House of Dreams
Maud hated being at the center of local gossip, as all of Cavendish followed the squabbling with interest. Grandfather was also feuding over some real or imagined slight with his eldest son, Maud’s uncle John, who lived next door. Maud had always disliked this uncle. John Macneill was a forceful man who could be brutal when he didn’t get his own way. He’d always frightened her. Maud did not like his sons any better, and felt miserable when she was forced to spend time in their company. The fighting both within the family and without put them all under a glaring spotlight.
Till Maud changed schools, Miss Robinson took her anger out on her young pupil — taunting and insulting Maud where she safely held the power. Maud hoped at least for a little praise for her writings, but none came from the immovable Miss Robinson. When Maud won honorable mention in the Montreal Witness, it was based on one of Alexander Macneill’s favorite tales, which hardly endeared it to her teacher.
In desperation, Maud copied one of her own poems out as a song called “Evening Dreams” and asked Miss Robinson, a fine musician, if she knew it. Of course Miss Robinson did not — her own least-favorite student had written it.
The “song” began:
When the evening sun is setting
Quietly in the west,
In a halo of rainbow glory,
I sit me down to rest.
Miss Robinson declared it “very pretty,” so Maud copied it over and sent it off with high hopes to an American magazine. It sailed back a few weeks later with her first — but not her last — rejection slip, and a note that she’d neglected to include a stamped return envelope. Maud next tried the local paper, which promptly rejected it. It was years before she even attempted to publish again.
Maud destroyed her early works one by one. Later she wished she had those first efforts back — even the melancholy “My Graves” and “The History of Flossie Brighteyes.” When Maud was fourteen she read over her old childhood diaries and burned those, too — to her everlasting regret.
A few months short of her fifteenth birthday, Maud began “a new kind of diary.” She declared the old writing so silly that she was ashamed of it. With characteristic self-mockery, she noted that she had written in it “religiously every day and told what kind of weather it was.” She would have thought it “a kind of crime” not to write in it every single day — “nearly as bad as not saying my prayers, or washing my face.”
In her new journal she determined to write “only when I have something worth writing about. Life is beginning to get interesting for me — I will soon be fifteen.” She was not going to record so much about the weather, she vowed. And, she added emphatically, “last but not least — I am going to keep this book locked up!!”
By now Maud had won a few composition awards. These early victories heartened her. Best of all, Cavendish had hired a new schoolteacher, Miss Hattie Gordon, who encouraged Maud’s literary efforts. In fact, she insisted all the schoolchildren write compositions every week. The labor of writing was play to Maud. When she was “scribbling,” time flew by. “Oh, as long as we can work we can make life beautiful!” she exclaimed.
Maud gratefully returned to her seat beside her beloved Amanda Macneill (“Mollie”) and other classmates. Miss Gordon expected fine things of all her students. She encouraged them in musical events, nature outings, and recitations, and organized school picnics at the end of each year. “I like her splendidly,” Maud enthused in her diary.
Miss Gordon was not conventionally pretty, but her looks were striking; she was “a true lady,” with a lovely smile and fair wavy hair. She was quick-tempered but seldom gave in to it, going silent till her anger passed. Maud revered her for being the sort of teacher who “had the power of inspiring a love of study for its own sake.”
Miss Gordon participated in the Cavendish Literary Society — and encouraged her students to do the same. This was just the support that Maud had been needing. The Macneills had banned Maud from “the Literary,” dismissing it as a waste of time, thus keeping Maud from the only resource that could feed her hunger for books and literary talk. But if all the other children were participating, Maud could hardly be the only pupil kept home. So Maud was at last allowed to join the longed-for Literary — and to recite in public.
Maud took as her first recital piece “The Child Martyr.” She recited with “flashing eyes and fervently clasped hands,” a neighbor reported. If anyone wanted to know what Anne of Green Gables really looked like, he declared, they need only have observed Maud in her trembling excitement. She was finally part of the literary life, an introduction that opened the way to new possibilities, new books — and her first romance.
Some folks declared Maud was “boy crazy”; she attracted the boys with her quick wit and vivacity. Uncle John’s daughter, Lucy, living right next door, probably told unkind tales against her popular cousin. Her strict grandparents kept a tighter rein on Maud than ever. Any time Maud left the house for a walk in her beloved Lover’s Lane, she was closely questioned. Even a simple walk by the shore would provoke an inquisition.
But Maud did have two female friends who were approved by her grandparents. One was Amanda Macneill, her old buddy “Mollie.” The other was Penzie Macneill, a cousin a few years older. In typical schoolgirl “crushes” of the time, Maud and Penzie exchanged sentimental poems and letters, declaring their mutual devotion.
Maud and Mollie had their two favorite boys at school, whom they nicknamed “Snip” and “Snap.” Snip was Nathan Lockhart, a slim, bright-eyed, fatherless boy, and the cleverest boy in school. Nate was crazy about books and writing. He was allowed to join the Literary before Maud won permission, and would sneak her a few treasured books to borrow. Snap was Nate’s best friend, John Laird — a handsome, good-natured fellow. In their early teens, Mollie-and-Polly and Snip-and-Snap became an inseparable foursome. They led their friends and classmates in popularity and in academics, and Maud and Nathan Lockhart formed a friendly rivalry over who placed first in school.
Nate’s father had drowned at sea before Nate was born. Nate, like Maud, understood about early loss. His pastor uncle, Arthur John Lockhart, was a respected poet, which gave Nate further standing in Maud’s eyes. She stayed friends with “Pastor Felix” all her life, and dedicated one of her finest novels, Emily Climbs, to him. When Maud placed third in a school essay contest, Nate bested her by placing second. Unlike the fictional Anne, Maud proved a gracious rival. “It is better than mine,” she admitted.
Though Maud claimed no romantic interest in Nate Lockhart, they were close comrades; they teased, argued, made up, and supported each other. Her teenage journal entries rise and fall depending on whether she and Snip are getting along or having one of their frequent misunderstandings. In her diary she wrote, “Snip is a very nice boy and we are great friends. He is crazy about books and so am I. . . . And the other scholars don’t like it because we talk of things they don’t understand.”
In November 1889, a few weeks shy of Maud’s fifteenth birthday, Maud and Mollie were walking home from a religious lecture in the cold and dark when Snip decided to escort them home. This was a great event in a young woman’s life — the first night she walked home holding a young man’s arm. Maud declared she felt “silly,” but she and Mollie stayed up all night talking about it.
Alas, they weren’t the only ones talking. Another pair of girls happened to see Nate accompanying Maud home. Word traveled fast in Cavendish. By the next day, the whole school knew.
A few weeks later Maud, Mollie, and Nate enjoyed another “scrumptious walk home.” This led to worse gossip, which turned into a months-long series of spats among the schoolgirls. Rumors and accusations flew thick and fast, leaving Maud and Mollie and their innocent escapades far behind. Finally, an exasperated Miss Hattie Gordon sat all the girls down and got things sorted out. To Maud’s credit, she had no interest in fighting or gossip, and she valued her reputation as honest and straightforward. Nor did she want to risk her newfound freedom to attend soci
al events like the Literary.
Maud had begun to look like a young lady. Her hair had been golden blond as a child but had darkened, first to the color of autumn leaves, then to nearly brunette. Her eyes were unusual, the pupils so large “that her eyes appeared black instead of blue or gray.”
All this time Maud described Nate as only a “good chum,” but she felt desolate whenever they quarreled. “Oh dear. I feel glum. I know Nate is mad at me.” She never meant to vex him, but she wrote in her journal, “I am a horrid little goose, I know,” and worse, “I can’t help being a horrid little goose.” A few days later she would report that she and Nate were good friends again. He was certainly a “nice boy,” she stoutly maintained, “clever and intellectual, and that is more than can be said” of the others.
Maud had always been an outsider in Cavendish, but she grew more aware of the division between her inner and outer life in her teenage years. There was no place where she could be whole. Maud constructed a separate inward existence “very different indeed from the world in which I lived, moved, and had my outward being.” One Maud went to school, diligently did her homework, attended church, and kept her mouth shut. The other sported with otherworldly beings, ruled imaginary kingdoms, fought demons. These real and imaginative worlds “clashed hopelessly and irreconcilably,” and she learned to keep them separate — at a cost.
Her relatives accused Maud of being “deep” and “sly.” Cousin Lucy’s gossip hadn’t helped matters. In one of Maud’s Emily novels, her heroine wonders why she would be thought sly. “I think it is because I have a habit when I am bored or disgusted with people, of stepping suddenly into my own world and shutting the door.”
Nate Lockhart was Maud’s closest intellectual companion. In her journal, Maud wrote, “It was so dreadfully lonesome the last time we quarreled.” Nate often came along on long rambles with Maud and Mollie. Together they’d attend debates and lectures, or coast downhill on sleds — there was safety and comfort in the threesome. “We talked of many things we three, soberly but not sadly,” wrote Maud in her journal. “We were all too happy for sadness.”
The year Maud turned fifteen, the Cavendish school got caught up in a new romantic craze. First, a boy or girl had to count nine stars for nine nights in a row. The first person you shook hands with next would be your true love.
On February 17, 1890, Nate Lockhart counted his ninth star and shook hands with a girl — but he refused to name her, even to Mollie and Maud. Maud finally wheedled the answer out of him by agreeing to answer “fair and square, without any evasion, any one question he might ask me.”
Nate summoned up his courage and asked, “Which of your boy friends do you like best?”
Maud wrote, rather snippily: “You have a little more brains than the other Cavendish boys and I like brains — so I suppose I like you best — though I don’t see why I should, after the trick you have played on me.”
Nate handed Maud the following note the next day at school, February 18, 1890, which she copied into her journal:
I have altered my plan of arrangement and resolved to give you hard, dry, plain facts, for they may possibly appear as such to you, but they are nevertheless as true as gospel. Here goes — Of all my feminine friends the one whom I most admire — no, I’m growing reckless — the one whom I love . . . is L . M. Montgomery, the girl I shook hands with, the girl after my own heart.
It’s hard not to admire the young man who wrote that brave note and reached out for that “heart-hungry” girl. Nate Lockhart seems a likely early model for the famous Gilbert Blythe, whom Anne Shirley marries and loves truly for the rest of her life. Like Gilbert, Nate was a worthy rival, a true friend, a fellow intellect, and a steady, loving personality. Photos reveal a thin, handsome boy with fair wavy hair, large ears, and an intense, level gaze. He has a strong jawline and firm mouth, indicating his own degree of stubbornness. Other girls were “crazy” about Nate. And he, apparently, was crazy about Maud.
But Maud’s response was mixed. On one hand she wrote in her journal in exultation, “he not only liked me best — he loved me!” Maud had feared he might name some other girl and was ready to change her own letter in an instant and write in the name of Snap instead — Nate’s friend John Laird. Maud felt a flash of joy, “a queer, foolish, triumphant little feeling about it.” She had grown so unsure of her lovability that she had often wondered if “anyone would ever care for me — that way.” Now she knew, without any doubt, that someone could and did.
Yet she also felt like a “perfect idiot,” and the next time Maud was alone with Nate, she felt “rather frightened and silly.” Nate was wise enough not to push the matter — but he did give Maud another letter, now lost to history. All we know is that she wasn’t sure “whether I liked it or not.” In some ways, she wrote, she did, “and in others I didn’t.”
Maud managed to evade Nate for the rest of the school year and kept him safely surrounded by plenty of other “chums.” They took part in various scrapes and school events — one spring day scrubbing down the whole school, nearly blowing up the old school stove in the process. The young folks held mayflower picnics and conducted the final school concert of the year, declared “a great success.” But Maud avoided spending time alone with Nate, fearful of what romantic thing he might say or do next. Years later she wrote that she simply had not been attracted to him and that their match would have been a disaster. “Why is it,” she asked plaintively, “that all through my life the men I’ve liked best were the ones I couldn’t love?”
It is perhaps the central question of Maud’s personal life. She was a terrible judge of the opposite sex. She loved the wrong men, always. Maud believed that friendship was based on similarities between people, and that passionate love was based on difference. Had Nate been less familiar, less like Maud herself, she might not have dismissed him so easily.
That spring, Maud offered friendship instead of her love, and Nate accepted. But he kept trying to court Maud when school was out for the year. It was no use; Maud was confident of her own inclinations.
Most of the marriages Maud observed firsthand were uneven partnerships. Grandmother Lucy Macneill managed her cantankerous husband by surrendering her will to his, maintaining independence in the domestic arena, resorting to subterfuge when necessary. Their marriage would hardly have inspired young Maud to seek out a partner of her own.
When Nate Lockhart declared his love, he and Maud were only fifteen years old. Maud was too young and ambitious to consider a serious courtship. Had they both stayed on in Cavendish, something might have blossomed between them, for Nate Lockhart was every bit as determined as Maud. Instead, an irresistible, unexpected invitation that summer swept Maud far from Nate Lockhart and everything she called home. It would have taken more than nine stars for Maud to have resisted its call.
In April of 1890, the fifteen-year-old Maud learned that her father, Hugh John, was thinking about inviting her to join him out in Western Canada. Hugh John Montgomery had remarried, started a new family, and was beginning to ease into the business of land settlement and real estate. He thought of making the family whole again. Maud dared not believe it at first. “I am frightened to think or say much about it,” she confided to her diary.
But by August, it had become a definite plan, with her grandfather Senator Donald Montgomery escorting Maud on the long train journey west to Saskatchewan. The cautious Macneills agreed that Maud might stay on for a year or more, only after repeated assurance that Maud would receive just as good an education as she could find in Cavendish.
Hugh John had proven he could support a wife and family. Maud longed to be with her “darling father” again. The teenager had begun to rebel in earnest against the restrictions set by her strict grandparents. They never approved, she fumed, “of anything which means the assembling of the young folks together.”
Maud and her thorny Grandfather Macneill never had an easygoing relationship, but now they constantly butted heads, and Grand
mother Lucy Macneill could not always reconcile the arguments between them. With both apprehension and relief, the elderly couple allowed their lively teenage granddaughter to rejoin her father out west.
Maud was all optimistic effervescence about the move. Maud had been waiting all her life for someone to call “mother,” and she was fully prepared to love her new stepmother. She felt thrilled to travel to new places and, of course, to be reunited with her Papa. Only on the eve of leaving Cavendish did she allow herself a few doubts. Would she like remote Prince Albert? And could she love her new stepmother, “just as if she were really my mother”?
Maud set out with high hopes on her journey on August 9, 1890. This time she did not stay with her “merry cousins” at Park Corner, but at the impressive home of her paternal grandfather, the Senator. He looked like a figure out of a storybook. Grandfather Montgomery was handsome, kindly, jolly, and outgoing. He “fed her up” as best he could, convinced that his slender granddaughter was “hollow all the way down” to her boots.
As a grand surprise, he introduced Maud to the premier of Canada, Sir John A. MacDonald, and his stately wife. This was heady stuff for a fifteen-year-old girl from tiny Cavendish. But Maud kept her wits about her. Sir John, she declared in her diary, was “not handsome but pleasant-faced.” His wife was impressive but homely, and worse still, in Maud’s eyes, dressed “very dowdily.”
Prince Albert constituted the farthest reaches of the newly federated nation of Canada, and to reach it, Maud and her grandfather had to endure ferries and trains, long carriage drives and still more trains. Many passages were steep and dangerous. Sometimes the train slowed to a crawl, or stopped when a cow wandered onto the tracks. They passed through “the wooded hills of Maine,” through Montreal, past the bleak northern wilds of Ontario. Maud kept her trusty notebook by her side and sat glued to the train window. Montreal, she declared, was a fine city — but she would never want to live there. She was not a city girl. Every shoreline enchanted her and reminded her of home.