I remember—who could ever forget it?—the first commendation my writing received. I was about twelve and I had a stack of poems written out and hidden jealously from all eyes, for I was very sensitive in regard to my scribblings and could not bear the thought of having them seen and laughed at. Nevertheless, I wanted to know what others would think of them, not from vanity, but from a strong desire to find out if an impartial judge would see any merit in them. So I employed a little ruse to find out. It all seems very funny to me now, and a little pitiful; but then it seemed to me that I was at the bar of judgment for all time. It would be too much to say that, had the verdict been unfavourable, I would have forever surrendered my dreams, but they would certainly have been frosted for a time.
A lady was visiting us who was something of a singer. One evening I timidly asked her if she had ever heard a song called “Evening Dreams.”
She certainly had not, for the said “Evening Dreams” was a poem of my own composition, which I then considered my masterpiece. It is not now extant, and I can remember the first two verses only. I suppose that they were indelibly impressed on my memory by the fact that the visitor asked me if I knew any of the words of the “song.” Whereupon I, in a trembling voice, recited the two opening verses:
“When the evening sun is setting
Quietly in the west,
In a halo of rainbow glory,
I sit me down to rest.
I forget the present and future,
I live over the past once more,
As I see before me crowding
The beautiful days of yore.”
Strikingly original! Also, a child of twelve would have a long “past” to live over!
I finished up with a positive gasp, but the visitor was busy with her fancy work, and did not notice my pallor and general shakiness. For I was pale, it was a moment of awful import to me. She placidly said that she had never heard the song, but “the words were very pretty.”
The fact that she was sincere must certainly detract from her reputation for literary discrimination. But to me it was the sweetest morsel of commendation that had ever fallen to my lot, or that ever has fallen since, for that matter. Nothing has ever surpassed that delicious moment. I ran out of the house—it wasn’t big enough to contain my joy, I must have all outdoors for that—and danced down the lane under the birches in a frenzy of delight, hugging to my heart the remembrance of those words.
Perhaps it was this that encouraged me sometime during the following winter to write out my “Evening Dreams” very painstakingly—on both sides of the paper, alas!—and to send them to the editor of The Household, an American magazine we took. The idea of being paid for them never entered my head. Indeed, I am not at all sure that I knew at that time that people were ever paid for writing. At least, my early dreams of literary fame were untainted by any mercenary speculations.
Alack! the editor of The Household was less complimentary than our visitor. He sent the verses back, although I had not “enclosed a stamp” for the purpose, being in blissful ignorance of any such requirement.
My aspirations were nipped in the bud for a time. It was a year before I recovered from the blow. Then I essayed a more modest flight. I copied out my “Evening Dreams” again and sent them to the Charlottetown Examiner. I felt quite sure it would print them, for it often printed verses which I thought, and, for that matter, still think, were no better than mine.
For a week I dreamed delicious dreams of seeing my verses in the Poet’s Corner, with my name appended thereto. When the Examiner came, I opened it with tremulous eagerness. There was not a sign of an evening dream about it!
I drained the cup of failure to the very dregs. It seems very amusing to me now, but it was horribly real and tragic to me then. I was crushed in the very dust of humiliation and I had no hope of rising again. I burned my “Evening Dreams,” and, although I continued to write because I couldn’t help it, I sent no more poems to the editors.
Poems, however, were not all I wrote. Very soon after I began to write verses I also began to write stories. The “Story Club” in Anne of Green Gables was suggested by a little incident of schooldays when Janie S—, Amanda M— and I all wrote a story with the same plot. I remember only that it was a very tragic plot, and the heroines were all drowned while bathing on Cavendish sandshore! Oh, it was very sad! It was the first, and probably the last, time that Janie and Amanda attempted fiction, but I had already quite a library of stories in which almost everyone died. A certain lugubrious yarn, “My Graves,” was my masterpiece. It was a long tale of the peregrinations of a Methodist minister’s wife, who buried a child in every circuit to which she went. The oldest was buried in Newfoundland, the last in Vancouver, and all Canada between was dotted with those graves. I wrote the story in the first person, described the children, pictured out their death beds, and detailed their tombstones and epitaphs.
Then there was “This History of Flossy Brighteyes,” the biography of a doll. I couldn’t kill a doll, but I dragged her through every other tribulation. However, I allowed her to have a happy old age with a good little girl who loved her for the dangers she had passed and overlooked her consequent lack of beauty.
Nowadays, my reviewers say that my forte is humour. Well, there was not much humour in those early tales, at least, it was not intended there should be. Perhaps I worked all the tragedy out of my system in them, and left an unimpeded current of humour. I think it was my love of the dramatic that urged me to so much infanticide. In real life I couldn’t have hurt a fly, and the thought that superfluous kittens had to be drowned was torture to me. But in my stories battle, murder and sudden death were the order of the day.
When I was fifteen I had my first ride on a railway train, and it was a long one. I went with Grandfather Montgomery to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, where Father had married again and was then living. I spent a year in Prince Albert and attended the High School there.
It was now three years since I had suffered so much mortification over “Evening Dreams.” By this time my long-paralyzed ambition was beginning to recover and lift its head again. I wrote up the old Cape Leforce legend in rhyme and sent it down home to the Patriot, no more of the Examiner for me!
* * *
Four weeks passed. One afternoon Father came in with a copy of the Patriot. My verses were in it! It was the first sweet bubble on the cup of success and of course it intoxicated me. There were some fearful printers’ errors in the poem which fairly made the flesh creep on my bones, but it was my poem, and in a real newspaper! The moment we see our first darling brain-child arrayed in black type is never to be forgotten. It has in it some of the wonderful awe and delight that comes to a mother when she looks for the first time on the face of her first born.
During that winter I had other verses and articles printed. A story I had written in a prize competition was published in the Montreal Witness, and a descriptive article on Saskatchewan was printed in the Prince Albert Times, and copied and commented on favourably by several Winnipeg papers. After several effusions on “June” and kindred subjects appeared in that long-suffering Patriot, I was beginning to plume myself on being quite a literary person.
But the demon of filthy lucre was creeping into my heart. I wrote a story and sent it to the New York Sun, because I had been told that it paid for articles;