Flint and Feather

by Charlotte Gray

  For the next six years, the Johnson–Smily partnership worked well: the two managed to travel together, perform together, share the same dressing room and eat their meals together without irritating each other too much. Only when business sagged did relations deteriorate. “This place is deadly dull, we have played to poor business…There is absolutely nothing going on,” a tetchy Pauline wrote to a friend from Montreal at one point. “Mr. Smily and I are forced to drive about the mountain daily, at the immense threat of everlasting poverty in consequence of such extravagance, but if we did not do something, we would grow heartily tired of one another and probably quarrel.” By 1893, Pauline and Owen had their act down pat. Owen always introduced the programme, which started with some sketches by him. His forte was monologues, such as “How Billy Atkins Won the Battle of Waterloo,” and ventriloquist sketches with titles like “The Slum’rous Citizen and the Midsummer Fly.” Owen used a lot of music hall business in his act: he would crack little jokes about local personalities, throw in some doggerel about a recent event, imitate the local accent. Then Pauline would step onto the stage in her Indian outfit and recite a few of her best-known poems, including “The Song My Paddle Sings” and “A Cry from an Indian Wife.” The evening would culminate with a joint presentation: a version of “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” that Pauline had rewritten as a playlet. Owen, in tie and tails, looked dash’d handsome as Charlie McDonald, while Pauline, in exquisite satin, played the fiery Christie.

  Pauline’s part of the programme was not always well received. Some rural Ontario communities found no charm in Pauline’s beguiling looks or in her verses about warrior wives. Rowdy schoolboys liked to unnerve performers with ear-splitting imitations of cocks, dogs and cats or a steady barrage onto the stage of nuts and hard candies. Pauline was mortified in July 1893 when Archie Kains came to see her perform in Vankleek Hill, a hamlet fifty miles (eighty kilometres) east of Ottawa. In front of a meagre audience of flinty Eastern Ontario farmers, her performance fell flat. “Gods! I wish I could forget that night,” she wrote to him in New York City a few days later. “It rises like a nightmare, and blots out for the time every triumph I had last season. I wanted to do so well, to please you, to do justice to myself, and I can frankly say I never had such a failure…How could one be artistic, emotional, fervent with such rows and rows of unen-couraging humanity before them?”

  In time, however, Pauline mastered the art of keeping spectators’ attention. She acquired several professional tricks from Owen, particularly his knack for witty little asides. She recalled Rosina Voke’s techniques for establishing a personal rapport with each audience. Her stage persona became less inhibited, more inviting. Although Pauline would not dream of describing herself as an “actress,” with its undertones of vulgarity and impropriety, she was now comfortable and animated when she was in front of the footlights. She threw herself into her blood-and-guts narrative poems. A shiver ran through each audience when Pauline let loose an eerie, off-stage war whoop, then glided softly to centre stage to recite “The Avenger.”

  Theatre reviewers liked the change. “Miss Johnson,” announced the Globe, “has improved her elocution.” She received “a pretty and flattering” notice in the Toronto Empire, for which she wrote a charming note of thanks to the author, Faith Fenton. (Faith Fenton was the pen name of a Toronto schoolteacher, Alice Freeman, to whom Pauline sent “love, to a fellow craftsman, or rather woman.”) When Pauline appeared at the Toronto Cricket Club’s annual concert, she was given a standing ovation. The Toronto Daily Tribune reported that “as a reader of her own poems, [Miss E. Pauline Johnson] is a great success, possessing as she does a clear, musical voice and an unusual gift of expression.” At a performance at Brantford’s Grace Church—her own church—the “enraptured assemblage became wild with enthusiasm,” according to the local paper.

  But some friends who had known the “old” Pauline were not so sure. Harry O’Brien was a Toronto lawyer Pauline had met in 1892 in Muskoka, where he was Commodore of the Muskoka Lakes Canoe Association. A jovial fellow who always wore a battered yachting cap, he loved the Pauline he had first met—a dignified young woman who wrote lyrical verse about maple-mantled hills, or stirring monologues about long-forgotten braves. After he saw her in performance early in 1894, he found himself unable to say anything to her about her act. He had hated the way she now catered to appreciative crowds and fed on their laughter and applause. He reproached her for debasing her talent.

  Harry’s disapproval stung Pauline to the quick. She knew that respectable people, including her mother, felt this way about actresses. Suddenly the “heights of Literature” to which she had always aspired seemed to slip into the distance. Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott would never spend their lives touring one-horse towns, imitating the local landowner and making grocers and blacksmiths laugh. On the other hand, Scott and Lampman didn’t have to—they both had government jobs. “More than all things,” she wrote to Harry, “I hate and despise brain debasement, literary ‘pot-boiling. ’…The reason for my actions in this matter? Well—the reason is that the public will not listen to lyrics, will not appreciate poetry, will in fact not have me as an entertainer if I give them nothing but rhythm, cadence, beauty, thought.” Pauline’s earnings helped support her family and her ambition. Although she knew that Harry was right—that she was fast becoming an entertainer rather than a poet—she could not afford to step off the stage if she was going to follow William Lighthall’s advice and go to England.

  Pauline had nursed an ambition to go to England for as long as she could remember. It is not clear why London was a greater magnet for her than New York City, a rival (and more easily accessible) publishing mecca to which writers like Bliss Carman had gravitated. Perhaps it was her upbringing, steeped in loyalty to all things British, and the traditional Iroquois assumption of a “special relationship” with the Imperial Crown. Perhaps it was Michael Mackenzie’s accounts of life in the Old Country. Perhaps it was Watts-Dunton’s gratifying review of “In the Shadows.” Whatever the reason, Pauline wanted to be accepted within the heart of the society from which English-speaking Canada took its cue. She wanted recognition and status in the country from which her mother’s family had come. As early as 1888, Pauline had told William Lighthall that “my intention is to publish [my work in] a book sometime in the future.” By 1894, she had decided she wanted such a book published in London. And she had finally scraped together enough money to pay for the trip.

  “The committee, who had charge of the entertainment to be given for Pauline a few days before her departure, asked whether she would rather have money or a piece of jewelry as a gift,” Evelyn Johnson wrote in her memoirs, as she recalled the send-off that Brantford gave her sister in April 1894. “Pauline said that she would rather have the money to help her on her undertaking. The day before she left on her trip the citizens of Brantford presented her with a purse of gold. We all drove down to the Kerby House where the entertainment was to take place. Just as we stepped out of the cab, the Reverend Mr. Mackenzie came forward to assist Pauline and the rest of us. He said, ‘This is the very thing that should have happened: your clergyman to meet you and escort you up the stairs.’”

  Pauline, resplendent in a white cashmere gown trimmed with heliotrope-purple velvet, spent the evening receiving the burghers of Brantford in the salon where the Prince of Wales had been entertained in 1860. After shaking dozens of hands, she gave a graceful little speech of thanks and recited one of her poems. In the audience, Emily Johnson must have felt her heart swell with pride. She followed Pauline’s career with intense interest; when Pauline performed in Toronto or in any town close to Brantford, Emily was always there. She admired Pauline’s creative achievements and her ambition, despite her own instinctive distaste for the theatre. She believed that once Pauline had found a London publisher for her poems, her younger daughter would leave the stage. Now Pauline was going to return to the land from which she herself had sailed sixty-two years
earlier. What mother would not be suffused with both happiness and anxiety on behalf of her daughter? Especially one as obsessed with respectability as Emily.

  The following day, Friday, April 27, Pauline climbed aboard the train at Brantford’s Grand Trunk Railway depot. Her brother Allen and sister, Eva, travelled with her as far as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, then Pauline went on alone to New York. There she boarded the Cunard steamship Etruria for passage to Liverpool. The Etruria, which operated a weekly service between Liverpool and New York,

  Emily Johnson wished that her talented daughter would settle down and stay close to home.

  was a prestigious vessel on which to travel. It had won the Blue Ribbon six years earlier for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic, and both Lord Curzon and the British music hall star Marie Lloyd crossed the Atlantic on it the same year as Pauline. Once Pauline had set foot on British soil, she would take the train south from Liverpool to London. The flinty farmers of Vankleek Hill were behind her; the elegant salons of Mayfair lay ahead. Surely now, she must have felt, she was on the right path to Parnassus.

  11

  SMOG AND SNOBBERY IN THE IMPERIAL CAPITAL 1894

  IN 1894, London throbbed with its own wealth and success. It was the biggest city on the globe and the centre of the largest empire the world had ever seen. But Pauline’s first glimpse of the Imperial capital left a great deal to be desired. Travelling alone into Euston Station on the Great Northern Railway from Liverpool, all she could see in the watery May sunlight were the cramped backyards of terrace houses, their brickwork blackened with soot, in the dreary suburbs of East Hampstead and Cricklewood. Beyond them was an immense sea of little chimneys rising from slated roofs, while in the distance tall industrial chimneys belted out black clouds. Smoke from coal fires, factories, steam trains and freighters was a constant feature of London’s atmosphere. The smog routinely dimmed the light, created mon-strous fogs, or “pea-soupers,” and speckled faces, cuffs and collars with dirty smuts or “blacks.” Late-nineteenth-century Toronto, with a population of 200,000, was dirty enough, but London, ten times larger, was filthy.

  Pauline had been dreadfully seasick on her transatlantic crossing. When the Etruria finally docked, she wrote to Harry O’Brien, it took her a long time to recover her “land gait.” She was still feeling unsteady when she disembarked from the train. Her first glimpse of Euston Station’s vast glass-covered terminus took her breath away. So did the noise that echoed across all the platforms: the yells of porters, the clatter of horse-drawn carriages, the squeal of train brakes, the whoosh of steam. Clutching her valise, she asked a porter to help her hire a hansom cab and learned to her dismay that half of London’s 11,000 cabdrivers were on strike against the cab owners. They were demanding a fare hike because (in the words of their petition of grievances) “omnibuses, telephones, messenger boys and other appliances of civilization have cut down their business enormously.” The Euston cab rank was empty. She would have to store her steamer trunk at the station to collect later, and take an omnibus. Because of the cab strike, the vehicles of the London General Omnibus Company were jam-packed with disgruntled travellers. Pauline eventually discovered one going in her direction and struggled up the staircase to the open-air “garden seats” on the roof. At least, she consoled herself, the weather was fine and she would get a good view of London and its citizens.

  She had barely sat down before the driver flicked his whip across the rumps of his two horses and the omnibus trundled off. Its route, with frequent stops, took it along Euston Road, through the maze of streets in Marylebone and onto leafy Bayswater Road. Pauline gazed out at an ever-changing vista. The streets around Euston reminded her of Toronto’s Cabbagetown; they were lined with homely shops, food stalls and crowded housing. Most of the people she passed were poorly dressed; the women’s aprons were dirty, and the men, in flat caps and grubby vests, were obviously labourers. But as the bus creaked around Marble Arch and set off down the Bayswater Road towards Holland Park, Pauline saw the leafy expanse of Hyde Park on her left and on her right, creamy-white terraces of four-, five- or even six-storey houses with pillared porticos and elaborate plasterwork. Elegant women, wearing the latest leg-of-mutton sleeves and beribboned bonnets, leaned on the arms of top-hatted, frock-coated gentlemen as they strolled down the pavement. Delivery carts, private carriages, cyclists and some strikebreaking hansom cabs narrowly avoided each other as they rolled down the street. There was a continuous rumble of wooden wheels on cobbled streets and a pungent smell of horse manure, human sweat, gas fires and rotten fruit.

  Pauline’s destination was 25 Portland Road, Holland Park West. Portland Road was situated at the northern limits of one of London’s most respectable districts, the Royal Borough of Kensington. The smart end of Kensington lay to the south, between Kensington High Street and the Old Brompton Road. Every summer afternoon, the open-air tea rooms in Kensington Gardens hosted throngs of wealthy area residents, who took tea under the elms and listened to military music from the regimental band playing in the bandstand. Nursemaids pushed well-sprung baby carriages around the Serpentine and supervised small boys in sailor suits as they launched their toy boats on the Round Pond.

  The Royal Borough’s north end, where Pauline was headed, was a great deal less sophisticated. Portland Road was a pleasant enough street of four-storey Georgian terraced houses, with iron railings around their basement areas and big casement windows. However, most of the houses had been subdivided into dwellings for two or three families. The end of the street closest to Holland Park Avenue was still a professional preserve. Architects, successful merchants and clerks lived there, and most employed servants. But as the road headed north, the number of people in each house increased and their occupations became humbler: dressmaker, ironmonger’s assistant, plasterer, tailor’s apprentice. The far end of Portland Street was close to one of the poorest areas of West London, Notting Dale. Here, pigs snuffled along crowded lanes, and each ramshackle cottage housed two or three families. Notting Dale men laboured in the local brickworks. Their womenfolk spent their days up to their elbows in soapsuds, doing laundry for the gentry who lived in Mayfair and Knightsbridge. Notting Dale pubs did a roaring trade every night. The death rate in this district was more than double that for Kensington as a whole, and nearly half the babies born in the cheap lodging houses, furnished rooms and brothels died before they were a year old. For more than a century, the area had been a major stopping-off place for brightly coloured gypsy vans in the late spring. Pauline would have seen wild-haired gypsy women telling fortunes on Holland Park Avenue and swarthy rag-and-bone men driving their barrows around Notting Hill.

  Pauline dismounted from the bus on Holland Park Road, turned right into Portland Road and looked for Number 25. She found it on the west side of the street, comfortably close to Holland Park Avenue. The house belonged to a retired schoolmaster from Suffolk named Thomas Sheffield, who usually had two boarders in the house in addition to his wife and daughter, a music teacher. It is likely that Sir Richard Scott, the prominent Liberal politician Pauline had met in Ottawa in 1892, had suggested Pauline stay in Holland Park. A branch of the Scott family headed by a Mr. James Scott and his wife, Emma, lived at Number 23, next door to Mr. Sheffield, and probably arranged her lodgings. It must have been reassuring for the young poet to hear familiar Canadian voices amongst the medley of London, Suffolk and Scottish accents of the street’s residents. Pauline had taken a brave and unconventional step when she had purchased her ticket to England. Although she was now thirty-three and accustomed to travelling around Ontario on her own, it was a very different matter for a respectable young woman to reside unchaperoned in London. Back home, her reputation preceded her, and she was usually able to enlist the patronage of the local mayor or church minister in the friendly small towns she visited. In London, she was alone, unknown and vulnerable. The city teemed with prostitutes; between 80,000 and 120,000 “ladies of the night” plied their trade within its population of 2.25 mill
ion. Some were like the miserable women, victims of vice, who stumble through the novels of Charles Dickens, but many were fashionable courtesans who openly competed with their “respectable” rivals. The plethora of prostitutes at every social level meant that any unaccompanied female might be regarded as “fair prey” as she walked along the street or mingled in a crowd.

  Pauline had brought mementos of home with her, which were soon artfully displayed in the studio apartment at the top of Number 25. On the mantelpiece, she placed a fierce medicine man mask from the Six Nations Reserve. On a screen, she draped her stage costume: her buckskin tunic, ermine tails, scalp and beaded wampum belt. She had also brought several photographic portraits of herself, taken by Mr. Cochran in his Brantford studio. Most important, in the bottom of her valise, she had the poems for which she intended to find a publisher, and the letters of introduction from prominent Canadians with which she hoped to secure some public engagements. She knew that the key to publication would be to establish a reputation as an artistic performer. As a penny-pinching, unknown colonial, she could not afford to rent a hall for a recital or hope to attract an audience off the street. Instead, she planned to make a name for herself as a drawing-room performer, entertaining Mayfair society in its own opulent homes.