Reluctant Genius (42 page)

Mabel’s first scheme was to organize a sewing school, in the hope of giving local girls skills that would allow them to earn their independence. She found the traditional weaving, crochet, and embroidery work that she saw in some of the cottages she visited so impressive that she started marketing it to relatives and friends in the States. She also established a monthly discussion club for local women, based on a similar club to which she had been invited in Washington at the home of Senator Eugene Hale. The Washington club met weekly, and participants discussed current events, books, and projects that interested them. In Mrs. Hale’s elegant Washington parlor, where the women paid as much attention to each others’ coiffures as to their words, Mabel struggled to follow the conversation and was often tongue-tied with shyness. But back on Beinn Bhreagh, she raised with Alec the idea of a similar club for Baddeck. If well-connected Washington women, with all the resources available to them, enjoyed such get-togethers, how much more would they appeal to women in Baddeck, where there still wasn’t even a public library?

Alec was quick to encourage her, since he was eager to keep his family in Nova Scotia after their summer visitors had gone. One warm October evening in 1891, Mabel sent a rowboat over to Baddeck to collect her guests for the first meeting of a club that, she explained, would be both educational and social. It was an instant success, and soon Mabel was writing to her daughter Elsie, “Yesterday was lovely. The Ladies’ Club Board came over for a meeting at four o’clock. We talked until five-thirty and then got out our needlework or knitting and gossiped until six, had a jolly dinner and then Papa showed us lantern slides… . There is nothing like real country life when you know how to manage it so that you have real sociability. I have more of this here than I do in Washington.” By year’s end, the club had forty-one members. One of the more impressive aspects of the club was that Mabel, the guileless outsider, had done what few Baddeck residents would even dare attempt: she had Catholics and Protestants sitting together in the same room.

Much as both Bells loved Cape Breton, Beinn Bhreagh created new stress between them. This idyllic corner of Canada was miles from anywhere. Mabel kept asking herself, was it a suitable place for their growing daughters to spend months in?

Mabel had good cause to worry. There was something obviously wrong with Elsie, aged ten. Five years earlier, the little girl had given her mother a severe shock when she suddenly went into a convulsion. Since then there had been no more convulsions, but Elsie’s behavior was increasingly erratic: she fidgeted, twitched, waved her hands about, and could not control these involuntary body movements. Eventually a Washington doctor diagnosed chorea, often called St. Vitus’ Dance.

Today, this neurological disorder is called Sydenham chorea, and is known to result from a streptococcal infection such as a sore throat, which can be treated with antibiotics. But there was no straightforward, empirical diagnosis for such a condition in the 1890s. A frantic Mabel was particularly exasperated by Alec’s vague conviction that somehow Elsie would simply grow out of it. Mabel decided to take her daughter, over Alec’s objections, to Philadelphia to consult Dr. S. Weir Mitchell. Dr. Mitchell, who had made his reputation treating Civil War gunshot wounds and phantom limb pain, was now the most eminent “nerve doctor” in America, famous for advocating the “rest cure” for women suffering from that vague Victorian diagnosis, “hysteria.” When Mabel and Elsie Bell arrived in his consulting room, the thin-lipped and self-assured physician examined the child carefully. Then, seating himself at his desk and fixing a harsh gaze on Mabel, he announced that the only treatment for Elsie was complete quiet and rest, far away from her mother. Elsie was moved to Dr. Mitchell’s nursing home in Philadelphia, where she spent most of the next two years under the strict (and expensive) supervision of a nurse companion.

From today’s perspective, Dr. Mitchell’s approach to women patients was relentlessly misogynist. Even in his own day, his practice was suspect. The American author Charlotte Perkins Gilman was among those obliged by Dr. Mitchell to spend weeks, during a bout of depression, incarcerated in her bedroom undergoing the rest cure. She channeled her disgust with his theories into her famous short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” published in 1892. Dr. Mitchell certainly did nothing for Mabel Bell’s already shaky confidence in her own capacity to be a mother. “He said he objected to … the atmosphere of our home, that Elsie boasted of how when she went home she would sit up all hours and read all kinds of books,” Mabel told her mother. “So my own child has helped to strengthen the doctor’s unfavorable opinion of me.”

On her regular visits to her daughter in Philadelphia, Mabel wrote Alec, “I am so afraid of doing Elsie harm.” And when Alec proposed to collect Elsie from Dr. Mitchell’s care and take her on a brief trip to see his mother, Mabel was in anguish. “Please don’t take Elsie to Washington with you. I am willing to take more risks with my children for your mother than for any one else because they are her only grandchildren, but think how long it has taken Elsie to get as well as she is … and how dreadful it would be for her to have a relapse now. Your mother would not thank you for making her the cause of such a disaster… . Think of having to pay for it with another year’s separation from our child.” Elsie stayed in Philadelphia, and Mabel continued to blame herself for Elsie’s condition, which Dr. Mitchell sternly described as “one of the worst cases of chorea he ever saw.”

Alec could see his wife’s distress, as Mabel brooded on both her inability to conceive and Dr. Mitchell’s disdain for her maternal skills. He tried to reassure her: “There never was a kinder or better or more loving mother than you have been, my dear.” He was dismissive of the august Dr. Mitchell’s pronouncements and remained convinced that “hygiene and Swedish movements,” preferably undertaken at Beinn Bhreagh, would cure his daughter. (His remedy, which amounted to nothing more than fresh air and exercise, would have worked. Modern textbooks state that the condition is “self-limiting”: Elsie would have grown out of it, as he had said all along.) To be sure, there was an element of self-interest in his prescription—he resented anything that took his wife and children back to the United States. In his view, their world could come to them, and once they were settled in the Lodge, it did. Each successive summer was more lively and crowded. Hordes of relatives would arrive—Mabel’s parents, Alec s parents, Mabel’s sister, Grace, and her husband, Charlie Bell (who was also Alec’s cousin), and assorted nieces and nephews and uncles and aunts. Some stayed at the Lodge; others took up residence in cottages across the bay in Baddeck village. And each successive summer, there were more children—not just Charlie’s two daughters, Gracie and Helen, by his first marriage to Berta Hubbard, but also his and Grace’s two sons, who would play with their cousins and the children of various Bell employees.

The long summer days were filled with extended clan picnics, excursions down the lake, and walks to Sheepville, followed by evening games of whist at the Lodge. And there was a new addition to the headland’s attractions: Alec commissioned a houseboat from a local boatbuilder and named it
Mabel of Beinn Bhreagh.
Every few days a handful of guests would chug off on overnight excursions, to fish and to explore the endless bays and inlets of Bras d’Or Lake. Meanwhile, Alec threw himself gleefully into family activities. He told his daughters and their cousins Gracie and Helen Bell wonderful stories about a character named “the Great Imagination.” He decided they must all learn to swim, so every morning, like a jovial Pied Piper, he donned a woolen swimsuit that covered his bulky torso from shoulders to knees and led his retinue of excited little girls down to the dock. They would all pile into a rowboat, and then, one by one, each child would have a rope tied around her waist and be told to plunge into ten or fifteen feet of water. “The rope pulls them up immediately,” Mabel told her mother, “and then they cling to the boat while Alec gets the life preserver under their arms, and then off they go kicking and swimming like little frogs.”

“Alec is so happy in this place,” Mabel wrote to her mother. Only in his own beloved Beinn Bhreagh, his daughter Daisy would recall years later, could he “let himself go and be as elemental as he pleased.” Sometimes this took the form of an urge to “float about in the water by the hour, particularly at night, smoking a cigar and looking up at the stars.” On another occasion, he decided to find out how a scientific man, cast ashore with only a penknife and watch on an uninhabited island, could stay alive. He strode off, stark naked, in search of food. “The most promising things he found,” according to Daisy, “were the heads of ripe seeds of one of the big weeds … along with some partridge berries, but [he] didn’t find them very sustaining.” His search for clothing was equally unsuccessful: he quickly discovered that he would have to collect a lot of sphagnum moss before he was decently covered. Moreover, “the moss was damp,” so he abandoned the experiment, retrieved his clothes, and went off to the Lodge’s kitchen to forage for buns, sausages, and hot tea.

After the second summer of such excitements, Alec announced that he wanted to stay in Cape Breton until after Christmas 1890, and thus avoid the elaborate and expensive socializing and gift-giving of the American capital. Once the summer visitors had gone, he returned to his sheep research with a vengeance, spending every afternoon with the sheep and shepherds, and looking, according to his wife, like “a big school-boy among the Lilliputians.” His latest brainwave was to design covered sheep pens on wheels, so he could move them around the hillside. He had also invented a “non-pollutable, non-freezable drinking trough for the sheep,” Mabel told her father. That fall, Mabel allowed herself to be persuaded to remain with him. “You will be surprised at my enthusiasm for the snow,” she wrote to her mother, “but Beinn Bhreagh snow is a very different article from Washington or even Cambridge snow. There it is damp and chilly, a nuisance in every way; here it is dry and crisp and nice to walk in ... I expect to be quite ready to go after Christmas, but I am more glad all the time that we have decided to remain.” By December 17, boys were fishing for trout and smelts through holes in the ice, and “sleds and horses have been using the harbor as a thoroughfare.”

A Cape Breton Christmas was Alec’s idea of heaven. He and Mabel played in the snow like children, along with Daisy (Elsie was still in Philadelphia). They tobogganed down the headland’s slopes onto the frozen lake, snowshoed all around the Lodge, and skated from Beinn Bhreagh to Baddeck—a distance of about a mile. Years later, Daisy would recall how Arthur McCurdy, who was now Alec’s full-time assistant, gave her parents “the kind of
young
friendship that they never had with anyone else. They had jolly carefree times with him out of doors.” On crisp December days, the party would set out to blaze new trails through the woods. McCurdy, tough and sinewy, was the leader, followed by Mabel, in elbow-length woolen gloves and a sealskin cap, with a little hatchet that McCurdy had given her tucked into the belt of her long, tight-fitting skirt. “How she ever ploughed through the snow in a skirt to her ankles seems astonishing,” reflected Daisy, who remembered vividly how beautiful her thirty-two-year-old mother looked that year, with her “exquisite skin … gray-blue eyes and masses of soft brown hair.” Mabel could not hear the crunch of snow underfoot or the excited cries of her companions when they spied a grouse or deer; but she marveled at the soft light of the snow-shrouded woods and at the brilliant sheen of the lake ice. Behind Mabel tramped Daisy, and Alec brought up the rear. Large and unkempt, with his iron-gray hair long and curly, Alec was always worried that Mabel might fall, because she had no sense of balance. But McCurdy “made light of everything [and] took it for granted she could go anywhere anyone else could, and yet seemed to know intuitively when she needed a helping hand.”

The Lodge, built for summer, was freezing in winter; a blazing fire in the ground floor hearth did not heat the thin-walled bedrooms. It was a struggle for Daisy to drag herself away from the roaring fire each night and scamper up to her bedroom, where the small fireplace scarcely took the chill off the air. Half-awake and clutching a stoneware hot-water bottle, she would look at the flicker of firelight on the ceiling and listen to the sounds of the piano downstairs, “for almost every night after the others had all gone to bed he would sit down and play for hours and hours.” Alec’s spirits soared in Cape Breton’s remote magnificence, and his mind raced with ideas for future research and inventions. “He played vehemently—passionately—pouring, pouring his soul out, and upstairs I would wake up at intervals and listen.”

During these months, Mabel watched her husband throw himself into “these breeding experiments with all his characteristic interest and absorption and thoroughness of detail,” numbering, weighing, and measuring every sheep. She applauded his efforts when he exulted, “Twins and extra nipples abound. One of the extra-nippled ewes gives milk
from all four nipples
—promising.” But much as she loved to see Alec so happy, she could not embrace life on their windy headland with such fervor once summer had gone. She did not “think it very much fun to walk silently along while Alec discussed the relative merits of different sheep with the men, [or] to remain idle in his little house on the mountain top while he counted, weighed and examined them the whole afternoon.”

The next crisis in their rural idyll slowly built as she thought about their future. “All my ambition now is for my children,” she told her mother. “Our daughters must have suitable friends.” Mabel knew she could not launch her daughters into Washington society from Cape Breton, let alone prepare them for an education at Wellesley College, where she was planning to send them. And her daughters’ interests were not the only concerns eating away at Mabel Bell: she herself longed for the quiet support of her parents and Grace, her only remaining sister, who were in Washington. It was exhausting being married to an erratic genius and housekeeping in the woods. She finally put her foot down at the end of January and ordered Baddeck’s sturdiest horse-drawn sleigh to come to the Lodge and pick up Daisy, herself, and a very reluctant Alec. It was the dead of winter, and the snowdrifts were so deep that it took the little party, swathed in buffalo robes, three days to traverse the island and reach Port Hastings, from where they could cross the Strait of Canso to the mainland and the train south.