The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (663 page)

During the first year on the farm, Mazo wrote the outstanding short story titled “Canadian Ida and English Nell.” This story, about the working-class British immigrants who laboured at that time in the hotels and factories of southern Ontario, was different from anything she had written before.

“Canadian Ida and English Nell” was a warmly empathetic and carefully observed portrait that revealed Mazo’s gift for dramatic situations and witty dialogue. Mazo had witnessed the events on which the story was based while helping in the kitchen and dining room of the hotel in Acton. Clearly, during the past ten years of moving here and there with her parents and Caroline, Mazo had developed from an escapist to a realist. From within the protective but restrictive confines of her family, Mazo could observe life carefully.

Her first stories, written about 1900, had been about an imaginary Quebec that she had never visited. This new story was about a recognizable Ontario that she knew well. Eventually, many years later, the story would form the basis of the novel
Delight
.

The story was published in a Canadian magazine called the
Metropolitan
in June 1911. Already Mazo was signing her work,
de la Roche
, although her father went by plain
Roche
.

Before long during that first year in Bronte, the farm was teeming with life, and the dark figures of the First Nations people were bent over the strawberry crop. In the evenings the sound of a fiddle wafted from the crowded shacks.

Then, when the strawberry season was at its height, a wild storm whirled from the lake and blew the dust and dirt before it in a cloud that covered all the red strawberries in a coat of grey and left their leaves withered and dry. Luckily there were still the raspberries, cherries, blackberries, Lawton berries, and apples. But the bad luck with the strawberries left the amateur farmers subdued, for the strawberries were one of the most profitable crops.

More misfortune was to come.

There was the high-priced pedigreed cow that had just calved, and was given a bucketful of ice-cold water from the stream. She lay in the stableyard, a great black and white mound, dying. There was the bay gelding, Mike, turned to pasture in a field where the barbed-wire fencing was hanging loose. He cut an artery in his breast…

There was the litter of lusty young pigs, overfed till they became paralyzed and died.

There were the turkey poults drowned in their run when the creek flooded. This same flood overran the stables as well as the poultry house.

But the greatest grief was the loss of Johnny, the bright chestnut horse that Will Roche had given to Caroline and Mazo. A stable boy let him out into deep snow for exercise after a week of inactivity. Johnny, full of joy in the sudden freedom, flung himself in a snowdrift to roll. He rolled. He whinnied in distress, for he could not rise. He had ruptured himself.

As well as these disasters and others with produce, livestock, and pets, one family member after another died in quick succession. Mazo’s paternal grandmother, Sarah Roche, died in 1911, as did Carolines mother, Martha Clement. Mazo’s maternal grandmother, Louise Lundy, died in 1913, as did Uncle George Lundy, who was only fifty years old. (Uncle George had sired a son in 1896, when Mazo was seventeen, so she was no longer the only grandchild.)

On the midwinter day in 1913 when Mazo learned that Grandma Lundy was dying, she went outside at bedtime, looked up at the stars, and childishly said aloud: “I have a grandma! I will not let her die!”

That night there was a storm. The sounds of the storm seemed to express Mazo’s intense emotions. As she herself explained: “The lake gathered itself together and hurled its strength against the shore. But its thunder could not drown the shrieking of the wind. At times it seemed that a great army was marching down the road… It seemed that the lake was pounding on our very door.” Mazo got little sleep in the “savage howling.” In the morning there was “brilliant calm” and “icy stillness.” Later that day, Grandma Lundy died.

Grandma Lundy’s death left the biggest blank in their lives. Never again was Christmas the same. The spirit of the day was so bound up in her.

Of course the sad losses were scattered between happy intervals. The orchards bloomed lavishly, the berries ripened, and the apples filled the shed to the roof. Mazo raised her chickens and wrote. She also entertained two suitors: a Frenchman named Pierre and a Scotsman named Alistair.

Pierre – Fritz Pierre Mansbendel – was especially important to Mazo. He was an engineer from the Alsace region of France. She had met him in Toronto, where she and Caroline went occasionally to see plays and concerts, and he courted her intensely. Ultimately, however, Mazo chose a career over a husband, and Pierre chose a housekeeper over a soulmate. He married his landlady: Mazo’s widowed Aunt Eva, who was almost twenty years his senior. The couple moved to New York City. Mazo went back to her writing.

Despite their problems, Mazo, her parents, and Caroline strolled in the evenings through the gorgeous countryside, and talked of all they would do when times were better. Although their financial situation grew steadily worse, they never talked gloomily, for Mazo’s parents never gave up hope that conditions would improve. Then one day Mazo realized that the family was refusing to face a loss that was about to destroy their world utterly.

On the first day of autumn 1914, she happened to catch sight of her parents walking through the orchard together. Unseen by them, she observed them closely. Her father was gaunt. His coat was hanging loosely on his broad shoulders. His dark eyes seemed huge and hollow. He was leaning for support on his much shorter wife, Bertie, who was still not strong. Mazo had known her father was ill, but suddenly she realized he was going to die very soon. And he would leave his wife and daughters destitute because he did not actually own the farm itself, only the farm’s stock and implements. And there were debts to pay.

Before her parents could see her, Mazo rushed down the shale bluff to the lakeshore. The enormous grey waves roared and hissed on the stony shore. Mazo stood on the stones and stared through dark eyes at the heaving freshwater sea. She screamed. She screamed again. And again. And again. At first she did not realize she was screaming, for she did not hear the sound. No one heard her terrible hoarse cries, which were lost in the thunder of the relentless waves. She did not return to the house until she was fully composed.

Those four years on the Bronte farm had been a slow turning point for Mazo. As her beloved father became weaker financially and physically, Mazo became stronger professionally and emotionally. As Mazo faced the mirror of her grim future on the shore of Lake Ontario in 1914, she knew that her poems and stories brought in little money. She also knew that Caroline, who had worked like a slave on the farm, had few financial resources – just the three hundred dollars she had received when she and her brother sold the land left them by their Grandfather Clement. Mazo knew too that the remaining members of her extended family could offer little or no financial assistance.

Where would they go? What would they do? Who would help them? Mazo was a fearful person. After all, she had suffered a serious nervous breakdown while in her early twenties. Yet now, in her mid-thirties, in a seemingly hopeless situation, Mazo did not allow herself to retreat into fear.

Soon help arrived in the form of a dog.

“As you know,” said Will one day in the late fall of 1914, “nothing would please me quite so much for a Christmas present as a puppy. It would be fun for me to train it. It would amuse me when time is heavy on my hands. And I know just where a Scotty could be bought, at a quite reasonable price. It’s from champion stock too.”

Under the grey sky of winter, the house faced the grey waters of the lake into which slow snowflakes fell and disappeared. Under the white covering of snow, the land slept. To Mazo the sleep seemed not a rest after fruitfulness, not a wait for the glad renewal of spring, but a chill trance of disdain for those whom the land had defeated.

Mazo tried to force herself to be cheerful for Christmas. She looked at the holly wreath on the door and the boughs of balsam above the pictures and the square, small-paned windows. She breathed in the resinous smell of the boughs, the indescribable smell of a pine knot burning.

Mazo, Caroline, and Mazo’s parents were sitting around the fire in the parlour when someone knocked on the back door. Mazo went to see who it was. The hired man had finally arrived from the train station with the Scotty Mazo had ordered for her father.

Caroline, Will, and Bertie joined Mazo in the kitchen. The hired man put the small crate in the middle of the kitchen floor, and everyone crowded around. Two glowing black, almond-shaped eyes looked up between the slats at the huge people. The hired man removed one of the slats, put his hand into the crate, lifted out the tiny puppy, and set her on her feet. Unafraid, she wobbled on uncertain puppy legs toward the people. This was Bunty.

Bunty, the black, female Scotty-pup, was a pleasure to Will Roche and his family that last winter on the Bronte farm. She romped with Jock, the collie, and affronted the dignity of Christopher, the cat. Always she could make Will smile. When he sat by the window and stared out at the cold grey lake, Bunty would come and paw Wills leg and he would bend down to pat her or lift her to his knee.

The family played cards during the long evenings of that long winter: Will and Bertie against Caroline and Mazo. Then Will found the games too tiring. Then spring came, and they sold the farm stock and implements for barely enough to pay Will’s debts. They were poor. They moved to rented accommodation nearby: half of a house owned by the elderly daughters of a deceased naval officer. Then summer came, and in July Will died.

Strangely, Mazo found she could leash the wild feelings that had almost overwhelmed her that day of the hysterical outcries on the stony shore. Of course she was badly shaken by this sad event. She suffered neuralgic pains in her head, and she felt very tired, so she had to rest more than usual and take relaxing walks in the fresh air. But somehow she carried on. While Caroline and her mother sewed black mourning clothes in Bertie’s shadowed room, Mazo slipped into the room where her father had recently died, sat down in his chair, and began to write a humorous story about three mischievous boys.