October Ferry to Gabriola

by Lowry, Malcolm

  What had that large prosperous Canadian, of benign demeanor, in tweed sports coat, smoking a pipe, and leaning back comfortably with folded legs on the opposite chair reading a book entitled Devils in the Dust, who seemed to be the only one reasonably happy and contented to be where he was—what had he of luck or romance in his destiny to compare with his own? And being sympathetic with him he felt all the fonder of this man too.

  It was as though through his sudden overwhelming conviction of his own good fortune in loving and being loved by Jacqueline he possessed all at once a sublimated and all-embracing love of all mankind. He had forgotten about Peter Cordwainer altogether…

  This mood of empathy and personal luck extended itself to positive bonhomie in the men’s washroom, where two youths of wild appearance, standing up drinking from a bottle in the shoulder-high lavatory stall, offered him a snort of hard liquor. Gin. He handed the bottle back, wiping its mouth with his coat-sleeved elbow before replacing the cap, with exaggerated thanks for the generous, almost sublime gesture, it seemed to him in his exalted state of mind—considering how depleted the state of the bottle. Yes, his acceptance by the human family had already begun. All the more heartwarming it should first come from a younger generation!

  But that sullen depressing monotone in here, that murderous sound of machinery, like a noise of death, that whirring crashing gruesome noise of weeping and gnashing of teeth, punctuated by those rushing gobblings at recurrent intervals when the idols of the urinal gushed forth and the antiseptic phosphorescence swept weepingly down the drain, and his perception of all this in these hellish terms even as he was telling himself what a child of hope, and now of virtue and good resolution he was, might have forewarned him he was not altogether unwatched by destiny.

  For it was every bit as if it had been waiting for him, planted there on purpose, or some malefic force had enticed him into the washroom, with the express object of showing it to him at this particular moment. On the floor lay a discarded page of a newspaper, in the middle of which was framed an advertisement that, for all its complete absurdity, could not have struck his eyes more violently had it been ringed with hellfire.

  Ethan raised his eyes slowly to the mirror above the washbasin, lowered them once more to the newspaper on the floor.

  If the offspring of one pair of flies lived to maturity the entire surface of the earth would be covered to a depth of 47 feet in one season.

  He was informed…It was not a Toronto Star either, but part of a western paper. The Vancouver Daily Messenger. “And finally

  British Columbia!” Ethan raised his eyes slowly to the mirror again. How many times lately had he discovered that Mother Gettle was haunting him? Very occasionally he’d seen a scattered hoarding, scarcely ever a newspaper advertisement. And not since the winter at least, not since, now he thought of it, he’d begun meeting Jacqueline regularly. Oh, he’d seen isolated advertisements commending or commemorating the product, mostly when glancing over the Quebec newspapers, but not so frequently it had given him that frightening feeling he’d had of old of being actually hag-ridden by the thing. It had seemed to him he’d been “getting rid of it,” at least he’d never seen the hoarding with the picture of Peter himself as a boy on it, for years. He had practically allowed himself to assume the business must have failed, or as good as failed, in the depression, like so many others, and himself been given absolution in the process. He had all but forgotten Peter Cordwainer himself for whole months at a time. But now it seemed that by the very act of starting to think again about Peter, wanting to tell Jacqueline about him, he had conjured the family firm back to life again, given it such life as it had never possessed before, at least in Canada, caused it to start expanding, start moving west to Toronto, over the whole country, the whole world, so that in the end perhaps there would be no place on earth he could hide his head without being reminded every day, every hour, through the fatuous medium of Mother Gettle’s Soups, of Peter Cordwainer himself and what he, Ethan, had done. Llewelyn, meaning unknown. Ah, that sorrowful, humorous, subtle, Protean, too honest, too innocent face you have, Ethan Llewelyn. Was that a human face anyway that regarded him from that mirror, or the face of a sort of devil, or of one who had once played the part of the devil…What mask had it assumed that night in Peter’s rooms at Ixion, at the University of Ely! If only he had not gone out that night for that last bottle of gin. “Let the bugger die!” they had shouted that night in the Headless Woman just before closing time—And there was no question of the kind of expression his face wore now. It was one of mortal agony. And behind it despair suddenly seemed written in letters ten feet high.

  Chapter 9

  Called to the Bar

  MR. ETHAN LLEWELYN WANTED in the next bar, please!”

  He’d heard himself being paged over the loudspeaker (the arrière-ban, the twice repeated call to arms, to action that must not only transcend the past, but the claims of the devil himself—after all, he hadn’t quite sold his soul to the devil that night, had he?! there were extenuating circumstances; maybe he hadn’t sold it at all—it was just that the devil, like a confidence man taking advantage of a man blind drunk the night before, liked to insist he had made the bargain), heard himself paged the second time as he came out of the washroom, and Ethan felt his long elbowing walk, past the countless tables of the Men’s parlour from which all eyes seemed turned on him rendering him outcast again, becoming an ordeal…But his spirits rose when he caught sight of Jacqueline beckoning from the other room, and they greeted each other with a rush of love.

  “Awfully sorry I was so long phoning,” she was saying gaily as the waiter, with a welcoming tray of beers, beamed above them like a benevolent father, “I was just telling my girl friend that there’s nothing like having a cabbalist for a father to help you figure out an income tax return for your future husband in nothing flat.”

  Income tax—or die Recknung?…Ethan, who was suddenly much soberer than he’d thought, feeling a stab in his heart, wondered if, to the contrary, Jacqueline had not been worrying in a girlish fashion lest anything she’d told him might make him less anxious to marry her, and she’d been seeking sisterly consolation or advice from her friend on the point. And the memory of Cordwainer struck its claws into him again.

  “Jacqueline, I’ve got something damned serious,” he began, but Jacqueline had already interrupted him:

  “Listen, but I must tell you what really made me take so long,” she was saying. “Angela just told me she’s going to be married to a chap from British Columbia called d’Arrivée she’s been going with. But what do you know, they plan to live in a remote island out there with only about two hundred inhabitants—one of the Gulf Islands, called Gabriola. Don’t you think that sounds like fun? His business is in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, they’ll commute by ferry.”

  Into Ethan’s mind came for a moment a clear vision of the ferry, but, for some inexplicable reason, sad, a glum Charon’s boat, plying up and down between mountains, the sun gleaming in the saloon windows: above, black clouds shot with bars of sunlight…And eternally bound as between some ultima thule and a nethermost suburb.

  “Wouldn’t that be exciting,” Jacqueline said.

  “I don’t know,” Ethan said. “If you’d asked me that half an hour ago I’d probably have said yes. But I was thinking in the other bar…Well anyway; wouldn’t that mean living too cut off from everybody and things…”

  And it was somehow still not the right time to tell her about Peter Cordwainer. It would be outrageous enough to tell the story in the half-frivolous way which had become his normal manner of speaking. It certainly wasn’t a subject suited to his own special brand of Galgenhumor with which he’d be bound to invest it after all he’d drunk. It was not conceivably a subject suited to any kind of humor, gallows humor least of all, be that from another standpoint the only humor appropriate. Yet that was the manner in which he would inevitably tell it, as he had told it in the past to so many others after a few d
rinks, and in telling it had nearly always found himself lying. And he did not want to lie to Jacqueline, if it would be no lie to say he did not know the whole truth. No, face it, and be honest with her he must. It was a bad enough thing to have to live with for the rest of one’s life without his soul being further corroded, and it had been corroded, by his own half-falsehoods on the subject. And then again: she might not take it seriously. It would be no more than “a grey hair in God’s eyebrow.” Few people ever had taken it seriously, partly, no doubt, because of that very manner he had of telling it. And there was an extremely good argument against saying anything about it at all to her, but would he be able to do that? Remorse, yes, he still felt shattering remorse, but was it remorse that made him want to talk about it, embroidering the whole damned mess with senseless inventions, or rather that he felt in some sense proud of the appalling thing he had not prevented from coming to pass? Or secretly admired Cordwainer for what he had done…But this much was an advance. Not for very many years now, and until he’d come to fall in love with Jacqueline, had he even fully admitted to himself how appalling it really was; unless this last fact, considering how long ago it had all happened, were not more appalling still…He had just about made up his mind again to try to tell her when there was a sudden embarrassing hush in which he heard Jacqueline saying airily:

  “Half the people in here look like criminals to me.”

  “Don’t be a bloody snob, Jacky sweetheart,” said Ethan, who had however been momentarily thinking nearly the same thing.

  “I am…It’s just as I said…I don’t think people are my brothers at all. I’m positively regal at bottom. My ambition runs to Nubian slaves. Not seriously, you know. I have this bad side…But I daresay there’s something in what you say,” she went on. “If so, it certainly wasn’t Father’s fault. People were always finding out about me for the simple reason he thought I shouldn’t be ashamed and my foster-mother was always telling everyone too. But that doesn’t mean people didn’t form their own opinions.”

  “Anyhow I’ll bet there’s no criminal in here so bad that he persuaded one of his oldest friends—” Ethan began, looking round.

  But the noise had started again and she hadn’t heard. Ethan again wanted desperately to tell her about Peter Cordwainer but did not, and they sat awhile without either speaking or looking at one another. The idea of having dinner in a restaurant, if that was what they’d do in the end, had become repulsive to both of them. Ah, how he longed to take her home to some pretty little house under the trees, a home whose windows and firelight would welcome them with kindness and warmth, as with the words: “I am yours, yours and hers…” Even on Gabriola Island; perhaps now particularly on Gabriola Island, that they were scarcely to mention again for over a decade, Jacqueline and Angela having somehow stopped writing one another during the war, and himself barely to remember after living in British Columbia itself for three and a half years. And, after all, what difficulties were in their path? Ethan had money. He was successful. The complications appeared few. It all seemed as normal and simple as did the desire. Little did Ethan suspect that one day they would find a place that said, not “I am yours,” but “You are mine!”

  Meantime the feeling of one’s love here for a poignant moment was like the sound of ghostly sleighbells, that had been rain falling in the lake that day they sat beside it. But the next moment this feeling of one’s love and destiny in this place where one could scarcely see or hear for the noise was like a roaring beneath it, ominous, like a massive growl of thunder in a blinding snowstorm.

  Chapter 10

  The Hound of Heaven

  THE GREYHOUND BUS SWEPT on and their reflections with it…

  Jacqueline was now thirty-one, Ethan still eight years older, and if they both looked ten years younger than they were, it was due in some measure, whatever Jacqueline sometimes said, to the character of the life they’d been living during the larger part of that “retreat”; certainly no habit of sun or sea or lake from earlier summers could have caused in both of them that glow of health and well-being which, however deceitful (like that glow of the Indian summer outside which promised neither good nor ill of October but whose veiled threat was frost and sudden death), still shone through in spite of all.

  Well, we are what suns and winds and waters make us. And, Landor might have added, fires and sorrows and hangovers too.

  The way they were travelling one tended to forget Vancouver Island itself was mountainous. The bus was really running along the base of high mountains, but through the window to the left you couldn’t see the peaks for the forest. Or the higher peaks ahead, behind where Nanaimo would be. So, though the scenery the Greyhound traversed was in reality varied and exciting, the journey began to be monotonous, its points of interest more and more at a remove, its mountain beauties confined to those on the mainland, more and more as if being left behind. Not that Mount Baker over there, or its summit, was not still trying to keep up with them—old Squamish omnipotent and kind Mount Ararat (not to be confused with Mount Arafat, Ethan thought, on top of which, according to Moslem legend, Adam and Eve were supposed to have met after the eviction from Paradise); but the places had grown fewer where their road skirted the sea, of which they now had only occasional glimpses. And their Gulf Islands had disappeared altogether, and with them, in a subtle way, the envisaged future.

  The Greyhound was going at a tremendous pace. Other motorcars, Victoria-bound, crashed past with a sigh. A natty Royal Canadian Mounted Police car shrilled by with great red spotlights and gramophone horns on the roof. All was rush, quickness, the beauty of swiftness and light. But the omnipresence of the ever-cleaving, yet towering and all-obliterating forest, primeval forest, forest, mostly Douglas fir here with a few clearings where it had been logged, the autumn-flowering dogwood blossoms themselves gleaming through the foliage like stars, and always that backward-swooping carpet of gold interspersed with dusty goldenrod too, acres of dandelion, imposed on the senses finally, in spite of the sheer exhilaration of speed, an extremity of motion that was no motion, where past and future were held suspended, and one began thinking of treadmills, or walking down an upward-moving escalator in a department store. As Tommy once liked to do…

  Ethan glanced sideways at his wife, who at the moment, in the window, seemed to be sitting in an orchard. The bus had been going so fast through the forest, with not so much as a farm to break the monotony, that it was difficult to realize it had a moment or two since stopped, and was now honking slowly through a long straggling village or country town. My God Bay, the general store, between two gnarled apple trees, announced. And outside, the headlines from the My God Bay Advertiser: ACUTE HANGING SHORTAGE. What? ACUTE HOUSING SHORTAGE, RAPPED BY RATE-PAYERS…And where no bay was to be seen. My God, My God Bay, where art thou? Probably the main road bypassed it. They’d paused to take on a group of schoolchildren.

  Jacqueline was wearing her silver-grey squirrel coat he’d bought her in their Toronto days, a little grey hat like a Juliet cap rimmed with grey fur, a green silk scarf, gloves, emerald-green suede shoes, and she carried a bag of the same color he thought he remembered in Toronto too. She looked both lovely and elegant and for a second it was impossible to see her as the same woman of their beach life. Ethan saw her expression growing aghast; everybody in the bus suddenly turned and looked out of the window. The part of the orchard they were now passing had been badly burned. To the left they saw the house itself, set back from the road with the orchard behind, among trees, where the mischief had clearly started, probably the night before. But the house, small, of lovely lines, with a curious long narrow tin chimney giving it the air of some little English steamer of the 1840s, and a lean-to kitchen, with green asbestos shingles on its beautiful sweep of roof, making it like a little replica too of their own old house in Niagara, had been partially saved, a bit of the roof had fallen in, or been hacked through. All the rafters still held. The upper windows (above which, on the sill or a dormer, housed b
y it, still menacingly, or movingly, or heraldically, perched a fire-scarred stuffed owl) were all broken, not a pane remaining, and those rooms behind were gutted. But all the rooms on the bottom floor, thank God, seemed intact. No broken windows here. Only the porch was a chaos, giving evidence of panic, or the impression that some people had at one point been trying to loot the house, rather than save it. In the trampled garden disembowelled and blasted sofas, antique chairs and tables, damaged and undamaged, were set among smashed panes of glass underfoot beneath the blackened apple trees; on the branch of one hung what looked an expensive chandelier, as if placed for an afternoon tea of friends. Worst of all, below the porch, perhaps dragged out at the frantic behest of the owners from a room that had been spared, but which, proving too heavy for its would-be salvagers, had been allowed to crash down the steps, was a broken baby grand piano, lying overturned with its legs in the air like a huge helpless insect. (Aidons nous, merci!) Had its owners given up? Who could say? At a little distance in a well-tended rose garden an old lady was calmly pruning her trees. Wandering in a lake of grass a little further on, a small child, clutching in one hand to her breast a bouquet of rusty goldenrod, was picking red leaves from a low vine-leafed maple tree. An official took notes in an official notebook. And from somewhere about the place Ethan heard, above the bus’s motor—or could it be, and say it was not, demolition!—the hopeful sounds of hammering. Ethan saw tears welling in Jacqueline’s eyes: did those beloved dark eyes of hers see what he saw and was better forever forgotten? or simply beyond this more gentle golden decline of goldenrod and maple in the woods now again around them (though the town had not ended, the tattered woods gentle and exhausted save where in some ever verdant place the sun struck life with a sudden tremendous glittering of green!) see sumac and teazel, the blaze and sumptuous opulence of eastern autumns? He gripped her gloved hand tightly: