October Ferry to Gabriola

by Lowry, Malcolm

  Yet perhaps it was at such moments, with hangovers in movies—as in pubs, hamburger stalls, lavatories, on ferryboats, in addled but profound prayer, in drunken dreams themselves—that the real decisions that determined one’s life were often made, that lay behind its decisive actions, at moments when the will, confronted with its own headlong disease, and powerless to save, yet believes in grace.

  …Much good that was doing poor old Buttadeaus, or Caragphilus, or Ahasuerus, the striker of Jesus, at the moment, either to believe in it, or appeal to it! “A fugitive and a wanderer shah thou be in the earth, ran the curse of the Lord,” someone was saying in a crackling voice on the screen. “And as with Cain, the Lord appointed a sign for him, lest any finding should smite him.” It was a flaming cross on his brow, that he covered with a velvet ribbon. Altogether worse than Ethan’s black eye. And it was not, at the moment, saving him from being smitten. So the Wandering Jew was in a sense Cain too, ghastly notion; especially since (apart from that little matter of Abel) Cain appeared to Ethan one of the few humane people in the Old Testament. But what else was it the Wandering Jew—not the legend, simply the words, the phrase—reminded him of? Inner Circle. Inner Temple. (The Inner Temple had provided Ethan’s own admission to the bar.) From Morn Till Midnight. London. Somehow London.

  No. It was Niagara-on-the-Lake’s cinema itself, which had something in common with his own first approach to the arts, that had reminded him of From Morn Till Midnight. The cinema in which he sat (he remembered again) had been built as an experimental theatre a quarter of a century ago, in those days of the early O’Neill in Provincetown, of The Long Voyage Home, in fact. Where the Wandering Jew now bemoaned his fate, the Hairy Ape had once beaten his breast, though without, unfortunately, attracting any attention from across the border, as had been the idea. It had closed for some years and reopened as a cinema, still privately owned, and following a policy somewhat similar to the one in Toronto where Jacqueline and he had first met, and all this he knew because his father, who had never seen a decent play or film in his life, but who liked a finger in every pie, had long been one of its directors. This project failing, as well as other more conventional policies, it had now become a movie house apparently showing anything so long as the piece was at least ten years old, and in this way, with still a fair sprinkling of English and foreign films, it occasionally put on something interesting. The Wandering Jew—too theatrical, too slow, poorly directed, lighted, portentously acted—still showed no signs of being among their number. And he recognized none of the actors, though the Jew himself, an excellent part, was effectively played.

  Ah, now he knew what he was reminded of. It was of a play he had never seen, of the advertisement for a play that had been running in London, years and years and years ago, when he was a boy. Matheson Lang in The Wandering Jew. He remembered the advertisements for it now, along the upper sides of the red two-decker buses, but mostly it was a huge poster in the London tube stations that had fascinated him. The poster, shaped to the concave tunnel, and half the length of the underground station, showing the wretched Jew, his eternal sea-gown scarfed about him, struggling against the wind, in thunder and lightning, among riven trees; yes, he saw the hoarding again now plainly, as if once more before his eyes. Because it had been just after his eyes got better. What wild romance it had denoted for him! That was what life was: to see—even to be—Matheson Lang in The Wandering Jew!…New Theatre. Nightly 8:30. Matinees Wednesdays and Saturdays. A Play in Three Acts by—by whom? Inner Circle. Inner Temple. The tube was known as the Inner Circle and there was an underground station, the “Temple.” By F. Temple—No, J. Temple Thurston! That was it. The Wandering Jew, a play in three acts by J. Temple Thurston. Most likely this was a movie made from that play, and if he hadn’t been so upset by his quarrel with Jacqueline, and self-conscious about his beard, he probably would have noticed that Mr. Thurston—whether the playwright would have been grateful for this or not—had been given credit in small letters on some placard outside the cinema.

  Just the same, the dreadful story of the poor Jew cursed by Christ never to the through the centuries—as if Christ could have been, be Christ, and put a curse on any man, least of all one who struck Him (had he, Ethan, struck Him? he, Ethan had struck Him—) the legend must have stemmed from one anti-Semitic source—could not lose all its force, or its power to move even to tears. Isn’t Death Wonderful? it should have been called. For it was death that was all the Wanderer’s longing; death precisely what no one was going to give him, death, the thought of which filled him with the same euphoria, meant the same thing as life for the lovers in that other, never to be forgotten, Griffith film, like that illness which is said to possess deep-sea divers, who cannot resist going lower and lower, until they drown, “the rapture of the depths”—not that the Jew, alas, ever seemed allowed to approach that close to drowning…

  “I plunge into the ocean; the waves throw me back with abhorrence upon the shore,” here he was saying, and in a flashback, suiting the action to the word. And now reporting no better luck with other, recently more familiar methods. “I rush into fire; the flames recoil at my approach; I oppose myself to the banditti; their swords become blunted against my breast.” Bloody woe, it was as bad as bad as the tank in Toronto. Yet that was nothing to the unkind treatment he was receiving from the volcano he’d just hurled himself into, from which he was now being spurned on an angry stream of lava. And all he got out of this was to be suspected of witchcraft.

  “He is looked upon as an alien, but no one knows whence he hails, he has not a single friend in the town: he speaks but rarely, and never smiles; has neither servants nor goods, but his purse is well furnished, and is said to do much good among the townspeople. Some regard him as an Arabian astrologer, others declare him to be Doctor Faustus himself…He is of majestic appearance, with powerful features and large, black, flashing eyes.”—“His hair hangs in disarray over his forehead…” H’mm. Not unlike Sergeant Major Edgar Poe, in fact, late of the American army, and points south. Or what about a large flashing black eye? So now, my God—and couldn’t one escape fire even at the movies?—they had got him, were going to burn the poor devil at the stake as a sorcerer. They were burning him. The flames shot up. But it was as one might have expected. Ahasuerus had proved, once more, incombustible. Not even his beard was singed. Some of his lower garments appeared scorched, otherwise he was unharmed. Yet instead of taking this sportingly as evidence of his innocence (as, say, the English might in Joan of Arc’s case), innocence, by this time heaven knows, of everything, his captors had to turn him loose with further maledictions on his head, to begin his wanderings afresh, coming through thunder, the film ending now, to sombre crepitant chords, with a windswept lightning-crackling landscape, the tableau exactly like that of the old hoarding of Matheson Lang in the whistling London underground. (And what more than lonely Wandering Jew was not he, Ethan, at last, to whom figures on hoardings had begun to have more validity than human beings!) But he was just lonely without Jacqueline. Together they could have enjoyed the film, bad as it was. She would have closed her eyes at the moment they set the torches to the stake, as she always too dramatically did when any character was being maltreated on the screen, opened them to see—perhaps—Donald Duck…It was not until Ethan had sat halfway through the cartoon following the feature that he began to perceive, with fear, a certain horrible relevance in that fire which had burned, yet not consumed…Or did he mean irrelevance, when he thought how completely their own house had been burned? Bah! Really, he must get hold of himself, go and look at the Kokoschka in the art gallery for a while (where first the image of the troop train as an evil spirit feeling its way into a human brain must have occurred to him). But with these reflections Donald Duck itself became horrible, and he watched the antics of the ill-tempered bird with gloom, as though seeing upon the screen his own passions hideously caricatured…There is no worse place than a cinema, either, in which to be conscious of the too many d
rinks you’ve had too many hours before, especially when in combination with the drinks you are proposing not to have afterwards.

  The feature began again: THE WANDERING JEW—yes—From the play by J. Temple Thurston…

  Ethan stayed to verify that much, then, like someone plunging headlong into a bar, sought refuge in the little public library, which stayed open till 9:30 P.M.

  “Good evening, Miss Braithwaite. Do you have a book here called Ten Talents?”

  “Who is the author, Mr. Llewelyn?”

  “Booth Tarkington.”

  Miss Braithwaite, with puzzled politeness, and a half smile, called her assistant. “Do you know anything about these Ten Talents, Kitty? By Booth Tarkington, Captain Llewelyn says.”

  “…We have Seventeen. Alice Adams…”

  After some discussion it was decided by Miss Braithwaite, politely (and correctly) that Booth Tarkington had written no such book, and by Kitty, that it was out.

  Ethan, as reluctant to provide a further clue by mentioning the chief of police had recommended it as he was publicly to pursue further interest at this time in a work about poltergeists, asked could he “browse” awhile.

  It was an interesting little library, in the old tollbooth, beneath the police station; the volumes mostly of the Victorian era, with complete sets of Howells, Meredith, Mark Twain, Mark Rutherford, and a startling array of translations from the nineteenth-century French classics: the Goncourt brothers, Zola, Flaubert; Crime and Punishment was there, in Constance Garnett’s translation; so was Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature; but twentieth-century fiction seemed scarcely represented save by the seven-day books, current best sellers, lying on a shelf above Miss Braithwaite’s head.

  There existed a separate section for “religious and occult” volumes, and aware of a certain ratification, even admiration, for his beard in this place, he browsed awhile without undue anguish. The section was well stocked with a surprising number of recently printed works of this nature, for which, one surmised, the war had been the invisible salesman. Ethan almost immediately—so immediately it was as though the volume had been waiting for him—found what he was looking for, took the book over to a table and sat down.

  Booth Tarkington had not indeed written Ten Talents. And Ten Talents was clearly not the name of the book the chief had in mind. Booth Tarkington had merely written an appreciation for a book named Lo! by a writer named Charles Fort, and a piece of its cover, with a quotation, was pasted inside an omnibus volume of works by the same author, among them Lo! itself, and a book called Wild Talents. It was this more inclusive volume Ethan was glancing through; “A writer whose pen is dipped in earthquake and eclipse”—Booth Tarkington. The chief’s mistake was complicated, but it wasn’t difficult to see how he’d made it, especially if he’d had one eye on Miss Braithwaite. While the name Charles Fort probably meant as little to him as to Ethan.

  But Wild Talents hadn’t much concerning actual poltergeist phenomena, though there seemed other large sections throughout the omnibus dealing with that subject. Fort, an American who had died in 1932, obviously a genius if ever there was one, the possessor, together with the appalling insight, of all the scotomas and quirks of such dedicated powers, had obviously also been a pioneer in his approach to this type of research: one felt much intelligent opinion had come closer in recent years to accepting some of his views on such phenomena—insofar as Fort had any, for dogma in any form seemed his principal foe—accepting them even as a possible cause of otherwise inexplicable fires, and it must have been these parts the psychic investigator had referred the chief to, under the impression their content was strictly “psychical.” The joke, to some extent, was on the investigator. But then the whole book, wherever you opened it, was so compulsively entertaining on the surface, even with all its enormous weight of documentation, it was easy to be deceived, so hard was it to concentrate on a given spot. The immediate thesis of Wild Talents, insofar as one could take it in so rapidly, was as logically compelling as it must have been acutely discomforting to Ethan, had not the author’s personality everywhere provided such robust assurance one soon forgot oneself. In no time at all one had been pleasantly convinced that certain unexplained fires (apart from those that seemed the undoubted work of poltergeists, whatever they, finally, were) had actually been feared into existence: that on occasion, feelings of sheer hatred or revenge toward other human beings had been sufficient to cause, without admixture of purposive “magic,” disaster, otherwise inexplicable, to others. (So why not to oneself, Ethan thought, as psychiatry implied, by hatred of oneself?) Moreover, that motives, not acted upon, could produce the same result as those same motives had they been translated into action…It was one thing to have felt this instinctively, quite another to see it in cold print. For what criminal lawyer could not recall some instance in his own experience, where a confessed crime of murder or theft had offered the only conceivable motive and explanation for some secondary collateral, apparently covering crime the criminal could not, in either the physical or legal sense, possibly have committed?

  None of this formed the main thesis of the whole work—Ethan was skipping back and forth in the omnibus from book to book by this time—into another book called The Book of the Damned, into yet another called New Worlds—all of so obviously extraordinary a kind one felt astonishment that its author’s name had not long since become a household word. Surely few writers were ever capable so swiftly and convincingly of disaffecting a reader from the regular bounds of his cosmos. Although in one sense Fort didn’t widen them, he narrowed them. In ten minutes more Ethan had become convinced that the source of Niagara-on-the-Lake’s black fog—for here, by Jupiter, were their black fog, and the mud, and the fireballs, and not only these but rains of periwinkles and frogs too—were perhaps unknown lands situated at relatively no great distance in the dark nebulae, that celestial visitors of all kinds were no uncommon occurrence, that the object shaped like a man seen passing over Vicksburg, Pennsylvania, the report of which had once so perplexed him, was possibly no less than he seemed to be. And now, on every page he turned to, he seemed to see examples of the kinds of phenomena which had plagued them so frequently of late, cited as having been reported innumerable times before throughout history, or at least the last hundred years; everywhere in the work they were given veredicity—yes, everywhere Ethan was looking, as if once more those pages had wanted, were demanding to be looked at tonight—here they all were again, the black fog, the mud, the unexplained fires, the fires that burned, the fires that did not burn, or went out, or did not wholly consume, the wandering mysterious lights in churchyards in rural places, and now again the fireballs, the flying saucers, the auxiliary prodigies, in fact everything save M. Grigorivitch’s blue dog, though no sooner had he thought that, than here was an example cited of a dog who had said good morning and vanished in a “greenish vapour.” Mr. Fort had drawn the line at the dog who said good morning.

  The cumulative effect was terrifying: yet, for all that, Ethan thought to himself again, oddly reassuring. It was all something like going into a house reputed to be—that one had always thought was—haunted, in the company of some amiable Don Quixote, and perhaps a barrel of amontillado. Or a hogshead of gin. But haunted by spirits? Not a bit of it. Such notions were really the work of romantics. The only haunted house was the human mind. And the human mind was that of a magician—how The McCandless would have liked this bit!—who had forgotten the use of his powers, but from time to time could not help using them. All of which by no means discounted the possibility of other “intelligences” inhabiting those regions so much nearer than were supposed, those near those—now he thought of it—far too near regions. Only nothing was supernatural. Everything would be explained when the time came. Even those “imperfect” conflagrations could be explained, were not really supernatural—and it was perhaps almost a disappointment after all, could be—

  Jesus.

  The man of one of our stories, J
. Temple Thurston—alone in his room—and that a pictorial representation of his death by fire was enacting in a distant mind—

  Suddenly Ethan’s eye fell on a passage that almost made him drop dead with fright. What?—J. Temple Thurston? death by fire…

  The man of one of our stories—J. Temple Thurston (he read, again)—alone in his room—and that a pictorial representation of his death by fire was enacting in a distant mind—and that into the phase of existence that is called “real” stole the imaginary—scorching his body, but not his clothes, because so was pictured the burning of him—and that, hours later, there came into the mind of the sorcerer a fear that this imposition of what is called the imaginary upon what is called the physical bore quasi-at-tributes of its origin, or was not realistic, or would be, in physical terms, unaccountable, and would attract attention—and that the fire in the house was visualized, and was “realized,” but by a visualization that in turn left some particulars unaccounted for.