Thine, E. Pauline Johnson.
Somehow, the strong-willed Pauline had extricated herself from her “network of tragedy too sad for human tongue to tell.” With the help of Frank Yeigh’s loan, she pulled herself together and resumed her career as a poet and performer.
Her first step was to put herself back under the management of Thomas Cornyn. With Cornyn’s wife, Clara, a concert pianist, she travelled east yet again. The two women gave a series of concerts in Newfoundland and New Brunswick, although they played to half-full halls and made no money. This time, Pauline decided to cut her losses. On October 9, Pauline once again appealed to Clifford Sifton, the federal Minister of the Interior and Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, who had given her $500 the previous year. Now she sent him a telegram from Campbellton, New Brunswick: “Can you arrange for three tickets from here to Montreal via Intercolonial want to leave at four tomorrow morning will be in Ottawa Saturday and remit payment want tickets in advance please reply immediately here.” Sifton sent the tickets. By late October, Pauline was safely back in Ottawa, where she was always sure of a good audience and good receipts.
Pauline then terminated the relationship with Thomas and Clara Cornyn, and recruited another partner for her stage appearances, a young actor called Walter McRaye. Her relationship with this capricious, sycophantic but ultimately well-intentioned young man would dominate the rest of her life.
16
ON TOUR WITH WALTER 1901–1905
WALTER McRaye was the kind of young man Emily Johnson had taught her four children to scorn. Evelyn Johnson, who inherited all her mother’s attitudes, never warmed to Walter, whom she regarded as pushy and vulgar. She was convinced that her younger sister’s professional relationship with him demeaned Pauline. Allen Johnson also found him distasteful and preferred not to see Pauline at all rather than see her in Walter’s company. But Pauline was a realist. She recognized that she and Walter made a good fit. Maybe he didn’t know which fork to use at a dinner table or how to address the aristocracy. Maybe his clothes were too flashy (particularly his thick gold ring and the beaver collar on his winter coat) and he was too familiar with strangers. She needed a stage partner who would act as her assistant; Walter needed to hitch his wagon to her star.
For more than a decade, the relationship suited each of them very well. It lifted the burden of organization off Pauline’s shoulders. Walter, a wiry little man with an inexhaustible supply of anecdotes and energy, found porters for Pauline’s heavy steamer trunk and ensured there was a dining car on the train for “My Lady.” He organized ticket sales, checked hotel arrangements and booked railroad journeys. He chatted up stage managers and greeted by name every hotel porter in the country, from the Crosbie Hotel in St. John’s to Victoria’s Empress Hotel. And despite Pauline’s occasional spurts of exasperation with “Dink,” as she called Walter, his support allowed her to regain her old joie de vivre. “His management has indeed proved a great thing for me,” she told Harry O’Brien in 1903, “and my freedom from business cares and anxieties has rejuvenated me beyond words.”
In particular, the relationship with Walter enabled Pauline to move on, both personally and professionally. She was no longer the slender, shy ingenue from the forest with whom the scions of Canada’s leading families had fallen madly in love. At forty, she was still beautiful; her low, musical voice still sent thrilling shivers through her listeners. But her upper arms were fleshy now, and her face had filled out. The bodices of her Barker’s gowns strained at the seams, and she had been obliged to sew extra fabric into the waistband of her buckskin skirt. The old dreams were gone—the literary vision of sufficient acclaim to allow her to write poetry full-time; the romantic fantasy of a blond Adonis who would take her to the altar. Instead, she was a celebrity in the prime of life who had published some widely admired poetry and who had audiences eating out of her hand. She had become a champion for and authority on native peoples (although she herself recognized the limits of her knowledge) and she had emerged from personal setbacks with her reputation and self-esteem intact. Like many women as they pass forty, Pauline finally accepted that what she was living was the rest of her life. The companionship of a loyal, energetic young fellow performer enabled her to enjoy it.
Walter McRaye always behaved as a courtier (and sometimes court jester) around Pauline. Fifteen years her junior, he had been stagestruck since his first visit to the theatre. His real name was Walter Jackson McCrea, and he had been born in 1876 in a tiny village called Merrickville, which was one of the twenty-four lock stations on the Rideau Canal between Ottawa and Kingston. Walter was always determined to go places; he attended high school in nearby Smiths Falls and then managed to get himself hired as an apprentice in the Merrickville telegraph office. The telegraphs, run by the railways in that era, were cutting-edge technology, and they attracted ambitious young men who wanted to travel and keep abreast of progress. The railways were the symbol of future wealth. “I remember how the citizens of my own village pictured the prosperity that would come” in the trail of the local branch line, recalled Walter in his memoirs. He spent three years preparing himself for a career as a railway telegraph
Walter McRaye (1876–1946) loved stylish clothes and cheap laughs, but his loyalty to Pauline never flagged.
operator by learning Morse code and tapping out messages on brass keys. By the time he was seventeen, he had managed to leave Merrickville behind and join a telegraph office in Ottawa, the Dominion capital. During lunch hours there, he would station himself on Sparks Street, just below Parliament Hill, where he might catch sight of such well-known politicians as Sir John Abbott, who had briefly succeeded Sir John A. Macdonald as Prime Minister, Liberal leader Wilfrid Laurier, Regina’s Nicholas Flood Davin, and handsome old Mackenzie Bowell from Belleville, the current Prime Minister, who would be knighted in 1895. “To my youthful eye,” recalled Walter, who never met a famous person he couldn’t idolize, “they seemed something more than human.”
But then Walter made his first visit to the theatre, and the magic of Mackenzie Bowell didn’t stand a chance. At Ottawa’s dingy old opera house, misleadingly called “The Grand,” Walter watched one of the great romantic actors of nineteenth-century North America, Edward Vroom, playing in Victor Hugo’s play Ruy Blas. The effect of this second-rate melodrama on an impressionable, bored young man was electric. “My youthful soul was smitten,” wrote Walter in his autobiography, Town Hall Tonight. “After that every cent I could get went into dramatic literature, plays, dramas and stories of the stage…Very soon I had memorized great blocks of Shakespeare, Sheridan, Bulwer-Lytton, Hugo and translations of Molière and Racine. At every carnival I would swank around in the costume of Hamlet, Don Caesar, Charles the First or some gay cavalier.” Walter used the word “gay” in its original meaning in his own account of his life. But it was likely appropriate in its more modern sense, too.
In the next two years, Walter paid a quarter to sit far up in the gods for every performance at the Grand. He saw all the great actors of his day: Margaret Anglin, James O’Neill, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, Forbes Robertson, Thomas W. Keene and Mrs. John Drew, the matriarch of the Barrymore dynasty. He caught a couple of performances by Pauline’s great teacher, Rosina Voke: “a delight in all her sketches, and what a company!” He loved plays like The Count of Monte Cristo and Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance. He laughed uproariously at the monologues of the English comic George Grossmith, and was spellbound by the “thought transmission” tricks of Anna Eva Fay, “The Mystic.” He wept as Madame Albani, the great Canadian soprano, gave her final farewell concert, and he wept again the following year when she returned for another farewell. He travelled all the way to Montreal to catch the ailing, aging Sarah Bernhardt: “What a personality was boxed up in her frail body.” He decided that he was meant for better things than a telegraph office. In 1895, he caught a train to New York City, determined to conquer the “Great White Way.”
Walter knocked on do
ors up and down Broadway, but no theatre manager was prepared to take a chance on a Canadian with no experience. His money ran out; he signed on as a clerk in a molasses factory to keep the wolf from the door. For a few months he clung on grimly, buying the cheapest seats at theatres and giving impromptu recitals of poems and playlets to the other residents in his 34th Street boarding house. But he was forced to admit he was going nowhere. However, Walter McRaye was never one to let circumstances defeat him. So he hopped on the train back to Canada and printed up a circular introducing himself as “Entertainer and Monologist—Special rates to Churches, Clubs and Societies.” His reviews were terrible; the local paper in Vankleek Hill (where Pauline had been booed) declared that “the only stage Mr. McRaye was fitted for went about five miles an hour.” When he wasn’t exactly overwhelmed with bookings, he joined a travelling theatrical troupe that even he admitted was “rotten.” He struggled on, until in 1897 he was sufficiently confident in his skills and reputation to embark on a cross-Canada tour.
Walter had honed a series of popular recitations for his one-man shows. Highbrow selections from Tennyson, Owen Meredith and Shakespeare were interspersed with vaudeville favourites such as “Spartacus to the Gladiators” and “Tradin’ Jo.” He was always eager to watch other performers on stage so he could keep abreast of (and steal) material with obvious audience appeal. In Ottawa he had seen an old theatrical lag called McKee Rankin launch into a poem called “Wreck of the Julie Plante,” spoken in a singsong French-Canadian accent. The poem was by Dr. William Henry Drummond, an Irishman who had emigrated to Quebec and, like Walter, had trained as a telegraph operator. Working in the bush near Lake Megantic, Drummond had been captivated by the idiomatic English of the French-Canadian lumbermen, canoemen and farmers. He himself went on to study medicine at McGill University and then to practise in Montreal, but his Megantic memories never left him. “Wreck of the Julie Plante” was just one example of the reams of humorous, and extremely popular, poems he wrote in this idiom.
Many French Canadians resented Dr. Drummond’s verses, which they felt were Anglo caricatures of their lives—the literary equivalent of Cornelius Krieghoff’s folksy paintings. Others enjoyed their humour; in 1897, Louis-Honoré Fréchette (brother-in-law of Pauline’s cousin Annie Howells) supplied an introduction to Drummond’s first book, The Habitant, and Other French Canadian Poems. For his part, Walter McRaye did not give a moment’s thought to the question of whether these were patronizing stereotypes. He seized on the book as a goldmine for a recitalist like himself, who relished exaggerated accents and slapstick humour. As he travelled west on the CPR, he sat in the railway carriage committing to memory some of Drummond’s funniest and most moving poems. Newly arrived families from the British Isles, Poland or the Ukraine must have stared in wonder at this jaunty young man with a big nose and a weak chin, muttering to himself:
Dere’s a beeg jam up de reever, w’ere rapide is runnin’ fas’,
An’ de log we cut las’ winter is takin’ it all de room;
So boss of de gang is swearin’, for not’ing at all can pass
An’ float away down de current till somebody break de boom.
By December 1897, Walter had reached Manitoba on his transcontinental tour and had several bookings for the New Year in North Dakota and points west. A couple of days before Christmas he clambered down from the railway carriage at Winnipeg station. He noticed posters advertising Pauline’s upcoming concert at Winnipeg’s Grand Opera House on December 29. The idea of meeting the acknowledged star of the Canadian stage, and of learning a few stage tricks from her, was irresistible. As soon as her Grand Opera House performance was over, he was at the door of her dressing room. On this occasion, he was elbowed out of the way by Charles Drayton with his bouquet of flowers. But Walter hung around long enough to persuade Pauline to let him appear on stage with her in some upcoming bookings.
In early January 1898, Pauline and Walter performed together in Boissevain, Deloraine, Hartney and Souris. Walter then travelled on to North Dakota, while Pauline returned to Winnipeg—and Charlie Drayton. The paths of the two performers did not cross again for four years.
The intervening years were as unkind to Walter as they had been to Pauline. There were too many cut-rate Mark Twains and George Grossmith imitators stumping across North America. His audiences remained small. One winter, he was reduced to living in a wooden shack in Northern California, stealing food from local gardens. He managed to work his way back to Central Canada, appearing as warm-up act in the ragtag shows put together to raise money for the soldiers in South Africa. But he could never make it on his own: he needed to ride someone else’s coattails. When he found himself once again in the same city as Pauline in November 1901, he immediately got in touch with her at Ottawa’s Russell Hotel to suggest they perform together. After the past few months with the Cornyns, Pauline knew she needed a new partner. She must have decided that Walter’s enthusiasm might compensate for his lack of talent. She invited him to appear with her at Ottawa’s Orme Hall on November 6.
The Orme Hall recital was important to Pauline, both as the relaunch of her own career and as the lift-off of the new partnership. Leading members of Ottawa’s political elite were in the audience, including some of Pauline’s most important supporters: Governor General Lord Minto and Lady Minto, Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier and Lady Laurier, Mr. and Mrs. Clifford Sifton. Pauline had sent Sifton two tickets in gratitude for the money he had sent so she could limp back to the capital after her disappointing tour in Eastern Canada. The stress of the past couple of years was obvious in the performance, as the Ottawa Citizen’s critic was quick to point out. She had almost no new material, he wrote, and her acting was almost mechanical. Her style was “vigorous and energetic, although rather exaggerated from an artistic standpoint.” McRaye’s reviews weren’t exactly glowing, either, although expectations for a newcomer were lower. He was judged to be adequate but amateurish, with his shrill, piping voice and peculiar habit of going up at the end of all his lines.
But the show was a success as far as Pauline was concerned. Enthusiasm amongst Ottawa’s politicians for the Mohawk poet was undiminished: the audience gave her a warm welcome. And although Walter’s elocutionary technique left a lot to be desired, he looked after her splendidly. Walter was always supremely self-confident. He needed to be, to protect himself—he knew his talent was slight and that he was far too fey for small-town Canada. So Walter always ignored reviews, and his jaunty self-confidence helped Pauline to pay less attention to them too. She agreed that they should team up for a limited tour.
First she had to raise money to cover costs until they began earning. She wrote around to all her usual supporters, including her cousin Annie Howells Fréchette in Ottawa. Annie’s husband, Achille, sent some money but commented to his wife, “The poor thing has a hard time of it, I’m afraid, and this life does her no good.” Achille had heard that Pauline had teamed up with Walter, of whom he had a low opinion. Thanks to his comfortable income as a House of Commons translator, Achille had never had to live off the slim returns of poetry. He dismissed Pauline and Walter’s recital as “a third-rate show,” adding haughtily that they were not doing “much for Art nor for themselves.”
Pauline could not afford such artistic scruples. Instead, she insisted that Walter had to improve his act. As they hopscotched their way across Southern Ontario, she drilled him in some of the techniques and sketches she had acquired from Owen Smily. This went on for six weeks. It cannot have been easy for Pauline, spending her afternoons teaching new tricks to a young dog and then having to compensate for his shortcomings each night. She quickly realized she was never going to make Walter McRaye into Henry Irving. She must have wondered whether the effort was worth it. But the Johnson–McRaye partnership was cemented that winter when Pauline was felled by a potentially fatal illness and Walter showed unexpected reserves of loyalty and compassion as he cared for her.
The week before Christmas, Pauline an
d Walter arrived in Orillia, 100 miles (160 kilometres) north of Toronto on Lake Simcoe, where they were due to give two performances. Pauline had been suffering from headaches and nausea for a couple of days, and she collapsed onto the bed when she was shown into her hotel room. Her skin prickled and her face was flushed. She had told Walter that they must have a run-through on the stage, so she reluctantly struggled to her feet and staggered over to the washstand to splash her face with cold water. When she looked at the mirror, she gasped. There was a large raised red patch of skin on her cheek. She must have instantly recognized the symptom, because she had seen the same kind of glazed red patch on her father’s face when he was sick. It was erysipelas, the virulent staphylococcus infection. In Orillia, the infection spread with terrifying ferocity. Within hours, Pauline’s face was covered in scarlet, blistered patches and her temperature rocketed up. She lay on the bed, sweating and shivering, close to unconsciousness. Her joints ached and her throat was parched. Walter quickly cancelled all their bookings for the next few days, then sat anxiously at her bedside, giving her sips of water and willing her to recover fast.
By Christmas Day, Pauline was delirious. According to Betty Keller’s 1981 biography, the erysipelas infection had now entered her bloodstream and caused cerebral thrombophlebitis, or, as the Orillia doctor called it, “brain fever.” He prescribed morphine and told Walter there was nothing to do but wait and see if her natural resistance could conquer this devastating infection. She was likely to lose her hair, the doctor said, and he could not rule out a coma and then death.
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