Flint and Feather

by Charlotte Gray

  Pauline undoubtedly behaved beautifully at the reception, although she never warmed to the large-bosomed Mrs. Henshaw. Still, Julia’s imperious self-confidence and la-di-da manner made her irresistible material for a future sketch. Besides, Pauline had as her private audience Walter and her two young acolytes, Bert and Archie—or the “little divils,” as she had already tagged them.

  Despite Mrs. Henshaw’s overbearing presence, the voyage to England was a tranquil interlude for Pauline. She had managed to scrape together the money for her and Walter’s tickets by a variety of ingenious tactics. The previous August she had written to Ernest Thompson Seton—or “Wolf Man,” as she always called him—for advice on how to sell the wampum belt that was part of her costume. She hoped Seton might purchase it himself, since he was besotted with his romanticized version of aboriginal culture. She told him the belt was “valued at $1600.00 as are all Hiawatha League belts…but of course I would accept much less for it.” Seton himself was now doing extremely well; after the runaway success of Wild Animals I Have Known (1898), his first general-appeal book, he had become a prolific writer. Lives of the Hunted (1901) and Two Little Savages: Being the Adventures of Two Boys Who Lived as Indians and What They Learned (1903) were both bestsellers, allowing him to buy an estate in Connecticut where he ran “Indian camp-outs” for local boys. Seton referred to participants at these bonfires as “braves,” awarded feathers to those who demonstrated athletic prowess and threw himself into the role of “Black Wolf,” the medicine man. Now he forwarded Pauline’s request to a collector and sent Pauline a small loan. “You loyal Indian-man,” Pauline wrote back with gratitude.

  Pauline also travelled to Troy, New York, to ask her sister Evelyn for a loan. Evelyn was working as a matron in the YWCA hostel, but she still received her share of the rent from Chiefswood. (Pauline had already had her share; she had borrowed against future rents in 1900 to finance the proposed trip to Australia that Charles Wuerz was supposed to manage.) Eva was horrified to think that Walter would accompany Pauline on the trip. She told her younger sister that Walter’s vulgarity would damage her image, and she certainly wouldn’t help Pauline put a shadow on the Johnson name. Pauline was equally determined to take her court jester “Dink” with her to do the arduous legwork (carrying bags, finding taxis, delivering letters of introduction and promotional material). So the two sisters parted abruptly. Still, by one means or another, Pauline raised sufficient funds for her return to the Imperial capital. She remembered the triumphs of 1894—her success in the Ripons’ drawing room, the laudatory newspaper articles, the important friendships, the publication of The White Wampum. She could hardly wait to “get me again to England,” she told Seton, “where I know a large field in literature and art is open for me.”

  Once again, Pauline, this time with Walter in tow, landed at Liverpool’s grimy docks. Once again, she took the cramped, creaky British train to London’s Euston Station and made her way to Holland Park. She had found lodgings this time in St. James’s Square (subsequently renamed St. James’s Gardens), one block west of Portland Road, in an attractive four-storey Georgian townhouse. Number 53 St. James’s Square had been divided up into small apartments; she took one and Walter occupied a second studio apartment. Pauline’s rooms overlooked the stolid mid-Victorian church that sat in the middle of the square’s communal garden like a stern navy-uniformed nanny. An Anglican clergyman was also a boarder in the house.

  Walter was thrilled to be in London for the first time in his life, and was soon exploring the neighbourhood and chatting up strangers in pubs. Pauline proceeded more slowly; she unpacked her battered steamer trunk, carefully arranging her remaining Indian artefacts around the room, and made a mental list of the friendships she would like to renew.

  Within days of her arrival, she discovered that London had changed a great deal since her first visit. When Pauline had last seen the great metropolis, the elderly widow Queen Victoria was still on the throne and the city exuded a solemn self-importance. The louche behaviour of Bertie, Prince of Wales, had triggered the occasional scandal during the 1890s, but by and large the aristocracy had ostensibly conformed to rigid standards of conduct. The growing middle class had followed suit. Despite the ferment of fin-de-siècle iconoclasm that had galvanized “thinking London” on Pauline’s last visit, conformity had stifled innovation in the arts. The London County Council kept a censorious eye on music hall lyrics. Oscar Wilde’s outrageously unorthodox tastes had resulted in both a term in jail and social ostracism. (Novelist E. F. Benson, author of the gossipy As We Were: A Victorian Peepshow, dismissed Wilde as “an exceedingly witty trifler.”)

  But by 1906, the Edwardian Age had dawned. As soon as Pauline stepped out of her front door, she could see, smell and feel the difference. Progress was in the air, and speed defined the mood. The streets were busier and noisier than ever, but now few vehicles other than hansom cabs and omnibuses were drawn by horses. The army of small boys who used to sweep up the manure had almost vanished. Humber and Daimler automobiles careered up Holland Park Avenue with much tooting of horns and squealing of hard rubber tires. Electrified trams clanged down rails in the centre of the main roads. If Pauline wanted to visit Oxford Street, she could take the new “tube railway,” which had opened in 1900 and ran all the way to Bank, in the heart of the City of London, from Notting Hill Gate station, for the flat fare of twopence. King Edward VII and his beautiful wife, Alexandra, had removed the shutters at Buckingham Palace, installed electric lighting and reintroduced the habit of state balls at which guests drank copious amounts of champagne and dined off gold plate. The look of the London crowds was different too. Women’s waists had shrunk and their hats had grown—often to monumentally picturesque widths—while men, in imitation of the new monarch, had abandoned top hats in favour of soft Homburgs.

  The theatre scene had caught the “anything goes” mood: tastes were changing and the appetite for popular entertainment was growing. There was a boom in concert hall and theatre construction. Just down the road from Pauline, the copper cupola of Notting Hill Gate’s Coronet Theatre, which had opened in 1898, towered over neighbouring butchers’ and stationers’ shops. Fifteen more theatres would be built in London between 1900 and 1913. In 1905 the King and Queen broke several taboos when they visited the Palace Theatre in Cambridge Circus to see operetta. Music hall entertainers were now attracting professional and titled audiences in addition to their working-class regulars. King Edward himself was known to hum the tune of “Hulloah! Hulloah! Hulloah!”—a risqué number that was a staple of “the Great and Only” Marie Lloyd, the music hall favourite. (Marie Lloyd’s songs, loaded with innuendo, included “She’d Never Had Her Ticket Punched Before” and “She Doesn’t Know That I Know What I Know.”)

  With this cornucopia of public entertainment, wealthy Londoners had lost their taste for the kind of starchy drawing-room recitals with which Pauline had scored such success twelve years earlier. When Pauline started calling on old friends and delivering letters of introduction to new acquaintances, she didn’t make much headway. Hamilton Aidé was now nearly eighty and seldom came to London; “Time flies with old people,” his companion, Genevieve Ward, wrote apologetically. Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s letter of introduction to Lord Brassey, a former Secretary to the Admiralty, didn’t cut any ice. “Lord Brassey desires me to say,” replied his private secretary to Pauline, “that he would feel greatly obliged to you if you would inform him as to the subject on which you desire to have an interview with him. At the present time he has many engagements and the difficulty in making appointments is considerable.” Pauline’s letter of introduction to the Duke of Argyll drew a similar blank; his secretary sent his lordship’s regrets, with the information that the latter “would not be in London with the exception of two days from time to time.” Even her Ottawa connections gave her the brush-off. Belle Scott, wife of the poet and civil servant Duncan Campbell Scott, had taken rooms close to Hyde Park for the London season. But when Paul
ine wrote Mrs. Scott a note to ask if she could call, she received this reply: “I am so sorry but I have an engagement for today, also am full up tomorrow and Wednesday.”

  A few old friends welcomed Pauline back. She was received enthusiastically by Lady Blake, the lively Irish wife of Sir Henry Austin Blake, who had spent several years as Governor of Jamaica before holding a similar position in Ceylon. The elegant Lady Ripon invited the Iroquois poet to dinner again. Pauline deliberately did not introduce Walter to her aristocratic friends, but this time she was bold enough to appear for the Ripons’ formal dinner in her Indian costume. A young Guards officer, Lord Cecil Manners, who made up for in height what he lacked in intelligence, was stunned to be asked to take her into dinner. He gazed at the wampum belts, listened to her sophisticated conversation, then stuttered during dessert: “I say, Miss Johnson, you are the most absorbing woman.” But Lord Manners’s reaction was not enough to persuade Lady Ripon to invite Pauline to return for a recital in her drawing room.

  Pauline was also less successful than she had hoped in placing stories and poems for publication. The editor of Canada, a newspaper published in London, turned down her account of travelling up the Cariboo Trail (which Saturday Night published the following October) and an article about Newfoundland. The editor of Chums, a boys’ magazine with the postal address “La Belle Sauvage, E.C.,” said he was “a little doubtful as to whether I can have the advantage of your assistance.”

  Lastly, there were few opportunities to perform. As soon as Pauline and Walter had arrived in England, they had registered with Keith Prowse, the theatrical booking agency, which included them in their newspaper advertisements under the heading “American and Colonial Artists.” (Other entertainers in this category included “Cole and Johnson, the American Coloured Duettists,” “Mr. Frank Lawton, Whistling Extraordinary,” and “Dr. Byrd Page, prestidigitateur.”) Pauline’s striking stationery included a picture of the “Iroquois Indian Poet Reciter” in costume and announced that she and “Mr. Walter McRaye, Humorist” were “Now Touring England.” But bookings were scarce, and the partnership never left London. Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show had toured England repeatedly, and interest in “noble savages” had peaked. There was still a market amongst small boys for stories of braves in buckskin—boys such as Archie Belaney, in the seaside town of Hastings. Belaney was so fired up by Buffalo Bill’s 1903 visit to Hastings and by Ernest Thompson Seton’s story Two Little Savages that he was already fantasizing himself into a completely different life. In the 1930s he would become an international celebrity as Grey Owl, the “Indian” environmentalist. But as far as a London booking agency like Keith Prowse was concerned, professional Indians were passé. Pauline suggested to the agency that the Johnson–McRaye act would be good for garden parties. “I note what you say…[but] I have not yet received any enquiries,” the manager wrote back.

  In London, Pauline became a protege of Canadian High Commissioner Lord Strathcona, whose own children were of mixed heritage.

  Once again, however, the expatriate Canadian community rallied to Pauline’s side. In 1894, the Canadian High Commissioner, Sir Charles Tupper, had been more than happy to take the young Mohawk poet under his wing. Sir Charles had been succeeded by the Scots-born financier Donald Smith. Before he returned to Britain and became the first Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal, Smith had been one of the most powerful men in the Dominion of Canada. He started life as a fur trader with the Hudson’s Bay Company, rose through the ranks to become the Company’s chief shareholder and Governor, and went on to become the President of the Bank of Montreal who gave crucial backing to the Canadian Pacific Railway. He had made and unmade John A. Macdonald’s governments, and his stalwart support of the CPR had earned him the privilege of driving the ceremonial last spike into the track high in the Selkirk Mountains in November 1885.

  By 1906, Lord Strathcona was a bearded patriarch of eighty-six, and had established himself at Canada House, in Trafalgar Square, as a ferocious champion of all things Canadian. He was delighted to become Pauline’s patron. He had met her some years earlier when they were both crossing the Prairies on the CPR and he had invited her to join him for breakfast in the dining car. As a gesture of thanks for his hospitality, Pauline had presented him with two poems about CPR trains, entitled “Prairie Greyhounds,” written on the back of the menu card. How could a self-made railway magnate who believed that the CPR would be the making of Canada resist a poet who serenaded the company’s westbound express in such lines as

  I swing to the sunset land—

  The world of prairie, the world of plain,

  The world of promise and hope and gain,

  The world of gold, and the world of grain,

  And the world of the willing hand.

  …

  I swing to the “Land to Be,”

  I am the power that laid its floors,

  I am the guide to its western stores,

  I am the key to its golden doors,

  That open alone to me.

  There was a further reason why Lord Strathcona made a particular fuss over Pauline. His own children, like Pauline, were of mixed heritage because his wife Bella, with whom he was deeply in love, was part Cree. He had frequently made speeches about the importance of religious and racial tolerance. During his successful election campaign in 1871 for a seat in both the Manitoba legislature and the Dominion Parliament, he had appealed to his audience to drop their prejudices against the Métis people. “Who are these Half-breeds?” he roared. “They are, let me say, men having in their veins blood of some of the best families in Scotland, England, France and Ireland.”

  Pauline’s elegance was undiminished, despite the advancing years.

  In London, Lord and Lady Strathcona immediately put Pauline on the guest list for several forthcoming events. It was a good thing that Donald Smith had made an immense fortune, since the Strathconas never did things by half—the main challenge at their parties was crowd control. (“Old Strathcona is a dear old man,” noted the fourth Earl of Minto, Governor General in Ottawa between 1898 and 1904, “but his hospitality was simply overpowering. Huge luncheons and dinners every day…one night there were around 1,000 present.”) Pauline and her partner, along with Bert Cope and the famous Canadian soprano Madame Albani, were invited to perform at the Dominion Day celebrations that the High Commission was organizing (and for which Strathcona was footing the bill) at the Imperial Institute in Kensington. Walter was among the 400 men who received engraved invitations to the Dominion Day “Men Only” dinner to be held at the Hotel Cecil on the Strand. Guests dined on salmon trout, ris de veau, mousse de jambon au champagne, saddle of mutton and “pêches albani glacées.” And both Pauline and Walter were among the 2,000 people invited to the Strathconas’ garden party to be held on July 14 at Knebworth House, the country estate in Hertfordshire that Strathcona had rented for 2,000 pounds a year from the Bulwer-Lytton family. The band of the Royal Artillery oompahed their way through Souza favourites while the likes of Sir Sandford Fleming and Miss Baden-Powell sipped strawberry cream soda, wandered through elaborate gardens and gazed in awe at Knebworth’s crenellated towers and Gothic gargoyles.

  “My dear Sir Wilfrid,” Pauline wrote to the Canadian Prime Minister. “I feel that you will be interested and gratified to know that your gracious and flattering letter, introducing me to Lord Strathcona, has been the means of practically giving me a place in Society that I could never have attained without your introduction and his kindly aid.”

  The Strathconas gave Pauline a social entrée, but another well-known Canadian in London, novelist and parliamentarian Sir Gilbert Parker, gave Pauline the professional contacts she required. Born near Kingston, Ontario, the forty-six-year-old Parker was an intense and determined writer with a dazzling résumé. He had worked as a journalist in Australia, settled in England in 1890, published more than a dozen books plus assorted plays and volumes of poetry, married the American heiress Amy Van Tine, been electe
d to the Westminster Parliament as a Conservative-Unionist and received a knighthood in 1902. Several of his novels, including The Seats of the Mighty and When Valmond Came to Pontiac, were big bestsellers; he had adapted The Seats of the Mighty into an equally successful stage play starring Herbert Beerbohm Tree.

  Canadian-born Gilbert Parker (1862–1932) was both a British MP and one of the most successful authors in the British Empire.

  Parker had met Pauline briefly at Hamilton Aide’s salon in 1894. At the time, he had recently published The Translation of a Savage, a novel about a beautiful Indian maiden who marries an upper-class Englishman. Parker’s views on women were regressive even by the standards of the time (“When women in England get the vote,” he snorted in 1906 when confronted by a suffragette, “I shall take the veil”). But he immediately took an almost proprietary interest in the Mohawk poet because his “Savage” heroine was as beautiful and demure—and as challenging to British views on race and class—as Tekahionwake. Since then, Parker’s literary reputation had spread, helped along by gushing reviews from old friends like Bliss Carman and Duncan Campbell Scott. (Carman described Parker as “Canada’s Kipling.”)

  Thanks to his own success and his wife’s money, Parker managed to infiltrate London’s xenophobic and haughty literary elite—no mean feat for a Canadian. He achieved this by a judicious mix of name-dropping and lavish hospitality. He often mentioned that both American industrialist Andrew Carnegie and Canadian Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier were close personal friends. Whenever he and his wife, Amy, visited his native land, he confided to British aristocrats, they stayed with the Mintos at Government House. He displayed prominently a photo of himself chatting with Edward VII at the Austrian spa Marienbad. He joined the best clubs, went to the leading tailor on Savile Row and frequented only the most fashionable resorts. Most important, he mixed powerful British politicians and leading writers at his parties in his large, elegant home just off Pall Mall and provided them with delicious dinners and original entertainments. The Parkers’ soirees at 20 Carlton House Terrace were legendary: North American visitors such as William Van Horne, Charles G. D. Roberts and Mark Twain would rub shoulders with literary lions such as Arthur Conan Doyle and J. M. Barrie and political heavyweights such as Joseph Chamberlain and the young Winston Churchill.