All things being relative in a parallel world....July & August 1915

Maud wrote often of the "hot" summers on PEI with the house full of company (Uncle Leander and entourage.)  Her discomfort seems incredible after I found that the high temps for the Island are recorded as 73 degrees for the month of July.  Yesterday, it was 102 degrees here on the inner banks of North Carolina.  (73 degrees is the mark where we set our air conditioners in order to feel comfortable in our homes.)

Perhaps it felt hotter in Maud's grandmother's house, because of the baking that she was required to do, and with the long hair, dresses and layers of underclothing.

All things being relative in a parallel universe...
________________________________________
One of the important lessons that may be gleaned from reading Maud's Journals (and it's a big one) is that it might be better not to depend on your children for your happiness. This passage is coming from Maud long before some even harder blows befell her.  It seems evident by this passage that Maud was always prone to depression..

The Manse, Leaskdale, Ont
August 13, 1915

"It is just a year to-day since little Hugh was born dead.  Oh, that hideous day!  Shall I ever be able to forget its agony?  And will it be repeated in October?  This thought is ever present with me.  I have had some bad attacks of nervous depression lately--one last night that was almost unbearable.  My condition--the war news --the weather--all combined to make me very miserable.  Sometimes I feel so unutterably disheartened that if it were not for Chester it seems to me that I would rather not go on living."

The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Vol I, p. 171, Rubio & Waterston 

----------------------------------------------------------

A lovely walk with her cousin Frede at Park Corner...

Park Corner

Sunday, July 18, 1915

Tomorrow I leave Park Corner...To-night Frede and I planned to have a walk together over the bridge in the dusk--a last farewell walk, the last one we could have there for many years--perhaps forever.  In the twilight we slipped away and had our hour.  The western sky was full of the hues of a weird sunset.  Before us the old pond lay in shadow and silver.  The evening was very still, very calm, very clear.  And through the stillness came the strangest, saddest most unforgettable sound in nature--the soft, ceaseless wash on a distant shore of the breakers of a spent storm.  It is more mournful than the rain wind of night--the heartbreak of all creation is in it.

  Frede and I walked back and forth over the bridge many times, sometimes in silence, sometimes speaking lowly of the deepest thoughts in our hearts.  We seemed a part of the night--of the dreaming water, of the dusk in the cloudy firs, of the far remote stars, of that haunting moan of the sea.  And when the twilight suddenly was night and the shining new moon swung above the tree tops that bend over that old homestead, we walked away from the glamor in a silence that touched the lands of dream and tears."

The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Vol I, p 170, Rubio & Waterston

"the old past was mine once more...."

As I am winding down the days till I board a plane in North Carolina to embark on my sojourn to PEI, I  am hoping to find a way to connect with Maud's feelings of homecoming.  It is nice to have this place--this blog--to share her record, and to validate my own feelings about this dream like Odyssey, to be where she has been, to see what she has seen, and perhaps to feel what she has felt.

It is a certain homecoming for me, too!

In a personal way, it seems strangely poignant that Maud--always self-searching and with a book on hand-- had missed the profoundly correspondent themes about home and self  in Thomas Wolfe's works.  After all, they were living in a contemporary world.  How could she have missed him?

Maud:

Sunday, June 27, 1915

The Manse, Cavendish, PEI

   ...Last night I had a very dear, very sad, very strange and unlooked for experience.
     When I was on the Island before I shrank from the very thought of going near my old home.  This year I felt the same until last night.  I was on the manse veranda.  The dew was falling.  In the south-east a large, hazy, full moon was rising.  To my left lay the dark trees that screened th old house from sight.  suddenly an irresistible longing took possession of me to go to it once more--in that pale enchantment of moonlight when one might chance to slip back through some magic loophole into the olden years.  I could not withstand it.  I slipped over the church grounds and through the old gap in the fence through which I used to go to church.  I walked along the meadow edge where the foot path used to be, past the grove of spruces, and on till the old house lay before me in a soft, silvery shadow.  I turned aside for a moment to the old well and looked down it.  The ferns that always lined its sides had grown completely across it.
     I went on to the old kitchen door.  Beside it, every summer a certain shoot of balsam poplar used to start up, to be trodden down under passing feet.  Since the old house was closed it had been able to grow and so fast had it grown that the whole angle between the kitchen and the cook house was full of it.  It as as high as the kitchen roof.
     I went around to the end of the house and stood under my old window.  The moon was floating over the valley below.  I had looked on that very scene a thousand times on moonlit nights of long ago.  My heart beat with mingled pain and pleasure until it almost choked me.  Everything in that kind radiance seemed so much the same.  For a space the years turned back their pages.  The silent sleepers in the graveyard yonder wakened and filled their old places.  Grandfather and grandmother read in the lighted kitchen.  Old friends and comrades walked with me in the lane.  Daffy frisked in the caraway.  Above me my old white bed waited for me to press its pillow of dreams.
     Most of the windows were boarded up but the south one in the parlor was not.  through it I could see the bare old room distinctly with the black mantelpiece that was the admiration of my childhood.  I went around and stood on the stone steps of the front door.  The old "front orchard" and the grove beside it seemed more bowery and bosky than of yore but I think that was only because i have grown used to a thinner screen of trees on my Leaskdale lawn.  How lovely and lonely it all was, and yet how unreal.  I seemed to be in a dream--and yet it seemed th only waking.  Oh, as long as that moonlit magic worked the past was mine once more--the old past, before the last sad years had spent in the old home.  Oh, beloved old place, that half hour I spent with you last night was worth the coming from a far land.  You were glad, I think to have me back---me, who loved you so.  For there is not one living now but me who loves you--not one.  As I stood there I seemed to feel a presence enfolding me as if it claimed me--as if something that had been forsaken and desolate were once more rejoicing in my affection.  Have not old homesteads souls that cling to them until they crumble to dust?
   I could hardly tear myself away from the spot.  Perhaps the charm it had for me is not a wholesome one--not altogether one to which it was well to yield.  Perhaps the dead past should bury it's dead.  It may not be well to linger too long among ghosts, lest they lay a cold grasp upon you and bind you too closely to their chill, sweet, unearthly companionship.  Certainly all the pleasures and joys of my real life seemed to grow pale and fade into nothingness beside the strange enchantment of that shadowy tryst."

The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Vol I, pp 168 - 169, Rubio & Waterston

"...and he had an instant sense of something re-found that he had always known--something far, near, strange, and so familiar--and it seemed to him that he had never left the hills, and all that had passed in the years between was like a dream."

Thmas Wolfe, "You Can't Go Home Again"    

Going home....

"...it was silly, anyhow, to feel as he did about the place. But  why had he always felt so strongly the magnetic pull of home, why had he thought so much about it and remembered it with such blazing accuracy, if it did not matter, and if this little town, and the immortal hills around it, was not the only home he had on earth?"    

 Thomas Wolfe,

 You Can't Go Home Again

                     Asheville, North Carolina   

Maud:

Cavendish trip, 1913

..."Voices were calling to me that could not be resisted--voices of the past, fraught with all the past's enchantment.  They summoned me imperiously and I obeyed the summons.  I slipped out into the darkness of the summer evening and went to find the lost years....
  ...In the dim, still, eerie twilight I slipped down the hill, over the bridge across the brook and up the dark path under the spruces.  It was the old way home.  I found the little gate in the fence and went through.... 
....Yes, there it was.  In the fading gray light I could see the old gray house hooded in shadows--I could see the little window of my old room--
.....I wept bitterly...."

The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, p. 126, Rubio & Waterston

"… for once seen, and list the moment that he sees it, it is his forever and he can never forget it. And then the slow toiling train has passed these lives and faces and is gone, and there is something in his heart he cannot say."

Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River  

Crimes of the Heart

"Yes; it was a crime to marry you. I have paid for it."
Irene Forsyte to Soames Forsyte, "The Forsyte Saga",  John Galsworthy

There is a strange feeling of sadness that has been falling on me as I am preparing for our trip to PEI in July. It seems as if Maud comes to me, and then I feel her intense love of the Island.  It is her marriage, and her disappointment over it that is getting to me. As I am shopping for my traveling clothes I begin to think of Maud's great attention to detail in the choosing of her honeymoon trousseau. Anyway, it all went so bad over time. It makes me sad.

Maud
" I had been feeling contented all morning.  I had gone through the ceremony and the congratulations unflustered and unregretful.  And now, when it was all over and I found myself sitting there by my husband's side-my husband!--I felt a sudden horrible inrush of rebellion and despair. I wanted to be free!  I felt like a prisoner--a hopeless prisoner.  Something in me--something wild and free and untamed--something that Ewan had not tamed--could never tame--something that did not acknowledge him as master--rose up in one frantic protest against the fetters which bound me.  At that moment if I could have torn the wedding ring from my finger and so freed myself I would have done it!  But it was too late--and the realization that it was too late fell over me like a black cloud of wretchedness. I sat at that gay bridal feast, in my white veil and orange blossoms, beside the man I had married--and I was as unhappy as I had ever been in my life."

 The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery - Vol I, p 68, Rubio & Waterston
_______________________________________________________________________

"Oh! Jolyon, yes.  He's in love, I feel he's in love.  And he'd say:  'My mother once married without love!  How could she have!'  It'll seem to him a crime!  And so it was!"

Irene Forsyte - "The Forsyte Saga", John Galsworthy

The Forsyte Saga - Granada Television 2002

Fate - and the Nine Lives of LM Montgomery

Mike and Leo

It seems incredibly fortuitous that during our upcoming July Odyssey on PEI,  there will be a happening!  Adam-Michael James and co-writer Leo Marchildon are working on a musical reunion of their well known production, "The Nine Lives of LM Montgomery."   We haven't heard the final details yet, but according to Mike, the stars are lining up!

Methinks I can see the hand of Maud in this.  If only someday, I can meet Mrs. Mary Rubio to ask a few questions that have been burning in my mind.  That will happen too, if it's meant to be.

Counting Down the Days to PEI - feeling a sadness for Maud

New Bern, North Carolina - my home

"bannered with crimson, sentineled by star.." LM Montgomery

 
It is 31 days till the fulfillment of a lifelong dream, a long yearned for visit to PEI -Maud's home and her lovely vista of childhood wonder.

Today, I feel a sadness for Maud that almost brings me to tears.  I think it has to do with some words by Thomas Wolfe which are ringing like a sad bell.  It is a quote from "Look Homeward Angel" where he describes his feelings of being "lost, on this weary unbright cinder".  Maud never knew that she was lost and in darkness.  The outside world was so beautiful to her.

Perhaps when the ugliness crept into her life,  if she had known, like Wolfe, that being lost and in darkness is the common state of man, she would not have felt so desperately alone.

I hope to get a sense of the spirit of Maud Montgomery on my visit to PEI, though I'm not sure that it is necessary to travel there to get it.

Still, Maud loved the island so very much!! There must be some shadow or a whispering of her spirit which is lingering there.

O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again. 

Thomas Wolfe - Look Homeward Angel