House of Dreams

by Liz Rosenberg

  Maud’s artistic dreams would have been enough to brand her an oddity in Cavendish. Well-bred girls became housekeepers, not artists. They were wives and mothers, or at most they took a turn at being teachers and shopkeepers from financial necessity. They did not set their hearts on anything as frivolous as writing books.

  Her relatives and neighbors might have looked more kindly on Maud’s ambitions had she set out to become a minister’s wife. There, her intelligence and bookishness could have seemed an asset. But Maud decided early that she was unsuited to any formal religious life. She associated religion with grim fear and long lists of rules.

  Maud was raised within the Scottish Presbyterian Church, the church of her ancestors. In the 1870s and 1880s, there were about thirty thousand Presbyterians on Prince Edward Island, and only five thousand High Church Anglicans. Any other religion was virtually unknown. Maud was subjected to terrifying fire-and-brimstone sermons, and so “suffered from spasms of fear about Hell.” In the summer Maud’s mind remained untroubled. But in the depths of winter, she would undergo fits of dread, and then deprive herself of even simple pleasures. She’d set the supper table giving herself a particular piece of bent silverware that she detested. To the elegance-loving Maud, this was heavy penance indeed.

  A photograph of Maud taken around this time shows an otherworldly-looking girl, thin and pale, with a small mouth and enormous, sad eyes. When Maud was six, her grandmother saw in the newspaper a prediction that the world was going to end the following Sunday. Maud maintained a young child’s “pathetic faith in the wisdom of grown-ups.” When her grandmother read the dire prediction aloud, Maud was terror-stricken. Grown-ups never lied. The newspaper never lied. Try as she might, she could not stop worrying about it.

  Maud held “a most absolute and piteous belief in everything that was ‘printed.’” If a thing was written down and published it must be true. All week she badgered her aunt Emily, asking piteously if they would be going to church that Sunday. Stiffly, Aunt Emily assured Maud that they would. That “was a considerable comfort. . . . If she really expected that there would be Sunday-school she could not believe that the next day would see the end of the world.”

  When Maud turned seven, her grandparents threw one final public celebration at home, their last hurrah before withdrawing from Cavendish society. It was the wedding of Aunt Emily, their youngest daughter. Maud remembered the event vividly, with everyone present from both sides of her family. She memorized every detail, as if knowing it was the last glimpse of something precious.

  Aunt Emily’s brown silk wedding dress featured pleats and flounces and ruches and an overskirt. The bride wore a bonnet, too — jet-black with a white feather. There was dancing and feasting. Maud remembered her uncle John Montgomery keeping things lively, and it all stayed clear in her mind, because it was the last time happy crowds gathered in the old homestead. Once Aunt Emily left as a bride, the Macneills retired from society — and seven-year-old Maud was forced to retire along with them.

  After Aunt Emily’s wedding followed a few dull months, when it seemed to Maud that nothing exciting would ever happen again. And then, suddenly, the near-miraculous occurred. Did Grandmother Lucy sense her loneliness? We’ll never know for sure.

  Maud’s grandparents agreed to board two orphan boys of six and seven. Their names were Wellington and David Nelson, nicknamed Well and Dave. Well was just one week younger than Maud; his brother, Dave, a year younger. Maud had always longed for a sibling, and now, out of the blue, she had not one but two companions. For four glorious years Well and Dave lived with Maud’s grandparents. Maud called these “the brightest and happiest memories of my childhood.” She might still get into scrapes — indeed she often would — but Maud no longer got into them alone.

  Dave, the younger, was fair-haired with deceptively mild, round blue eyes. Well was dark and handsome, “with laughing eyes and a merry face.” Dave was never happier than when tinkering with tools and scraps of metal or wood. He was a natural engineer who loved putting things together and taking them apart. Well was bright and academic-minded, a reader almost as avid as Maud herself. Together they pored over fairy tales, ghost stories, and classics.

  Neither boy ever quarreled with Maud, but both were hotheaded and fell into frequent tussles with each other. Dave always got the worst of these battles. He’d lose his temper so he could barely see straight. His fair skin would glow bright red, earning him the nickname Rooster. As quickly as the brothers came to blows, they’d make up again, and ten minutes after a battle they’d be hugging each other and rolling around like puppies. Fighting was a form of play to them — “a positive enjoyment,” Maud declared.

  Grandfather Macneill usually put a quick stop to this kind of pleasure. But one winter evening Grandmother Lucy Macneill attended a family wedding, leaving him home to mind the three children. Never a fan of young people, Grandfather Macneill told the boys they could fight all night long if they wanted — and Well and Dave took him at his word.

  They threw themselves into brawling with a delighted vengeance, while Maud and her cousin Clara sat calmly in the next room, a few yards apart from the din. The boys filled the kitchen with howls and thumps till ten that night, when Grandfather Macneill finally sent everybody to bed. The brothers were black-and-blue the next morning, but declared they’d had the time of their lives — and looked forward eagerly to the next family wedding.

  The three children enjoyed calmer pleasures as well. They built a playhouse in a circle of spruces. The door was made of three rough boards with leather hinges cut from old boots, and the children planted a garden beside it. Their goals were ambitious: they sowed carrot seeds and parsnips, lettuce, beets, and flowers, but the only things that thrived, despite — or perhaps because of — all their feverish care were the wild, weedy live-forevers, and a few hardy sunflowers that lit the spruce grove with “cheery golden lamps.”

  Maud, Well, and Dave roamed through orchards and woods, played make-believe, picnicked out of doors, swung on homemade swings, built fires on cold winter nights. In the evenings they scared one another with ghost stories revolving around “the Haunted Wood” — a small grove of spruce set in the field just below the orchard. They pretended to see mysterious “white things” flitting through the Haunted Wood, though they all had a fair suspicion that the ghosts were their own invention.

  But one dim twilight Maud, Well, and Dave were playing in the grove when they all saw one of their dreaded white things creeping along the grass toward them. All three children saw the specter at the same instant. No doubt about it, this was real.

  “Nonsense,” Maud said, trying desperately to be practical and keep her head. It had to be the Macneills’ white calf, she declared.

  Well hurriedly agreed with Maud, but in truth, “the shapeless, groveling thing did not look in the least like a calf.” Then it swiveled toward them.

  “It’s coming here!” Well shrieked, and the three children tore off to a neighbor’s house, where the frightened servants armed themselves with pitchforks and buckets. No phantom immediately appeared — but a few minutes later Grandmother Macneill arrived with her knitting in one hand and in the other hand a long white tablecloth she’d left bleaching on the grass. She had flung it over her shoulder when the children began their stampede. The white cloth got caught over her head and she was trying to pull it loose as she stumbled along. The gruesome, lurching white thing was none other than Grandmother Macneill herself.

  That July, in a storm, the cargo ship the Marco Polo ran aground with its treasure and crew. All twenty members of the crew lodged in and around Cavendish. The staid village suddenly became a colorful place filled with noisy wagons of Irishmen, Spaniards, Norwegians, Dutchmen, Swedes, and — best of all to Maud, Well, and Dave — two Tahitians.

  Since the Macneill home was one of the oldest in Cavendish, the Marco Polo’s captain boarded there — along with all the ship’s gold. The Norwegian captain was an elderly gentleman, popular
with his crew. His English was imperfect, but his manners were all one could wish. “Thank you for your kindness against me, little Miss Maud,” he would chant with a deep bow.

  One night the crew gathered in the front parlor for their pay. There, in the same room where Maud’s young mother had lain in her coffin with her golden-brown hair spilling around her, the table stood heaped with sovereign coins. It was more gold than any of the children had ever seen. The lost treasure of her mother had been temporarily, magically transformed into piles of gold treasure.

  Between ages seven and eleven, Maud thrived. She made good friends in school, and had the Nelson boys at home. It was the closest the young Maud came to a “normal” family life. The three children foraged for apples in season and went trout fishing in summer. One day in the nearby pond, Maud snagged a trout as large as any grown-up had ever caught, and Well and Dave looked at their friend with newfound respect. Maud was brave, resourceful, and willing. Together they followed the tracks of foxes and rabbits, picked berries, or trailed whistling robins into the woods.

  Maud was a quick learner, lively and fun-loving, and despite her peculiar status as a semi-orphan, she became a leader among her schoolmates. She had a knack for inventing exciting things to do. Most of Maud’s school friends were near or distant relatives, and they played in the woods behind the schoolhouse, along the seashore, and up and down Maud’s favorite walk, a tree-filled haven she dubbed “Lover’s Lane.” The children played stepstone, Little Sally Water, blindman’s buff, and drop-the-handkerchief. They coasted down the hill behind the schoolhouse in winter. One afternoon Maud and her chums led the whole school on a wild chase through fields, into woods and over muddy streams.

  Then, just as suddenly as they’d appeared, one morning, Well and Dave Nelson vanished. There were no explanations, no discussions about where or why they went. Maud had no chance to say good-bye. Other living arrangements had been made for the boys. Their room was empty, every trace of their belongings removed. Perhaps the elder Macneills thought it kinder that way, or worried that Maud was getting too old to play with boys. Perhaps they failed to realize how much it would matter.

  To Maud, the Nelson boys’ sudden departure after four years was as inexplicable and terrible as anything in a fairy tale. It would be decades before she laid eyes on Well and Dave again. The jolliest period of her childhood came to an abrupt end — but at age eleven Maud was on the verge of becoming a teenager, with piquant joys and trials ahead.

  Alone once more, Maud turned back to her twin comforts: the worlds of nature and of books. And she had firmly in place her most enduring dream, the “one wish and ambition” of her childhood: to write, and to take her place among the world’s “poets and artists and storytellers . . . who have never forgotten the way to fairyland.”

  Maud had one constant consolation all the time she was growing up in the Macneill homestead — the privacy of her own room. “A room where one sleeps and dreams and grieves and rejoices” takes on a life of its own, Maud wrote. Her summer suite of upstairs rooms became her essential and cherished place to dream and work.

  Maud’s grandparents sent their granddaughter to bed promptly at eight o’clock — but she didn’t object, for her dream world began then, “that strange inner life of fancy which has always existed side by side with my outer life.”

  In winter the Macneills lived in the kitchen area, close by the large cast-iron stove. It would have been too expensive to heat the whole house, so the family confined itself to the downstairs. Grandmother Macneill knitted or sewed, her work-worn hands always busy. Grandfather Macneill bent over the newspaper or sorted the mail. Sometimes on bitter nights, Grandmother and Grandfather Macneill slept in the warm kitchen. Maud stayed nearby, in her small, dim “winter bedroom,” close to the hearth.

  She desperately awaited spring and summer, when she could race back upstairs, “returned from exile . . . a queen in my own independent little kingdom.” Her rooms overlooked a world of beauty: fields and woods and flowering fruit trees. She knelt by her casement window and over the low hills watched new moons “I shall remember in the halls of eternity.”

  As a young child, Maud slept in what was called the look out, a tiny morsel of a room — basically, an oversized closet. Maud dubbed it her “boudoir,” thinking it sounded elegant. Here she kept her first few books and magazines, her dolls, workbox, and treasured knickknacks. The view was of western Cavendish, over the trees of the garden to far hills and woods. “Poor little room!” she wrote in her journal. “I dreamed many a bright dream there.” A few years later she moved into the larger den next door and her former boudoir became a trunk room.

  Maud hung photographs, pictures, calendars, and keepsakes, and kept the room well supplied with fresh blooms. Her bedspread was white, the wallpaper figured with small gay flowers. The room was open and airy; the only crowded space in it was her bookshelf.

  On warm days Maud opened the casement window and listened to the singing of birds, the rustling of poplars. Even as a small girl, Maud’s moods soared or plummeted according to the seasons. Her favorite time was late spring and early summer. Here was “a kingdom of beauty,” she wrote. She delighted in summer rain pouring in green torrents over hills and fields. In fall she watched the flame of sunset, or the rising of a moon over the tip of a larch tree.

  Each winter Maud returned to the dark downstairs “like a caged creature.” The windows became so thickly covered with frost, she felt “literally imprisoned.” One May evening she wrote, “I have moved upstairs again — which means that I have begun to live again. . . . To me it means the difference between happiness and unhappiness.”

  Of course, her summer den served an important function she never uttered aloud — it became her writer’s study. Here Maud secretly composed her most beloved books: Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea, Kilmeny of the Orchard and The Story Girl.

  The only view Maud lacked was east, facing the back orchard and the sea. It is exactly this east-facing view she gave to her most famous heroine, in the little “east room” of Green Gables. Everything in Maud’s early life led to the writing of that book, but she had to overcome a hundred obstacles to achieve it.

  At age nine, Maud presented her visiting father with her first poem, called “Autumn”:

  Now autumn comes, laden with peach and pear;

  The sportsman’s horn is heard throughout the land,

  And the poor partridge, fluttering, falls dead.

  What sort of poem is that? asked the bewildered Hugh John. Maud explained that it was blank verse. “Very blank,” came the judgment. From that moment on, Maud’s poems always rhymed. She also wrote all kinds of prose: “descriptions of my favourite haunts, biographies of my many cats, histories of visits, and school reviews.”

  Luckily for Maud, writing materials came readily and freely to hand. She began writing on the letterbills her frugal Grandfather Alexander Macneill saved from their home post office — unwanted scraps of colored paper used for post-office bills. A few years later, Maud wrote in the small yellow notebooks whose covers advertised patent medicines.

  Maud’s passionate fondness for books was considered odd at best, her dedication to writing dismissed as a flagrant waste of time. Maud hid her writings under the parlor sofa, on secret low shelves she had made by nailing two boards together.

  The parlor was a refined hiding place. Maud considered it “the height of elegance,” with its long lace curtains. The rug was “very gorgeous — all roses and ferns.” To a more discerning eye, the elderly Macneills’ decorations and furniture would have looked old-fashioned, presided over by a great black colonial mantelpiece out-of-date even in Maud’s earliest childhood. Here in the least-used room of the house, tucked under the sofa, Maud secreted her earliest poems, stories, and diaries.

  Though her grandparents considered writing a waste of time, Maud was surrounded all her life by storytellers. Her cantankerous Grandfather Macneill was a marvelous storyteller. So were her
great-uncle Jimmie Macneill and great-aunt Mary Lawson. Mary, especially, was “a brilliant conversationalist . . . it was a treat to get Aunt Mary started on tales and recollections of her youth.” Aunt Mary provided living proof that a woman could tell glorious stories and hold an audience captive. They were special chums, Mary Lawson and Maud — the elder woman in her seventies, Maud in her early teens. They exchanged confidences and tart opinions. “I cannot, in any words at my command, pay the debt I owe to Aunt Mary Lawson,” Maud later declared.

  At her one-room schoolhouse in Cavendish, Maud formed a story club with friends. She specialized in melancholy tragedies. She wrote a long story called “My Graves” about a minister’s wife who leaves a string of infant graves across the length and breadth of Canada. Maud also composed “The History of Flossy Brighteyes,” about a doll who suffers every possible misfortune. “I couldn’t kill a doll,” she admitted, “but I dragged her through every other tribulation.”

  The year Maud turned twelve, the Cavendish school hired a new teacher — Miss Izzie Robinson. Izzie Robinson asked to board with the Macneills, as other teachers had done, but Grandfather Macneill put up a fight. He disliked female teachers — inside his house or out of them. Miss Robinson managed to foist herself on the Macneills as a boarder, but it led to such ugly quarrels that Maud had to withdraw from the Cavendish school for a time and attend a different school.