O! Lure of the Lost Lagoon,—
I dream to-night that my paddle blurs
The purple shade where the seaweed stirs,
I hear the call of the singing firs
In the hush of the golden moon.
The canoe expeditions were light relief: Pauline spent most of her time bent over the table in her hotel room, writing on lined legal-size pads in her flowing, forward-leaning script. The following year, 1909, The Boys’ World would carry eleven stories by her, and eight more pieces would appear in The Mother’s Magazine. Most of these were probably written during her summer sojourn in Vancouver during 1908. Most followed the successful and conventional formulas she had already developed for each outlet: plucky and truthful heroes for The Boys’ World, women whose lives were centred on husbands and children for The Mother’s Magazine.
There were two particularly significant pieces of writing that Pauline produced during this period. The first was her four-part series entitled “My Mother,” which appeared between April and July 1909. It is a less than trustworthy memoir, but as critics Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag point out, it slotted easily into “the magazine’s ideology of the sanctity of motherhood, the romance of the happy family, and the importance of good mothering to the future well-being of the nation.” It was also Pauline’s attempt, as she settled down and reviewed her own life, to make sense of the stresses she had faced as the product of a mixed marriage. In her account of her parents’ relationship, she pretended that such a marriage was a metaphor for a larger ideal: that Canada might be strengthened by a union of European settlers and Indians in which the traditions of both peoples were respected. By the time she wrote “My Mother,” it was obvious that the ideal had been shattered. One of the most popular poetry collections
Hastings Street: the streetcars are on the “wrong” side of the road because Vancouver used the British system of driving on the left until 1922.
published in 1908 was The Empire Builders and Other Poems by Robert J. C. Stead. It included “The Mixer,” a description of how the country itself turned immigrants into Canadians. The poem had an ominous last line:
In the city, on the prairie, in the forest, in the camp,
In the mountain-clouds of color, in the fog-white river-damp,
From Atlantic to Pacific, from the Great Lakes to the Pole,
I am mixing strange ingredients into a common whole;
Every hope shall build upon me, every heart shall be my own,
The ambitions of my people shall be mine, and mine alone;
Not a sacrifice so great but they will gladly lay it down
When I turn them out Canadians—all but the yellow and brown.
The second significant story that Pauline wrote during these weeks is “The Legend of the Two Sisters,” which appeared in the January 1909 issue of The Mother’s Magazine. This is the story of how the twin mountain peaks known to Europeans as the Lions of Vancouver received their Indian name, the Two Sisters. The legend is about two beautiful young sisters who persuade their father to end a brutal war with the Indian people farther up the BC coast. The legend, as Pauline recorded it for The Mother’s Magazine, had been told to her by “a quaint old Indian mother”—almost certainly Mary Agnes, Chief Joe’s wife. Pauline had quickly become fascinated by the west coast legends that she heard in the home of her Squamish friends. She loved listening to the sibilant accents and singsong rhythms of her new friends, experts in the art of storytelling, just as she had once loved listening to Iroquois elders. Pauline’s growing determination to settle in Vancouver was fed by her discovery of this goldmine of Indian legend. Perhaps the ideal of harmonious co-existence between Europeans and Indians had been shattered, but that was no reason for Indian culture to vanish.
Chief Joe Capilano was not the only friend Pauline rediscovered on the west coast. Bertha Jean Thompson was the young woman who had joined Pauline and her friends for their 1903 camping holiday on Stony Lake. In 1906, Jean, who had graduated from teachers college, had moved to British Columbia and was living in a rooming house in New Westminster, where she gave piano lessons. She also wrote a column called “Up and Down the Pacific Coast” for her father’s newspaper back in Thorold. Now thirty-two, Jean was an outgoing, impulsive young woman with thick, curly hair and clear brown eyes. She hovered between the self-assured independence of a “New
Bertha Jean Thompson, a young piano teacher from Thorold, Ontario, was a close friend of Pauline’s in Vancouver.
Woman” and the insecure loneliness of a daughter far from home who missed friends, family and familiar surroundings. “Oh! The rain! It rains, and rains, and rains,” she wrote in a 1906 column. “Yet when one beautiful day comes everyone forgets the rain and damp cold, and says, ‘How is this for the coast? People in the east haven’t got this weather to boast of, have they?’” When she read a newspaper announcement that Pauline was giving a recital in Fairview Hall, she immediately took the bus from New Westminster into Vancouver. After the performance, she called on the star at the Hotel Vancouver. It was an exuberant reunion: Pauline was as happy to see her young friend as Jean was to meet her heroine.
In a column published in August 1908, Jean described to her Thorold readers an incident in Pauline’s life that suggests that the Hotel Vancouver—the CPR’s flagship hotel on the Pacific coast—did not quite live up to its claims to being a “first class establishment.” One evening, Pauline asked the head waiter to leave her supper on a tray in her room, because she would be out late. But when she returned to the hotel and lifted the napkin covering the tray, she found only three empty plates, plus a salad in a covered dish. “I was amazed,” Pauline told Jean. “I concluded that, as I always left my door unlocked, some man, a little tipsy, had entered and eaten my supper, but had not cared for salads.” The waiter, when summoned, was as flummoxed by this as she was. Pauline ordered a second dinner, and when she had eaten it, she went to bed. Then, she told Jean, “as soon as I quieted down I saw two enormous rats climb over the window-sill from the tin ledge outside. They scampered to the couch, and raced round and round, smelling where the tray had been, and the mystery of the empty plates was solved.”
Despite the hotel rats, Pauline’s six-week vacation did her good. She put on weight, and the bounce returned to her stride. According to a reporter from the Vancouver World who spoke to her in July, she radiated “the cheeriest optimism.” She still tired easily, and when she was tired her sparkling grey eyes would sag and her lips, once full and smiling, would settle into a thin grim line. But she had regained the energy she needed to go on the road again. She wanted to do one last tour and earn enough money to set up a home in Vancouver.
On August 14, 1908, Pauline left Vancouver and joined Walter for more engagements through the fall in Ontario and Pennsylvania. After spending Christmas with Kate Washington and her husband in Hamilton, Pauline started the slow trek back to the Pacific. She and Walter stopped at the little Prairie towns strung out along the CPR rails, giving what had now become their “well-loved” (and rather threadbare) programme to audiences who had often seen her three or four times already. By May 6, 1909, Pauline was back in Vancouver, where she announced in the Pender Auditorium that she intended to settle in the city. The final Johnson–McRaye concert was given in Kamloops in July.
“Dink is fat, conceited and fur-lined,” Pauline had written to Archie Morton, “and hoping to get wedded.” As Walter McRaye’s nine-year partnership with Pauline drew to its close, the young man adroitly fulfilled his hopes and at the same time recruited a new partner. In 1909, Lucy Webling had finished her last tour in Britain and crossed the ocean and the continent. She joined her sister Rosalind in Vancouver, where Ros’s husband, George Edwards, was making a name for himself as a photographer. On August 24, the McRaye-Webling wedding took place in Vancouver’s smartest church, Christ Church Cathedral at Georgia and Burrard. Walter waited at the altar with his best man, an actor named Jeremy Howard. Lucy looked like Lillie Langtry in her prime as s
he sashayed up the aisle. She wore an ivory silk gown with a huge hat swathed in chiffon and trailing long white ostrich plumes that she had brought from London. She was given away by her brother-in-law. After a three-day honeymoon in Victoria, the newlyweds immediately started a new tour. It was not
Lucy Webling and Walter McRaye on their wedding day, August 24, 1909.
a marriage made in heaven: Walter was more interested in Lucy as a stage partner than as a wife. Within a few years the couple would grow apart, and in 1924 Lucy made the definitive break and returned to England. But for now, the “McRaye Company” had got its show on the road.
With Walter’s departure, an important chapter in Pauline’s life had ended. After more than twenty years of recitals, she had finally fulfilled her mother’s dearest wish: she had left the stage. The poet may have felt a spurt of nostalgia for all the adventures—the Cariboo Trail, Lady Ripon’s drawing room, the energetic applause from British, Newfoundland and Canadian audiences. But Pauline’s over-whelming sensation must have been relief. She no longer had the energy for constant travelling; she probably had suspicions that her declining health and stamina were due to something more threatening than the passage of time. She certainly recognized that the future for touring companies was precarious. Many of the mining towns in the Kootenays that had welcomed her so ecstatically were now bust. Greenwood, Sandon, Ferguson, Trout Lake, Moyie and Fairview were already ghost towns, their shafts abandoned. And there was new competition for audiences: moving pictures had arrived. Montreal already boasted seventy movie houses and Toronto had eighteen. More were opening in every town of any size across Canada. A Toronto city official, reported the Toronto Star, dismissed their spread as “a fad.” Most people thought that the fad was unstoppable, and some even predicted that the new moving pictures sounded the death knell for live shows.
Pauline rented a two-bedroom apartment in a newly built, modest apartment block at 1117 Howe Street, two blocks from the Cathedral. The porter at the Hotel Vancouver loaded her steamer trunk and travelling valises into a cab for her. Kate Washington dispatched to Vancouver all the furniture and household articles that had been stored in her Hamilton basement ever since Emily Johnson’s death. For the first time in her life, Pauline arranged a home for herself. The round oak table and chair from Chiefswood went into the sitting room and became her work area. Emily’s green china tea set, cut-glass sherry decanter and silver bonbon dishes were displayed in a glassfronted cabinet. A smaller table, two chairs and all the household china and cutlery were arranged in the kitchen, where Pauline ate her meals. She hung her gowns and Indian costume in the larger bedroom behind a screen on which she had glued pictures of animals and Indian artefacts. She made up the second bedroom (which was so small that she endowed it with the splendid title “the steamer state room”) for visitors.
1117 Howe Street, Vancouver: Pauline’s apartment on the second floor was her first permanent home since she left Brantford.
Within days, Pauline knew the occupants of the other three apartments in the building. Buddy, the three-year-old son of her neighbours, was soon turning up at her door with bouquets of dandelions for “Johnson,” as he called her. She took delight in the unfamiliar pleasures of housekeeping: she washed the curtains, polished her furniture, scrubbed the floor. She acquired a big black cat, which she named Tillicum (the Chinook word for “friend”) and to which she fed a rarified diet of condensed cream, chops and sardines. And she began to entertain. “Bert usually dines with me on Sundays,” she wrote to Archie Morton in November. “Did you even know that I am a crackerjack of a cook? Not a bad accomplishment when one lives in ‘ranching’ rooms as I do.” Pauline’s pride in her domestic skills amused her guests. “She was more genuinely pleased,” noted one, “with a delighted remark over a grilled steak, a perfectly roasted chicken or a beautifully assembled salad than she was over a compliment paid to a new poem.”
Now that she was no longer on the road, Pauline’s gift for making friends blossomed. There was Rosalind Edwards, Walter’s sister-in-law, who would call round for tea with her three children. Pauline often joined the Edwardses for dinner. There was Eileen Maguire, an Irish contralto who had given a performance at the Hotel Vancouver when Pauline had been a guest there the previous summer and who sometimes went on tour with Walter and Lucy. There was not only Bert Cope, turning up each week to sample Pauline’s cooking, but also his mother, Margery. There were several women writers anxious to make the celebrated Mohawk poet welcome in their city. One of the most prominent was Isabel Ecclestone Mackay. Mackay was an Ontario-born poet whose work had appeared in major Canadian and American magazines and whose first book of verse, Between the Lights, had been published in 1904. Mackay, who settled in Vancouver in the same year as Pauline, was already a member of the Canadian Society of Authors and the Canadian Women’s Press Club. Like Pauline, she revelled in the exuberant go-ahead style of Vancouver. Sights that would have shocked Toronto, such as women driving cars, women entering restaurants alone, women with bare heads, and female bylines in the newspapers, were commonplace here. Mackay was eager to start some sort of club for literary women.
One particular visitor to No. 1117 Howe Street had a special place in Pauline’s heart. Jean Thompson loved her visits to Pauline’s apartment, “where we enjoyed delectable dinners prepared by her in her little kitchenette.” On warm days the two women would go off on canoe expeditions together in the light canoe that had been presented to Pauline by her Capilano friends. Pauline took to calling the young woman “Tommy,” while Jean referred to Pauline as “Johnlums.” The affection was mutual, and each woman gained a great deal from the friendship. For Jean, Pauline was “a woman of the world. She taught me in many ways, steering me clear of some things that could have been pitfalls to a girl alone in a big city—she would have been a glorious mother.” For Pauline, Jean was a source of energy and laughter—particularly when she herself felt weary. “Sometimes I told her what I thought,” Jean would recall in later years, “and she would listen with a funny look in her eyes, then ‘Tommy’ she would say…‘You’re a source of continual amusement to me.’”
Jean took Walter’s place in Pauline’s life: she was an energetic comrade with whom Pauline could fool around. Where Pauline and Walter had had a menagerie of imaginary companions—elves, Felix the Bug, the cat called Dave Dougherty—Pauline and Jean could summon an invisible army of moods, to which they gave ridiculous names. Pauline’s alter ego was “the Bug,” a battle-scarred character who embodied Pauline’s sense of independence. (“The Bug says, John, males is false, very false—don’t you trust ‘em, and the Bug knows,” Pauline wrote to Jean.) Jean’s contribution to Pauline’s world of imaginary companions was “Belty,” a character who had emerged in a dream. Belty was a young girl in a shirtwaist and cloth skirt with a leather belt and strong cowhide boots. The two women often used “the Bug” and “Belty” as mouthpieces for their own thoughts. It is unlikely that the friendship ever strayed beyond the conventions of a close female rapport, but Pauline was clearly the dominant partner, while Jean played up her own vulnerability. And there was an antimale frisson to their delicious alliance.
One day when Jean was visiting Pauline, they were joined by another of Pauline’s “regulars”: Chief Joe Capilano. The bond between the genial old chief and the poet was stronger than ever. Pauline treated Joe with a deference quite unlike the gushing respect she accorded to powerful men whose help she had needed in the past—Clifford Sifton, Prime Minister Laurier or Lord Strathcona. With the Squamish chief, Pauline was quietly reverential. As a child, she had been taught to listen politely to the elders of the Six Nations, to respect their wisdom and their experience. For Pauline, an afternoon with Joe Capilano was like an afternoon with her grandfather, John “Smoke” Johnson.
Moreover, her relationship with Chief Joe gave Pauline a second chance. She had never forgiven herself for not listening to Smoke Johnson’s tales of the past—the Iroquois legends handed down fr
om one generation to the next, the tales of Mohawk bravery in battles against the American rebels. The Squamish people had a treasury of fables and stories at least as rich as that of the Mohawk people. And Joe Capilano was happy to share it. He would settle himself on Pauline’s couch and sit silently for a while. Pauline would welcome him, offer him refreshment, then sit in silence with him. With a little prompting, he might begin a story in his halting mix of Chinook and English. He took his time, smiling to himself as he let a few sentences lie between them before embarking on the next part of the story. “She always let him tell the legends in his own way,” Jean Thompson noted. “If she needed to make a note to assist her memory she went into the kitchen on the pretense of getting a drink of water and there jotted down the note. Never did she do this before her guest.”
Pauline was fascinated by Chief Joe’s stories. They included magic talismans, powerful medicine men, potent dreams and respect for the indwelling spirit of every waterfall, mountain, rock and tree. They invoked the divinity of Sagalie Tyee, who “moulded the mountains, and patterned the mighty rivers where the salmon run, because of His love for His Indian children, and His wisdom for their necessities.” They spoke of the value attached to daughters, girls and women in Indian society. The spirituality, humour and beliefs embodied in the legends resonated with a woman who had spent her early years on a reserve, amongst people for whom magic and metaphors were important. Pauline the writer knew that Squamish folklore was a precious source of material for short stories. Pauline the woman embraced its deeper significance as a mythology that gave meaning to life. A premonition of her own mortality had begun to haunt her; she drew solace from the timeless spiritual wisdom offered by Squamish mythology.
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