October Ferry to Gabriola

by Lowry, Malcolm

  It was assumed, as such things are so often publicly given the impression of being assumed, that he had ruined this “innocent and penniless girl,” not merely in the accepted manner, but also by his “corrupt and immoral practices” and his “evil rites.” (Ethan, who’d since defended a man who called himself a “practicing astral healer” from a charge of rape brought by one of the man’s clients who’d patently attempted to seduce him—whereas she claimed he had, on the contrary, persuaded her against her will to undertake with him an astral journey to Venus, couldn’t help wondering if the statistically large number of involvements in such ugly human scandals by “honest” practitioners of the occult were not part of the price they had to pay for being what they were, or what they thought they were, as if this might be, for their pretensions to the superhuman, their inevitable human penance.)

  But the actual facts, as Ethan now began to perceive them, were far more sympathetic to his father-in-law-to-be, the more so since he’d clearly lost the only person he’d ever truly loved, and as far as Ethan was concerned, much more sympathetic to Jacqueline’s real mother, who appeared as a unique person, and an interesting and astonishing one. About the only true thing to emerge from the inquest was that Flora McClintock was a magical pupil of Angus McCandless at that period, if scarcely a neophyte. (She had ably and with professional zeal come to his assistance in a feud he was currently waging with the Rosicrucians, a society he had not forgotten to bait, however, even in his days with the Royal Caledonian Horse.) The irony was that The McCandless not only had not “ruthlessly cast her adrift after making her his mistress,” as the coroner’s jury’s verdict asserted, but had actually, and passionately, wanted to marry her, and this before ever she became pregnant, a knowledge, incidentally, that had not for some reason been imparted to him. Jacqueline’s foster-mother would not consent to a divorce (Angus was not in his Catholic period then), and the second objection, which might have seemed to many more of a recommendation, was one affecting The McCandless pride. Far from being penniless, Flora McClintock had much more money than he had. She was a relatively wealthy woman who preferred to live in conditions nearly resembling poverty, at the same time being extremely generous and in the habit of giving large sums away. But the third and most potent reason was that this magical pupil, whom the hapless magician considered his intellectual superior, who combined an interest in ceremonial magic with anarchy, was besides one of the early Scottish nationalists and was distantly related to a Scottish lord of session, and did not believe in marriage at all.

  Anything was better than to accept the social lie, or such was Flora McClintock’s pose. Her sole concession to the human norm, it seemed, was to have fallen madly in love with The McCandless, and her influence on him was to be seen partly in Jacqueline’s own upbringing. But she must have eventually come to hate Angus more, at least at one time, and this for reasons by no means apparent. To begin with she had not disclosed her pregnancy to Angus, and when at the fourth month she found it becoming impossible to conceal this much longer, she had with sudden and inexplicable felinity driven the poor McCandless away and refused thereafter, on hearing he had revisited Jacqueline’s foster-mother on this first occasion, to see him again. Most perplexing of all was to discover any valid motive, other than the false one established at the inquest, seeing the sort of person she was, for the suicide itself. Here again, her father said, she had sometimes threatened it but (Ethan winced at Jacqueline’s words) to do this simply out of curiosity. Certainly there had seemed a motive of revenge in her two related melodramatic actions. But it was all very unlike the most abnormal workings of ordinary jealousy. In a way, and such was Jacqueline’s opinion, it had been more like a chastisement, an act of unbalanced yet total and final rebellion against what she considered The McCandless’ own apostasy—though what choice he had had considering her treatment of him was not clear—in having “gone over to the enemy” by having returned meantime to live with his wife. In any case Ethan’s little Hardyan fantasy about Assiniboine Street had not been quite accurate. Jacqueline had been left on The McCandless’ own doorstep, with a note pinned to the blanket she was wrapped in leaving no doubt as to her identity. On the same day, and before Angus could reach her, Flora McClintock killed herself. The fact that she had been living with someone else in her deceitfully poverty-stricken flat shortly before Jacqueline was born never came out at the inquest. Nor that, with magnificent illogic, she had left all her money to the Rosicrucians.

  At this point in Jacqueline’s recital some people at the next table, unable to attract the waiter’s attention, started banging their glasses on the table and Ethan lost track completely of what Jacqueline was saying.

  “…and so you see, through Mother, that makes me also one-eighth Indian,” Jacqueline’s voice emerged brightly out of the brouhaha into another lull as the drinkers’ glasses were returned replenished, “and you are breaking the law in yet another way by bringing an Indian into a pub.”

  “An Indian——? I don’t think…Anyhow, if it does I was breaking it eightfold the other afternoon in Oakville, where I dropped into a pub and fell in with the chief of the Mohawks. I don’t believe anybody would have dared to refuse him a drink. He’s a client of mine, in a way—he once called on me to help in the case of a fellow Mohawk in trouble. Are you a Mohawk?”

  “Assiniboine. Like the street. Sioux. It was a coincidence, simply.”

  “Oakville—” he said and then was silent.

  “Oh…I thought it might be a wonderful place for us to live, there right on the lake…and unspoilt as yet…Of course with this showdown with Hitler that seems to be coming they may start moving in Moxo—Alas my poor brother! Or some other indispensable war industries…Still, one can hope not. There’s a judge’s old wooded estate, on a rural route, that’s being broken up into lots—you could get a lovely place with the lawn under the Judas trees going right down to the lake…There’s the advantage of a school nearby.”

  “Oh, you’re extending me the privilege of going on working after we’re married.” Jacqueline gave him a tender look.

  “I didn’t mean that…If you want to, of course…Maybe I was being a bit previous…I was thinking…The point is, the judge built five or six really beautiful little homes there, but quite widely separated. But his old edict stands that more houses can’t be built on his property. And it’s a huge estate. He had other more uncomfortable edicts, such as that no one even after his death can smoke on the property; but I don’t think anyone’s going to pay much attention to that. He was an eccentric old duck, with a terrible fear of fire…In effect, you have acres upon acres of elbow room.” Suddenly he said passionately: “I can’t stand the idea of all the heartbreak and homelessness you’ve been through!”

  “Oh for God’s sake, please don’t feel tragic over me, because I don’t.”

  “I love you.”

  “But the whole thing is, Ethan dear, it’s made me a bit of a snob…I’m proud of being part Indian and I’m even more snobbish about having a great-uncle who had a title. And The McCandless too. After all, he is The McCandless, even though the McCandless clan are not so very large or important, and he left Scotland when he was a very young man, and it doesn’t mean so much any more, this chieftain business. Still, I’m glad. Sometimes it’s the only way I can reconcile myself to being a child of passion, of being a bastard. I don’t like to think of myself being conceived in a place like this, even if I was. It somehow washes the footmarks off the pillowslips a little, if you see what I mean.” She laughed.

  “Great God, how your mother would not have approved of those sentiments!”

  “So you don’t see what I mean,” Jacqueline immediately took him up. “You don’t see at all—yet.”

  Ethan, eating from a bag of potato chips bought from a crippled vendor the waiters hadn’t the heart to deny entrance, noticed that the tables on the “Ladies and Escorts” side of the “parlour,” as a touching little tribute to the genteel, wherever th
ey had survived the assaults of the table-bangers, were covered with tablecloths, observed after a while, a wide brass-railed companionway leading to a higher roped-in level with more tables to accommodate an overflow nearer closing time, the ceaseless murmuring and clattering and battering and monotonous ships-engine-like clamor, the whole place suggested a nightmare dining saloon of indeterminate class far below decks in a transatlantic liner (or, for a moment of stillness, one of those “trick” illustrations, apparently intended half to suggest such a liner’s dining room, but with the subscription by the artist: What’s wrong with this picture?), observed he was afraid she didn’t get much support from his side of the family, though he had had an ancestor in Canada’s first Parliament in Niagara-on-the-Lake—“It was he first built the house, though Grandfather renovated it—my father’s living in it with a housekeeper who is a horror, a long-suffering Negro butler who was a Pullman porter, and a Yugoslavian practical nurse, which house incidentally I may inherit with luck, so we can have one on both sides of the lake”—he passed her the bag of chips—“It’s sometimes pretty hard to think of the old man as even a Canadian at all. I’ve occasionally put it down to the fact that he was such a British chauvinist at heart he’d begun by being ashamed he was originally Welsh or that we had miners at one time, and for that matter even coal-heavers, in the family—I remember one drunken wooden-legged uncle with a great sack on his back with affection—well, one has to be sympathetic. Grandfather really made the pile—the family’d fallen into the discard meantime—and Dad didn’t have quite so adventurous a spirit, and no doubt his idea of the success story was to be a sort of Canadian in reverse, like Lord Beaverbrook, and to become Lord Barkerville of Norway. For my part I’ve never been allowed to think of either Norway or Niagara as home and so as a consequence I don’t.”

  “Now you’re looking all tragically at me again.”

  “I was thinking of your father and how much he must have suffered.”

  “He did. He suffered abominably. But he always had pretty harsh ideas on the subject of remorse. And after he became a Catholic they became harsher.”

  “But it’s a terrible thing to feel you’ve been even partly responsible for somebody else’s death.”

  “So far as his own guilt was concerned—and you’d have to know Father to know he wasn’t being callous—he said that it was of less significance than as if a single hair had gone grey in God’s eyebrow.”

  “As if…” Could one only believe it were true, that one’s guilt meant so little. Or so much.

  Ethan went out to buy some hamburgers (which, like the potato chips, it was illegal to bring into a beer parlour) and when he returned he found himself alone. And as a matter of fact this was illegal too in Canada. If Jacqueline were away too long he’d have to move out of the Ladies and Escorts over to the Men’s side, though it was a ruling seldom enforced outside of reason in these days. What a country of fatuous prohibitions! When would they grow up? What would people like his grandfather have made of it? It wasn’t as if they made use of what freedom they had—the Niagara, in common with a great many pubs in Ontario, was licensed to serve wine, but almost none of them did so, a supersession deplored by his father, a teetotaler all his life, and dying of cirrhosis of the liver, who was still president of the Vintner’s Association, Niagara-on-the-Lake being a town that adjoined the vineyards on the peninsula. Quebec’s liquor laws were more sensible.

  Why on earth was Jacqueline so long? She’d gone to phone the friend she shared an apartment with that she’d be late.…Dear God, what a history was hers. And his! Suddenly, his sense of guilt increasing intolerably as he sat on alone, with his wretched hamburgers concealed on a chair, Ethan felt he simply had to tell Jacqueline about Peter Cordwainer. He tipped their waiter, asking him to keep their places with the beers still standing on the table, and asked to be paged when Jacqueline returned. Then, though he hadn’t been asked to shift, he went next door to have a bottle of eastern ale and think how to approach the subject. How to tell about—Peter Cordwainer.

  Chapter 8

  “Really, Serving Mother Gettle’s Soup Is Lots Simpler”

  SEATED BY HIMSELF, HALF hidden in the Men’s parlour, though warmed by the excellent bottle of ale, Ethan was possessed from head to foot by the sensation of his own loneliness without Jacqueline. He didn’t want to eat his share of the hamburgers without her, though they were growing cold, and had that been his object in being seated so askance. From that small absence of hers had taken root, too, for the first time, the full consciousness of how lonely he’d been all his life. He hadn’t wished to admit to himself that his whole life since the business of Peter Cordwainer had been in the nature of self-inflicted penance, just as what had happened to him in childhood had been a similar penance, only inflicted on him from outside. And that former was a penance which also, despite his career, that might have seemed to contradict this, had essentially cut him off from mankind. Though he’d never really got to know any of his clients, with the possible exception of old Henry Knight—and what had happened to him by the way?—he identified himself with them completely, and no guilt was too bad for him to be able to identify himself wholly with its subject even while passionately declaring that subject’s innocence. Beyond any self-love involved, he knew there was latent a genuine and compassionate love of humanity somewhere in this, but it was not a love that had ever made him feel part of mankind. He stood apart, self-condemned, a kind of pariah, and imperceptibly his colleagues had come half to feel this too, without being able to give a reason for it, and no matter how they might personally like him, or admire his talents. Jacqueline was right—and he had been right too, that afternoon—he was also like an actor, but like an actor continually playing the part of one engaged in his own self-defense. His life had been less a life than a sort of movie, or series of movies. But now perhaps his penance would be over. He had taken enough punishment, had been punished, for one thing—and this was surely something of rare occurrence in a man of his age—by never having known what it was really to love before. But with Jacqueline, he need never be lonely and homeless. He would need no longer to feel himself so cut off. Now there would be someone else to think of who must, whatever she said, have often felt as lonely and homeless as himself. Gone, anyhow, was the savagery of this afternoon. His whole heart went out to Jacqueline as to some deep wound of homelessness he sensed in her and longed to assuage. Good heavens, the way in which she had told her story, detachedly, wryly, jesting, her tone mostly that of enthusiastic high-school gossip about beaux or jazz orchestras, the substance of her worlds not more strange and primordial than had they concerned some changeling brought up by the Demogorgon. It had given Ethan at one point a sudden awful feeling of being situated in a chaotic limbo at the very outermost fringes of the world, no, peripheral to it, beyond it, where one could not imagine that this beer parlour with its eternally recurrent ranged batteries of soapsuds-filled glasses on the bar was spinning on the same axis as he did, at the centre of the world, Piccadilly Circus and the Pantheon.

  And meantime what a lonely home from home was the Men’s side of a beer parlour in a great Canadian city. Nowhere in the world perhaps were there similar places whose raison d’être is presumably social pleasure where this is made harder to obtain, nowhere else places of such gigantic size, horror and total viewlessness. And you wouldn’t have thought at first you could be lonely, even by yourself, especially on Saturday night, for if they were the hugest and ugliest drinking places on earth they were probably among the most crowded and so with that much more possibility of invitation to the human fellowship that exists. And exist of course it does, in those rare cases where it can survive the evil-favoredness of the surroundings. But beer parlour! Yes, their final ghastly malevolence was summed up in that one genteel and funereal substantive, once and for all: in that too, within their gloomy, music-bereft and often subterranean portals, you were obliged to drink nothing but that drink which of all alcoholic drinks perhaps
most powerfully suggests gardens, song, merriment…

  It seems that man if alone cannot resist gazing at his reflection while drinking, however horrible the result, and a huge flawed mirror running down one side of the parlour produced the illusion from time to time that everyone was talking to himself. And perhaps essentially it was so. But now Ethan became aware of something very curious. Even in sombre places like this, and not because of the menace, he had always remained half-conscious of his isolation from his fellow man. He’d tended to see people in groups, integrated among themselves, excluding him—“See—that fellow sitting over there in the corner, I’m not sure I like the shifty look of him, he isn’t one of us,” he could feel people saying of him, with a suspicion that could quicken in his returned glance to enmity as easily as his heart could be touched by a look of warmth. But now he found himself looking at the faces about him with a quite new affection. He saw that these were just the same kind of tragic, isolated individuals as himself. Like himself; yes, but not like. For never before, despite all the material advantages of his life, had Ethan seen himself, as now, a creature of luck. And this newfound knowledge he accepted with humility; on account of it gazed around him with that much more sympathy and love. The two poor, shabby, half-starved lone old Englishmen seated under those fake ye olde coache and horses lanterns, in which burned sinister bulbs that had glowered all this spring afternoon, still fostered some crepuscular illusion that this was their favorite brew (and who dared say the English were not a great and tragic race when even their favorite drink was bitter?), what brokenhearted destiny had they to look forward to? What loveless, lonely, misbegotten haunt of collapsed illusions to which they hoped to crawl back, supposing them capable of reaching it—Yes, and what of that ancient, bearded and turbaned Hindu, wafted here by some freak of irreligion, and now on the point of being thrown out, and to whose rescue he wanted to go, though it was already too late—what lonesome, battered, dirty old squatter’s shack down by the waterfront did he live in he would not see till after a night in gaol? And then, what voice of love would welcome him? And that Negro, perhaps a Barbadian, who seemed dancing even while sitting down, and glancing nervously about him, in a sort of paroxysm of laughing terror, who, though it was anything but a warm evening, had brought a lump of ice with him, and having first put it in his beer, was now pretending enthusiastically to suck at it? Or this poor fellow trying in grisly travesty to sell one of his front teeth that had just fallen out. Had these people got homes, or had they come here to escape from them? And having escaped from them, what was it they found here, or rather, alas, what was it that they would not find? Could never, or so rarely, or so pitifully find, and having found, what then? Roofs of a fallen sort over their heads they might have, but drink was the only tie-beam of their despair. And to transpose but a single letter of that word “home,” what hope did they have? Or hope or love that could compare with his, Ethan Llewelyn’s, the hope and love that was bestowed on him now mercifully through Jacqueline? And it was not merely of these obviously hapless mortals he had this feeling, but of everyone in the beer parlour.