October Ferry to Gabriola

by Lowry, Malcolm

  Ethan glanced yet again at the passage, saw that was what it said—almost incomprehensible when so isolated, but God knows it said enough—noted the page and the end of the preceding paragraph: “It was during a thunderstorm and the woman had been killed by lightning,” which seemed irrelevant (though another storm was at this moment beginning), took out the book and ran up the steps leading from the basement of the police station.

  The knowledge, in any case, could scarcely be borne alone. He’d narrowly escaped having to bear it too, being locked up in the darkening public library, that, as he hurried out, had been on the point of closing, himself forgotten, to be bailed out perhaps, at the frantic sounds of his knocking, only by old Chief Tollbooth Tarkington himself, in cautious search of subayuntamiento polterghosts.

  Held Over. The Wandering Jew. Cameo Cinedrome. Ethan’s feeling of panic was now succeeded by a mysterious sense of elation, even self-congratulation, flooding through his being as he hurried through the hot lightning-flickering dusk under the few remaining elms thrashing overhead in concussive gusts (he wondered later if Mr. Fort was right, and this sensation perhaps an atavistic one, common to all men, who suddenly seem to feel, if only for an instant, and on a sublunary plane, their own lost magical powers restored), hurried past the clock-tower, over which a frantic homing seaplane was flying soundlessly, like a bird with long shoes, into a patch of hyacinthine sky in the west—hurried home to the Prince of Wales Hotel…King Storm Whose Sheen Is Fearful.

  He found Jacqueline, who had previously announced with fury she was going to bed, after having seen to Tommy for the night, wildly drinking beer and talking to M. Grigorivitch in the almost deserted Ladies and Escorts. She greeted him with a radiant and friendly smile while M. Grigorivitch went off to get them one on the house.

  “What’s the book?” she said cheerfully.

  But Ethan’s calm had left him, and having tried to tell her his story about the cinema, the Wandering Jew, and the library, his hands trembling, he couldn’t find anywhere the passage in Wild Talents about Temple Thurston.

  “Give the book to me…

  “ ‘Upon the night of April 6, 1919,’ ” Jacqueline found immediately these words which she read aloud, “ ‘see the Dartford (Kent) Chronicle, April—Mr. J. Temple Thurston was alone in his home, Hawley Manor, near Dartford. His wife was abroad.’ ”

  “But Jacqueline——!”

  “ ‘Particulars of the absence of his wife, or of anything leading to the absence of his wife, are missing. Something had broken up this home. The servants had been dismissed. Thurston was alone.’ ”

  “But that wasn’t the passage—”

  “ ‘At two forty o’clock, morning of April 7, the firemen were called to Hawley Manor. Outside Thurston’s room, the house was blazing, but in his room there was no fire. Thurston was dead. His body was scorched, but upon his clothes there was no trace of fire.’ ”

  “But Jacqueline!”

  “ ‘From the story of J. Temple Thurston I pick up that this man, with his clothes on, was so scorched as to bring on death by heart failure, by a fire that did not affect his clothes. This body was fully clothed, when found, about 3 A.M. Thurston hadn’t been sitting up drinking. There was no suggestion that he had been reading. It was commented upon, at the inquest, as queer, that he should have been up and fully clothed at about 3 A.M. The scorches were large red patches on the thighs and lower parts of the legs. It was much as if, bound to a stake, the man had stood in a fire that had not mounted high.’ ”

  “Great God!” Ethan felt a tightening of his throat at the roots of his tongue. “But Jacqueline. The end of the Wandering Jew, in the movie—”

  “All right, Ethan. I get it.” She looked up at him with frightened eyes. “But wait—let me finish…

  “ ‘In this burning house nothing was afire in Thurston’s room. Nothing was found, such as charred fragments of nightclothes, to suggest that, about three o’clock, Thurston, awakened by a fire elsewhere in the house, had gone from his room, and had been burned, and had returned to his room, where he had dressed, but had then been overcome. It may be that he had died hours before the house was fired.’ ”

  “But that’s absolutely inconceivable! That isn’t the passage I read at all!” Ethan burst out.

  “ ‘It has seemed to me,’ ” Jacqueline pursued, calmly reading on, “ ‘most fitting to regard all accounts in this book as “stories.” There has been a permeation of the fantastic, or whatever we mean by “untrueness.” Our stories have not been realistic. And there is something about the story of J. Temple Thurston that, to me, gives it the look of a revised story. It is as if, in an imagined scene, an author had killed off a character by burning, and then, thinking it over, as some writers do, had noted inconsistencies, such as a burned body, and no mention of a fire anywhere else in the house—So then, as an afterthought, the fire in the house—but, still, such an amateurish negligence in the authorship of this story, that the fire was not explained. To the firemen, this fire in the house was as unaccountable as, to the coroner, was the burned body in the unscorched clothes. When the firemen broke into Hawley Manor, they found the fire raging in Thurston’s room. It was near no fireplace, near no electric wires that might have crossed. No odor of paraffin, nothing suggestive of arson: or of ordinary arson. No robbery.

  “ ‘The fire, of unknown origin, seemed directed upon Thurston’s room, as if to destroy, clothes and all, this burned body in unscorched clothes. Outside, the door of this room was blazing when the firemen arrived.’ ”

  In the same way he had felt himself flooded by that strange sense of elation after leaving the library, Ethan now felt the fright this had cancelled coming back, but in a far more powerful form, as though now he were being overwhelmed by a sea, a huge breaker of primeval terror, and as if the obsessive thought of fire itself had produced the compensatory image, the opposite symbol of water—or it was like an incoming wave from the burning lake of fire in his nightmare—and now, as the feeling receded, he were left sprawling in a titanic undertow.

  At the same time he saw clearly the blazing door, the unscorched clothes, the imperfectly burned body of the poor playwright alone in his room, saw the closing scenes of the movie again, the Wandering Jew bound to the stake. “It was much as if bound to a stake, the man had stood in a fire that had not mounted high”; the imperfectly burned undying Ahasuerus, his imperfectly burned dead “creator” “in a fire that had not mounted high, as if bound to the stake”; and fearing to see these things too clearly, found himself remembering too some words of the passage he had been unable to find again in Wild Talents: “that the fire was visualized by a visualization that in turn left some particulars unaccounted for”; “that a pictorial representation of his death by fire was enacting in a distant room”; “that into the phase of existence that was real, stole the imaginary”; then——!

  But he now became conscious of something more frightening yet taking place in his mind. It was a feeling that permeated the high ill-lit yellow walls of the hotel beer parlour, the long dim corridor between the two beer parlours, on which the door now seemed to be opened by an invisible hand (revealing, lying flat on her back, a good woman weighing 350 pounds, from Gravesend, London, who had so far resisted all efforts to be lifted—it was fruitless, as Ethan well knew, who had tried before: she went through this performance almost every night about this time, and then, at ten forty-five, just before closing time, would get up of her own accord and go home, as though nothing had happened), a feeling which seemed a very part of the ugly, sad, red-and-brown tables and chairs, something that was in the very beer-smelling air, as if—the feeling perhaps someway arising, translated to this surrounding scene, from the words themselves—there were some hidden correspondence between these words and this scene, or between some ultimate unreality and meaninglessness he seemed to perceive adumbrated by them (by these words, under their eyes, in the book on the table—and yet for an instant what meaning, what terrifying message
flashed from all this meaninglessness), and his inner perception of this place: no, it was as if this place were suddenly the exact outward representation of his inner state of mind: so that shutting his eyes for a long moment of stillness (in which he imagined he could hear—God—distantly, pounding, the tumultuous cataract of Niagara Falls twenty miles away) he seemed to feel himself merging into it, while equally there was a fading of it into himself: it was as though, having visualized all this with his eyes shut now he were it—these walls, these tables, that corridor, with the huge woman from Gravesend, flat on her back motionless in it, obdurate as the truth, this beer parlour, this place of garboons hard by the Laurentian Shield! But in this new reality not even the goodness of its landlords served to redeem it. Nor any other benevolence of fellowship, gaiety, the relatively innocent drink it purveyed. For his visualization appeared to include everything that ought to have been ordinarily invisible too, Sergeant Major Poe’s “unparticled matter” rendered palpable to the gaze, so that it was like seeing all the senseless trickeries and treacheries alcohol had here imposed on the mind; all the misery, mischief, wretchedness, illusions: yes, the sum of all the hangovers that had been acquired here, and quite overlooking those that had been healed. Ethan now held this collective mental image for an instant completely, unwaveringly, on the screen of his mind. Image or state of being that finally appeared to imply, represent, an unreality, a desolation, disorder, falsity that was beyond evil. Satan was in a sense perhaps a realized figure in the human psyche. But even such a Satan could not, and for that reason, dwell in this region: or if this were in his domain, he held no sway; or, by some more than legal fiction, so far beneath the abysmal was it, his law sounded here faint, unheard, confused—like the recurrent sounds of the motor in the refrigerator. Yet this seemed the home also of more conscious mental abortions and aberrations; of disastrous yet unfinished thoughts, half hopes and half intentions, and where precepts, long abandoned, stumbled on. Or the home of a half-burned man, himself an imperfect visualization, at the stake; this place where neither death nor suicide could ever be a solution, since nothing here had been sufficiently realized ever to possess life. Ethan opened his eyes. What was he saying to himself? Had he really had some sort of vision—the feeling had not altogether departed—some kind of “mystical” experience “reversed?” Some form less of an illumination, than a disillumination, a kind of minor St. Paul’s vision upside down; certainly it had arisen, if in an unorthodox manner, from an almost complete and mysterious identification of subject with object: and had been accompanied, paradoxically, by such an astonishing sense of ecstasy, one felt one could never begin to describe it, even to Jacqueline, even to her father, who, if anyone, should be equipped to understand it, without somehow leading to the propagation of a lie, an ecstasy which still persisted, though diminished, an icy perverted ecstasy now before “reality” asserts itself—and waking indeed you discover your clothes to be neatly folded up in the icebox where, alas, no drink has been providently left. Ethan came to his senses abruptly. Grace had at least penetrated to this more immediate mundane region in the shape of another beer, and he drank it greedily. It wasn’t that there was anything particularly original about such thoughts, any more than there had been, he now saw, in the form of his “disillumination” (on the contrary, as to aesthetic content it had perhaps hardly more merit than a parody based on a misreading of T. S. Eliot, or for that matter, Swinburne), yet the intensity, the conviction, was still there, this impression as of something overwhelmingly important that had just occurred. And he saw something important had occurred, and quite apart from the experience, its “mystical” validity or otherwise to another, and something of striking obviousness. What was important was that he was now convinced there must be some complete triumphant counterpart, hitherto based on hearsay or taken on trust, of that experience he had had, or almost had: as there must be of that abyssal region, some spiritual region maybe of unborn divine thoughts beyond our knowledge…

  So why, then, should he have rushed to the conclusion that the extraordinary thing that had happened tonight with the Wandering Jew and Temple Thurston and Charles Fort, that this collision of contingencies, was in its final essence diabolical, or fearful, or meaningless? Why, to the conclusion that he had somehow magically produced it himself, then that any message in it for them was necessarily terrifying? Mightn’t he equally well consider that he’d been vouchsafed, was so being vouchsafed, a glimpse into the very workings of creation itself?—indeed with this cognition Ethan seemed to see before his eyes whole universes eternally condensing and recondensing themselves out of the “immaterial” into the “material,” and as the continued visualization of their Creator, being radiated back again. While meantime here on earth the “material” was only cognizable through the mind of man! What was real, what imaginary? Yes, but couldn’t the meaning, the message, for them, be simply that there had been a message at all? Yes, could he not just as well tell himself, as Cyprian of Antioch, that here God had beaten the devil at his own game, that magic was checkmated by miracle! Ethan drank half another beer. Gone was his fright. In its stead was awe. In the beginning was the word. But what unpronounceable Name had visualized the Word?

  “Nothing mysterious at all,” Jacqueline was saying calmly. “I simply looked up your Temple Thurston in the index, since it didn’t seem to occur to you.”

  “I didn’t know there was an index,” Ethan almost shouted, as thunder, a single colossal explosion, struck overhead.

  Other more distant thunderclaps crashed and banged around the peninsula, then all the lights in the Prince of Wales Hotel went out.

  Outside of war, there is no noise on land or sea as shattering and extreme as that of a thunderstorm in the Storm Country, in the Great Lakes basin, and it seemed useless, with this going on, which possessed its own peculiar uneasy exhilaration, in the intermittent dark and blaze, to attempt to explain to Jacqueline, as if she needed any further explanation, the significance of poor Temple Thurston’s unscorched clothes, his scorched body, the Jew at the stake.

  M. Grigorivitch drifted in, carrying candles, their gold flames wavering in the draft. “The lightning is peeling the poles and biting the wires, Captain Llewelyn,” he moved on with his candles to the other tables.

  Then there was dead silence and the lightning started again soundlessly on its own accord and the impression was of a child playing with an electric torch, switching it on and off in the hotel garden. “I must say Fort didn’t show much pity for poor old Temple Thurston,” he heard Jacqueline saying, though it was the kind of thing he might have said himself, and perhaps indeed he had said it: “It’s an inconceivably horrible world, why does anyone bother to live in it?”

  “Have you ever heard of Charles Fort before?” Ethan, almost certainly, had asked.

  “No.”

  “Your father never spoke of him?”

  “No…Not that I know of…I think he’s writing of the Qliphoth, though; the world of shells and demons. It was one part of the cabbala of which Father would never speak.”

  “Do you suppose Tommy’s sleeping through this?”

  “Like an angel.”

  Suddenly, just the same, cobalt lightning filled the room, and he saw Jacqueline’s face across the table, her dark eyes, enormous, staring widely at him.

  “But you must have read this passage,” all at once she cried through the thunder. Then, as the lights came on again: “Here. Look for yourself. Thurston, J. Temple. 912f. It’s the only page reference it gives in the index.”

  “But I told you—I didn’t look in the index. Why the devil should I?”

  “Well, try to remember the number of your page then.”

  “It added up to 7…1051. Let’s try that.”

  There, sure enough, was the passage, and Ethan read it to her: “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—”

&
nbsp; “Very well then! It was an oversight of the person who made the index,” Jacqueline said stubbornly.

  Thunder sounded like a single plane, high, in windy cloudy weather, that, going fast downwind invisibly overhead (the wind blowing in the opposite direction below) sounds like forty planes, as they sat looking at each other with scared eyes across the table.

  And though they searched till closing time, in candlelight, and under electric light, and with candles again, all through that omnibus of Charles Fort’s works, nowhere did they find any further reference to Temple Thurston; there was no hint that Fort had ever heard of him as an author at all, and certainly not the author of the play, The Wandering Jew, at the end of which “bound to a stake, the man had stood in a fire that had not mounted high…”

  And perhaps it had been another Temple Thurston.

  That night a house, on the lakeside of the Prince of Wales, took fire, and Ethan felt himself being borne solemnly homeward on a litter to the Prince of Wales Hotel, with its triple signature of fleurs de lis over the door: a cage of lovebirds, lofting slowly out of a window, and floating down toward him, had struck him on the head…

  He had gone to the rescue with the volunteer fire brigade at 2 A.M., clad in his pyjamas and an army greatcoat. Not that this was a serious fire either, even for the lovebirds, or himself, but it did the trick. They went west.

  While one of his last memories of Niagara-on-the-Lake was of the lurid vitrified lake itself, reflecting the fire: and of the grocer, who had nobly arrived with his fire extinguisher (M. Grigorivitch, the electric light having failed once more, leading the way, beyond the desolate Men’s beer parlour, to the shadowy stairs, with white face and upheld flambeaux)—of the grocer saying, “H’m. It’s just like I said. The element follows you around, sir!”