Flint and Feather

by Charlotte Gray

  Faced with Pauline’s determination to carry on as though nothing was wrong, her friends colluded in her denial. Mary Agnes, Joe Capilano’s widow, would paddle across Burrard Inlet and meet Pauline at the north end of Howe Street for a canoe outing. Chief Matthias continued his father’s habit of coming over and relating to her his people’s legends. Pauline, now an acknowledged champion of the Squamish people, wrote a letter on his behalf to Sir Wilfrid Laurier in July 1910, asking the Prime Minister to receive Chief Matthias when he visited Vancouver later that month. She explained that the young chief wanted to “’shake hands with the government’—his own expression, and to assure you personally of his allegiance to His Majesty King George.” When she was able to tell Chief Matthias that the Prime Minister had consented to see him, the young man’s face underwent “a wonderful transformation from anxiety to delight.”

  Lionel Makovski, who was already a regular tea-time visitor, took to transcribing her stories as she dictated them, if she was in too much pain to write them herself. Another writer for the Daily Province Magazine, Isabel MacLean (who wrote under the pen name “Alexandra”), quietly activated support for Pauline within Vancouver’s literary and social elite. Isabel had all the right connections; well-known as a journalist, she was also the daughter of Vancouver’s first mayor. Before Pauline knew what was happening, she had been adopted by both the newly formed Vancouver branch of the Canadian Women’s Press Club (of which both Isabel MacLean and Isabel Ecclestone Mackay were founding members) and by the Vancouver chapter of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire. Pauline was invited to speak at the first annual luncheon of the Women’s Press Club, while the Vancouver IODE declared itself “the Pauline Johnson Chapter.” Both these women’s organizations, as well as the Women’s Canadian Club, would play a crucial role in supporting Pauline through the difficult times that lay ahead.

  Fresh air and good friends could banish “the glooms” only so far: Pauline was still under constant pressure to earn her living. She gave a handful of recitals, usually with the Irish contralto Eileen Maguire since she was not strong enough to sustain an entire evening herself. By 1911, however, public performances were beyond her. She watched for poetry-writing competitions in the papers, but was rarely successful. (“I see a Sapperton man got The World contest prize, $250.00,” she wrote to Jean Thompson. “I think I shall try the next one. I don’t suppose he needed the money, do you?”) With Lionel Makovski’s help, she managed to produce a few more pieces for the Daily Province Magazine.

  Jean Thompson continued to visit frequently, cheering Pauline up with anecdotes about her leaden-fingered piano pupils and her landlady’s Chinese houseboy. She knew that Pauline’s financial situation was dire but that the older woman was too proud to accept handouts. Pauline’s apartment was often freezing since the kitchen range was “one of those diabolical quarter-in-the-slot contrivances” that regularly ran out of money. Jean found a surreptitious way to help Pauline. She would quietly leave a pile of shiny new quarters on a shelf by the kitchen door. They always disappeared. “Once, when I dropped into her apartment, Pauline was ill in bed and the gasman was reading the metre in the kitchen,” Jean Thompson wrote in a later memoir. The gasman took $13.75 from the range, mainly in Jean’s shiny new coins. One coin, however, was worn and black. Pauline suddenly asked Jean, “Have you a quarter?” When Jean produced the coin, Pauline asked her to give it to the gasman. Jean retrieved from him the black quarter, which was covered with a coat of shoe polish, and gave it back to Pauline. “It’s the last money my mother ever gave me,” Pauline explained, then turned her face into the pillow and heaved with terrible sobs.

  Pauline’s spirits rose whenever her finances received a boost. One day she told Jean with a chuckle, “Now Tommy, I’ve got some money in from the estate—Chiefswood, you know—and I’m going to pay my bills. Listen, and you’ll have some fun. I’m going to phone each merchant [and tell him] that I want to settle my bill but am not well enough to go out. I’ll thank them for their courtesy in waiting so long and ask them if they’ll be kind enough to send their collector around this week. They’ll all say that it doesn’t matter at all, that any time will do—but every one will be here inside of an hour.” Events unfolded as Pauline had predicted.

  Such lighthearted occasions became increasingly rare. With a sinking heart, Jean watched Pauline decline. Tillicum, Pauline’s cat, was killed in a fight with a dog, but Pauline continued to divert attention away from herself and onto her young friend. “Don’t get homesick, Tommy dear,” she wrote to Jean. “Eat good food and go out every day, rain or shine. Glooms are terrible to fight, as I know to my sorrow, but it can be done.” Jean was at Howe Street one day when Dr. Nelles called. While he examined his patient, Jean waited in the kitchenette. Immediately after the physician’s departure, Pauline refused to tell Jean what he had said. A few weeks later, she confided that Dr. Nelles had told her that her days were numbered, and that in addition to her cancer she also had a weak heart; “He said I might drop off any time—while I was shopping perhaps—Tommy dear, I do so want to die with my boots on!”

  Pauline clung to life, despite the terrible bouts of pain. In March 1911, she celebrated her fiftieth birthday. A few days later, she showed Jean a small receptacle and told her, “I have something here to end it all, if ever I know that I shall linger on to be a burden to others.” Yet she never resorted to the suicidal impulse—indeed, she regarded every month she survived as a personal victory. The last poem she wrote took its title, “And He Said, Fight On,” from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s stirring poem “The Revenge: A Ballad of the Fleet”; its first verse suggests that she saw death as the enemy:

  Time and its ally, Dark Disarmament,

  Have compassed me about,

  Have massed their armies, and on battle bent

  My forces put to rout;

  But though I fight alone, and fall, and die,

  Talk terms of Peace? Not I.

  The most difficult moment for Jean Thompson came in late spring 1911, when she broke the news to Pauline that she was to be married. Jean had begun a correspondence the previous year with a young Methodist minister named Harry Stevinson, who was a friend of her younger brother Ted. Born in England, Harry had been a missionary in South Africa before emigrating to Saskatchewan, where he met Ted Thompson. A tall, serious and rather quiet man who loved to read, Harry was captivated by Jean’s lively, amusing letters. When he travelled to Vancouver to meet her in person, he fell in love with her; within weeks he proposed. Jean knew that as the wife of a minister in Western Canada, she would live in draughty, badly furnished manses in dusty little towns for the rest of her life, moving every two or three years. But she was now thirty-four, tired of teaching music to tineared children and afraid of being dismissed as “an Old Maid.” She accepted the proposal from her suitor, who was three years her junior.

  “Don’t do it, Tommy,” Pauline exclaimed, when she heard her friend was to marry a man she termed “a devil-dodger.” “You’ll always have to play the church organ and you’ll never get any thanks for it—and you’ll be the target for all the natural meanness of the people every place you go.” But Jean’s mind was made up. On August 2, 1911, Bertha Jean Thompson married Harry Stevinson at Christ Church Cathedral, where Walter McRaye had married Lucy Webling two years earlier. With rouge and her feather boa to mask the physical effort involved, Pauline stood next to Jean at the altar as one of the witnesses. That evening, Pauline sat at her round writing table and gathered all her strength to write a farewell letter to “Dearest little Tommy.” She knew that the friendship between “Tommy” and “Johnlums” was over: from now on, Jean’s first loyalty would be to her husband. Drawing on her own experiences, Pauline offered some last advice on the give and take of an ideal partnership. Memories of past lovers—Charlie Drayton, Charles Wuerz, perhaps Michael Mackenzie—and of the sad end of each affair must have flooded in as she willed her emaciated hand to keep moving across the page:


  I want you to know that I am thinking of you very lovingly, that I am hoping for you all that is good, and happy, and inspiring, and noble, and above all, humanizing. Love is hard to ensnare, hard to appropriate as one’s own. I am so sure H. will make you happy if you will only leave yourself gently and sweetly in his hands. You looked so well today, so effectual. I was very proud of my pretty little campmate of years ago, and someway or other I had a certain pride in H., too. He is very real, Tommy dear, very manly and devoted. Try to make him happy as well as yourself. It is a poor rule that does not swing both ways. Good night, dear old girl, and may all the happiness go forth to you that your first girlish idealization longed or wished for—and for my part—this—

  By the time the pen reached the bottom of the page, Pauline’s arm ached and tears flowed down her face. Her signature was illegible through the blotches.

  At the end of the year, the Stevinsons left Vancouver for Coal Creek, a tiny British Columbia community near Fernie, where Harry had been given a church. Within a few years, they had moved several times, they had two sons and Jean had discovered the truth of Pauline’s warnings about the perils of being a devil-dodger’s wife. Meanwhile, back in Vancouver, Pauline was left unbearably lonely—and desperately worried about money.

  After her marriage to Harry Stevinson (right) in 1911, Jean Thompson embarked on life in the isolated and rugged communities of rural British Columbia and Alberta.

  But Pauline was not alone. Her gift for friendship, and her national reputation, spurred her friends to action. In September 1911, Isabel MacLean arranged a meeting between members of the Vancouver Women’s Press Club, the Women’s Canadian Club and Lionel Makovski and Bernard McEvoy, both of the Vancouver Daily Province. She also managed to rope in the Vancouver lawyer Sir Charles Hibbert Tupper, son of Pauline’s great admirer, the former Prime Minister. Isabel explained to those present that the great Pauline Johnson was nearly destitute. The poet who had added such lustre to Vancouver’s wafer-thin cultural community when she settled in the roughneck city needed their help. Isabel’s audience was horrified: most assumed that a writer as well-known as Pauline had a comfortable income from publications. Isabel MacLean proposed that some of Pauline’s Squamish legends should be published in book form, with the profits paid into a trust fund to provide an income for Pauline’s remaining months. By the time the meeting broke up, a committee had been formed for this purpose, commitments made and a strategy developed to help Pauline without wounding her pride.

  As Isabel anticipated, this proposal was welcomed by Pauline. She urged the committee to call the forthcoming book Legends of the Capilanos, as a tribute to Chief Joe, but accepted Legends of Vancouver as a title on the grounds that it would sell well. The Pauline Johnson Trust Fund sent out appeals to potential donors asking for help with the publishing costs. Sir Wilfrid Laurier contributed $10 after receiving a letter that read, “As we feel that the preservation of the legends she has gotten together is a work of national importance in which all will be interested, we take the liberty of enclosing you a copy of [the Trust Fund circular], as we feel you will be interested in this undertaking not only for its own sake but also on Miss Johnson’s account.” The first edition of 1,000 copies at $1 a copy, published by Vancouver’s Sunset Publishing, appeared in early December. Thanks to the committee’s enthusiasm, it promptly sold out. Another thousand copies were ordered.

  News of Pauline’s ill health spread across Canada. Her friends in Brantford rallied and held a collection for her. Evelyn Johnson scraped together $10 for her sister. “Dear old Ev,” Pauline replied, in a warm letter that reflected the gush of relief triggered by financial security:

  Your letter with the order for $10 came two days ago, and I want to thank you over and over for it. But don’t send me any more money, the Brantford people made my testimonial $475.00 so you see that at last I am even with the world here and free from worry. I am so well, going out daily and so busy or I should have written before…My book went out in the book stalls on Saturday at noon hour, and by Wednesday not a copy was left in the publishing house. Spencers (who is like Eatons in Toronto) sold 100 of them last Friday, there never has been such a rush on a holiday book here. Brantford telegraphed for 100 to be sent them, but Mr. Makovski could not let them have one single copy, the entire edition is sold out, is it not glorious? I am so tired with people coming here

  Pauline, her face etched with pain, and Lucy McRaye on the steps of 1117 Howe Street. A few weeks later, Pauline moved to Bute Street Hospital for round-the-clock care.

  with 4 or 5 books for me to autograph day in and day out. The books sell at one dollar and the reviews have been magnificent, all the papers seem to think I have done great things for the city by unearthing its surrounding romance.

  Walter McRaye, who had just returned from a tour, presented Pauline with $5. (“I bought a swagger pair of boots with it,” she told her sister, which probably exasperated the frugal Eva.) Walter also persuaded Pauline to autograph the next edition of Legends, then wrote letters to all Pauline’s and his old friends across Canada, urging them to order the autographed copies at the outrageous price of $2 each. Orders flooded in. For the first time in her life, Pauline did not have to worry about money.

  But a rush of cheques could not stave off cancer. In March 1912, Pauline’s condition deteriorated rapidly and it seemed the end could be only weeks away. She had persistent bronchitis; deep, hoarse, tearing coughing fits left her drained and white. Dr. Nelles and the indefatigable Isabel MacLean decided that the Pauline Johnson Trust Fund should be used to move Pauline into a new private hospital on Bute Street, around the corner from the Howe Street apartment, where she could have round-the-clock nursing. As the days grew longer and the leaves unfurled, Isabel Ecclestone Mackay, Beatrice Nasmyth, Isabel MacLean, Lionel Makovski, Eileen Maguire, Lucy McRaye and Rosalind Edwards took turns sitting with their friend.

  Sometimes they would chat with her, read the newspaper to her or support her back when a coughing fit took hold; other times they sat quietly as she slept, wondering whether her shallow breathing would cease as they watched. Her hands lay motionless on the bedspread, curled like claws, knucklebones white under the paper-thin skin. Pauline’s room on the second floor was decorated with her most precious possessions—her father’s dagger, her Onondaga turtleshell medicine rattle, her silver-backed hairbrush, her costume, including the scarlet blanket used when the Duke of Connaught was made an honorary chief of the Six Nations in 1869. Hyacinths, lilacs and tulips sent by well-wishers crowded the windowsill. But their heavy scent could not smother the sickroom smells of disinfectant, sweat, fear and mortal illness.

  “Oh Tommy! All I ask,” Pauline had said to Jean Thompson before her friend left Vancouver, “is one more summer to look off at my dream hills.” To her friends’ astonishment, it seemed her wish would be granted. After hovering close to death for weeks, she started to sit up, eat again and leave her room. Soon she was insisting on her daily walk. “My dear good Yeigh-Man,” she wrote in triumph to Frank Yeigh in June, after he had sent her a generous cheque. “I am in hospital, but just now am very well. I go out walking daily and can take many little enjoyments when I am not suffering pain. My splendid young doctor…has pulled me up on my feet time and again, over and over, when the whole city has thought I should never be seen again walking its lovely thoroughfares…I have just come through two months of being in bed, much of the time in extreme pain, but here I am, able to walk downtown and in Stanley Park and by English Bay, able to shop and sew and write and laugh and enjoy life for a little while.” Her spirit was unquenchable. She signed her letter, “Always your old-time ‘star,’ E. Pauline Johnson.”

  By midsummer 1912, orders for Legends of Vancouver were pouring into the Pauline Johnson Trust Fund. Some of the subscribers had been contacted directly by McRaye or the trustees; others had read in the newspaper that she was terminally ill. “Pauline Johnson, song bird of the red men, will sing no more,” read a brie
f item in the Jarvis Record, an Ontario paper. “Her physicians state that the renowned Indian poetess will never lift a pen again.” The illness was not specified, since breast cancer was never mentioned in polite company. Pauline herself observed the taboo. “An organic trouble of my heart and an exceedingly painful complication of the glands have put me on the invalid’s list for all the time I am to be here,” she explained to Archibald Kains, who had sent a “more than generous cheque” when he heard the news. Pauline and Archie had been out of touch for years; now she was overwhelmed to receive word from him. She was finally able to tell him how grateful she felt for the way he had encouraged her to enjoy art: “You helped me to understand and love the art of

  In September 1912, the Governor General, Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, presented medals to Vancouver’s Boy Scouts, then took time to visit Pauline.

  painting, in which I was so lacking…I should never have been entertained in the studios of Sir Frederick Leighton, Byrne Jones [Burne-Jones], dear old Mr. Watts, Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema, had you not been the first to make me love pictures.”

  A sense that the clock was ticking for Pauline added urgency to every visit, every occasion. In September, a royal visitor took time out of his schedule to see the ailing poet. Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, had been appointed Governor General of Canada the previous year by his brother Edward VII just before the latter’s death. One of the Duke’s first official trips, which he undertook with the Duchess, was to Vancouver. En route, he inaugurated the new Connaught Tunnel, which carried the CPR through BC’s Selkirk Mountains under the treacherous Rogers Pass. Once in the Pacific city, the vice-regal couple had a busy programme: in addition to a Canadian Club luncheon for 1,000 at the Arena skating rink and tea with the Daughters of the Empire, the Duchess opened the new Connaught Bridge and the Duke presented medals to local Boy Scouts in Hastings Park. But the Duke also spent thirty minutes at Bute Street Hospital with Pauline.