October Ferry to Gabriola

by Lowry, Malcolm

  “I feel lonely,” he said. “Everybody takes me for an Englishman and they seem to hate the English like the devil. Myself, I take pride in saying I’m English even though I’m half Welsh, even though strictly speaking I’m a Canadian.”

  “I’m Scottish.”

  “—but are we going to heaven, or hell?” the great voice of one of the characters in the show boomed through into the foyer…“Ah,” came back the answer, “But they are the same place, you see.” Had the voice been that of the Inspector, who was supposed to be God, who had come aboard that ship of the dead to judge the passengers? Or was it Scrubby the barman speaking, the “halfway,” destined because of his suicide to commute eternally on that spectral ferry between earth and the unbeholden land?

  Chapter 4

  Isn’t Life Wonderful

  BUT FROM THE FIRST Jacqueline and Ethan had been completely at home with one another. They joined a film society showing film classics on Saturday afternoons in an auditorium—it turned out—belonging to the tuberculo-therapic annex of the General Hospital, where they went to see, for a start, D. W. Griffith’s Isn’t Life Wonderful.

  Life might be wonderful, or seem so at the moment, but it hadn’t occurred to Ethan before that it could be provoked to actual mirth at the mere hint of death or dissolution…Yes, uncharitable as it was merely to entertain such a thought here, even in the absence, naturally, of the patients, Ethan and Jacqueline, seated almost alone in the stalls equipped with objects they at first mistook for ashtrays, every time they reflected on their environment vis-à-vis the title of the picture, found themselves, to their shame, beset by promptings to irreverence similar to those which sometimes tempt the kindliest folk to bizarre behavior at funerals. And for a few minutes they actually had a hard time stopping each other laughing out loud. Ethan soon discovered the film was impressing him deeply and in a new and strange manner in which he never remembered being impressed before. The scene was laid somewhere in the Balkans, and the film opened with two young lovers, newly married, being driven from their home, a hut on the edge of the forest, by looting soldiers who killed their parents and then set fire to their hut. Now the lovers were fleeing for their lives, dragging their sole remaining possession: a sack of potatoes. Behind them, distantly, their home burned. The day declined in the forest with a turbulent sky above the trees presaging storm, and the lovers, fearful of more soldiers, or bandits, did not know what path to take. Next, bandits ambushed them and robbed them of their sack of potatoes. Night fell. The defenseless lovers were lost in the forest. All was dark…The story thus far had the virtue of its own naïveté but also to their more modern eyes the film occasionally appeared so crude and jerky it was difficult not to laugh now for that reason. But quite suddenly Griffith’s genius began to transmute all this, and in such a profoundly beautiful way, Ethan felt it almost beginning to change something in himself. The camera traveled slowly up to the treetops bending in the wind and now you saw the tempestuous sky brighten as the moon sailed out of the clouds. And instead of giving way to despair as the lovers had seemed about to do, they gazed up with a hungry supplication at this wild beauty of trees and stormy moonlight above them, then turned to each other with love, as to say, a supposition confirmed by the subtitle, Isn’t Life Wonderful.

  Ethan, who had his excuses, reflected he hadn’t often felt life was very wonderful—certainly not in that way. Still, he must have sometimes gazed at the beauty of trees or the moon or the sea—undoubtedly the sea—in much this fashion, in youth at least, though such yearning was always short-lived with him, short-circuited by embarrassment at himself, the foolishness of the girl he was with, by some feeling of general frustration, more often sexual, or a humble, obscure and complicated sense of ignorance, as from some lack of ratification for what one saw, which perhaps was not what one was supposed to see, or which was not all a finer nature would see. And how many times had not misery or loneliness, or when he grew older, guilt, even complete hopelessness, got in the way? Anyhow, this scene on the screen with the transfigured faces of the lovers gazing up at the moonlight falling through the treetops struck him all of a sudden as so much more poignant than anything he had ever experienced in fact, and seeing it with Jacqueline affected him with so much the more uninhibited wonder, that what happened was extraordinary. It was like deducing the real from the unreal. It was as though the moonlight falling through the trees on the screen inside the theatre, by the transpiercing beauty of the manner in which it was perceived and photographed, gave the remembered moonlight of the world outside a loveliness it had never before possessed for him, nay, gave the earth, life itself, for him, another possible beauty, a new reality somehow undreamed-of theretofore.

  But now here was all this, and here he was, aware of Jacqueline’s moist hand in his, of both of them trying not to weep, but he could feel it happening by a perfect identity, they were the lovers themselves. Now they saw with the lovers’ eyes. It was they who, having lost everything, had not given way to despair. It was they themselves, Ethan and Jacqueline, who were gazing up now at this wild beauty of trees and stormy moonlight above them in rapture, and thanking God for their love, because life was wonderful and they were in love themselves and this was what it was to exist!

  The film ended with a similar scene of trees in sunlight with the lovers approaching down a long road, hand in hand, gazing up at the over-arching treetops overhead, then there was only the long road stretching into the future…while the next moment Jacqueline and he were standing outside the cinema on a similar deserted road, one of the quiet tree-lined avenues adjoining the hospital grounds; beyond to their right they found a small park, where a few convalescents were walking or being wheeled by nurses, and where now, excited by the film and uncertain where to go (Ethan was still afraid of her youth, didn’t know where to take her, and perhaps was a little afraid of himself), they began to drift up and down, discussing the film. Ethan became so enthralled he scarcely knew after a time whether he was talking or simply thinking to himself. Not only was the film not sentimental, he decided, there was no irony in the title. It was, in a mysterious way, the truth, yes even in Keats’ sense. (Latterly Ethan, then almost totally ignorant of literature, unless rhetoric be a branch of it, but anxious to prove himself indeed Jacqueline’s twenty-third pupil, had taken to reading poetry, Jacqueline having started him off recklessly with Keats.) There was the beauty of truth within which was the truth of love, and the truth of beauty above, which love perceived through its own eyes, and to which it mysteriously corresponded. Something like that. So that if you had love, even if you’d lost all your worldly goods you simply spoke the truth when you said, “Isn’t Life Wonderful?”

  Suddenly death appeared an enemy, the world (so different from the earth), not less so: then you were a great deal stronger than death too, if you had love, and faith in that love. Ethan waxed impassioned, derivative, contradictory, philosophically profound, personally adolescent. He also felt himself being very entertaining, in the manner of a lover who arouses gaiety with all the ardor of one making love, a gaiety in which, especially when remembered in later marriage, sometimes sounds a note of sadness, as though such moments foreshadowed not only the lightheartedness and companionship of that married life, but its pitfalls, sorrows and bereavements too…

  As he was saying, only the earth with all its beauty was your friend, and the outward correspondence of your inner nature, when you were blessed with love. And if you betrayed this by too much attachment to the things of the world, love could only revenge itself by appearing in material guise too and bring about your downfall. And it was scarcely Ethan’s most logical or original argument for the defense, that that had started out on behalf of “life,” nor involved any point of view or law—whether jus civile, jus divinum, jus gentium, not to mention post liminium—he had ever formerly maintained or thought of maintaining. But certainly it was his most eloquent and persuasive speech, which (while rendering yet more untrue that sentence we read in the
novel on our grandmother’s shelf: “Seldom can a proposal of marriage have veiled itself in terms calculated to seem less attractive to a beautiful young girl”) was no doubt more illogical under the circumstances than anything in it, and, as it proved for him, certainly his most important.

  “Ethan, are you saying you love me?”

  “Am I—I—”

  “Would you do that for me?”

  “…Would I do what—?”

  “If we were driven out of our home into a forest with everything gang agley, and all our plans turned round in mid-air and thrown away in an old boot, and there we were with sweet damn all in the world, and everyone against us and nowhere to go, would you still look at the moon like that with me and say, ‘Isn’t Life Wonderful?’ ”

  Ethan looked up at the moon through the trees which the ratepayers of this district had recently petitioned to have removed as a menace to life, and as old-fashioned eyesores not in keeping with the modern development of this fine section. It was the first time he had so passionately sided with the trees, even though he did not know what kind they were.

  “Is that what you feel, Jacqueline?” Ethan, still looking up at the trees under a sky like an illuminated eiderdown, felt suddenly sorrowful and hopeless. “But I’m too old for you.”

  Jacqueline put her arms around his neck and kissed him. “Aye, you’re a sad disappointment to me, with all your sorrow and gloom.”

  “It’s because I’m so terribly in love with you.”

  “Huh. I’ve known that for ages.”

  They stood with their arms about one another. “Oh, I can see we’re going to be a terrible comfort to each other,” Jacqueline said wryly.

  Chapter 5

  A Devilishe Pastime

  IT WAS SPRING AND they walked down the sidestreets toward a field where a game of English rugger was in progress and where, along its edge by the pavilion, near which Ethan had parked his car, trees were already in bloom. Bluebells and crocus and little wildflowers were blowing in the grasses here, and above the sun was shining. Grim Toronto was still a little town called York in this place. Ethan asked what sort of trees these were but Jacqueline seemed still in a strange mood induced by the film they had just seen, Wuthering Heights.

  “I asked you about the trees?”

  “Ah yes, the trees,” Jacqueline, who had been gazing, deeply abstracted, at the wildflowers, woke up again, and turning to him suddenly flung out her arm in a graceful dramatic gesture. “Cherry, peach, pear, my God, don’t you know that? Don’t you see anything? Except hildy-wildy films with me. And don’t you do anything, besides defend people charged with horrible crimes? I mean. Belong to any clubs, or anything? Don’t you know anyone?”

  “Yes, I belong to a club, composed of other people who defend people charged with horrible crimes.”

  They were watching the rugger game, Jacqueline rather listlessly, Ethan intermittently, and with some sardonic relish passing such un-Canadian judgments as “Jolly well tackled, sir.” Or “Drop a goal, why don’t you?” Or “Heel it out of that scrum.”

  “If it matters, very few people outside my work. And if you want to know too,” he glanced about him at the gently tremulous pink-and-white snow of blooms on the trees among which the ball, the consequence of a wildly aimed drop-kick, was bounding erratically, and now, fielded by one of the dozen or so spectators at their end was returned with a heavily expert air, “this is the first time I’ve ever really seen a spring, this time with you, in my whole goddam life. And if you want to know why, it’s partly because I was blind, or almost blind, from the age of eight or nine to thirteen or thereabouts, so I never acquired the habit of looking at things, trees and flowers you see, or understanding what nature was about, and anyhow there was no one who cared to teach me…But perhaps you’d feel better if I told you I got sidetracked from an important brief last week reading those bits of Hardy and Burns you suggested…Wonderful. But it’s almost all a revelation to me. Almost all new…Back we go into touch—another line out!”

  “Ethan, my poor darling!”

  “I only told you partly to explain why I still have difficulty in reading, and understanding certain things. I just didn’t acquire the habit.” Later, he said, at the University, he took to law enthusiastically, “I think I can say because a lot depends on memory,” and he’d acquired an encyclopaedic memory of a narrow kind. Otherwise he’d also inherited from his childhood a capacity for concentration and wandering attention about equally extreme. “Anyhow, the way it’s worked out—though I won’t say I wasn’t read to, even my father read to me when he felt in a mood to listen to his own voice—and though I must have crashed through heaven knows how many libraries of law books by now, and even have some philosophical training—I’ve only read about half a dozen serious novels right through without skipping. Crime and Punishment…I read all that, including the epilogue…And I know something about music, and can even pretend to tootle on the clarinet like Mr. Goodman.” He said all this quite seriously, looking down at Jacqueline, who made sounds both soothing and admiring.

  “But poetry, ancient and modern, was almost absolutely a dead issue with me till I met you, and art, in the sense of painting, is totally beyond my knowledge. I secretly believe the world is flat, and have such godawful difficulty working out my income tax it’s come to be a standing joke with the income tax department…Well, I’m partly joking now…Take a breathah, you fellows! Or let that bloody ball out to the threes—” He turned back to her. “At least this isn’t illegal any more, or considered a ‘devilishe pastime which led to brawling, murther, homicide, and great effusion of blood.’ Though can’t you just see a Toronto Leet Roll ban after the pattern of the Manchester one three centuries ago ‘because of great disorder and the inhabitants charged with makynge and amendynge of their glass windows broken by lewd and disordered persons playing with the foote-ball…’ I have a lot of apparently useless knowledge like this. I find it invaluable in court.”

  Jacqueline was laughing. “But you seem to know a lot about this game.”

  “…that bit was cheating, really. It sounds as if I’d been making esoteric legal researches but actually I got it out of the Manchester Guardian. Besides, it strictly pertains to soccer. I played rugger for three and a half years at an English public school and got to like it a lot, though I never was much good. I had plenty of time to transcend it all, but maybe the damage was done.”

  “You mean your eyes? But you recovered, didn’t you?”

  “No. I didn’t. I mean from the cruelty. The bloody obscene cruelty of those fiendish little bastards of children when they had somebody helpless like me at their mercy. Pardon me.” With suddenly trembling fingers he relit his pipe, then proffered her a crumpled Sweet Caporal from a flattened package. But Jacqueline shook her head abruptly and took out of her bag a small leatherbound case in which lay tightly packed about seven yellowish-brown cigarettes; she selected one and Ethan shielded the match for her, his hands still trembling.

  “Caucasian cigarettes,” she said. “A gift from a Scottish admirer—they were sent him from Constantinople by a Russian exile.” There was no one looking and she kissed him, looking long into his eyes. “But you don’t wear glasses.”

  “It wasn’t that kind of trouble. It was simply corneal ulceration, and it can be cured these days in a fortnight or less.”

  “My dear darling. Did you have such a wretched childhood?”

  “Properly speaking I didn’t have any childhood at all, though cheerfulness, as they say, would keep breaking in. I hope you’ll admit I acquired a sense of humor at least. My father sent me away year after year to prep school—a boarding school in Stoke-Newington of which he was one of the directors and which boasted, by the way, of being Edgar Allan Poe’s alma mater. I like to think it was, even if most of the old buildings have been pulled down. But once there, divided in their mind, I daresay, as to how to treat such a valued, if useless pupil—they wouldn’t let me do any work, or play any games
, so I just wandered about the grounds in dark glasses, or a double eyeshade, or one eyeshade, according to the status of my affliction, and had a perfectly wonderful time looking after the headmaster’s dog for four years or so. Meanwhile also keeping the head himself, who had a wife unsympathetic on that score, well supplied with whiskey. Well, there was no law in those days against a child going into a spirit merchants, or buying it at the chemists. His brand of usquebaugh was Golden Guinea, I recall…Altogether the ideal life.”

  Ethan also recalled for her that despite these special privileges he’d been kept in a state of semistarvation, was lucky if he saw an egg or a glass of milk in a month, and that the services of one school doctor were dispensed with for having tactlessly argued that gross malnutrition was at the root of the trouble. Following this, an occasional spoonful of malt was added to his diet, apart from which he never remembered receiving any treatment for his eyes beyond zinc ointment, castor oil, and a flogging, when he had a relapse, from a junior master (who had attributed his condition, Ethan did not mention, to “certain dirty schoolboy habits…” As had his father, who however, when Ethan was home for the holidays, preferred to beat him over his chilblains with a razor strop, at the same time insisting—which Ethan didn’t mention either—how his filthy vice which had probably already led to complete impoverishment of his blood, would result in atrophy, complete idiocy and finally death at the age of nineteen.)

  “As I was saying, the old man preferred the razor strop,” Ethan went on, “I told you that sort of eye trouble could be cured in a short time today. But my father didn’t condescend to take me to an eye specialist until I was thirteen…He’d lost Mother some years before all this started and of course I couldn’t guess what he was going through at the time. Finally he took me up to London and a Queen Anne Street ophthalmologist put cocaine on my eyes and simply scraped the affliction away in half an hour, like a sailor scraping rust off a deck.”