Flint and Feather

by Charlotte Gray

  Pauline’s heart probably went with them. She had been cooling on London even before she met the BC chiefs. She had already written for Sir Arthur Pearson’s Daily Express a series of articles under the byline “Tekahionwake (The Iroquois Poetess)” that drew heavily on her native heritage. The first of the four articles, “A Pagan in St. Paul’s: Iroquois Poetess’ Impressions in London’s Cathedral,” described a visit to St. Paul’s Cathedral, “where the paleface worships the Great Spirit.” The building’s architecture and the boys’ choir metamorphose into the “teepees of far Saskatchewan” and the “far-off cadences of the Sault Ste. Marie rapids, that rise and leap and throb…like the distant rising of an Indian war-song.” A second article, “The Lodge of the Law-Makers,” compared the Westminster Parliament, where male MPs argued vociferously across the floor, with the Iroquois system of government, in which chieftains chosen from certain families by tribal matriarchs quietly gnawed at an issue until consensus was reached. The final two articles, “The Silent News Carriers” and “Sons of Savages,” were straightforward accounts of life on the Six Nations Reserve.

  Pauline had developed for her Daily Express articles a new voice—the voice of a woman who had stepped straight from her Indian reserve (or from the world of Longfellow’s Hiawatha) to the centre of the “paleface’s” world. One article began, “Many moons before I set moccasined feet in these London highways…” A second opened with the observation, “It is a far cry from a wigwam to Westminster.” She called Buckingham Palace the “Tepee of the Great White Father” and the Houses of Parliament “this great council-house on the Thames river.” No one who read these articles would know that the author’s mother was born in Bristol and that Pauline herself could recite more English poetry than most English women. From a twenty-first-century perspective, Pauline’s cliché-ridden, faux naïf voice is jarring—a Pocohontas act designed to fit comfortably into British stereotypes of Indian maidens, based on the cartoon characters the British had seen in Buffalo Bill Cody’s shows and read about in the new genre of cowboys ‘n’ Injuns novels. At the time, though, the articles caused a sensation in London. Moreover, in their own way, they were subversive. “As with so much of Johnson’s writing,” point out critics Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag, “we soon discover another dimension.” Pauline used her Daily Express articles to score some serious points. In “A Pagan in St. Paul’s,” she asserted the equality of Indian spirituality and Christianity. In “The Lodge of the Law-Makers,” she pointed out that Iroquois women enjoyed a political power denied to British women. She regarded her Daily Express articles as amongst her best writing.

  After four months in St. James’s Square, Pauline’s investment in a second trip to England appeared to have paid off. The Daily Express articles, the Steinway Hall show and the publicity surrounding her meeting with the Indian chiefs secured new bookings for the Johnson–McRaye partnership. “A Pagan in St. Paul’s” attracted the interest of editors from a couple of other publications, who wrote to Pauline asking for contributions. “I am up to my ears in literature,” she gloated to Archie Morton. “Lots of orders for stories and good money in view.” Her friend Lady Blake suggested she do a tour in the British West Indies in January and February. Pauline quickly wrote to her most important patron: “My dear Sir Wilfrid…Could you give me letters to any of the governors general of the British Islands…I shall appear in Jamaica, the Barbados, the Bahamas, the Bermudas and Trinidad, also at Georgetown, British Guiana…Once more my dear Sir Wilfrid, I beg to thank you for your unnumbered kindnesses to me.” She also received what she described to Sir Wilfrid as “a splendid offer” from an American bureau to do a recital tour of several summer camps run by the Chautauqua movement in the American Midwest the following July.

  But none of these small victories could curb Pauline’s growing homesickness. She was increasingly exasperated by the sheer discomfort of living in London—the size of the city, the stark contrasts between rich and poor, British attitudes to colonials. As the chilly fogs of autumn mornings curled under the window sashes of her small rented apartment, Pauline felt the tug west. One particular incident confirmed her sense of alienation from the Mother Country, as most Canadians continued to call Britain.

  Late one night, Pauline was sitting in her rooms in St. James’s Square, writing at the table, when she heard someone walk down the hall and knock on the door of the Anglican clergyman. “He went out at all hours to visit the sick and dying, so I thought nothing of it when I heard two men pass,” she recalled for a Canadian friend some years later. At two in the morning, there was a knock on Pauline’s door. She gingerly opened it and was “horrified to see the clergyman standing there and shaking as though he had the palsy, while his face was the colour of ashes.”

  Pauline gave the poor man a glass of brandy and asked what had happened. The cleric explained that he had been summoned to baptise a dying child. He discovered that the address he had been given was a room in the worst slum imaginable, in which drunken men and women lay snoring on a bare and filthy floor. Leaning against a wall was a man who was stone-cold sober, with an infant in his arms. The man said to the clergyman, “This child will be dead in an hour and I want it baptised. But it’s only fair to tell you that the young woman lying drunk at my feet is its mother, and I am both its father and its grandfather.”

  The clergyman grimaced as he told the tale to Pauline. Nineteenth-century Christian doctrine declared that a child of incest was damned, but he knew that a helpless soul was waiting: “In the presence of death there I had to decide.” So he went ahead and baptised the baby, wondering all the while if he had perjured his own soul by this act.

  Pauline listened sympathetically to this appalling story, which haunted her for years. She was shocked at the idea of such squalid depravity, the likes of which she had never seen on the Six Nations Reserve or in her subsequent travels. However, it was not the state of the clergyman’s soul that troubled her but the hypocrisy of the British. As she put it to the friend in Canada, “With slums like this in the heart of London, they’ll dare to send missionaries to our Indians in Canada!”

  In November, Pauline finally booked passage home for herself and Walter on the CPR mail ship The Empress of Ireland, sailing on Friday, November 15, to Saint John, New Brunswick. Walter bid Lucy Webling a sad farewell, and Lucy promised to come to Canada in the near future. As Pauline watched the warehouses and hoists of the Liverpool docks recede into the horizon, she could mentally tick off an impressive catalogue of successes in the past few months: important new patrons, the Steinway Hall recital, the Daily Express articles, the prospect of tours in the West Indies and in the American Midwest. She had also had fun, both with Walter and with Bert Cope and Archie Morton, the “little divils” from the SS Lake Champlain. Bert Cope had booked passage on The Empress of Ireland, too, so he could remain close to his revered Iroquois poetess. Pauline had new London gowns in her trunk, plus souvenirs for her sister and coloured hat-bands for her brother Allen (“If you see anything extra in black and red, bring one of that,” he had requested on a postcard).

  But once again, Pauline was coming home penniless. As she retreated to her cabin, she turned her mind to her usual, dreary preoccupation: how was she going to earn her living in the coming year?

  18

  THE CHAUTAUQUA GRIND 1907–1908

  PAULINE’S second visit to England raised her morale. After a slow start, she had achieved her goals: satisfactory reviews, commissions and opportunities for 1907. Moreover, while she was in England she had managed to complete more pieces for The Boys’ World. When she submitted them to Elizabeth Ansley, the associate editor, Ansley accepted them enthusiastically. Most were run-of-the-mill adventure tales featuring plucky lads, loyal dogs and villainous bullies; all had happy endings. They were “red-blooded stories that will delight any real Canadian boy,” in Walter’s opinion. But a few were less conventional. Sometimes the hero was a wise Mohawk elder or a courageous Cree warrior. The most
startling story appeared in the January 19, 1907 issue of The Boys’ World. Entitled “We-eho’s Sacrifice,” it described in unflinching detail how a little boy’s pet dog was strangled so it could become the burnt offering in the White Dog ceremony of the Onondaga Indians. “To endorse both the strangling of a pet and the practice of paganism in a magazine for children,” suggest critics Veronica Strong-Boag and Carole Gerson, “was a remarkable gesture.”

  Pauline’s success as a short story writer allowed her to dream of getting off the recital treadmill. But she had no permanent home in Canada where she could settle down to write. She had been on the road almost full-time for seven years, but she could not afford to slow her pace. Stage recitals were bread-and-butter for both her and Walter. Within a couple of weeks of their return from England, the Johnson–McRaye partnership embarked on a tour of the Maritimes. They were scheduled to play Bridgewater, on the south shore of Nova Scotia, during the Christmas week, so Walter booked them into Clark’s Hotel, a large frame building close to the station. As soon as they arrived, Walter went down to the bar to get a drink while Pauline began to unpack her trunk in her bedroom on the second floor.

  It was a cold December night, and the windowpanes rattled in their frames as a sharp east wind gusted inland from the ocean. Pauline’s sparsely furnished bedroom was lit by a single unshaded light bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling. At about 7:30 p.m., the light went out. Pauline waited for a few minutes, expecting the bulb to flicker back on, but nothing happened. When she opened the door, she smelled smoke and heard an ominous crackling sound. The roof and the whole third floor of the hotel were in flames.

  Pauline rushed to the banister and yelled down, “Fire! The hotel is on fire!” Since it was the holiday week, there were few people around. Walter took the stairs two at a time as he ran upstairs. He stared in horror at what was happening, then shouted at the reception clerk to call for help. When the firemen from the Bridgewater Hose Company arrived, they said the fire was so intense that they could not reach the third floor at all. With a sickening lurch, Pauline realized that she might lose everything—her Indian outfit with its silver trade brooches, ermine tails and wampum belts; her father’s dagger; her London gowns; her writing case containing precious private letters (including the unopened envelope from her mother); her hairbrush with its Art Nouveau silver back on which her name was engraved; her half-completed stories and poems. She dashed back into her room, despite the heat and danger, and stuffed her possessions into her trunk. Then she did the same next door for Walter. Meanwhile Walter carried all their luggage to safety: three trunks, three valises and various travelling bags.

  They were just in time. The water that the hoses spewed onto the roof poured down through the furnace pipes, soaking plaster and flooding halls, carpets, beds. Ceilings and stairways collapsed. Local residents stood across the street, staring as the flames leapt up into the dark sky. Many offered beds to the hotel guests since the sitting room and most of the bedrooms were ruined. “When I discovered the fire,” Pauline wrote to her sister Evelyn, in a vivid description of the event, “I was the only person in each of the upper flats [floors] at the time. Had I been out undoubtedly the entire house would have gone. Luck and good fortune again. We would have lost everything we possessed. Think of the ruination to us…I am so grateful.”

  Pauline and her sister had made up their quarrel. Pauline had sent Evelyn judicious quotations from the London reviews, plus copies of her Daily Express articles, to reassure Eva that Johnson family honour was intact in England despite Walter’s presence. Eva didn’t believe Pauline’s protestations of success. In her own memoirs, she recorded how she and Allen had warned Pauline not to take Walter with her: “Just as we said, Pauline failed, and although people were nice to her on this trip, she never regained her former popularity.” But family loyalties superseded private doubts. Eva sent Pauline a generous Christmas present: a bolt of fabric from which Pauline could fashion herself a blouse. “Thanks many times for the waist length,” Pauline, who still enjoyed making her own gowns, wrote back in her letter from Bridgewater. “It is sure to be enough, for all waists have net yokes and elbow sleeves even yet in England and France, and the style is likely to remain for another year, the London houses predict.” Notwithstanding the horrors of the hotel fire, Pauline’s tone throughout her long letter to Eva was friendly and cheerful. She told her that the bitter cold had given way to “glorious, springlike” warmth, so she and Walter had gone for a walk in the woods—“Great pine woods, that border the town on all sides. I did wish you could have been with us. The blue-birds are chirping and I am enclosing the sprig of the green spruce we used to decorate the old Tuscarora Church with at Christmas.”

  Pauline’s equanimity despite the Bridgewater conflagration was at least partly due to the thrilling prospect of her West Indies tour. She was looking forward to several lucrative weeks in the sunny Caribbean. But bad news reached Walter and her while they were still touring the Maritimes. In mid-afternoon on January 14, 1907, an earth-quake destroyed the city of Kingston, Jamaica. Nearly 1,000 people died, including several delegates to the Colonial Agricultural Conference and the Imperial Cotton Conference, which the capital of Jamaica was hosting that week. Pauline had recently asked Sir Wilfrid Laurier for letters of introduction to the governors of islands in the British West Indies. Now she dropped him a sad little note from the Halifax Hotel: “In view of the present disaster in Jamaica, which I intended making my headquarters, I shall not attempt the trip this season.”

  Kate Washington always welcomed her cousin Pauline to her large, comfortable house in Hamilton, and allowed her to store her possessions in the basement.

  Instead, Pauline took the train back to Ontario. She made an extended visit to her cousin Kate Washington in Hamilton while Walter—or “Dink” as she continued to call him—attached himself to an English company which was on a Western Canada tour. The Jamaican setback brought Pauline face to face with a fact she had hitherto tried to ignore: her exhaustion. In the December letter to Eva she had asked, “Did I tell you I was pretty thin? Lost pounds since I returned from England, but feel well outside eternal lassitude.” In Hamilton, she tried to get her strength back. The Washingtons’ home was a large red-brick house on a well-to-do street at the foot of the Niagara escarpment. Nursed by her sympathetic cousin and waited on by the Washingtons’ house-keeper, Pauline recuperated in comfort. At the same time, she buckled down to story-writing.

  Elizabeth Ansley had moved from The Boys’ World to The Mother’s Magazine, also published by the David C. Cook Publishing Company, a religious press in Elgin, Illinois. Ansley wrote to Pauline in Hamilton, asking her if she could produce a 3,000-word story (“for mothers, not women in general”) within a month, to be published on Dominion Day. She also suggested topics for future issues of the magazine: “Outdoor Sports, Mother and Child out-of-doors, Health Exercises, Picnics, Camping etc., all written especially for the mother and her family.” Pauline sent along six story ideas, including “Mothers of the Iroquois Indian Race,” anecdotes about “heroic but not dramatic motherhood,” and descriptions of the traditional outdoor activities of a “Red Indian mother in her uncivilised but rare and beautiful life.” Motherhood was not simply a biological activity in Pauline’s mind; like almost all of her generation, she also saw it as an essential role for women. At the end of her list, she offered an additional idea—“A word for the foster mother”—and she frequently wrote about women who generously adopted children.

  At $6 per thousand words, magazine commissions were relatively well paid. In April Pauline received $17.64 for “Her Dominion,” the Dominion Day story for The Mother’s Magazine, and $57.04 for three stories she had sent to The Boys’ World. In the years 1907 and 1908, The Mother’s Magazine published a total of ten pieces and The Boys’ World used eleven stories by Pauline. Many of the stories had their origins in Pauline’s experiences on the road. “A Night with North Eagle,” which appeared in The Boys’ Wor
ld in January 1908, incorporated the occasion in 1901 when the CPR express on which she was travelling was parked on the Blackfoot Reserve near Gleichen. “Mother of the Motherless,” which appeared in The Mother’s Magazine the following November, described a farmer’s wife Pauline met on a train crossing the Prairies who had just added her brother’s four orphaned children to her own large family.

  During these years, Pauline also had articles, stories and poems in publications such as the Brantford Daily Expositor, Saturday Night and Canadian Magazine. She dashed off most stories within a day or two, making prose a less demanding and more rewarding endeavour than poetry. She had already calculated that over the past two decades she had earned less than $500 from all her poetry, and by 1907 she had almost abandoned verse. But even with the higher rates paid for prose, she was still earning less than $300 a year from journalism and fiction. If she was going to rely exclusively on publication for income, she must either write more or find publications that paid more. Such publications did not exist in Canada. When the editor of Toronto’s Saturday Night had accepted one of Pauline’s articles the previous year he had bluntly informed her, “I suppose you know that we cannot pay anything like the rates that you will receive from London publishers.”