October Ferry to Gabriola

by Lowry, Malcolm

  “Good God, Ethan,” Jacqueline said, “I never in my life heard such an awful story. Good God, it must have hurt you!”

  At the far end of the field a three-quarter broke away from the disbanding scrum, sold two dummies, cut in over the twenty-five, dodged the opposing fullback, changed his course and sprinted at the corner flag, knocking it down as he slithered in to score a try. Not satisfied with that, the captain of his side made the rare decision of selecting the same man to attempt its conversion into a goal. Taking his aim wonderfully, still panting, covered with dirt and blood, the exhausted three-quarter did so, kicking right from the corner of the twenty-five. Curving in from its great wide angle the ball hovered, dropped accurately over the cross bar.

  “But if you ask me didn’t I have any happiness at all in my youth, the answer is yes,” Ethan said. “Bravissimo!” he joined in the renewed applause. “When I was seventeen I left my public school and signed on a sailing ship for five months and went to Ceylon and I was happy when I was aloft. In fact the higher aloft I got away from everyone on board the better I liked it. My best friend of all was the moonsail, which is the highest sail of all, which almost doesn’t exist, and I became so fond of it the captain said when I left the ship I better take it home and go to bed with it or I wouldn’t be able to sleep, just as the saying is among sailors they won’t be able to sleep when they get home unless they hire someone to pour buckets of water on the roof all night. You’d have thought I’d have learned something too from that experience, which was a devilishe pastime in many ways, and you’re quite right I did, though it hadn’t occurred to me really what till this moment…I ran into the bosun in Birkenhead a year after I’d got back—he’d been quite a tyrant on board—and we had a beer together and he said to me: ‘Ethan, I wouldn’t say you were one of my star turns, but you were a good lad, and I never knew you shirk a dirty job, and now I suppose you’re telling all your tiddley friends you had enough experience to last you a lifetime after all we went through on that packet, and you went through with your old bloody bosun hazing you and one thing and the other.’ I told him I’d enjoyed a lot of it but on the bad side I thought I’d taken as much as anyone could expect to take on a first voyage, to which he replied: ‘First voyage! If you want to be a real hard case like me you’ll go back on another ship, worse than that one, with a bloody bosun ten times worse than I ever was, and that’ll be your first voyage!’ ‘You haven’t had a first voyage yet, son,’ he said.”

  Jacqueline appeared to find his laughter catching, for she laughed herself till she got out of breath, and even seemed to be half crying.

  “But at least you had a father,” she said finally, as the whistle blew prolongedly (the game, probably the last of the season, over, won—to judge from the catastrophic thwackings of approbation the three-quarter was receiving, that now nearly brought the fellow to his knees again—won at the last moment for his side by the last indefectible and indefeasible place-kick, and the players began to disperse toward the pavilion.

  “Oh yes, had and have a father. He’s living in Niagara-on-the-Lake again, in the house where I was born, poor old chap. I’ve grown kind of fond of him, though I’m not much more popular with him now than I was then…Sure, I had a father all right all right.”

  “Well I’ll tell you what,” Jacqueline said gaily. “I didn’t…That is, I did…But I’m a bastard…And now we’re going to a beer parlour.”

  Chapter 6

  Niagara

  IN THE NIAGARA, A pub from whose suddenly opened door crashed a hubbub like a tape-recording of black brandts in the mating season, sitting in a niche in the Ladies and Escorts, under the notice forbidding alcoholic beverages to minors and Indians, Jacqueline drank her beer and said:

  “You’ve been holding out on me, you’re a famous man, I saw your picture in the Sunday supplement last week.”

  “Quite possibly. I got into the news for breaking up a case based on prima facie evidence a couple of years ago and they’ve been writing me up ever since.”

  “You’ve known me all this time, we’re even engaged, and you never once thought there was anything odd about me, you don’t know anything about me either.”

  “No. I didn’t. I don’t.”

  “Maybe that’s because you’ve lived so long in England. Well, I’ll tell you—” Jacqueline laughed and took a long drink and blew out a flood of smoke from her yellow “Caucasian” cigarette. “It was very interesting. I was picked up on the doorstep as a baby. And just for the record, my father and mother were coming back from the movies…No, but what’s really funny, it was a D. W. Griffith film, Intolerance—or maybe Way Down East.”

  Or perhaps (and ah, the eerie significance of cinemas in our life, Ethan thought, as if they related to the afterlife, as if we knew, after we are dead, we would be conducted to a movie house where, only half to our surprise, is playing a film named: The Ordeal of Ethan Llewelyn, with Jacqueline Llewelyn), or perhaps The Ten Commandments, he resisted a temptation to say. “Go ahead, it seems I wasn’t taking you seriously after all.”

  “It was in Winnipeg, and I’m not joking. That was after I’d been abandoned by my real mother as a child about a week old.”

  Ethan buried his hands on his face on the table.

  “No, please don’t say ‘Good God, how awful for you,’ after all, I didn’t know anything about it. Sit up, you fool. My adopted father, that is, he’s my real father too—you’ll probably like him a lot—well—” Jacqueline laughed again in a certain oblique smoke-wreathed way, and trying to fan off the smoke, that was to become so familiar. “That isn’t quite the point either. What I want to make clear is—my life.” Like a little tree divesting itself of rain, she shook from herself a merry cascade of laughter. “My father is a magician.”

  “Oh? You mean he’s an illusionist—in show business?”

  “Heavens, how he’d like that—no I mean, like Werner Kraus in The Student of Prague, that we’re going to see at the film society—only a good magician, a white one.”

  “I see,” Ethan looked wildly, and said blankly. “—Um, you got as far as their finding you on a doorstep. The white magician, not played by Werner Kraus—”

  “Yes, though that isn’t the point at all. Anyhow they did, and not having any children of their own—my dad and mum, my father and my foster-mother that is—they took me home and in the end adopted me. And they’ve always been very good to me, and I really loved them. And still do.”

  With a pang Ethan saw the lonely child lying on the cold doorstep under the moon. Assiniboine Street. The Wild Assiniboine!…The two figures, the magician, muffled in a dark cloak, and his wife, in coat of shabby karakul, emerge from the back exit, over which glows a single ruby bulb, of the Strand Cinema. Picking up the infant in swaddling clothes they move off down the dark alley under a maze of telegraph wires past the Bone Dry Fertilizer Company. The moonlight falls on their faces, revealing for a moment the pure cold face of the child, slides down the iron of fire escapes. “Fain would I, dear, find some shut plot of earth’s wide wold for thee where not one tear, one qualm, would break the calm,” Ethan thought, looking, deeply moved, though feeling a sense of complete unreality, around the roaring beer parlour: he caught sight of their waiter and held up four fingers for more beer.

  “I thought you ought to know, but now I tell it it doesn’t sound interesting at all.”

  It is bad enough to learn one’s home life began by being plucked up as a baby on a January night from a freezing doorstep in Winnipeg without being informed that this sort of thing in England is considered a subject for loud laughter, Ethan was thinking, both the stock-in-trade of Victorian melodrama and a household joke, together with the drunken man embracing a lamp post, father compelled to play Jack-pick-up-sticks, the hysterical wife throwing a flatiron at him, and the deserted woman, also with her chee-ild, in a snowstorm, on Waterloo Bridge. In this category British humor also placed cripples and all those suffering from the pox, and Oscar Wilde,
handcuffed, compelled to stand from eleven A.M. to two P.M. at Clapham Junction before being consigned to Reading Gaol. Truly those were right who said the British could take it. It was a pity there was often such a sneering curve to the otherwise stiff upper lip.

  “By the way,” Jacqueline was saying, “I mean—are you religious?”

  “Religious?…I’ve seen so much suffering, heartbreak, so much, sometimes lying awake at night I want to bite trees—I want to travel the world, walk through all the thunderstorms, to put a stop to someone innocent being hurt—”

  “I mean do you have any specific religion?”

  Ethan shook his head slowly at the terrible beer parlour, shook his head very slowly without looking at her, much in the manner of a doctor at the wheel of the car trying, without taking his eyes off the road, to convey mutely to someone beside him that the injuries of the man in the back seat would not prove fatal. A Niagara of noise, he thought.

  “My parents, when in Wales, attended the Church of England. Though my father had a Puritan streak, he had a romantic side too, once went off to Czarist Russia after a quarrel with my mother, when I was three or four. Nowadays there’s nothing he believes in. My grandmother—my father’s mother that is, actually despised my father, which wasn’t surprising since it was her husband made the cash after all, made it in the Cariboo, while it was my father lost most of it—my grandmother was a fanatical Swedenborgian—”

  “Anyhow, my father’s a real live magician—how do you like that?” Jacqueline interrupted. “Many people think he’s crazy as a hoot owl. Will you give me a cigarette?”

  “You’ve got one burning in the ashtray.”

  Jacqueline smiled, peeling a fleck of yellow cigarette paper from her lower lip. “Father’s in Toronto now, lecturing at the Cosmological—I think the Cosmological Society Temple is what it’s called.”

  More beers arrived while she told him for the first time about The McCandless. Since she laughed frequently both at her own remarks and everything Ethan said, it was hard at first, amid this Saturday tumult of the beer parlour, to obtain any sort of clear or plausible picture. But after a while a pattern emerged, and the strangest thing about this pattern was that shortly one found one had taken it for granted, like those inhabitants of Vicksburg, Pennsylvania, he had read about, who, happening to observe one sunny afternoon of the eighteen-seventies an object shaped like a man pedaling solemnly across the sky at a height of three thousand feet, more or less, questioned finally neither their eyes nor their sanity, but watched with interested attention while the forever unexplained phenomenon passed overhead in the rough direction of Maryland.

  A religious division had developed in Jacqueline’s adopted family because Jacqueline’s Scottish foster-mother was and had remained staunchly Presbyterian, whereas The McCandless, in the course of their marriage and his magical and agricultural and military career, had become a Catholic, and this not because he became “converted” to Catholicism—a procedure which would have dishallowed his magical oath—but because from a “magical” viewpoint he generously conceded the Catholic Church to be no less than what she claimed to be: “The Guardian of the Mysteries.” For a similar reason, which was another massive thought, he’d once, previously, become a Mason. Jacqueline’s foster-mother, who was still living on the prairies, having no children of her own, had latterly adopted other children. But Jacqueline’s parents had come to live mostly apart, so she no longer had a “home”; meanwhile her father still made her a small allowance and she was always welcome to stay with either parent when she wished. At present Jacqueline shared an apartment with another teacher on the outskirts of the town, a small bus ride from her school, which until today, despite their declaration of love—their engagement!—and on this dull word what a miraculously bright and wistful transformation was wrought by that love, how it shone with a diamonded light!—was almost all Ethan knew about her.

  Ethan smiled courteously, but discouragingly, at a bearded drunk of, now one thought about it, Satanic mien, who had risen at the next table and, detaching himself from a group of six other drinkers seated before at least twenty-six glasses of beer, seemed, standing there, nodding confidentially at Jacqueline and himself (who he perhaps imagined were discussing lacrosse or horse racing), threatening to come over and join them.

  “…But that doesn’t mean one can really laugh at people like my father,” Jacqueline was saying, through the din. “Oh, it’s all holy enough in its way, all too holy. But it’s colossally complicated too—oh, you nearly have to be a higher mathematician to understand most of the gibberish. Oh holy gibberish!” She sighed. “All I can say is that he thinks it’s important, poor man, and maybe it is. Anyhow latterly—and what do you think of this?—Daddy’s had the idea that people like him are needed to combat the evil side of it all, which he maintains is flourishing now more than it did in the Middle Ages. He’s got a bee in his bonnet about Hitler, for example.”

  “Ich auch. Who wouldn’t?”

  “But he says that on this side too there’re evil forces at work—and that there’re some alchemists too among the scientists, like an old wizard friend of his in Cleveland—and that in a few years they’ll have the power to blow the whole world to smithereens—it sounds crazy, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, and dangerous too,” said Ethan.

  “Well,” said Jacqueline, “I never caught on to the Catholic religion, or any religion particularly, and Father counselled me never to give over my will into the hands of another power—not even his. Will you order some more beer, the waiter’s looking at you.”

  “To holy gibberish,” Ethan raised his glass.

  But Ethan felt his brain reeling, despite these noble sentiments on the side of latter-day earnestness and good behavior, the Middle Ages closing over him. God knows in his profession he’d had glimpses of some curious ways of existence…One’s common or garden conception of betrothals, streets, houses, family life, was here suddenly overthrown. Jacqueline’s story of her upbringing would have been frightening had she not been so funny about it. It was not only that The McCandless, as he was later to find out for himself, literally thought of nothing else but the great “Plan” of the universe (what was more extraordinary here was perhaps that the average person never reflected, unless solipsistically, about such matters at all), but thought of himself, if with a saving Highland cynicism, as a single factor whose conduct vitally affected it. If he so much as marked out a chicken run, it was the reciprocal path of the Hierophant that he was tracing, “which would always have an influence horizontically across the Abyss of the Tree below.” The humblest piece of gardening—the laying out, say, of a walk between the strawberry beds and the loganberries, or the setting up of a scarecrow, would elicit from him, Jacqueline was saying, some such phrase as “This you see is the path of the Hanged Man which will always leave him suspended from the reciprocal path of the Star, or Aquarius, of the next ‘Tree’ while he is seen below Tiphereth—that’s him over there—on his own Tree…”

  “You can imagine these sort of conversations going on between him and Mother on the farm,” Jacqueline said, “punctuated by other arguments about the price of harrows or thrashers or whether one should buy thirteen yards of well-rotted cow or what not, or how much alfalfa one should plant that year, and always Mother accusing him of inviting hellfire down on us all—you couldn’t help liking him, though I doubt not in another age he’d have been burned at the stake, and I’m not sure he’ll go free in this. But none of this was what I really wanted to tell you.”

  She gave him a long, dark, almost savage look, at the same time pleading and humorous, which was later also to become so familiar, then she said very quickly: “You see, my adopted father is my real father, I mean I’m his bastard, my own mother committed suicide. No, please don’t say anything. Just let me tell you.”

  “Tell me.”

  “She made sure. They found her hanging in a gas-filled flat.”

  “She hanged herself?”


  “She hanged herself.”

  Chapter 7

  A Grey Hair in God’s Eyebrow

  ETHAN TOOK HER HAND across the table and held it for a moment, but she drew it away, gulped her beer, talking impetuously, almost incoherently now, it seemed to Ethan, and as Saturday afternoon resoundingly merged into Saturday night the pandemonium within the Niagara grew so demoniacal he could hear only part of what Jacqueline was saying. Furthermore there appeared to be two versions of the story, and Jacqueline jumped without warning back and forth from the first to the second; the one, based on the construction the coroner and the general public had put on the tragedy, the other, The McCandless’ own.

  He had gone overseas in the Great War, he and Jacqueline’s foster-mother had been married only a short time, and when he returned, wounded, late in 1917, they had found it hopelessly difficult to take up their lives again. Apparently their physical incompatibility couldn’t have been more complete, but not unrelated to this, there were spiritual divergences yet more sundering. Not strong enough to resume farm work immediately, The McCandless sought ever-increasing refuge in his occultist activities which, having now some cause to be jealous of them, his wife challenged him to give up altogether. This resulted in their separation for several months and during this period Jacqueline’s father had a short-lived but violent affair with her real mother whose name (her middle name was also Jacqueline) was Flora McClintock, a beautiful and wild girl of Highland stock, an intellectual, and a Scottish patriot, but who had been born in Nova Scotia.

  At the inquest, and apparently quite without consulting the finer points of the evidence, they had turned on the brokenhearted McCandless all the mountain howitzers, skoda guns, spavined horses and mules available to the moral forces of municipal Canadian nonjudicial opinion, shortly to become popular opinion, had blasted him up and down as a “moral leper,” as one—a touch that would have pleased Von Stroheim—whose conduct had been unworthy of an “officer and a gentleman” (The McCandless having refused a commission had been a master-sergeant of cavalry in the Royal Caledonian Horse serving with which he had won the DSM), held his status as a Canadian itself in question, not so surprising since there was no such thing as a bona fide Canadian citizen in those days—in fact there was no such thing then in 1938—and even raised the possibility of his deportation (whether to France or bonny Scotland or the sixth dimension was another matter) and all this to his credit Angus McCandless mostly endured in silence.