in her journal. “Our old world has passed away forever.” Yet that vanished world is kept alive in Anne’s House of Dreams, a book that explores the meaning of friendship, rescue, and finding home. The story is deeply rooted in Prince Edward Island, and celebrates the joy of belonging to a close-knit community — even while Maud was mourning its loss.
Maud began at this time a short memoir, written in a sequence of articles for a popular women’s magazine. These articles were later collected and published as a book, The Alpine Path. The memoir focused almost solely on Maud’s writing life. She managed to evade writing about her marriage, focusing instead on childhood, ancestry, Prince Edward Island, and literature. Though she had loved Herman Leard passionately, “I was never in love with Ewan — never have been in love with him,” she confided to her journal. She was “fond” of her husband, and grateful for having been rescued from a lonely life. None of those facts, she declared, had any place in her memoir.
The years 1918 and 1919 were arguably two of the worst in Maud’s life. She claimed that after 1919, she was never entirely happy again. The yeard 1918 began terrifyingly. One night in January, Maud felt a hard lump in her breast. She was sure she was dying of cancer. Maud did not feel she could consult the local doctor, for fear of his gossipy wife spreading the news. Instead she visited a doctor in Montreal who, after a series of tests, assured her that the lump was benign.
Maud barely had time to feel her relief when the latest terrifying war news eclipsed personal concerns. Ewan came through the door, asking, “Do you want to hear the latest news from the front?” A friend had written to say that the British line had broken, and Germans were raining gun shells down on Paris. Maud nearly collapsed. If Paris was lost, all was lost. It was days till Maud learned the true facts. Meanwhile she paced the parlor floor, wringing her hands and murmuring, “Oh God, oh God.”
Maud turned to Veronal tablets to help her sleep. Veronal was a sleeping pill, a hypnotic and barbiturate that was addictive and potentially deadly. There was many a “hellish week of up and downs” on the war front when Maud stopped eating, barely slept, and depended heavily on these pills.
Even her visit to Prince Edward Island that summer failed to rouse her. Maud missed her daily newspapers and felt out of touch with the world. Change was afoot on her beloved island. The beautiful woods behind her schoolhouse had been chopped down. Cars with their noise and dust had come at last to Prince Edward Island — the last Canadian province to lift the ban. In Cavendish, Maud found one of her old schoolmates, Lizzie Stewart Laird, in a terrible state. Lizzie had spent a year in an insane asylum and more years struggling against mental illness. The two old friends exchanged kindly words, but Maud came away heartsore. The Lizzie she’d known as a child didn’t exist anymore.
During that same visit, Maud returned again to the old Macneill homestead. But there was no enchanting moonlight to soften the scene this time — instead she found only “the woeful desolation of everything.” Uncle John had let the homestead decay and collapse. The front door was held closed by a single wire.
Maud did what she had never expected to do again in this life — she walked inside her grandparents’ house. She stood in the kitchen and imagined herself back into the past. Ignoring the odor of decay, she made her way into the parlor and dining room, and began to mount the stairs to her old room, that “illimitable kingdom” of her youth. But she stopped at the threshold. Her precious room was too full of “ghosts — lonely, hungry ghosts.” Such visits were too eerie, the sweetness too mixed with the bitter. “I will make no more of them,” she swore.
Shadows were approaching, and nothing would ward them off. That July, Maud helped host a large dinner party at Park Corner. It was a jovial gathering, including Frede’s brother, George; his wife, Ella, and their little son, Georgie; Aunt Annie; Maud, Stuart, and Chester; and others. Maud took a head count and came up with thirteen. Jokingly she pointed out the unlucky number — then immediately regretted it, for Ella was pregnant, unhappy, and feeling ill. To cover her mistake, Maud smilingly said, “Frede, you were the thirteenth to sit down — the omen must be for you.”
Frede at once jumped up from the table and refused to take her seat again. It didn’t matter how much the others teased or begged her to come back. Frede ate her dinner on the porch. That night, Maud and Frede stayed up late, chatting and confiding, and all of their immediate worries — including the unlucky thirteen at the table — were forgotten. Yet when Maud left the Campbells’ a week later, she sobbed uncontrollably, “as if I never expected to see Park Corner again.”
Instead, Park Corner came to see Maud — in the form of Aunt Annie. Maud was delighted to have her company, made still sweeter on October 6, 1918, by the news that Germany and Austria had at last surrendered, marking an end to the terrible war. The date, Maud declared, “should be written in capitals — in letters of gold.” Maud was so thrilled, she called every friend in town and ran outside to put up the flag. “Sit down, child,” said Aunt Annie calmly.
As fall turned to winter, Maud fell ill with the Spanish flu. She came close to pneumonia and was bedridden for days. While she lay ill, a letter came from Aunt Annie telling that her only son, George, one of the thirteen diners at that unlucky table, had died. Soon followed a heartbreaking letter adding that little Georgie, George and Ella’s young son, had succumbed to the deadly flu as well.
Ella and Aunt Annie were sick from shock; the other children ill with the flu. Frede hurried home to manage things as best she could. Once again, Maud flew to her cousin’s rescue. When she arrived, everyone was sick in bed except Frede. They stayed up all night talking, “rinsing out their souls.”
Park Corner had fallen on hard times emotionally and financially. The two cousins, Maud and Frede, put their heads together to discuss things as calmly as they could. They cleaned and disinfected the house. They placed their hope for Park Corner’s future on one of the younger Campbells, Dan, “a fine smart lad, industrious and thrifty . . . a new streak in the Campbells.” Maud had loaned money to her late cousin George and vowed not to take a penny’s interest on the loan. Somehow, Maud and Frede promised each other, they would manage to pull through.
On the evening of Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, Frede and Maud strolled together in the dark and walked the lane across the Lake of Shining Waters. Now that the war was over, Frede was soon to be reunited with her soldier husband, Cam Macfarlane. Frede’s engagement and marriage that spring had happened within six hours — so suddenly that it had left Maud feeling “dumbfounded, flabbergasted, knocked out and rendered speechless.” She had not yet met Frede’s husband — indeed, one might argue that Frede barely knew him herself.
Maud feared that her best friend had married in haste and would repent at leisure. Ever since the typhoid fever, Frede’s heart had not been strong. “Oh Freddie-girl, I want you to be happy!” Maud wrote in her journal that day. “You have had so little happiness in your uneasy life.”
At the year’s end, despite all the recent sorrows, Maud finished her ninth novel, Rainbow Valley — an effervescent, dreamy book about Anne’s children and their group of young friends. It was, as Robert Frost
once wrote of great poetry, “a momentary stay against confusion.”
But darkness loomed just ahead. Two of the thirteen at the unlucky table in Park Corner had already died of the flu. As 1918 turned the corner into the new year, Maud learned that her beloved Frede was desperately ill again in Montreal, this time with pneumonia. Maud had come to her cousin’s rescue four years earlier; she believed she could perform a second miracle.
Maud arrived exhausted in Montreal on a Thursday night. Almost as soon as she laid eyes on Frede, white and still in her hospital bed, Maud knew there was no hope this time.
By dawn on Saturday, January 25, the doctors admitted they could do no more. Frede was kept calm on morphine. She lay muttering quietly to herself, her breathing hoarse and labored. Maud told Frede that she was going to write to Aunt Annie and wondered if Frede had any word to send her mother. “Yes. Tell her I want to know exactly how her hand is,” she said. Frede’s message to her new husband, Cam, was less “commonplace.” She wished for him “the courage of the strong.”
Maud summoned all her bravery for one last question. She didn’t want to frighten Frede. But the cousins had agreed years earlier that whichever of them died first would visit the other and reassure them after death. Earnestly, Maud begged Frede not to forget her promise.
“You’ll be sure to come, won’t you?” Maud pleaded.
“Certainly,” Frede said, loudly and distinctly. It was the last thing she said. She died just after dawn, quietly, “as a tired child might fall asleep.”
Frede was the one great, enduring, irreplaceable love of Maud’s life. Frede herself once told Maud, “there’s nobody true — except you. You are the only person I’ve ever found whom I could trust absolutely.” Maud adored her young cousin. She admired Frede; loved her intelligence and strength; depended on her good sense, her good humor, her laughter and wit. No one could raise Maud’s spirits like Frede. No one else ever drew so close.
How, Maud thought frantically, how could she survive a life without Frede? Maud pictured the years stretching out empty before her, scene after scene of desolation. Not for the first time, Maud’s imagination worked against her. All the pain and sadness that should have come upon her over time, “all the loneliness — all the longing — was concentrated in those hours.” It marked a time “of horror” for Maud, who never completely reconciled herself to the loss.
The war had ended at last, but Maud could not be comforted over the death of Frede. Where, Maud asked in anguish, “is that unfailing humor, that flashing wit, that tender strength, that magnetic personality?” No answer could console her. “In all our great crises of life we have been together,” wrote Maud. In this, her greatest crisis yet, Maud stood alone.
Later that spring, Ewan suffered his first complete nervous breakdown. He may have been responding to his wife’s depression and despair. He may have finally realized, with the death of Frede, that he and Maud remained fundamentally separate. Perhaps he had been spiraling downward for a long time, unnoticed, unattended, and unable to rise.
Ewan hid his breakdown as best he could from his two congregations. Any form of mental illness was considered a shameful secret. Maud carefully hid the truth of her husband’s psychological condition. She went to great lengths to preserve the myth that Ewan was only physically sick or exhausted. Sometimes she wrote his sermons for him, and poor Ewan stumbled through them as best he could.
But that May of the deadly year 1919 — “the most terrible year of my life,” Maud wrote — Ewan’s condition was too desperate to hide, or to keep out of plain sight.
The crisis also marked a return of Ewan’s religious demons. He became convinced that not only he but also Maud and their children were condemned to eternal damnation. Maud knew that when Ewan was in his right mind, he did not believe in an old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone hell any more than she did. But she recognized that this might be the symptom of true mental illness, and she was terrified that his sanity might never return.
That May, the Macdonalds were to host a number of high-powered, influential visiting ministers for several days. Initially, Ewan seemed fine, even jovial, though suffering from headaches and insomnia. Then suddenly, in the middle of the visit, he took to walking aimlessly in fields and lanes late at night. He fell into a silent, depressed lethargy. He would have nothing to do with the visiting ministers. All he could do was lie in his hammock, brooding over his own and the children’s eternal damnation.
Maud took over all of the social obligations, staying up late with their visiting guests. She tried to explain away Ewan’s behavior as the result of physical problems. When her newly married cousin Stella came for an ill-timed visit, Maud hid the problem from Stella as well. She begged Ewan to give up his late-night wanderings. But his condition continued to deteriorate. Finally, as a desperate measure, Maud sent him to his sister’s in Boston.
There, doctors confirmed Maud’s worst fears. They believed Ewan suffered from chronic “manic-depressive insanity.” Maud’s horror indicates that somehow she had still failed to connect this disorder with her own recurring severe mood swings. She began to plan for a future without him — she must get the children someplace safe, and find a good sanitarium for her husband.
The doctors did suggest one other possibility: Ewan might be suffering from kidney disease. Maud seized on this as something she could talk about to others. Ewan was told to drink plenty of water and given chloral tablets to help him sleep. Chloral hydrate, now illegal in the United States, was then used as a sedative and sleeping aid — sometimes even as an anesthetic. Its side effects on the heart and renal system could be deadly. Worse, Maud combined Ewan’s dose of chloral with the sedative Veronal, thinking it would help Ewan sleep. Instead, he muttered and twitched restlessly all night, tapping and talking endlessly, like some monstrous version of her old fiancé, Edwin Simpson. Maud dared not leave her husband’s side. While Ewan slept three or four hours a night, Maud lay awake.
Ewan’s condition deteriorated all summer and into fall. No wonder Maud called 1919 “a hellish year.” By September, Ewan slipped in and out of complete mental collaspe. Only now did Maud learn that this was not Ewan’s first brush with madness — he had suffered from religious melancholia both times he went away to college in Canada, and during his catastrophic trip to Glasgow.
Nothing roused or comforted him. He could barely be distracted for an instant from his brooding. He showed no interest in either of his sons. In fact, they only increased his sense of horror. Ewan told Maud he wished the children had never been born.
In these terrible, lonely days, Maud thought repeatedly of Frede’s final promise, to reveal herself to Maud after death. So far, there had been no such visitation. One bleak afternoon, Maud sat with her cat Daffy and thought, “if you are here, make Daff come over to me and kiss me.” Daffy was Maud’s least affectionate pet. Immediately Daffy walked slowly across the room, placed his paw gently on her shoulder, and touched his mouth to Maud’s cheek — not once, but twice. Maud clung to this reassurance as a sign.
Writing, for Maud, was rescue, escape, salvation, and purpose. She finished her tenth novel, Rilla of Ingleside, a book about World War I that she dedicated to Frede. Maud felt little enthusiasm for Rilla, which critics generally agree is one of Montgomery’s weakest Anne books, uncharacteristically dark and sentimental. But its author was pleased at least when she sat down in 1919 and tallied her literary earnings. Maud had come a long way from her first five-dollar check from Golden Days. She had earned close to $75,000 from her writing — a fortune in those days. With wry modesty, she described it as “not a bad showing, considering my initial equipment — my pen and scanty education.”
Her youngest son, Stuart, too, was a comfort, always merry, affectionate, and bright, while his older brother Chester, at seven, had become a worry. Chester rarely showed open affection to anyone. Chester, like his father, was reserved and secretive. He took after his father in other ways, seeming almost entirely indifferent to n
ature’s beauty, as was Ewan, whom Maud once described as being as “unaware of it as a blind man.”
Stuart had an open, fervent nature, and was dedicated to Maud. He was a handsome, fair-haired boy with large, brilliant blue eyes and a rosy complexion. Stuart would tell his brother, “You have a father. This is my mother.” The family divisions, later so deep and so painful, began to form even this early on.
Ewan had been stumbling along, barely getting through his days, when his longtime good friend the popular and energetic Reverend Edwin Smith came to Leaskdale for a visit. Edwin Smith was to Ewan what Frede had been to Maude. He was a confidant, trusted friend, and clerical brother. All the while that Maud kept sending Ewan to doctors, Ewan had been saying, “I need a minister.” He may have been right. As Maud described it, “when he left to meet Captain Smith at the station he was very miserable. Two hours later, when he returned, he was well.” Whatever Mr. Smith had said or done, it had a miraculous effect on Ewan.
Edwin Smith was everything Ewan was not: successful, vivacious, charismatic, boyishly handsome. Even into his fifties, Smith looked no more than thirty-five. In photographs of the best friends standing side by side, Edwin, the elder minister, looks young enough to be Ewan’s son. Smith was also a war hero. The first time Maud ever laid eyes on him, a friend commented, “That man is too good-looking to be a minister.”
Edwin Smith brought out the best in Maud, too. He became, in his own masculine way, the kind of figure that Frede had been — magnetic, brilliant, full of life. Maud relished his visits and called Smith a “universal genius.” At the heart of Maud and Ewan’s marriage was a great void. Edwin Smith helped fill that emptiness. Maud never forgot the miracle he accomplished that September of 1919.