Flint and Feather Read online

  Parker’s raw ambition was not to everybody’s taste; it particularly offended anybody who resented colonial arrivistes or who professed to scoff at British snobbery. The socialist essayist Sidney Webb once remarked that “In the dead silence of the night you hear a distant but monotonous sound—Sir Gilbert Parker, climbing, climbing, climbing.” But Sir Gilbert used his contacts for the benefit of his fellow Canadians. “He is constantly helping some struggling and ambitious youth to get a few rungs higher up on the ladder,” the writer W. J. Thorold told Massey’s Magazine in 1897. “There are not a few who owe much to the kindly influence of Gilbert Parker exerted for their advancement.”

  As soon as Pauline got in touch with the Parkers, Lady Parker invited her to give an after-dinner recital at Carlton House Terrace. The invitation was not unqualified: “I fear to be quite frank,” wrote Lady Parker, “that I cannot offer you quite the full price you ask, but perhaps you would come for a little less.” What Pauline sacrificed in income, however, she made up for in contacts. Before dinner, the attractive poet in her fringed and beaded buckskin made a strong impression on a well-mannered stranger who was fascinated by Pauline’s descriptions of traditional North American native customs. He diffidently suggested she might be interested in contributing to his publications. His chief publication turned out to be the Daily Express—Pauline was talking to Sir Arthur Pearson, one of the most powerful media barons in Britain, who owned thirty newspapers. She was more than happy to agree to prepare some articles.

  In addition, Sir Gilbert Parker wrote letters of introduction for Pauline to the editors of the Daily Telegraph, the Morning Post, the Standard, the Pall Mall Gazette and the St. James’s Gazette. Last, thanks to the indefatigable Sir Gilbert, Pauline was invited to tea on the terrace of the House of Commons, overlooking the River Thames. Her host was Hamar Greenwood, another well-known Canadian in London, who had been the MP for York for several years. Greenwood put together an all-Canadian gathering for the visiting poet. It included Pauline’s fellow poet Wilfred Campbell, the Attorney General of Manitoba and two Canadians who sat in the British House of Commons as Irish Nationalist MPs, Edward Blake and Charles Devlin.

  Pauline approached all these social events with a purpose: to acquire wealthy patrons and to spread the word of her forthcoming public recital. She had booked Steinway Hall on Wigmore Street for the evening of July 16, and had flyers printed to advertise the event. Since she was virtually unknown in London, it was up to her and Walter to build an audience. “We are up to our ears in work,” she told Archie Morton in a scrawled note, “trying to plash [sic] sell or rob people for coin for tickets. Walter writes about forty letters daily and we are hoping for a house.” Thanks to the Strathconas, the Parkers and other expatriate Canadians, by the day of the concert the majority of tickets were sold and leading reviewers had promised to attend. Bert Cope and Archie Morton would of course be in the audience. Sir Charles Tupper, now retired from Canadian politics and living in Bexley Heath, came in for the evening with his wife. Most of Pauline’s part of the programme consisted of the Indian ballads she had written more than fifteen years earlier. These old favourites were greeted with gratifyingly enthusiastic applause.

  The reviews in the papers the next day included complimentary comments that Pauline would use in all her subsequent publicity.

  At Steinway Hall, London [seen here in a photo taken c.1920), Pauline appeared to one reviewer as “an Indian Boadicea.”

  Most reviewers, however, either concentrated on her exoticism or damned her with faint praise. The Pall Mall Gazette described her as “an Indian Boadicea,” and The Times suggested she was a powerful reminder of “a great moribund nation.” The Westminster Gazette reviewer wrote that the “Iroquois Lady Entertainer” enunciated clearly and steered clear of affectations, “but otherwise her powers under this head can hardly be described as exceptional.” The reviewer added that most people would never know about her “interesting ancestry” were it not for her “picturesque garb,” since she looked like a young lady of “purest Canadian or American or, for that matter, English descent.” Being a fourth-generation Canadian whose family had always lived on the American continent was not enough, in British eyes, to render Pauline of “purest Canadian descent.”

  Sir Gilbert Parker did one further service for Pauline that she never forgot. A few minutes after Pauline had left the stage of Steinway Hall, he ushered into her dressing room a large and boisterous man who greeted her like an old friend. This was Theodore Watts-Dunton, the critic who had singled out for special praise Pauline’s verses in the 1889 Lighthall anthology, Songs of the Great Dominion. Pauline was overwhelmed by this august figure. Watts-Dunton never forgot how “with moist eyes she told her friends that she owed her literary success mainly to me.” As he would later write in the introduction to a book of Pauline’s verse, “Gratitude indeed was with her not a sentiment merely, as with most of us, but a veritable passion.” It was also a most endearing form of flattery. Overcome by the passion of Pauline’s thanks, Watts-Dunton invited her to dine with him at the Pines, his Putney home, the following night.

  At the Pines, a further surprise greeted Pauline. In 1879, the avuncular Watts-Dunton had taken to live with himself and his wife Algernon Swinburne, the poet whom Pauline had admired since her teens. Swinburne had been living a wild, bohemian life, his financial and personal affairs totally out of control, until Watts-Dunton (a country lawyer by training) took him in hand. Now Swinburne was a wizened little old man, his flaming red hair faded to grey and his Dionysian habits long forgotten. Watts-Dunton’s care had proved both wise and deadly: Swinburne’s health had recovered, but his literary output had deteriorated. Pauline was appalled by Swinburne’s appearance; she told Walter that he wandered around in a state of bewilderment and spoke incoherently. Nevertheless, she set out to charm the two aging patriarchs of British culture, and succeeded admirably. Two years later, when Charles G. D. Roberts dined at the Pines and the three men were discussing Canadian poets of merit, Watts-Dunton interjected, “Now, Algernon, don’t forget our dear Pauline!” Swinburne replied, “I could never forget her!”

  “We are in the heart of the London season, and doing well,” Pauline wrote to a friend in faraway Saskatchewan. “England is lovely this year. We have been here two months and it has rained one day in all that time.” Pauline’s pleasure in their metropolitan sojourn was tempered by her concern about finances, but nothing could dampen Walter’s high spirits. Edwardian London was a paradise for a thirty- year-old man with a taste for high living. He had joined the United Empire Club in Piccadilly, had ordered new dress suits from the J. R. Dale Company in Westbourne Grove and frequently met Bert Cope and Archie Morton for a pint in a pub in Leicester Square. In addition, he now had a glamorous young actress to squire around town.

  Pauline had introduced her partner “Dink” to the Webling family, whom she herself had first met in Brantford in the early 1890s. The Weblings had spent a year in Brantford, and Josephine, one of the six Webling daughters, subsequently married a Brantford man. The rest of the family had returned to London, but three of the girls had developed a stage act with which they had toured North America. During the 1890s, they had occasionally run into Pauline and Owen Smily in the remoter regions of the Canadian and American West. In 1898, Rosalind Webling married a Vancouver photographer named George Edwards and settled in Canada. The Weblings were always glad to welcome Canadians to their home.

  The Webling family star was the youngest girl, Lucy, who had spent nineteen of her twenty-six years on the stage (many of them playing Little Lord Fauntleroy in adorable curls and velvet knickerbockers). Lucy was talented and much tougher than her delicate appearance and sweet smile suggested; she kept stage-door johnnies at bay and was already writing poetry and short stories for publication. McRaye, aware of Pauline’s sagging stamina, must have seen Lucy as a stage partner for the future as well as a sweetheart for the present.

  Walter flirted with Lucy Webling,
but he knew his first loyalty and financial security still lay with Pauline. He escorted his partner to several shows during their London stay. Their taste was relentlessly old-fashioned. Although provocative productions of plays by the likes of George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen were mounted that year, the two Canadians opted for conventional melodramas with titles like The Case of the Rebellious Susan and Boy O’Carroll. They liked the London traditions of Elgar overtures before the curtain rose and trays of tea between acts. Walter revelled in what he described as “the old guard, the favourites of London for so many years”—George Alexander, Charles Hawtrey, Lewis Waller, Mrs. Patrick Campbell and, best of all, Beerbohm Tree, who had first trod the boards over thirty years earlier. But unlike Walter, Pauline was never able to completely immerse herself in Edwardian comedies.

  Lucy Webling (1877–1952), the most talented of the six Webling sisters, spent part of her childhood in Brantford, Ontario.

  One evening, she and Walter went to see Somerset Maugham’s play The Land of Promise at the Haymarket Theatre. The play concerned homesteaders in Manitoba (which neither Maugham nor the set designer had ever visited) and reminded Pauline of her adventures out West. Walter turned to her and asked her in a whisper how she would like to be in British Columbia again, on the old Cariboo Trail. According to Walter, before the play’s second act was over, Pauline had scribbled onto her programme “The Trail to Lillooet,” a poem destined to become one of her most popular compositions. Its final two verses are filled with the same longing that assailed Pauline in the sticky English summer of 1894:

  Trail that winds and trail that wanders, like a cobweb hanging high,

  Just a hazy thread outlining mid-way of the stream and sky,

  Where the Fraser River canyon yawns its pathway to the sea,

  But half the world has shouldered up between its song and me.

  Here, the placid English August, and the sea-encircled miles,

  There—God’s copper-coloured sunshine beating through the lonely aisles

  Where the waterfalls and forest voice for ever their duet,

  And call across the canyon on the trail to Lillooet.

  “I remember,” she told a friend some years later, “how terribly homesick I became for the Western woods and mountains. The great city seemed to shut me in and smother me.”

  The most important contact that Pauline made during her 1906 London trip turned out to be from her homeland rather than from within the heart of Imperial culture. In early August, a delegation arrived in London from British Columbia asking for an audience with King Edward VII at Buckingham Palace. It consisted of three native leaders: Chief Joe Capilano of the Squamish people, Chief Charlie Silpaymilt of the Cowichan band and Chief Basil Bonaparte from Kamloops. All three spoke some English, and Joe Capilano, a kind and dignified old man who had spent thirty years defending the interests of his people, could easily make himself understood. (He was already the béte noire of the Vancouver newspapers for his efforts to protect an Indian burial site near Stanley Park against logging interests.) But to ensure clear communication, the delegation included an interpreter, Simon Pierre of the Keatzie Reserve, Port Hammond.

  The British Columbian delegation came to London to protest new game laws that had been introduced in their province. For years, BC’s native peoples had complained about encroachments on their lands by

  Chief Joe Capilano (in fox fur hat, centre left, carrying a blanket) made a direct appeal to King Edward VII for Indian fishing and hunting rights.

  miners, railroaders, fishermen and settlers. British Columbia was the only province in Canada where Europeans had appropriated land from the indigenous peoples without negotiating land treaties. Successive governments had broken one promise after another regarding land settlements. Now they had unilaterally announced that Indians could only hunt and fish in season. These days many Indians made a good living in the fishing and lumber industries, but many still lived almost exclusively off the land and the new laws would cause grave hardship. Europeans (who regarded hunting as a sport rather than a food source) respected neither the traditional division of game between bands nor their informal agreements on how much game or fish might be taken without depleting stocks. BC natives had protested vigorously, but Canadian politicians were deaf to their arguments.

  Joe Capilano resolved to appeal to the special relationship that supposedly existed between Canada’s aboriginal peoples and the British Crown. He had already learned the power of publicity, so (to the fury of local Indian agents) he decided to take the Indian case to London. “I go to see the king in England,” he announced as he caught the eastbound CPR express at Vancouver Station. “I will speak to him of what his Indian subjects want. I will tell them when I come back what he says. I will shake his hand in loyalty for you. He is the king of the Indians and the white men. Under him they are all one big family. When I see the king I will tell him that his subjects are all faithful in British Columbia.” As the train steamed out of the station, an Indian fife and drum band struck up “God Save the King.”

  The Indian delegation had no pre-arranged appointment with either King Edward VII or his ministers, and legally they had no direct right of appeal. Despite the fact they had no vote in Canadian elections and their bands had never signed land treaties with either Victoria or Ottawa, they were now the responsibility of the Canadian government. Chief Joe made headlines in London when he arrived at Euston Station in ceremonial dress: trousers and fringed buckskin shirt, a woven cedar-root blanket and an enormous fox fur hat with a tail that hung down his back. Lord Strathcona sent an official to meet the three chiefs and arranged for them to stay at the Chelsea Barracks. He showed them every courtesy, and rather surprisingly he notified the Secretary for the Colonies that they were the responsibility of the British government. The British minister quickly discovered that the chiefs had no intention of leaving until they had seen the King. However, the royal family was enjoying its annual holiday on the royal yacht Osborne during the Cowes sailing regatta and had no intention of returning to London for a few days.

  Pauline and Walter were not in London on August 6 when the delegation arrived. They were taking a short holiday 80 miles (almost 130 kilometres) west of the capital in Inkpen, a beautiful Berkshire village with a thirteenth-century church and a seventeenth-century gibbet. (Walter was more interested in the pubs. He waxed lyrical in his memoirs: “The many country inns with their quaint names, ‘The Olive Branch,’ ’The Axe and Compass,’ ’Ship at Anchor,’ and ‘The Four Tons of Hay’ were a delight. What a lunch of rare beef, old cheese and homemade bread, washed down with good old ale, in a taproom hundreds of years old!”) But one morning the village postmistress, Hortense Homer, arrived at the house where Pauline was staying with a letter from Sir Arthur Pearson. Would she come up to London to interview the chiefs?

  With blithe British presumption, Sir Arthur appears to have thought one North American Indian would automatically speak the same language as all the others. In fact, not only could Pauline barely speak her own tongue, Mohawk, she was completely unfamiliar with any of the six different languages (let alone the numerous dialects) spoken by BC Indians. However, she did know a few words of Chinook, a hybrid language that west coast bands had developed in order to trade with Europeans. She and Walter quickly returned to London, and Walter bought a large supply of tobacco as a gift for the “three old boys with their blankets,” as he referred to them. Lord Strathcona had organized a room for the encounter at Canada House, where the chiefs waited morosely. Lonely and isolated in the unfamiliar metropolis, treated like strange savages by its residents, the four men were already feeling a long way from home and no closer to attaining their purpose. With Sir Arthur’s reporters close behind her, Pauline entered the room and greeted them: “Klahowya tillicum skookum.” Their faces lit up. So did Pauline’s at the sight of visitors from those dense forests, roaring rivers and copper sunsets for which she yearned. The occasion was the start of one of the most significant
relationships in Pauline’s life: her friendship with Joe Capilano, a full-blooded Indian who treated Pauline as a fellow Indian rather than as an emissary from the white world.

  One week after the delegation arrived, the chiefs achieved their goal. Edward VII agreed to receive them at Buckingham Palace. On August 13, Sir Montagu Ommanney, permanent Under-Secretary for the Colonies, ushered them through a mirrored antechamber and into the Throne Room. The King and Queen were seated on a raised platform, but Edward immediately stepped off the platform, came forward and shook the hands of the chiefs. Next he led them over to Queen Alexandra and introduced them. Joe Capilano made a formal speech, describing how white people were crowding out his people and taking away their heritage. “We bring greetings to your Majesty from thousands of true and loyal hearts, which beat in unison beneath the red skins of our tribesmen,” he read from a prepared text. “It is because of our love for your Majesty, coupled with the desire to live in harmony with the white people who are filling up our country, that we appeal to your majesty in person.” He presented to the Queen four cedar baskets made by his twelve-year-old daughter, Emma.

  When the delegation emerged from the palace half an hour later, a crowd of reporters was waiting for them. Chief Joe described the meeting. “The King he so pleased he laugh when he see the baskets,” he told the reporter from Lloyd’s Weekly News, “and he make me open them and show inside. Then I hand the great Queen a picture of myself and my little girl, and she laugh, and she thank me so pretty. When she go out she take up baskets in her very own arms and go away with them.” “The Great White Father,” as Chief Joe referred to the monarch, promised to look into the issue of fishing and hunting rights, although he cautioned that it might take as long as five years to sort out. Edward presented each man with a gold medallion on which he and the Queen were represented. The following day, the three chiefs and their interpreter took the train to Liverpool and returned to Canada on the CPR steamer SS Lake Manitoba.