The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche

by de la Roche, Mazo

  Mazo, seated at the kitchen table, wrote on and on. While Grandma Lundy kneaded the bread dough and made an apple pie, Mazo covered eight whole, foolscap pages!

  “What are you writing, Mazo?” asked Grandma Lundy.

  “A story,” Mazo replied without looking up. She kept on writing.

  “Youth’s Companion is advertising a short-story competition for children of sixteen and under,” said Mazo’s mother, entering the kitchen with Caroline. “Mazo thinks she can win.”

  “Its a story about a lost child named Nancy,” said Caroline.

  “But Mazo is only ten,” said Grandma. “She can’t compete with sixteen-year-olds.”

  “There! It’s finished,” announced Mazo, putting down her pen and gathering up the pages. “Nancy went through terrible times. She was forced to eat potato peels. But at last she was restored to her mother. And her mother quoted St. Luke, Grandma. When Nancy came home, her mother said: ‘It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.’”

  “But darling,” said Mazo’s mother, “do you think a child would ever be so hungry she would eat potato peels?”

  “Nancy was,” Mazo said firmly.

  “And do you think her mother would quote a Bible text the moment her child was given back to her?” asked Mazo’s mother. “It sounds so pompous!”

  This criticism Mazo could not answer. She stared down at the pages in her hands.

  “I’m dead sure I’d eat potato peels if I were hungry enough,” came the voice of Mazo’s father from behind her. “And as for the text – it was the proper thing for the mother to quote. Don’t change a word of your story, Mazo. It will probably win the prize.”

  Two weeks later, Mazo received a long envelope in the mail. Inside was her story. It had not won the competition. Also inside was a letter from the editor of Youth’s Companion. It said: “If the promise shown by this story is fulfilled, you will make a good writer yet.”

  “Isn’t that splendid!” exclaimed Mazo’s mother.

  Mazo sat on a stool in a corner, covered her face with her hands, and sobbed out her disappointment. Her family, not knowing what to say, stood around her for a long time.

  Finally her father spoke.

  “Come on, Mazo,” he said. “I’m going to teach you how to play cribbage. It’s a good game, and you have no idea how comforting a game of cards can be.”

  In 1889, Caroline’s parents and older brother arrived in Orillia. The reunion was not happy because Caroline’s father was not happy. James Clement was a poor man who could barely afford to rent a few small rooms to shelter his family. He and his teenage son were working at menial jobs in the pail factory where his brother-in-law, Daniel Lundy, was the foreman. Daniel Lundy – Mazo’s Grandpa Lundy – had given the jobs to James and his son.

  James still owned about twenty hectares of land in Cherry Creek that had been willed him by his father. But he could not make a living from this land, and he could not sell it. Grandfather Clement’s will stated that the land must go to James’s children after James died. Anyway, James didn’t want to live near his family in Cherry Creek. His family scorned him.

  All of his brothers and sisters had done better than he had! Stephen was sheriff of the entire western judicial district of Manitoba. Sarah and her husband had a farm in Manitoba. Lewis was a medical doctor in Bradford, Ontario. Catherine’s husband had been a successful merchant in Barrie, Ontario; furthermore, he had represented the riding of North Simcoe in the Parliament in Ottawa for nine years. Even Joseph, David, and Eliza, who never left Cherry Creek, at least owned forty or more hectares of land there. What was wrong with James?

  James was a traitor! He had forsaken queen and country! He had become an American citizen! Although the Clements were of French, Dutch, and German descent, they had been officers in the British army for four generations. They had been United Empire Loyalists, pioneers of Niagara, heroes of the War of 1812. They had fought against the Americans. James’s grandfather had been killed in that war! James was the black sheep! He had no pride!

  Officially, Caroline Clement, now eleven, was living again with her parents and brother. But James, Martha, and James Junior were strangers to her, so she often rejoined Mazo at the Lundys. There Caroline could forget about her unhappy father and the cold Clements.

  Mazo de la Rache at about eighteen.

  3

  Young Women

  I gazed and gazed. I felt that never again should I be the same.

  Mazo, thirteen, had moved the year before to Gait, Ontario (today called Cambridge) with her parents. Mazo and Bertie were living with Will in a hotel in Galt. In Galt, Mazo’s education continued in another private school. Mazo never did much homework. Her mother was ambitious for her, but she never supervised Mazo’s studying. Mazo also took violin lessons, which she loathed.

  Mazo began to read the books of the great nineteenth-century novelists, like Charles Dickens, whom her mother was reading. Mazo also read popular adventure novels, like Allan Quartermain by Rider Haggard, which was the sort of book her father most enjoyed. Her father was not a lowbrow though, for he urged her to read the great French author, Balzac.

  During the evenings in their quarters in the hotel, Mazo and her parents took turns entertaining each other by reciting poetry and reading plays. Bertie might recite a poem like “The Lady of Shalott” by Alfred Lord Tennyson. Will might recite “The Wreck of the Julie Plante” by William Henry Drummond. Mazo might recite “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll. One play the family read aloud together was Shakespeare’s Othello – until Bertie suddenly decided the play was not suited for someone so young and innocent as Mazo. Mazo and her parents also went to the theatre together, rode around in a buggy together, and walked together.

  Yet all this closeness when Will Roche was present did not prevent Bertie and Mazo from feeling gloomy when he was far away. Mazo’s father, now a travelling salesman for a clothing company, was going to be away for six weeks. Mazo’s mother, Bertie, was ill and unhappy.

  Bertie was confined to bed. She had a troublesome bronchial cough that even the dry air of Galt could not cure. She had to use an inhalor and take frequent doses of cough medicine that ruined her appetite. Bertie was very worried about being left with only Mazo to look after her.

  Mazo felt a great foreboding. After her father was gone, one thing after another made Mazo brood on the strangeness of life.

  One morning Mazo was woken by a roaring sound. It came from the direction of the river, which had been frozen. The ice had broken and the river was rushing through the town. Mazo ran to the window. She could see the broken ice rocking and whirling along.

  After breakfast she ran to the grey stone bridge over the river. Below the bridge, she could see uprooted trees in the dark and churning river and a poultry house with the poor hens still inside staring wildly through the broken ice. Then came a slab of ice carrying the body of a sheep and a little lamb standing beside the body.

  For a long time, Mazo stood watching, fascinated, asking herself how such things could be. As she stared, the body of a cow passed beneath, and then a living cow.

  Finally Mazo tore herself away from the strange scene. She ran back to the hotel to tell her mother about everything she had witnessed.

  “Mama,” she began. But her mother cut her short.

  “I can’t bear to hear about it!” her mother cried.

  Then Mazo noticed that her mother had closed the curtains so she could not see the river.

  Mazo and her mother returned to Orillia and the Lundy household, where there was companionship for Mazo and care for Mazo’s mother. Mazo and Caroline resumed their sisterhood and their shared, imagined world.

  In September 1892, Mazo began to study in the public high school in Orillia. Caroline, who was in poor health, stayed at home until the following year. Caroline’s belated attempt to join Mazo in high school did not last long. She finally registered at the age o
f fifteen in October 1893. Her father died the following year, on August 27, 1894.

  No notice of James Clement’s death appeared in the Orillia newspaper. His gravestone in the Clement Cemetery in the old Cherry Creek district of Innisfil Township was small and inexpensive.

  In 1894, Daniel Lundy accepted a job as supervisor of the woodworking shop at Central Prison in Toronto. He and his family (including Will, Bertie, and Mazo Roche) moved to a two-storey, red-brick house on Dunn Avenue in the Parkdale district in the city’s west end. Caroline Clement soon left her mother and brother and joined the Lundy household once again.

  Mazo continued with her studies in a public high school, Parkdale Collegiate, and she also took piano lessons at the Metroplitan School of Music. Caroline, who was still suffering from health problems, attended private classes with a few other girls, took banjo lessons, and spent much time at home with Mazo’s mother, who was also still ill. Happily, Caroline and Bertie had similar interests, especially sewing. Slowly, as Caroline grew stronger, she joined Mazo more often in all the delightful activities for young women that the city could offer.

  The girls walked to Lake Ontario just a few blocks away, rode on the King Street electric tram, sipped sodas at McConkey’s at King and Yonge Streets, attended plays at the Princess Theatre, and flirted with neighbourhood boys. They also continued to share their imaginary world, and they still put on plays for family and friends. They worshipped at St. Mark’s Anglican Church quite regularly, although they were not particularly religious. They went to the outdoor band concerts at the Home for Incurables.

  The Home for Incurables was located across the street from Grandpa Lundy’s house in Parkdale. On the evenings of concerts, Mazo and Caroline watched the members of the band pass by with their instruments. They watched twilight deepening to darkness. When they heard the first strains of music in the placid air, they crossed the street and hastened toward the gardens of the Home, watching for the flare of the torches against the blackness of the trees and the glint of the brass of the horns.

  Mazo and Caroline submerged themselves in the sauntering crowd. They joined a decorous little group of other young people. When the band broke into “Soldiers of the Queen,” their hearts surged with patriotism. Soon Queen Victoria would celebrate her Diamond Jubilee!

  Often, as Mazo and Caroline were strolling among the formal flower beds filled with red geraniums and purple asters, they met one of the neighbour boys with his friends. The neighbour boy was named Gordon McGrath. Gordon had a tennis court. Admittedly it was only a lumpy grass court, but Gordon and his friends had fun playing on it. Gordon’s widowed mother would sit in the shade of the trees, with a friend or two her own age, watching the young people play.

  Although Mazo and Caroline saw Gordon almost every day, it was Gordon’s oldest brother that Mazo and Caroline adored. This brother was as remote as a Greek god, and he looked like a god too. He had been in a regiment in Ireland. He played polo. He was tall and athletic. He wore Irish tweeds. The sight of this Adonis always sent Mazo and Caroline scurrying to the windows to rhapsodize over his looks. Once when they were spending an evening playing Crokinole with Gordon and his mother, this brother came in. He showed the girls his stopwatch. Everything he did was perfect! Eventually he married a very rich wife.

  The fat pony clopped lazily up the narrow dirt road, stopping now and then to crop a few mouthfuls of long, juicy, green grass. The pony was pulling a small, light cart that easily carried two slender young women.

  In the summers of their late adolescence, Mazo and Caroline still vacationed at the south end of Innisfil Township, beside Lake Simcoe. Today, although the young women had set out immediately after breakfast, the late-August sun was already becoming hot by the time they reached the wrought-iron fence of the pioneer cemetery. The heat bugs were buzzing.

  The spoiled pony had taken over one hour to travel just four kilometres from Lake Simcoe to the cemetery that Caroline’s Grandfather Clement had donated to the old Cherry Creek district more than sixty years earlier.

  Mazo, tall and auburn haired, was holding the reins. She halted the pony in the shade of a row of lofty pines, climbed down from the cart, and tied the reins to the fence. Caroline, short and platinum blond, was holding a bouquet of flowers. She slid down from her seat, opened the iron gate, and walked purposefully to a huddled cluster of tombstones at the far end of the graveyard. Like Mazo, Caroline was wearing a simple but pretty cotton dress that reached to her ankles.

  Caroline halted first before the small, grey, rectangular gravestone of Mary Jane Clement. She read, “died Oct. 1842, aged 14 years, two months, 23 days.” Strange that both Caroline and her father had an older sister named Mary who died young.

  Caroline did not stir as Mazo caught up with her and stood silently by her side.

  “I remember looking at Mary Elizabeth’s grave back when I was six or seven in Grand Forks,” said Caroline. “It was a warm spring day, and I stood there wondering when she would wake up. After all, the flowers always woke up in the spring.”

  “’Wakefield’ is a name on one of the tombstones in Newmarket near Grandfather Roche’s stone,” mused Mazo.

  Caroline walked slowly toward the grave of her father’s parents. Their stone was by far the tallest in the family plot. It was an obelisk. It was white, while the other, humbler tombstones were grey.

  “Grandfather Clement was very domineering from what everyone says,” murmured Caroline. “He was a big man with a bushy white beard.”

  “Lewis James Clement ruled over his wife and ten children like a biblical patriarch in the wilderness,” said Mazo. “Innisfil Township was truly wilderness when your grandparents came here. As everyone says, they built the first frame house.”

  “Grandmother Clement died at ‘49 years, eight months, 1857,’ said Caroline. “Probably worn out from having so many children. Of course Grandfather Clement lived a good long life. He was seventy-five when he died in 1873. Five years before I was born.”

  Caroline moved toward a small grey grave.

  James Clement… Caroline read silently.

  “Father’s tombstone isn’t much bigger than Mary Jane’s,” said Caroline in a tight voice. “Yet he lived to be sixty-four years old, married, had children, and… did things.”

  Caroline began to cry. Mazo cried in sympathy.

  When the cousins returned to the cart in the shade, they sat for a while without speaking. While Caroline recovered her poise, Mazo looked at the magnificent view from this fragment of what had once been a vast estate owned by Caroline’s Grandfather Clement. He had truly been the squire of the district! Why each of his eight surviving children had received at least forty hectares of land – or the equivalent in cash.

  Across the road was a wooded ravine: the land sloped downward toward Cherry Creek and then rose to the Willson farm where Hiram and Caroline Willson had homesteaded. Mazo wondered whether Caroline’s parents, Martha Willson and James Clement, had met in the ravine for secret trysts when they were young lovers. She couldn’t imagine Aunt Martha and Uncle James as young lovers! Aunt Martha was over sixty! Her hair was grey!

  Grandma Lundy had been raised on that farm from the age of nine. Caroline had been born on it. The farm was called “The Maples.” Cattle and horses grazed in its green meadows lined by stately leafy trees.

  Beyond the Willsons’ forty hectares, the shimmering land rose gradually toward the horizon, about three kilometres away. On that horizon Mazo could make out the steeple of the little red-brick Anglican church where Hiram and Caroline Willson were buried: Caroline’s maternal grandparents and Mazo’s great-grandparents. The church, St. Peter’s, had been built in the 1850s, but the pioneers had arrived much earlier. The Clements had come in 1829, the Willsons about ten years later.

  Caroline’s only inheritance would be her share of twenty hectares of land adjacent to St. Peter’s. The land had once been owned by Grandfather Clement, of course. Caroline and her brother would sell the lan
d as soon as they could. They needed the money. Grandfather Clement’s will said they could not receive the land until the youngest child, Caroline, turned twenty-one. Another two years to wait.

  Mazo could see the narrow old Yonge Street road rising northward up the hill to St. Peter’s. In a few moments, the pony would clop up the road past the Willson homestead, turn east, and go back towards Lake Simcoe to Aunt Mary’s house. This Mary was Mary Catherine, born Willson, now Mrs. Richard Rogerson.

  Mazo could just make out a corner of Uncle Richards forty hectares. Carolines widowed mother, Martha, boarded with Aunt Mary now. At the age of seventeen, the beautiful, high-spirited Martha Willson had married the eldest son of the richest man in the neighbourhood of Cherry Creek: James Clement, son of Lewis James Clement. But Marthas life with James Clement had not been easy.

  Today Mazo and Caroline were to have dinner with the whole family at Aunt Mary’s house. Then they would travel back to Toronto by train.

  “We must go now,” said Caroline finally. “I’ll be all right.”

  What enormous dinners most of the family ate! No matter whose house it was. Rogersons, Willsons, Clements, Lundys, Roches, Bryans – they were all the same. Year in and year out. Everyone sat around the table talking, squabbling, and eating.

  The table was always set with heavy plates and vegetable dishes, squat cruets and large English cutlery. A huge roast of beef, thick gravy, mounds of mashed potatoes and turnips. Strawberry shortcakes, raspberry tarts, pumpkin pies… Everything washed down with endless cups of hot, English-style tea with cream and sugar.

  Heavy furniture in the dining room. A dark, polished sideboard. Inside shutters and long curtains of yellow velour, caught back by cable-like cords with tassels at the end. Family portraits in oil, heavily framed…

  Today Grandpa Lundy was in a particularly jovial mood. He and Uncle Bryan had gone to the circus together! Grandmother Roche’s older brother, Abraham Bryan, was a fast friend of Grandpa Lundy. A childless widower, Uncle Bryan officially lived in Whitby, but he often visited the Danford Roche home in Newmarket and the Daniel Lundy home in Parkdale.