Flint and Feather

by Charlotte Gray

  The engagement took their respective friends and relatives by surprise. Amongst Pauline Johnson’s personal papers, no letters between Pauline and Charlie, or their families, have survived. If Pauline kept such letters, they would certainly have been amongst those that her sister Evelyn burnt after her death in an effort to protect Pauline’s reputation. So it is impossible to know exactly how the Draytons or the Johnsons reacted to Pauline and Charlie’s engagement. Emily Johnson almost certainly regarded Charles Drayton as a “catch” for her strong-willed daughter as Pauline’s fortieth birthday approached. Pauline’s mother must have hoped that a husband would persuade Pauline to stop appearing on stage and settle down to a more respectable life as a wife. She must also have thought wistfully of grandchildren. By now, both Evelyn and Allen were living at home—Allen had abandoned his job in insurance and appears to have become a chronic depressive. Neither of Pauline’s siblings showed any inclination to marry, so Emily’s hopes were pinned on her youngest child.

  Charlie’s Toronto family and friends, on the other hand, would most likely have been horrified by the difference in age (Charlie was eleven years younger than his intended) and background. Mixed marriages were increasingly frowned on within Canadian urban society. The opinion of Henry Drayton, Charlie’s elder brother, would carry particular weight within his family, and inevitably it would be hostile. Henry would not have been the success he was in stuffy Toronto if he welcomed his brother’s unorthodox choice. By now, Henry Drayton had secured his own “catch”: Edith Cawthra, whose forebears had been part of the Family Compact autocracy that had controlled Upper Canada in the early nineteenth century. Edith’s father was a banker, and her family was so much grander than Henry’s that when their engagement was first whispered, Henry’s sister, Margaret, commented, “Harry will have to carve out his fortune first before he can dream of asking her hand in matrimony.” By 1892, however, Henry had successfully scaled the Establishment heights and married Edith (“a sweet, unaffected girl,” Margaret reported to Reggie Drayton’s wife, Agnes). The wedding took place at the Cawthras’ Rosedale residence, and Edith was promptly swallowed up by the Society cycle of At Homes, garden parties and charity work. A half-Mohawk sister-in-law who appeared in buckskin in opera houses and church halls may not have appealed to Mr. and Mrs. Henry Drayton.

  Yet affairs were more complicated than this. Not everybody in 1898 took the view that the proposed marriage was inevitably a triumph for Pauline and a disaster for the Draytons. Pauline was a celebrity whose fans, for example, liked her the way she was. Would marriage diminish her mystique and smother the dangerous eroticism of her half-English, half-Indian theatrics? “That her rare accomplishments and pleasing personality should win many bids in the matrimonial market was to be expected,” commented the Brantford Courier. “But Miss Johnson was enthroned by her genius far above the commonplace of life and getting married is such an ordinary thing to do that it was the last thing expected of her.”

  And the Drayton family was not as rigid as it might appear. Charlie’s sister, Margaret Drayton, wrote to her aunt, Agnes Drayton, “I suppose you have heard that Charlie is engaged to Miss Pauline Johnson, the Indian poetess…Her mother belonged to a very good English family and was related to Howell the American writer. Her father was a very clever man and every one says he was so nice. He was head chief of the Mohawk tribe and interpreter for the six nations. Pauline an Indian Princess herself is a half breed but then such a nice one. When she was over in England she was received everywhere and she recited for the Princess of Wales.” Maybe Margaret was a little too insistent that the Johnson family was “nice,” but Pauline’s achievements counted for something. Charles’s mother and sister were not unhappy with the engagement.

  Meanwhile, Pauline herself was less certain about the match than she appeared. Charlie was doubtless a dear boy. But unlike her suitor Michael Mackenzie, a decade earlier, apparently he did not inspire a single love poem. No “wave-rocked and passion-tossed” verses survive from 1897; no young Apollo throws the poet into a painful emotional maelstrom. The few poems that can be dated to this period are mainly about Indians and Indian legends. “The Corn Husker,” dating from 1896, describes an old Indian woman, bent with age and hunger, scavenging for forgotten cobs after the corn harvest. Pauline’s growing commitment to her Indian heritage, despite developments in her personal life, is unmistakeable:

  And all her thoughts are with the days gone by,

  ‘Ere might’s injustice banished from their lands

  Her people, that today unheeded lie,

  Like the dead husks that rustle through her hands.

  Deliberately defying convention, Pauline insisted that she would continue stage recitals after her wedding. “It is a matter for congratulation,” reported the Brantford paper, “that Miss Johnson does not intend to abandon her professional life.” She was still busy embellishing her image as “the Indian poetess.” A few months earlier, on a second visit to Fort Macleod, she had seen a Blood Indian chief ride into town at the head of fifty warriors in war paint and buckskin. The chief had seventeen Sioux scalps hanging on his belt. “The desire of my life had been to possess an Indian scalp,” Pauline confessed to an officer of the North-West Mounted Police. The latter persuaded the chief to present to the Mohawk maiden one of his trophies, decorated with rows of turquoise-blue Hudson’s Bay Company beads. Pauline immediately attached this treasure to the waist of her own Indian costume. It is hard to imagine that marriage to young Charlie was going to extinguish her resolve “to stand by my blood and my race.” A life of five-o’clock At Homes in Rosedale would never be enough for a woman whose idea of a corsage was sometimes a Sioux scalp.

  A few days after her engagement was announced, Pauline demonstrated her determination to continue her career by setting off for the promised tour of Western towns. Despite –30 degree Celsius temperatures and mountainous snowdrifts, she boarded the CPR train westbound. But when she arrived in Regina on February 20, she found a telegram with dreadful news from Brantford. Her mother was very ill. Pauline cancelled her bookings, turned around and clambered aboard the next train going in the opposite direction. The weather was so bad that the eastbound train could only crawl along the thousands of miles of track or steam to a standstill when snow blocked the rails. For seven wretched, long days, Pauline stared out at blizzards or tried to concentrate on the piece of velvet she was embroidering. She changed trains in North Bay and then in Toronto. At Union Station, she was touched to find Charles’s mother, Margaret Drayton, waiting on the platform, ready to accompany her on the last leg of the journey to Brantford. The train journey was an opportunity for Mrs. Drayton to get to know her future daughter-in-law, but it was also a kind gesture of support for an exhausted and grief-struck woman. By the time the two women stumbled through the front door of 7 Napoleon Street, Emily Johnson was unconscious. Less than an hour later, she passed away.

  All the old friends congregated for Emily’s funeral. The Reverend Mackenzie conducted a short service in the house, then a longer one at the Mohawk Chapel. There were three Indian and three non-native pallbearers, just as there had been fourteen years earlier for George Johnson. The Indians were Allen Johnson, Chief William Wedge and Chief John Hill. The non-natives were Colonel J. T. Gilkison, the former Superintendent of the Reserve, Mr. Dingman, Inspector of Indian Affairs, and Hugh Harts-horne, Pauline’s former paddling partner, who was now an up-and-coming Toronto lawyer. “Mother had requested that Old Hundred be sung at her funeral,” Evelyn recalled sadly, “and this was done.” As the hymn “All People That on Earth Do Dwell” filled the chapel, Pauline stifled her tears and stared at the mounds of flowers covering the coffin. Among the wreaths were several from Johnson relatives, such as Mansel Rogers in Kingston, the Washingtons from Hamilton and Miss Howells from Toronto. Charlie’s mother brought violets, and he himself wired an order from Winnipeg for cut flowers from a Brantford florist.

  Emily Howells Johnson always insisted to her
children that it was possible to honour both their Mohawk and their British heritages.

  Evelyn, Allen and Pauline Johnson stood together in the front pew, stiff with self-control. Emily Johnson’s death was a painful wrench for each of them. She had helped her children define who they were and had bequeathed to them an intimidatingly stern example of how to behave. It wasn’t just her insistence on well-pressed collars and perfect table manners. It was also the commitment she had instilled to both their Mohawk and their English blood. After the funeral, Pauline read and reread the newspaper obituaries. The Brantford Expositor spoke of Emily’s deep religious faith: “The deceased was sincerely beloved by all who knew her, and her true Christian life and many estimable qualities endeared her to all with whom she came into contact.” The Toronto Globe delved further back into history: “Elderly people…will remember well the astonishment with which society received the news of the engagement and subsequent marriage of the popular and much-admired Miss Emily Howells to a full-blooded Indian, Chief Johnson by name. That this unusual marriage should have turned out most happily is only another proof of the fact that what everybody says is not necessarily true.”

  Pauline must have compared her parents’ perfect marriage to her proposed union with Charlie Drayton. Would he respect her Indian blood as Emily had respected George Johnson’s? Or would her fiancé Charlie behave as the character Charlie McDonald had behaved in her story “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” and regard his British heritage as superior to the native heritage of his Indian bride? As she had sat with Charlie’s mother on the train journey from Toronto to Brantford, Pauline had been charming but uncompromising about her pride in her Mohawk heritage. She was not prepared to try to “pass as white.” “She told mother,” Margaret reported to Agnes Drayton, “that she had always said she never would marry a white man but you see she is going to after all…Mother and in fact all of us are quite contented about the match as she is devoted to Charlie and he to her.”

  A string of crises put the relationship under severe stress in the next few months. First, Pauline developed a throat infection, probably triggered by staphylococcus bacteria related to the erysipelas that had killed her father. The throat infection led to a bout of the rheumatic fever that would dog Pauline for the rest of her life and that would weaken her heart. She tried to fulfill recital commitments in Toronto, Ottawa, Sudbury and the northern United States, but was repeatedly forced to retreat to Brantford to rest. Next, Charles Drayton’s own mother, who was only fifty-one, died suddenly and unexpectedly in early July; the cause of her death is not recorded. And at the end of July, Pauline and Evelyn had to go through the emotionally taxing process of dismantling the Napoleon Street household. Allen had already found lodgings elsewhere, Evelyn could not afford to live there alone and Pauline made it clear that she would never return permanently.

  Evelyn insisted on dividing up their family possessions item by item. She negotiated with her sister as to who would have the red tablecloth and the photo of the Grand River Canoe Club (Pauline), and who would take the paper rack, two large milk bowls and their mother’s linen blouse (Evelyn). Pauline’s careless attitude to possessions exasperated Evelyn, who scraped by on her meagre salary and treasured every reminder of past happiness. “Where is the pleat for the front of the linen blouse?” she later complained to Pauline. “I saw you with it, you said you did not want it, but I can’t find it. It was embroidered with pink lining.”

  Poor Evelyn. Neither sister now had a home of her own, but Pauline’s prospects appeared so much more glamorous and secure than those of her elder sister. While Pauline was about to marry into a well-off family and had her own income from her poetry, Evelyn must now make her way in the world as an impoverished, ill-educated, forty-four-year-old spinster. The Brantford newspapers rubbed salt in Evelyn’s wound by its constant attention to her younger sister. When their mother passed away, the Brantford Expositor headlined its story, “Mother of Pauline Johnson Died Last Night After Lengthy Illness.” When they finished packing up the house, the Brantford Courier announced Pauline’s departure: “Countless friends and admirers of Brantford’s talented authoress, Miss E. Pauline Johnson will be sorry to learn that she is about to sever the ties which have hitherto bound her to this community. Tomorrow she leaves on an eastern tour then followed by a trip through the North-West. After this her marriage takes place in Winnipeg.” There was no mention of the sister who had nursed Emily through her lengthy illness, who now remained in humble lodgings in Brantford, working as a typist for the Waterous Engine Works.

  But Pauline already knew that her supposedly rosy future was less settled than Evelyn imagined. Her engagement was unravelling. She had barely seen Charles for the previous five months, and doubts on both sides eroded their confidence in a shared future. There is no evidence of exactly what went wrong. Was Charles irritated by Pauline’s insistence that she should continue to perform as “the Indian poetess”? Did Pauline find Charlie a little too conventional, his expectations too constricting? When Charlie’s mother died, did Pauline lose her strongest Drayton supporter and Charlie find his elder brother Henry’s snobbish disapproval too much to resist? Whatever the cause, the engaged couple made less and less effort to see each other. They kept up the pretense of an impending wedding. Pauline’s friends continued to assume that the marriage would go ahead. “I…congratulate you heartily on your approaching entry into double bliss,” Ernest Thompson Seton wrote from Manitoba, where he had already heard Charles Drayton described, he reported, as “a fine fellow.” Pauline’s future, though, appeared increasingly uncertain.

  Pauline’s response to uncertainty was to throw herself into a demanding schedule of recitals, under the direction of a new manager, Thomas E. Cornyn. She had the usual reason for a new tour: she needed the money. But more complicated motives were involved, too. She was determined to continue with her professional life. And she was damned if she was going to let Charlie think she was a wilting violet or that age or grief was slowing her down. So she put herself back on the treadmill of small towns, bad hotels and uncomfortable travel. In the early fall, she completed another Western tour on the main CPR line. “September is a good month for entertainment,” she wrote to a member of the Department of Education in the North-West Territories (now Saskatchewan). “The harvest money is in, the schools are open etc. This is all business detail, but we must all take small things into consideration in these matters.” In late November, she took a trip up the branch line from Portage la Prairie to Yorkton, performing in the tiny settlements of Minnedosa, Rapid City, Birtle, Binscarth, Russell and Saltcoats. She followed this with another branch-line tour, from Regina to Clouston, calling in at Saskatoon and Duck Lake, the community in which seventeen people had been killed during the 1885 North-West Rebellion.

  It is hard to imagine a sadder or more gruelling period in Pauline’s life. Her health was still poor (there were regular attacks of rheumatic fever), and she was now travelling by herself in the depths of a harsh Prairie winter. She had to entertain her audience solo for over two hours, with only a few minutes’ break as she changed from buckskin to satin. It also meant long journeys sitting alone in the railway carriage, alternately freezing and boiling according to the whims of unreliable heating systems, watching the flat white expanse of snow-shrouded prairie, its few trees glistening with ice, slip past the window. When massive snowstorms brought the locomotive grinding to a halt, there was only Pauline to telegraph ahead and reschedule. When she finally arrived at a destination, huddled in a threadbare wool cloak against the bitter wind, there was no Owen Smily to help carry the bags and arrange overnight lodging. In the hotel dining room, she could expect only her own company. When she felt tears flood her eyes because the audience was poor, the train was delayed or the memory of her mother’s death stabbed her, there was no one to raise her morale.

  Perhaps she and Charlie were still exchanging fond letters at this stage. But even the occasional billets doux would not blot out the h
ardships and indignities of a theatrical tour through the boondocks in the depths of winter. “Now, friends,” the master of ceremonies at a shabby little hall in Medicine Hat said, by way of introduction, “before Miss Johnson’s exercises begin, I want you to remember that Injuns, like us, is folks!” An expression of weariness and disillusion begins to creep into photographs of the poet from this period. Her skin was still velvet-soft; when she smiled, warmth flooded her face and her eyes sparkled. But in repose, her lips formed a thin, grim line, and the grooves etched from nose to mouth had deepened. The loneliness must have been almost unbearable. She had no stage partner, little real prospect of marriage to Charles, the vaguest of plans for the future and no home of her own. While she was on tour in February 1899, she heard that the Manitoba Hotel had burnt to the ground. Even her tenuous connection with Winnipeg had gone up in flames.

  Two weeks after Emily’s funeral in 1898, Pauline had received a letter that Emily had written and mailed to her daughter as her death approached. Pauline could not bring herself to open the letter straight away. She kept the sealed envelope in her jewellery case, occasionally pulling it out on chilly nights in Portage la Prairie, Russell or Saltcoats, and staring at the familiar handwriting. Weeks turned into months, and still the envelope remained sealed. Why couldn’t Pauline open it? What did she fear her mother had written? Did she suspect that Emily had poured out her hopes for a happy union between her daughter and Charlie, and for Pauline’s exit from the stage? Did Pauline feel that she had betrayed her mother’s hopes and could not bear Emily’s disappointment, even from beyond the grave? Or was it simply that while the letter was unopened, Pauline took comfort from an unfinished conversation with the mother she missed so much? She was losing Charlie; she couldn’t bear to accept that she had lost her mother too. The sealed envelope remained tucked amongst her rings and brooches, a talisman of Emily’s continued presence in her daughter’s life. “I shall go to my grave,” she confided to a friend in later years, “with the seal of my mother’s last letter unbroken.”