Flint and Feather Read online

  Her sense of occasion undimmed, Pauline insisted that the nurses help her struggle into a splendid new blue and gold kimono which the Women’s Press Club had sent round for the occasion. Back in 1869, when she was eight years old, she had watched her father officiate at the ceremony in which the shy nineteen-year-old Prince Arthur was inducted as a chief into the Six Nations. Now an erect, military sixty-two-year-old with a gleaming handlebar moustache, the Duke admired a photo of George Johnson at Pauline’s bedside and insisted that he remembered the dashing Mohawk chief from the 1869 ceremony. Pauline pointed out the red blanket draped over the chair on which he was sitting and told him it was the very same blanket on which he had stood on that momentous occasion. Her physical weakness had not diminished her professional savvy. By the time the Duke rejoined his aide-de-camp outside her room, she had secured his permission to dedicate to him her forthcoming volume of collected poems, to be published by Musson.

  Two months later, another distinguished visitor arrived at Bute Street Hospital: Charles Mair, the poet whose 1886 drama about the Indian leader Tecumseh had been much admired by Pauline. Mair was shocked to see not the dusky Indian maiden he had always romanticized, but an old woman in pain: “Alas! The change! The worn face, with its sad but welcoming smile, the wasted form, the hand of ice! Never [could I] forget the shock as [my] thoughts ran back to the beautiful and happy girl of former days.”

  The irony was that now that Pauline was known to be dying, the kind of literary recognition for which she had always yearned suddenly seemed within reach. Demand erupted not only for the stirring poetry written for recitals, but for her whole oeuvre—adventure tales, personal memoirs, lyrical poetry, stories for mothers. By the end of 1912, Legends of Vancouver was into its fifth printing. In December, the Musson Book Company brought out a collection of Pauline’s poems entitled Flint and Feather. It omitted many of Pauline’s verses, and the first edition contained many misprints (“a nightmare to me,” Pauline fulminated to a friend). Nevertheless, it rapidly went into a second edition. Its splendid inscription did sales no harm: “To His Royal Highness The Duke of Connaught, Who is Head Chief of the Six Nations Indians, I inscribe this book by his own gracious permission.”

  Another Toronto publisher, William Briggs, started assembling some of Pauline’s contributions to The Boys’ World, to be published under the title The Shagganappi with an introduction by Ernest Thompson Seton. All this excitement galvanized the Ryerson Press into action: an editor there decided that twelve of Pauline’s articles and stories (seven of which originally appeared in The Mother’s Magazine) would make an attractive collection under the title The Moccasin Maker. Pauline’s new-found literary celebrity was largely thanks to the Vancouver women’s organizations that had publicized both her work and her plight. The cosy network of Canadian male writers—Roberts, Carman, Seton, Campbell, Scott—had rarely made any effort on her behalf, although they had constantly “boomed” each other’s work. But the growing muscle of New Women lifted Pauline out of poverty.

  Throughout the fall of 1912, there were days when Pauline was well enough to sit at a small table in her hospital room and acknowledge those who were working on her behalf. “My dear Mrs. Campbell,” she wrote to a friend in Winnipeg in October.

  Three weeks ago last Tuesday you came to pay me a most delightful visit…and from all the Prairie towns there drifts in an almost daily evidence of the work you are doing for me. Orders for books and cheques also: I feel it is going to be difficult to find words to thank you for your interest and energy on my behalf. But my good friend I have the old Indian appreciation of a kindness just as strong within my being as if there was not a drop of “white” blood in my veins, and what you are doing sinks deeply within my heart, and some way or other I feel you know how grateful I am, even if my words cannot well express it.

  However, Pauline’s final months were not untroubled. Around this time, Evelyn Johnson heard that Pauline had taken a turn for the worse. Walter McRaye, in a misplaced respect for family ties, may have dropped Eva a line to tell her of her sister’s decline. The sisters had not seen each other since their brother Allen’s wedding in 1907, but had stayed in touch through the occasional warm but guarded letter. Now Evelyn felt an immediate obligation to be at her sister’s side. She took the train to Vancouver and found a room for herself three blocks from the hospital. “I was living in Philadelphia at the time,” she wrote in her memoirs, “but fitted myself out for a trip to Vancouver to be with Pauline. When I went there I found her entirely changed. She had turned against Allen and me…I stood ready to help her, but she resented me.”

  Never had the starkly different personalities of the two sisters been more evident. Evelyn was appalled by the impact of chronic illness on Pauline’s appearance, and refused to pretend that death wasn’t imminent. She felt it her duty to insist that Pauline should conserve her strength and concentrate on putting her financial and spiritual affairs in order. She was horrified that such raffish characters as Walter McRaye and Lionel Makovski would sit around Pauline’s bed, smoking and laughing. She discovered that Pauline still had debts in the city and had not paid Dr. Nelles’s account in full (“I asked the doctor for his account, which I paid and made Pauline very angry”). She insisted on discussing Pauline’s will with her because she wanted to ensure that any of their parents’ treasures in her possession stayed in the family rather than being scattered amongst friends. Having failed to persuade Pauline that she should go east and die in Brantford, she argued that Pauline should leave instructions that she should be buried in Brantford. Her sister’s body, she said, belonged in the cemetery of the little Mohawk Chapel alongside her parents and brother. In particular, as a devout Anglican, Evelyn probably urged Pauline to prepare herself for the end by seeing the Reverend Cecil Owen of Christ Church Cathedral every day.

  Evelyn’s company and constant nagging had always irritated Pauline. As an adult in a rapidly changing Canada, Evelyn had kept her bearings by clinging to the past—the religion and example of their parents, the happy memories of Chiefswood. These meant a lot to her younger sister, too, but Pauline had grown beyond them and had learned to rely far more on friends than on family. On her good days, she loved the lively company of both her Women’s Press Club colleagues and gallant younger men like Walter and Lionel. She felt deeply grateful to them, and was determined to recognize their help with particular bequests in her will. She had already decided that her round oak table should go to Bert Cope, her cut-glass decanter and sherry glasses to his mother, her green china dessert set and Onondaga turtleshell rattle to Dr. Nelles and her mother’s silver coffee spoons and porcupine quill mat to Eileen Maguire. She wanted her buckskin costume, including her grandmother’s silver trade brooches, her father’s knife and the red blanket she used as a cloak, to go to the museum of the city she regarded as home, Vancouver. She found Eva’s scrupulousness about money infuriating—lots of people didn’t pay their bills on time.

  The subject of religion triggered an even deeper tension between the sisters. Pauline grudgingly agreed that the Reverend Owen should give her Communion. But she steadfastly refused to countenance the idea that her body should be buried back east. She believed she belonged in Vancouver. Moreover, she was ambivalent about the “white man’s God” invoked to justify the existence of reserves, residential schools and land grabs. She had a spiritual hunger for a benevolent deity visible in the natural world that was unsatisfied by the Christianity of British Imperialists. She was far more drawn to Indian spirituality, embodied for her in the “Grand Tyee” of the Capilano people and the Great Spirit of the Onondagas. Before Jean Thompson left Vancouver, she had watched her friend drift towards traditional native beliefs as she faced death. Jean sympathized with it:

  Can anyone wonder that she, with her analytical mind, balanced the Pagan religion of the Indians against Christianity as she found it? She told me of the Onondagas, that tribe of the Six Nations which is still Pagan. “They will tell you,”
she said, “that Christianity costs too much coin. Their faith costs nothing but personal devotion. They object to Christianity because of the incessant begging for favours from the white man’s God. ‘You are always asking the Great Spirit for endless things,’ they will say. ‘Let him alone. He knows what is good for you.’”

  Evelyn Johnson, schooled in her mother’s British faith, regarded Pauline’s views as heathen.

  The clash of wills between the two sisters was painful. By Christmas 1912, they could barely exchange a civil word. “I was an uncomfortable observer of a violent quarrel,” recalled Beatrice Nasmyth, “about raincoats and whether people did or did not have to wear such garments in Vancouver. Pauline said they did not and Sister said ‘They so did’ and the air was blue for a time…You never saw them together five minutes that they were not at it hammer and tongs over nothing. Two less compatible people it would be difficult to find.”

  It cannot have been a happy time for Evelyn, watching her sister die in a strange city, while Pauline’s friends treated her with chilly conde-scension. Eighteen years after the event, Lionel Makovski reminded Walter McRaye in a flippant letter how they had “fought to keep the one who was of value to Canada alive and to keep the other from creating an atmosphere around her sick-bed.” Pauline banished Eva from her sickroom, saying that only solitude would allow her to keep on with signing all the copies of both Legends of Vancouver and Flint and Feather that had been ordered. “I was merrily overworked before Christmas,” she wrote to a friend in Montreal who had sent her a pretty hand-knitted bedjacket. “For five consecutive nights I worked inscribing books until 2 am and once until 4 am. I simply hate the sight of a pen…but I am also getting paid for it.” On Christmas Day, Margery Cope sent her car to pick up Pauline for dinner. “I donned radiant robes, put a touch of rouge on my rather wearied face (I was tired out with work and excitement!) and away I was whisked to a jolly dinner with those I love and who love me.”

  Evelyn was not included in the Copes’ party. But she sat with Pauline on New Year’s Eve, and they listened together to the whistles and hullabaloo in the street below. It was a rare moment of family harmony, as the two sisters smiled together at memories of the New Year’s Eves of their childhood. Eva finally took her leave at 12:30 a.m. “As I passed the window, she leaned out to call good night and ‘New Year’ to me, and I called back to her, ‘New Year! New Year!’ I thought at the time how she must feel—knowing that it would be her last New Year.”

  Each time Pauline looked in the mirror, she could see death at her shoulder. “It hurts a woman’s heart to grow old, particularly when the heart itself is in an everlasting April,” she confided to a correspondent. After Evelyn had left, Pauline opened a biography by Elbert Hubbard of the artist Corot that she had bought at Roycroft five years earlier. On the title page she wrote a special inscription to her old “tillicum” Walter. She wrote as if she had already passed into the “Happy Hunting Grounds” of Indian legend: “Corot and I shall have both our pictures and poems ready to greet that royal soul of my old comrade Walter McRaye, when he too travels up the trail to the barbizon that we shall have created to welcome him.”

  She was now in constant pain and felt both physically and mentally weary. Dr. Nelles stepped up the morphine, and Evelyn planted herself firmly in the chair at her sister’s bedside to ensure that visitors would not disturb the sickroom calm. But even Eva had to close her eyes sometimes. In the morning of March 7, 1913, she slipped out of Pauline’s room and returned to her apartment, where she lay on her bed, fully clothed, and fell into a deep sleep. Her place at Pauline’s bedside was taken by Mrs. Moran, the hospital matron. Pauline, now unconscious, gave a couple of low groans. Mrs. Moran leaned over her and gently lifted her shoulders. With a faint gasp, Pauline died in her arms.

  Pauline had left instructions that nobody should see her body after death. While Mrs. Moran waited for Dr. Nelles to arrive and sign the death certificate, she wondered what to do. What about Pauline’s sister? And all the friends who had sat with her? And Walter McRaye, who made her laugh and knew her perhaps better than anyone? And sculptor Charles Sergison Marega, who had already made discreet enquiries about the possibility of making a death mask?

  A strange calm pervaded Pauline’s room for a couple of hours after she had taken her last breath. Then Evelyn returned, discovered what had happened and asked indignantly why she had not been called. She telephoned her brother Allen and his wife, Floretta, in Toronto and her cousin Kate Washington in Hamilton. Meanwhile, Dr. Nelles alerted Isabel MacLean at the Vancouver Daily Province. The news of Pauline’s death travelled in widening ripples, gathering force as it spread through Vancouver’s literary community, along the streets of its West End mansions and its Squamish village, and across the Rockies into the nation’s newsrooms, drawing rooms, reserves, small towns, government departments and publishing houses. Marega was allowed to make a plaster cast for the death mask. Newspapers rushed to prepare obituaries.

  “By the death of Pauline Johnson, Canada loses a great daughter of the flag,” declared the Vancouver Daily Province the following day, in an obituary probably written by Lionel Makovski. His lament for the departure of a national and well-loved celebrity was typical in tone of the obituaries in most Canadian newspapers:

  All she wrote betrayed her love of the country which had passed from the rule of her fathers into the hands of aliens.…Her Legends of Vancouver are a magnificent illustration of her understanding and her genius. Through them all runs that instinct for poetry which has found expression in “The Song My Paddle Sings” and many others of her poems. And on the fragmentary anecdotes of the Indians of the coast she built a saga that will live long after the generation that knew her has followed her across the Great Divide.

  The keynote of her whole disposition was a generous charity towards everything and everybody with whom she came in contact…She loved life with a passionate devotion that was almost pathetic in its intensity. In spite of all her travelling, her experiences, which were by no means easy, Pauline Johnson never lost the capacity for getting the best out of life…To all who knew her she was “the best beloved vagabond.” It was always fine weather and good going on the trail when Pauline Johnson blazed the way.

  The Vancouver branch of the Women’s Canadian Club took charge of Pauline’s funeral, which was scheduled to take place on March 10. The Club’s president, Mrs. Elizabeth Rogers, made sure Pauline was dressed in the garments and jewellery she had selected for the occasion: a grey cloth evening cloak, and round her neck the small silver locket containing the photograph of a young man. Pauline had shown her the photo inside, but Mrs. Rogers never asked the identity of the man. Pauline’s secret went to the grave with her. Mrs. Rogers pressed into Pauline’s hand the silver and ebony crucifix she had asked to hold as she was cremated. In the end, her Christian faith had prevailed.

  The funeral cortège left Bute Street Hospital at 1:30 p.m., followed by a lengthy parade of the city’s best-known men and women. Chief Matthias Capilano, in full ceremonial dress and the tall fox fur hat, was prominent amongst the official mourners. All along the three-block route to Christ Church Cathedral, the street was lined four or five deep with people, non-native and native. Throughout the city,

  Georgia Street was lined with mourners, and flags were at half-mast, as Pauline Johnson’s coffin was taken to the Mountain View Cemetery on March 10, 1913.

  public offices were closed and flags flew at half-mast. This was the largest funeral the young city had ever seen.

  By the time the solemn procession arrived at the Cathedral, every pew was jammed and a silent crowd filled the street outside. Evelyn sat in the front, hiding her grief behind the impassive mask she had assumed at the funerals of her father, her brother Beverly and her mother. Although Pauline had requested that there should be no flowers, her coffin was piled high—a wreath from the Royal Society of Canada, violets and ivy leaves from the IODE, violets and hyacinths from the Vancouver Women’s Pr
ess Club, a lyre of spring flowers from the Canadian Women’s Press Club, bouquets from friends and relatives from all across Canada. Pauline had asked that Chopin’s “Dead March” should be played, but to Mrs. Rogers’s frustration, the organ was broken. The choir sang Pauline’s favourite hymns unaccompanied, “Peace, Perfect Peace” and “Crossing the Bar.” The Reverend Owen preached a sermon. The service over, the remains were taken to the Mountain View crematorium. “A half glow seemed to settle over the business and residential sections of the city. It was as if the rush and noise of the city had been stayed in respect to this gifted Indian woman,” according to the following day’s Vancouver Sun.

  Three days after the funeral, Elizabeth Rogers and Lionel Makovski went to the crematorium to pick up Pauline’s ashes. “We were ushered into a room where a largish, squarish cement, very plain box stood on a table,” Mrs. Rogers later recalled. “The ashes were in a small brown tin with white ribbon on the top and a label tied to it…The tin [was] about as large as a Dutch cleanser container.” Lionel placed a copy of Legends of Vancouver and a copy of Flint and Feather in the cement container next to the tin. These were the only two books by Pauline that were in print when she died. After the under-taker sealed a lid onto the container, Lionel carried it out of the crematorium and placed it on the leather seat of Mrs. Rogers’s car.