Flint and Feather

by Charlotte Gray

  Pauline was in her element. By now, she was such a skilled performer that she knew exactly how to play her audience. One of the most popular numbers in the Johnson–McRaye programme was “At the Ball,” in which two guests at a ball given in Kensington Lunatic Asylum mistake each other for inmates. The sketch brought the house down. Pauline also knew that her Kootenay fans preferred humour and sentiment to high art; she usually followed “At the Ball” with a poem of pathos or patriotism that was guaranteed not to leave a dry eye in the house. In fact, she had become a bit of a ham. This approach suited wheezy miners and lumbermen, but her old admirers and the big city critics felt she had lost her finesse. When she and Walter finally emerged from the Kootenays in September to give a recital in Vancouver, the Vancouver Province critic remarked that she was struck by the “marked change which two or three years have brought about in her stage manner, her pose and even her delivery. Not that she has depreciated in any of these points but there is an air in all of them that is more professional and perhaps less charmingly ingenuous.” An old friend from Brantford, T. S. H. Shearman, was harsher. He much preferred “the beautiful, timid Pauline Johnson of 1885” to the accomplished performer he now saw. With the blunt insensitivity of “an old friend,” he told acquaintances that she had bartered her “divine gifts for a wretched mess of pottage.” It was the same criticism that Harry O’Brien had made back in 1894.

  A similar note of fastidious distaste emerged in the reviews of Pauline’s second book of poetry. She had always planned to publish another book to solidify her credibility as a poet. Once she had paired up with Walter, she was able to prepare thirty-one poems for publication in 1903 by George Morang of Toronto in a volume entitled Canadian Born. The collection was difficult for critics to encompass since it includes both “highbrow” romantic verse and “lowbrow” stage recitations. Reflective poems like “Fire-flowers” and “Silhouette,” which she had written while she was with Owen Smily, are interspersed with “Riders of the Plains” and the title poem that she had written later specifically for performance. Her London editor had rejected several of the poems when he was making his selection for The White Wampum. However, there are also some accomplished poems in the collection of which Pauline had every right to be proud—poems such as “The Corn Husker,” which combine an eye for detail with the energy and sense of injustice of her earlier Indian narratives:

  Hard by the Indian lodges, where the bush

  Breaks in a clearing, through ill-fashioned fields,

  She comes to labour, when the first still hush

  Of autumn follows large and recent yields.

  Age in her fingers, hunger in her face,

  Her shoulders stooped with weight of work and years,

  But rich in tawny colouring of her race,

  She comes a-field to strip the purple ears.

  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.

  Nevertheless, there is a slipshod quality to Canadian Born. It is best typified by Pauline’s clumsy dedication to every potential reader she could capture: “Let him who is Canadian born regard these poems as written to himself whether he may be my paleface compatriot, who has given me his right hand of good fellowship in the years I have appealed to him by pen and platform, or whether he be that dear Red brother of whatsoever tribe or province, it matters not—White race and Red are one if they are but Canadian Born.”

  The review in the Globe was typical: “We had looked to see the level of her work sustained if not heightened by the passing years and I must confess to a feeling of disappointment. The collection at hand gives so little evidence of her finer imaginative vision and more cultivated poetic diction.”

  The negative reviews stung. But Pauline had developed a tough skin, at least in public, and had learned from Walter to emphasize the positive. “Poor book!” she wrote flippantly to Harry O’Brien. “The Toronto Globe and Saturday Night gave it a most scathing roast. But the News and the Montreal Star gave me such splendid reviews. Lady Laurier wrote me such a kind letter…Well, I must try a novel now, and get criticised.” She had little time these days, though, to sit down and write anything. Her Kootenays trip had more than covered its costs, but she was still in debt. Rents for halls in Eastern Canada or cities like Winnipeg and Vancouver were high and competition for audiences fierce. So Pauline stayed on the small-town circuit, where she and Walter could keep expenses down and audiences up. In addition, two of the handful of poems she wrote in these years were commissioned pieces: “Canada for the Canadians” for the Summerland (BC) Development Company and “Made in Canada” for the Manufacturers Association’s annual banquet in Brantford. Both were designed to elicit bonhomie and patriotic cheers from businessmen after a good dinner.

  The Johnson–McRaye schedule was relentless. In late 1902, they played the Prairie towns along the CPR route as they returned east. In 1903, they played various venues in Michigan and Illinois. (Pauline found the people of Michigan “very uncultured, very ignorant, very illiterate,” she told Harry O’Brien. “Daily I grow to be more and more of a ‘Cannuck’ and Mr. McRaye is quite rabid as a Canadian patriot now.”) In 1904, the partnership headed west again, ending up with a YWCA-sponsored concert in Vancouver’s Pender Auditorium to raise money for a new ladies’ hostel in the city. From there they travelled all over Vancouver Island and the Fraser Valley. In May, they were in Alberta; in June, they were back in BC’s mining towns. In July, they made the 400-mile (nearly 650-kilometre) trip by horse and buggy up the Cariboo Trail to Barkerville, the site of the 1862 Gold Rush, giving concerts every time they stopped to change horses. The well-attended concerts were often followed by exuberant square dances. Pauline was thrilled by the adventure, and she was soon in rude health: “I slept like a baby, laughed like a child and ate like a lumber jack.” They spent the fall of 1904 appearing throughout Manitoba and around Regina before returning to Ontario. In January 1905, Pauline and Walter launched a new tour which began in Ontario, moved into New York State and up into New Brunswick, then circled back into Northern Ontario. In September, they travelled west again to help the newly formed Prairie provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan celebrate their births. They jogged backwards to Manitoba for November and December.

  It was a breathless pace, and Pauline must have felt that her home was a railway coach. At one point, Harry O’Brien asked for the return of a book he had lent her. “Now Mr. McRaye and I have been in a stew over that booklet for months, we have misplaced it somewhere, but where? Some of our stuff, our books, pictures etc. are at Mr. McRaye’s home, some with Allen and some with Mrs. Washington.” The recitalists didn’t always steam along in the comfort of a Pullman car; in order to get to the next town in time for the show, they often had to hitch rides in the cabooses of freight trains, construction trains and gasoline jiggers. There wasn’t a branch line in Ontario that they didn’t get to know intimately, whether it was the Brockville, Westport and Sault Ste. Marie line (known as the Brockville, Westport and Seldom See Money Railway) or the Kingston and Pembroke line (known as the Kick and Push). Most of these railways were unreliable and underfinanced: the BW&SSM never reached Sault Ste. Marie, and the K&P never reached Pembroke.

  “Throughout it all,” recalled Walter in his memoirs, “Pauline Johnson kept her splendid spirit of optimism. Life with its many ups and downs, it successes and failures, never grew stale…Our entertainments were given under all sorts of auspices and for all kinds of charities. In one Ontario village the funds were to purchase a wooden leg for the town constable.” In Kuskanook, BC, the Johnson–McRaye partnership performed on top of a billiard table in one of the town’s eighteen saloons to help raise money for the community’s first church.

  The rigours of constant travel were alleviated by the easy relationship that had developed between the two recitalists. As
the train steamed west or the coach bounced north, Walter would read to Pauline from her treasured copy of Swinburne’s poetry while she sewed or embroidered. Other times he would make her roar with laughter with the outrageous adventures of a whole host of imaginary companions: elves, a cat called “Dave Dougherty,” an insect called “Felix the Bug” and “Baraboo Montelius” the mongoose. Pauline’s siblings and friends resented Walter’s baby talk, his endless bragging and the way he never let anyone else near to his “Lady.” But to Pauline, he was always “the same unselfish, considerate boy.”

  Occasionally there were holidays with old friends. In August 1903, thanks to her Brantford canoeing partner Alick Mackenzie (younger brother of her beau Michael), Pauline was able to rediscover the pleasures of life under canvas next to a lake that the Canadian Illustrated News described as “possibly the prettiest locality in Canada.” Alick Mackenzie was now an ordained minister, like his father, and the headmaster of the Grove, a small private boys’ school in Lakefield, ten miles (sixteen kilometres) north of Peterborough on Lake Katchewanooka. Whenever Pauline was giving a concert in the Peterborough area, she would visit Alick and his wife in their comfortable stone home. Alick had always encouraged his students to spend their weekends paddling on the lake, or hiking and camping in the woods. Now he organized for Pauline an expedition into Stony Lake, two lakes north of Lake Katchewanooka in the Kawarthas.

  Pauline’s brother Allen and his new girlfriend, Floretta Maracle, a Mohawk schoolteacher from Ohsweken, joined Pauline, Walter and a large party of Mackenzies. So did a twenty-six-year-old woman and aspiring poet from Thorold, near St. Catharines, named Bertha Jean Thompson. Jean had met Pauline earlier in the year when Pauline and Walter gave a recital in Thorold, where Jean’s father was the owner, editor and publisher of the local newspaper, the Thorold Post. “All the girls fell in love with Pauline,” Jean later reminisced. In a typically spontaneous gesture of friendship, Pauline had invited her young admirer to join the camping party. The group spent long sunny days paddling among Stony Lake’s 1,200 rocky islands or along the dramatic red granite rocks of its north shore. Pauline and Jean even called on Kate Traill on her three-acre island, called Minewawa. Kate was the daughter of Catharine Parr Traill, author of The Backwoods of Canada, who had been known as “the oldest living writer in the British Empire” before her death, aged ninety-seven, four years earlier. Pauline marked this occasion for Jean by presenting her with a copy of Canadian Born. For the rest of her life, Bertha Jean Thompson would treasure the volume, with Pauline’s inscription: “Minewawa, August 1903.” When Jean (under the pen name “Thornapple”) later published a slim volume of her own verse, entitled A Glimpse into My Garden, she dedicated it to Pauline.

  The two Johnsons, Allen and Pauline, thrilled their fellow campers with their canoeing skills, and Allen fed the party with a steady diet of freshly caught salmon trout, cooked on an open fire. Walter wore an eccentric succession of hats (a fez, a boater, an NWMP felt hat) and imitated everybody’s accents. In the evenings, as the loons called and the stars twinkled, Alick led singsongs round the glowing embers. If Pauline closed her eyes, she could almost imagine she was back on Lake Rosseau with the Brantford Canoe Club. The only shadow on this idyllic interval in Pauline’s hectic schedule was her brother Allen’s mounting exasperation with Walter’s constant chatter, familiarity and antics.

  “Christmas on the road is a lonesome season for the touring entertainer,” remarked Walter in “East and West with Pauline Johnson,” an account of the Johnson–McRaye travels that he published in the Canadian Magazine in 1923. But one of the highlights of these busy years was the Christmas of 1905, which they spent in the lumbering and railroad town of Rainy River, on the Ontario–Minnesota border: “The spread set out here by the proprietor of the little hotel was a marvel. He had all kinds of meat—deer, bear, beaver, partridge, grouse, turkey and chicken.” Most of the local citizenry appeared for this feast, then stayed on for a barn dance and a performance by the entertainers. It was the kind of occasion that Pauline had come to love: spontaneous, high-spirited and filled with good cheer. It matched her mood because these days, at age forty-four, she had a new-found optimism about the future.

  The mature Pauline had taken two bold decisions. The first was to concentrate on literary activities that would yield a decent income. Primarily, this meant more recital tours. But it also meant a change of direction in her creative writing. In the past few months, Pauline had started writing in a genre that she was confident would be more lucrative than poetry. Her mentor Charles G. D. Roberts had already realized that although, in his words, he “lived for poetry,” he had to “live by prose.” Both he and Ernest Thompson Seton were quickly establishing reputations throughout the English-speaking world with nature and adventure stories for boys. Their success demonstrated that there was a market for short, lively, action-packed tales—a larger and better-paid market than for verse, although poetry was still regarded as the pre-eminent literary art. So Pauline followed suit. Earlier in the year, she had sent off to an Illinois-based magazine, The Boys’ World, a story entitled “Maurice of His Majesty’s Mail,” about a brave boy who faced down bandits in the Canadian West and delivered wages to an isolated mining camp. In October, Elizabeth Ansley, the associate editor, had sent an enthusiastic letter back, describing the story as “beautiful” and asking for two more submissions of about 2,200 words each as soon as possible. In November, Miss Ansley had written again, approving of Pauline’s suggestions for further stories. “What we are in need of are good Canadian stories,” Miss Ansley explained. “We have experienced considerable difficulty in procuring Canadian stories with the real patriotic ring—stories where the loyalty does not seem forced.” Miss Ansley assured Pauline that there would be little editorial interference in her prose, and asked her for a photograph to use in the magazine. The Boys’ World paid $6 per thousand words. For the first time in her life, Pauline was writing on commission rather than on spec.

  Pauline’s second decision was that she would return to London the following year. Ever since her 1894 triumph in the Imperial capital, she had dreamed of another visit. In early 1904, she had asked the Prime Minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, for letters of introduction to various distinguished London residents, including the Canadian High Commissioner in London, Lord Strathcona. Laurier had obligingly supplied such letters, informing the recipients that Miss Johnson belonged to “the powerful Indian tribe of the Six Nations” and was “a very highly cultured lady…endowed with a remarkable poetic talent and with high dramatic powers.” Now, nearly two years later and after four years of non-stop travelling, she had finally paid off most of her outstanding debts. She still did not have enough money to cover the costs of a transatlantic passage plus a flat in London, but she had some ideas on how to raise funds. And she had enough confidence in her stage skills that she felt ready to appear not in the confines of aristocratic drawing rooms, but in the more professional venue of a real theatre.

  17

  A PAGAN IN ST. PAUL’S 1906

  THE SS Lake Champlain, one of the CPR’s fleet of ten passenger liners on the North Atlantic, drew out of Saint John, New Brunswick, with little fanfare on a damp and dreary Saturday in April 1906. It steamed down the Bay of Fundy, rounded the southern tip of Nova Scotia and set course east for the seven-day crossing to Liverpool. The ship’s single stack belched out black smoke, and the CPR’s famous red and white chequered house flag fluttered in the chilly breeze.

  In the First Cabin, however, the mood was far from dreary. Most of the eleven passengers had already met on the CPR train journey across Maine from Montreal. It was a congenial group; besides Pauline and Walter, there were Ernest Ramsay Ricketts and the Henshaw family from Vancouver, Mr. and Mrs. Laird from Winnipeg and a Mrs. Sanford. There were also two young men who were thrilled to be travelling with the famous “Iroquois Indian Poet Reciter,” as Pauline was billed on her new stationery. Archie Morton was a student from Halifax; Bert Cop
e was a talented seventeen-year-old violinist from Vancouver. Bert’s mother, Margery Cope, had attended one of Pauline’s recitals in 1904 and gone backstage to congratulate her; she had told her son to make himself known to the famous poet. By the end of the voyage, Archie and Bert had both formed friendships with Pauline Johnson that would last a lifetime.

  Within a week of leaving Canada, Ernie Ricketts (who was manager of the Vancouver Opera House) had put together a shipboard concert in aid of the Liverpool Seamen’s Orphanage. It included a violin solo by Bert Cope and a comic recitation by Walter McRaye. Pauline’s name was not on the programme. Perhaps she had decided to take a well-earned rest or to stay out of the limelight to preserve her mystique. She had already discovered that she had some serious competition for the position of literary grande dame. Mrs. Julia Henshaw was a redoubtable Vancouver society hostess, novelist, journalist, botanist and Tory. Her wealthy husband, Charles, was a less impressive character: a gadfly who loved entertaining and was known as “Afternoon Tea Charlie.” His reputation in British Columbia had never recovered from an occasion a few years earlier, when he had persuaded all his dinner guests to don specially imported Parisian bathing costumes for an impromptu swim in his magnificent pool. Within ten minutes, his guests were scrambling for cover because the swimsuits had dissolved, and Charlie was laughing himself silly. Charlie’s frolics did not faze his wife. Julia had published a novel called Why Not, Sweetheart? and a book on Canadian wildflowers, and was a regular contributor to two of Vancouver’s newspapers, the Province and the News-Advertiser. She was also a formidable organizer. Three days after the concert, Julia Henshaw sent out invitations to a musical At Home from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. in the ship’s first-class saloon.