Flint and Feather

by Charlotte Gray

  The immediate challenge for Pauline, now that she had abandoned recitals, was to earn her living. All she had to rely on was her own pen; she had already taken all the rents due from Chiefswood, and neither Allen nor Evelyn could help her. She wrote to the Musson Book Company in Toronto offering them a complete collection of all her poetry, including the poems that had appeared in The White Wampum and Canadian Born (both of which were out of print) and all her fugitive work: “The demand for my complete works I find constantly growing, but the public does not appear to care for a ‘selected’ edition. They want one big volume of all I have ever written.” She also offered Musson “a book of short stories for boys…the schools and Sunday Schools are crying loudly for boys’ books.” But she knew that reprints of her existing work would yield little income and that she had to keep writing. The Boys’ World and The Mother’s Magazine, the two magazines published in Elgin, Illinois, provided a steady market. Chief Joe Capilano’s stories were an invaluable new source for her literary endeavours. But she needed additional outlets. So she made an appointment with Walter C. Nichol, owner of the Daily Province, the Vancouver newspaper with the most interesting weekend magazine. Nichol had attended one of her recitals and was more than happy to receive “Princess Tekahionwake,” as he thought of her. He suggested that the magazine’s editor, Lionel Makovski, join them.

  Makovski was a young Englishman who had only recently immigrated to Canada and started work in Vancouver. At first, he was polite but distant with the shabbily dressed, middle-aged woman in his boss’s office. Vancouver seemed to be full of lady authors who wanted to get their family histories, children’s stories or nature poems into his columns. But his attitude changed as soon as he heard Pauline’s name. Unlike Nichol, he thought not of the recitalist who had criss-crossed Canada but of the byline under an extraordinary piece he had read a couple of years earlier in the Daily Express. Several of his journalist friends in London had remarked on its originality. “Not ‘A Pagan in St. Paul’s’?” he exclaimed. Pauline’s face shone with pleasure. “The same,” she said. “The best piece of prose I ever wrote. How did you come across it?”

  Nichol interrupted. “Miss Johnson has a story you might like to use for the weekly. I’ve got to go…excuse me, Miss Johnson.”

  Pauline proceeded to tell the astonished young editor her circumstances when she wrote her piece for the Daily Express: “I was giving recitals in London salons. In my Mohawk regalia…I must have been somewhat startling. But if I appealed to the audiences as a primitive from Canada, you can imagine how they impressed me amid their Victorian surroundings.” With a charming smile, the poet moved quickly on to the purpose of her visit. Handing him a copy of “The Legend of the Two Sisters,” the story that had recently appeared in The Mother’s Magazine, she asked him if he could use it in his magazine. If he liked it, she could write more stories in a similar vein—“My friend Chief Joe Capilano is an untapped reservoir of such legends which should be preserved.”

  Lionel Makovski did like “The Legend of the Two Sisters,” which appeared in the Daily Province Magazine in April 1910 under the title “The True Legend of Vancouver’s Lions.” It was the first of twenty-one pieces by Pauline that appeared in the magazine that year, most of which were Squamish legends. Pauline had listened carefully to the tales told by both the old chief and his wife, tales characterized by the rhythms and repetitions of myths sustained within an oral tradition. She had reshaped them into the kind of linear narratives that would appeal to the Daily Province Magazine’s readers. Most were illustrated with photographs taken by George Edwards, Walter’s brother-in-law.

  “Amongst the red nations of America,” Pauline wrote in “The Deep Waters: A Rare Squamish Legend,” which appeared in September 1910, “I doubt if any two tribes have the same ideas regarding the Flood.” She went on to describe how “my royal old tillicum” had arrived to see her one cold, wet winter day. “Woman-like, I protested with a thousand contradictions in my voice, that he should venture out to see me on such a day. It was, ‘Oh! Chief, I am so glad to see you!’ and it was, ‘Oh! Chief, why didn’t you stay at home on such a day—your poor throat will suffer.’ But I soon had quantities of hot tea for him, and the huge cup my own father always used was his—as long as the Sagalie Tyee allowed his dear feet to wander my way.”

  Pauline’s article continues with an account of how Chief Joe settled down, then hinted that he had a story to tell. “Immediately I foresaw the coming legend, so crept into the shell of monosyllables.” The old man “plunged directly into the tradition, with no preface save a comprehensive sweep of his wonderful hands towards my wide window, against which the rains were beating. ‘It was after a long, long time of this—this rain. The mountain-streams were swollen, the rivers choked, the sea began to rise—and yet it rained: for weeks and weeks it rained.’ He ceased speaking, while the shadows of centuries gone crept into his eyes. Tales of the misty past always inspired him.”

  Chief Joe’s version of the story of the Flood told how his people had climbed to the top of the tallest mountain as the rains fell. There the men had felled a huge tree, and “toiled over its construction into the most stupendous canoe the world has ever known…Meanwhile, the women also worked at a cable—the largest, the longest, the strongest that Indian hands and teeth had ever made.” As the rain fell and the waters continued to rise, the Indians lifted into the vast canoe every single child in the band; “not one single baby was overlooked.” The bravest, most handsome man and the mother of the youngest baby in the camp were selected as guardians of the children. One end of the cable was secured to the canoe and the other end to a boulder, “a vast immovable rock as firm as the foundations of the world—for might not the canoe, with its priceless freight, drift out, far out, to sea, and when the water subsided might not this ship of safety be leagues and leagues beyond the sight of land on the storm-driven Pacific?”

  Chief Joe described how the canoe was set afloat, how the doomed adults drowned, how for days and days there was “only a world of water.” Finally, one morning at sunrise, “a speck floated on the breast of the waters.” It was the summit of Mount Baker. The young man cut the cable and paddled to dry land. There the two guardians made a new camp and built new lodges, and “the little children grew and thrived, and lived and loved, and the earth was repeopled by them.”

  In Pauline’s article, Chief Joe concludes with the words, “’The Squamish say that in a gigantic crevice half-way to the crest of Mount Baker may yet be seen the outlines of an enormous canoe; but I have never seen it myself.’”

  Then Pauline herself left her readers with the image of the storyteller and his scribe, in quiet harmony: “He ceased speaking with that far-off cadence in his voice with which he always ended a legend, and for a long time we both sat in silence listening to the rains that were still beating against the window.”

  The same year, in addition to the twenty-one contributions she sent to Lionel Makovski at the Daily Province Magazine, Pauline produced fifteen pieces for The Boys’ World and eight pieces for The Mother’s Magazine. She had never worked so hard, or written so much, in her life. Such productivity required a strict routine. Pauline would rise at 7:15, eat breakfast and attend to domestic details until 9:00, then write all morning and (if necessary) into the afternoon. One week, she boasted to Jean, she managed to write a total of 12,500 words—“9,500 for the Elgin people at $6.00 for M [thousand] if it is all accepted and 3,000 for the Province, bringing me in about ten dollars. So, if everything is accepted, as I am pretty confident it will be, I shall net over sixty dollars for my week’s work…Today for a change I cut out a duck skirt for myself…I am fair sick of a pen and the sight of ink.”

  Most weeks, however, she could not sustain that pace. She now admitted to herself that there was something seriously wrong. She was often overcome with fatigue. Shooting pains would paralyze her right arm and shoulder, preventing her from working. She was losing weight, and her face was drawn. Since th
e near-fatal bout of erysipelas in 1901, she had avoided doctors—life on the road had meant she had little time to find one, anyway. Sometime in 1910, she steeled herself to find a physician in Vancouver and consult him about something she had been trying to ignore for three or four years: a lump in her right breast. By the time she sought help, her breast was already swollen and uncomfortable.

  Dr. Thomas Ransom Biggar Nelles was only twenty-six years old when Pauline found her way to his office. A graduate of McGill Medical School, he had done some post-graduate studies at the New York Skin and Cancer Hospital, then set up a practice in Vancouver as a general practitioner. For Pauline, his greatest appeal was that he came from Brantford, where his father had been a missionary amongst the Iroquois. “My doctor is a sincere boy,” she wrote to Frank Yeigh. “His mother was a Miss Biggar of Brantford and I can remember her as a very beautiful young lady when I was a child. She was a great favourite with my parents. Dr. Nelles is…without doubt the most skillful medical man I ever had attend me.” It helped that Dr. Nelles was the only physician in Vancouver with any training in the treatment of cancer—although that was not saying much. Treatment of any form of cancer was rudimentary at the start of the twentieth century, and breast cancer was particularly neglected because it involved a part of the body that was never discussed in “polite circles.”

  The only treatment for breast cancer in Pauline’s day was surgical removal of the breast. Mastectomies had been performed on women with breast tumours since the late-eighteenth century. In 1812, the English novelist Fanny Burney, then aged fifty, underwent an agonizing operation to remove her right breast. The entry in her diary describing the seventeen-and-a-half-minute procedure is one of the very few memoirs of the brutal surgery that was the standard treatment for the next century. With a cambric handkerchief over her face and only a “wine cordial to drink,” Fanny was fully conscious throughout the operation. As soon as her surgeon’s “dreadful steel” was plunged into her flesh, “I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision—and I almost marvel that it rings not in my ears still, so excruciating was the agony.” Fanny’s lump was probably not malignant: she survived for a further twenty-eight years after her mastectomy. Most women died within months of the surgical torture, often as a result of the surgery rather than of the cancer. Radical surgery rarely did anything more than delay death, since few surgeons understood that the cancer had likely spread to the lymph system.

  By the time Pauline consulted Tom Nelles, her cancer had almost certainly metastasized. A century after Fanny Burney’s excruciating agony, the only treatment choice available to Pauline Johnson was a similar operation, albeit with improved anaesthesia. Alternative medical therapies (caustic pastes and poultices) had proven ineffective, and radiation and chemotherapy still lay years in the future. Dr. Nelles told Pauline that a mastectomy was necessary but warned her that the outlook was not good.

  “One day,” recalled Jean Thompson in a memoir of Pauline that she wrote in 1931, “I was waiting for her to dress and she came out from behind her big screen with one bare shoulder. In a panic I saw that one breast was gone. Too ill to speak, I dropped back into the chair. We looked at each other and as she passed she touched ever so lightly the hair on my temple. ‘Tommy’s pretty hair,’ she said softly. This was demonstrative for her but we both understood. She knew her days were numbered.” But Pauline rarely wept in front of Jean, and she never complained of her pain to her friends. Her mother’s training in stoic self-control and her father’s example of relentless commitment to purpose sustained her.

  Within a few weeks of hearing the bad news about her own health, Pauline suffered another blow. Chief Joe Capilano passed away in his sleep on March 10, 1910, a victim of tuberculosis, the “white man’s disease” that had killed so many of his people. Chief Joe’s funeral was held a week later, at the little white church in the Squamish village. A huge crowd of Indians and non-natives gathered to pay their respects to such a well-known and respected man. Matthias and Emma walked behind the coffin, carrying photographs of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. A Union Jack fluttered in the breeze outside the church.

  Afterwards, the band elders took Chief Joe’s ceremonial cloak, belt and medals from the coffin and adorned his twenty-five-year-old son Matthias with them to signify that he was the new chief. Slowly, Matthias picked up the tall fox fur hat himself and placed it on his head. Then Chief Joe’s coffin was taken in a hearse from the church to the Indian cemetery on the hillside above Burrard Inlet. The Indian mission band led the funeral cortège, and two more Union Jacks, carried by two more chiefs, followed the hearse. After a lengthy oration by Chief Joseph of the Fraser River, the coffin was lowered into the ground. Pauline, who acted as mistress of ceremonies at the chief’s house, helped Joe’s widow, Mary Agnes, receive Indian delegations from all over the province. Each visitor was presented with a piece of the frozen fish that was piled up like cordwood against an outside wall. Pauline stood all day, drinking strong black tea to sustain herself.

  Pauline’s editor, Lionel Makovski, had stood close to Pauline at Chief Joe’s graveside. Like so many young men before him, from Hector Charlesworth to Bert Cope, Lionel had become one of Pauline’s devoted admirers. He was impressed with her prose and poetry, bewitched by the magic that she could still exert. He grinned like a small boy when Pauline referred to him as the “dearest of all men.” He never forgot the words she murmured as the earth rattled onto the coffin lid: “I’m coming; I’m coming, I’m coming…” Conscious of Makovski’s gaze, she turned to him and said quietly, “It is one thing of which we are certain, isn’t it?”

  Not long after the funeral, Jean Thompson visited Pauline at Howe Street. Pauline was still locked in sadness as she described to her young friend the events of that cold, grey March day—the eerie chanting of the inconsolable women, the tearful faces of the members of the Indian Mission Band, the white lilies on the coffin as it was lowered into the ground. “When everything was over,” Pauline told Jean, “the young chief turned and went away alone. At the edge of the hill I saw him drop to his knees and lift his hands to the sky. ‘Oh, my father, my father!’ he cried. Never have I seen anything so dramatic in my life.” Pauline shuddered at the memory, then spoke again. “It takes me back to my father’s death—that was the last time the death cry was sent down the Grand River. It is sent only when a great chief dies.”

  Jean stared with distress at her grief-struck friend. “It was a cruel blow to her when he died,” she said later, “It seemed now as though she were in a pit of Stygian blackness. For weeks gloom pressed her down.”

  20

  SAILING INTO THE CLOUD LAND 1910–1913

  FROM then on, Pauline’s state of health was unpredictable. Sometimes callers at her Howe Street flat would find her incapacitated by pain, or drowsy with the morphine that Dr. Nelles gave her to control it. Other times she was almost her old self. “Her vitality was astounding,” reported Jean Thompson. “At times I feared she would not last a month, and the next time I called she would be out shopping.” Throughout the ordeal, Pauline made it clear that she did not want to discuss her condition, and she would not ask for help. She made an effort to look her best, hiding the tendons that jutted from her thin neck with starched white collars and a flamboyant feather boa. She refused to be a victim, always trying to put the spotlight on others instead.

  “Tommy my dear, your letter has just come,” she wrote to Jean Thompson, after the latter admitted in a sad little missive to feeling wretchedly homesick.

  Now you are to put your toothbrush in your boot leg and come over to me on Monday for a nice two or three days visit and get rid of those double-barrelled glooms of yours. You need a change. We’ll eat breakfast in the kitchen and have dinner in state at my round table. You can’t come Saturday, you say, and Sunday I have an engagement. So you show up Monday any time. Tell your pupils to go to Jericho, that you are not well enough to teach, and come over to me. T
he [McRayes] went two weeks ago so their steamer state-room is ready for you. I have an engagement for, I think, Tuesday night. The [Copes] are taking me to see David Warfield in “The Music Master.” It is the best thing that has ever come out of New York, and you won’t mind my trotting off to it with them, will you? The rooms are yours while you are here and you may write or read or do anything you like. Go out and come in—make tea—do anything and everything so long as you make yourself at home and feel happy. Bring an old gown as I go out rain or shine and get my skirts wet every day; and you’ll come with me. It is the only way to chase the glooms away—go out, no matter what the weather. Let me know when to expect you and I’ll be ready. Love ever and always.

  Thine, “John.”

  For as long as possible, Pauline stuck to her own prescription. An expedition from her apartment to Stanley Park was part of her daily routine. The gaunt woman bundled up in an old-fashioned black cloth coat became a familiar figure as she walked through the West End towards the densely forested acres at the tip of the peninsula. The scent of cedar on the salty breeze as she stood by the shore or the rich, loamy smell of ferns and damp black earth when she strolled below the towering firs invigorated her. Most of all, in the summer she loved to look at Grouse Mountain and the towering peaks beyond, shrouded in the smoke of forest fires or the midsummer haze of pearly purple. Ethel Wilson, a young teacher who dreamed of being a novelist, recalled Pauline’s “sad beauty” in those years: “she was ill, walking very slowly and lost in sombre thought.” Jack Scott, a future Maclean’s magazine writer, remembered her “leaning over the guardrail near Siwash Rock [in Stanley Park] while the tide was out, always alone. Stoic and curiously dignified, watching the gulls.”

  On days when she felt her strength fail, Pauline would hire an open carriage to drive round Stanley Park. One evening, she recognized an old admirer from Brantford, Harry Weir, strolling through the park with his fourteen-year-old son, Harold. Father and son clambered into her carriage and sat on each side of her, holding her hands. As the shadows lengthened and the sun sank towards the horizon, Pauline lifted her eyes to the fading light and recited snatches of her poetry. Despite the lines of pain on her face, her magic remained undimmed. “As we parted from her,” young Harold would always recall, “my father kissed her, whereupon I was overwhelmed with hobbledehoy embarrassment.”