October Ferry to Gabriola

by Lowry, Malcolm

  “You need a claymore for that job,” said The McCandless.

  Their little yellow boat, whose sternline that morning was made fast to the sawhorse, rolled on its beam ends, scended to a pitch where its bow hit the forward mooring post, a horizontal two-by-four, projecting from the unfinished front porch and hanging over the water. And each bump hurt his heart, he felt it contract and he looked toward Jacqueline with concern, but the tides weren’t brimming high enough to threaten the garden, yet he waited for the noise, and all the tender anxieties for their little household it aroused, each one separate and stabbing his heart with love, to subside a bit before speaking.

  “I remember that Lamb says somewhere, helpfully, ‘reason shall only visit him through intoxication,’ and he’s very good too I think where he speaks about the difficulty of doing awything, of the ‘springs of action being broken.’ ”

  The berserk flare had died to a small quiet jet, a cool religious flame against the green bank, making the scene at Shellco appear almost pastoral, while the only sound to be heard was that warning bell of a train beating along the coast, but turned soft, nostalgic, homelike, as The McCandless said, it being Monday:

  “ ‘Tis sweet to hear a brook, tis sweet To hear the Sabbath bell…’ ”

  The joke here was, Ethan thought, in the bus, that, unlike Niagara, no Sabbath bells were permitted to chime at all in Vancouver or its vicinity, certain delegations of workers, those “bloated capitalists” of the New World and arbiters of its taste, perhaps, who knows, the oil workers, having complained to the authorities that their sound kept them awake on Sunday mornings. It was true that, not far away from the Llewelyns, about a mile behind the oil refinery, in a region where the bones of a race of giants had been lately discovered, existed a monastery possessing some of the most fluent bells in the Western Hemisphere, cast from the same mold, it was said, as those of Westminster Cathedral, by certain dignitaries of which the bells themselves had been presented. But the monastery neither possessed a campanile nor had sufficient money to build one strong enough to accommodate the bells. And had they erected the campanile they would not have been allowed to ring the bells. So the bells, tended by a sad monk, languished on the ground in a kind of outhouse built for their tongueless purpose. They could be seen, on payment of an admission fee…A little way behind that monastery too, on that opposite bank, was the city’s most formidable prison, its chimney visible on a clear day, that very prison where, in an elevator shaft painted bright yellow, on December thirteenth, the boy Chester—

  And this prison possessed a bell too that never rang, though Ethan had never seen it.

  And it was a little later on that Monday that The McCandless burst on them once more, like a spectre, from the forest path, where they stood below the steps, between the well and the woodshed, chopping shakes from a block of cedar with an adze.

  It was The McCandless’ birthday. Jacqueline had never told Ethan how the whole business of birthdays and anniversaries within her family had been managed in her childhood, but so far as her own was concerned he suspected that it was only after she’d had a child of her own that birthdays had taken on a kind of ambivalence, since they never ceased to cause her some measure of pain, though she referred to it with amusement as “The McCandless’ little astrological problem.” She was meticulous about remembering Tommy’s birthday, and his own, the same went for The McCandless, though the only anniversaries of any moment to the old magician were the equinoxes. Yet they set great store on The McCandless’ birthday, on those rare occasions when he’d been geographically available. This could almost have looked like a form of revenge on her part but that it could conveniently be celebrated, and to some extent subsumed, by an occasion when one could also be celebrating something else: Empire Day, though the Empire could not be said any longer to exist.

  This had certainly been a week of strange weather, too early in the year to have attracted normally more than the odd boatload of sightseers—Rotarians, nuns, Americans, Communists—were not today the Monday toward which the weekend tended: Empire Day, the last Monday in May, and moreover that day on which, traditionally, British Columbians took their first swim of the year, as on Labor Day their last. Tommy should have been out to visit them today, but had begged off to attend, so he said, a meeting of Junior Forest Wardens. It was a day of flags. And not to be found flagging in outward patriotism the outcasts of Eridanus, evincing that extra share of patriotism noticed in convicts during wartime, also displayed, from their cabins, the Red Ensign, the Union Jack, and even at one place, the Jolly Roger. From the Llewelyns’ house as a token of international goodwill, the twin flames of the Union Jack and the Stars and the Stripes fluttered and flapped in the trade wind side by side at the two small mainmasts raised on either side of their pier.

  It was one of those rare occasions when Ethan had been actually prepared quite to forget the special pride and pathos of their isolation. He had been looking forward to exhibiting to The McCandless the unrivalled interest and color of their rich poverty in the purely bourgeois pleasure that Eridanus was really capable of, feeling in itself with, and floating and flowing past in their own back yard and their windows, of showing him that the true aristocrats of the inlet were the fishermen in their huge halibut boats, often, at high tide, seeming on a higher level than the eyes, as they splendidly sailed downstream, often four or five abreast, magnificently and recently painted in emerald and cobalt and white, deep-waisted and constellated, fore and aft, almost medieval-looking, yet lavishly modernly equipped. But the gorgeous sea procession hadn’t arrived, this Empire Day, and though at any other time he would have been relieved, because they caused a huge and ruinous commotion as their united wash swung inward against the beach and the house, today he felt a faint disappointment.

  But it was the signal of departure, The McCandless, the oil and the bad weather vanishing almost simultaneously, leaving their heaven quite without a stoop in its soul (after a day or two) for not being apparently recognized as such.

  Chapter 23

  Adam, Where Art Thou?

  YET ETHAN WAS A man who always had his ideas of the good life (he could and indeed had lived quite happily once in New York, to be sure before he knew what “happiness,” to him, could mean): and it could not be said that these ideas at first had been essentially changed by their life at Eridanus. Rather they had become, in common with most of his other ideas—he’d felt this as a gradual process while living there—harmonized, accordés.

  He’d begun his retreat by finding himself, before a week was out, deeply shocked all over again by how little he knew, despite all Jacqueline’s efforts, and his own, to widen his horizon during the past years. How close the stars as they rose over the mountains, and were reflected in the inlet, among the reflections of the pines. Yet of their names, their behavior, it came to him, he still knew nothing. He hadn’t even known till Jacqueline told him that Eridanus was also the name of a constellation, far less that it was the river, in Virgil’s Aeneid, which watered the Elysian Fields of the Earthly Paradise, something that was probably not in the mind either of the English skipper of the freighter S.S. Eridanus, of the Constellation Line, just at the moment he ran his freighter aground here, a piece of history filling a more forgivable gap in one’s knowledge that had been supplied by their friendly neighbors the Wildernesses—those then paradoxically unbaptized waters. And this renewed sense of his ignorance had not been borne upon him with shame, but by a sort of love, a speechlessness, in which his feeling for Jacqueline had a part. It was as if a new aspiration had come into existence, a longing to be better, a more worthy man, more worthy of love, and of giving love. And he was in love; he fell in love again with Jacqueline. There was no other way of saying this. And everything seemed to help. Even the knowledge she could have no more children, which in any case meant reevaluating their lives on a wholly different basis, but which had threatened to separate them, only served to draw them closer together. The same aspiration took the sh
ock when now suddenly he realized how little still he’d read in general (yes, again, after all these years, and despite Jacqueline’s encouragement, though this time the aspiration was more genuine, he wasn’t as before half trading on his ignorance), read not merely of astronomy, but in philosophy, history, or literature. He’d ended by suspecting that he might be in no very different position in regard to the law, that despite his practical experience for all that he was aware of it as a living changing thing he was like the man in L’Education Sentimentale (he’d borrowed Flaubert’s novel, together with an adze, from a cheerful if distant neighbor Roderick Fairhaven, a Scottish schoolmaster) who had attended his law lectures for a fortnight but given up the Civil Code before the lecturer had reached Article 3 and abandoned the Institutes of Justinian at the Summo Diviso Personarum. And indeed, in Canada, too often it was not a living, changing thing. Quebec still used the Code Napoléon. Some of the laws in British Columbia seemed to him of an unbelievable barbarity. And instead of being adapted to changing circumstances and continually reformulated, as he now began to feel they should be, by those not only acquainted with the principles of the law itself, but with the highest of all arts, the intricacies of psychology and medicine, when a new law was made it often turned out more barbarous and intolerant than the old. Obviously, in a few years, Canada would be bound to revise her entire legal code. Temporary retirement did not disqualify him from making certain proposals to the right quarters, indeed who was better qualified in some ways than he to make them? That didn’t mean he could not become better qualified in his own eyes.

  So Ethan, taking advantage of a sensible arrangement by which books could be sent out from the City Public Library to rural places, had begun to read intensively though not, because of the erratic contents of the library itself, with much method. He pored over what he could get of Aristotle, Dante, Kant, Bishop Berkeley, Spinoza, Michelet. And what reading he’d already done he tried as best he could to revise. Fragments from William James, Jung, Dostoevski, whose volumes were nightly piled by his bed, jostled in his dreams with bits of the Book of Changes, Keyserling, Moby Dick, Wilhelm Meister. At night too, Jacqueline loved him to read Shakespeare to her, and they both laughed their heads off over Stendhal’s wonderful “The Telegraph,” with its almost exact description of the local political situation in Vancouver. His reading led him back to his former reflections on the “good life” and hence into strange paths indeed. Having received one month by mistake a package of books on modern architecture he discovered himself, all of a sudden, to be an admirer of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, in general agreement with the socio-architectural tenets of Lewis Mumford. From the objective standpoint, of course.

  But even before The McCandless’ visit he could not say that his “appreciation” of the Shellco refinery, for instance, had been “sentimental” in the sense that he’d had to adapt the place to some category of shared gemütlichkeit (which was the opposite of their attitude toward the wilderness, and the mountains anyway) before being able to stomach it at all. He didn’t regard it as obviously “ugly.” No, if there had to be oil refineries, that at Shellco, he’d seen detachedly, was probably a pretty good one, oil-waste pyre and all. Even after it had showed itself in its true colors on that discouraging occasion, or what had appeared to be its true colors, he saw, with the same detachment, that it possessed “drama and beauty.” Certainly he had thought if those pyres went on reduplicating themselves without anyone doing anything about it, none of the workers who lived hardby would be able to get a wink of sleep at night, but that was another story. He was able emotionally then, for some reason, to dissociate himself from what the place meant…Whatever it meant. Probably the oil workers were happy enough where they were in those adjacent repetitive houses of sensible design back on the hill. After all, not everyone could have the privilege of living right on the water like themselves. What was it the great Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had said, “Less is more.” From which it was but a step to “everything for nothing.” But since man was by and large incapable of appreciating everything for nothing, even when he had it in his grasp and right under his nose, what was the use of blaming the machinations of real estate operators for depriving him of it? “Modern architecture should be structural architecture.” That was their little house too, all right. But if he was not sentimental about it, it was because he didn’t need to be…After that painful week with The McCandless bad oil slicks were few and far between: when on occasion there was one, those tides of Eridanus, at their work of pure ablution round the shores, soon cleansed the filth away, in the space of a tide, a few hours, so that the inlet was running cleaner and swifter than ever, though it was true that a particular accident with the oil valve had caused such a commotion among the rate-payers who lived near, though not upon, other distant sections of the inlet, or had pleasure boats anchored in it, that the steamship company had been obliged to pay for some pure ablution on their own account, to the tune of $10,000, setting to work hosing down the beaches with detergents, which a local cartoonist pictured as being siphoned off from the barrels of the local beer parlours. And when a second oil-waste pyre was added at Shellco, the brilliance of both seemed somehow tempered: and whether people had complained about the noise or not too at some point, the pandemonium never, since that evening with The McCandless, seemed so awe-inspiring again…Or perhaps it was that the Llewelyns had simply absorbed Shellco, taken it in their stride, and so come almost to forget it. The mountains and the stars were still there: so was their forest, even if it had to be an oasis of unspoiled wilderness in the midst of an abomination of desolation, that only added to the beauty of their side of the picture, to their drama. And the swimming was better than ever. So what were they worrying about? They were not worrying. Not even the memory of Mother Gettle moving in on their home in Oakville made him worry now, did it? While the nightmares of Niagara began to partake of the diffident quality of some half-forgotten waking dream endured under morphine.

  The only thing that worried him was when he went to town; then he felt guilty because he would not put in an appearance at his law office. He read the Code of Hammurabi and came to the conclusion that Babylonian law, severe as it might have been, was probably less inhumane than Canadian law. “Penalties attached to perjury and false accusation assured that malicious actions were seldom brought,” he learned, and “the utmost pains were taken to protect the rights of the individual.” So said his authority, Carleton. One exception, however, seemed to be the survival of the dreadful lex talionis, whereby if under certain circumstances a man accidentally brought about the death of a child, not he, but his child must be killed. Therefore—though this had been much later, it was early this year, only a few months ago—when a sixteen-year-old boy named Richard Chester was sentenced to hang for the rape and murder of a girl a little younger, a boy who also had lived in a shack on government property incidentally (though in the city down a creek on a mudflat where his father, a fisherman, kept his boat), as a consequence of which all such cabins everywhere were promptly termed by the authorities and the newspapers “rats’ nests of vice and spawners of crime,” when Ethan began to compose a public defense of this boy (and was he really thinking like this, was he, Ethan Llewelyn, in the bus really thinking like this?), he did not of course invoke this particular point of Babylonian law in the hope of obtaining an acquittal…in fact he did not base his defense on any point of law at all. In fact…in fact but upon a passage in Herman Hesse’s novel Demian.

  Ethan read, with enthusiasm, Thomas Mann. He even read a book about the cabbala sent him by The McCandless after his visit which, though its high-flown “occult” diction struck him as peculiarly loathsome—bearing out one of its own theses that the higher a certain kind of mystic rose in such a hierarchy the more he was in danger of leaving his intelligence behind and his good taste as well—he found not only extraordinarily interesting but, as a method of thought, profoundly helpful. In fact he could sum up no better their life on the be
ach than to say it had been, in a manner, his cabbala, in the sense that, if he was not mistaken, that system might be regarded on one plane as a means less of accumulating than of divesting oneself—by arrangement, balancing them against their opposites—of unbalanced ideas: the mind, finally transcending both aspects, regains its lost equilibrium, or for the first time truly discovered it: not unlike, Ethan sometimes supposed, the modern process of psychoanalysis. “Rebirth”—every morning waking up to make the coffee, splitting kindling, doing the smallest, or the most onerous chores. Yes, Ethan felt exactly as if he’d been reborn, mentally and physically. Never before had he taken such an exultant delight in sheer physical labor. But then (and here came all these thoughts again, like damnation now, redundant and weary as the thuddings of Ravel’s Bolero on a favorite sad old cracked record) never before had he taken such a delight in swimming itself, in sailing a boat, in sunlight and sea wind and the flight of gulls, in making love to his wife. While this sense of mens sana in corpore sano was enhanced by an extraordinary strengthening of his vision—his eyes always his weak point which had been bothering him again, seeming enormously to benefit from salt water and the use of coal oil lamps.

  Sometimes his feeling of well-being was almost too much for him and he’d take his old clarinet—still Virgil’s flute in the Eclogues—into a secluded place in the forest he was on good terms with, and play such wildly ecstatic hot music all by himself that when he stopped it seemed that all the birds for miles around were singing like mad. Or sometimes when Jacqueline felt like talking to Primrose they’d take his instrument down to the Wildernesses’, who lived in a similar cabin in a similar bay about three quarters of a mile down the beach, and with Sigbjørn, who was an unsuccessful Canadian composer, but an excellent jazz pianist, at his cottage piano, they’d all have a jam session: singing the Blues à la Beiderbecke, the Mahogany Hall Stomp and heaven knows what. Or they’d play Mozart, after a fashion. But mostly the Llewelyns were alone and happy in one another. Seabirds and wildflowers were friends they both knew by name. Those complexities and confluences of those tides so entranced Ethan at first that he had passages of the Harbour Board’s tide book by heart and he concocted a special tide calendar for Jacqueline which she hung on the wall. He found endless amusement doing sculpturings in driftwood, but above all he was, or had become by force majeure, a more than enterprising woodsman and carpenter, in short something of a pioneer. And though Jacqueline might be handier than himself when she put her mind to it, as the majority of bona fide native Canadians were handy by upbringing and instinct, to Ethan, throughout his former life so troubled by clumsiness, the intransigeance of objects, this was triumph indeed. And then just when life to him for the first time had meaning, ritual, direction, its holy of holies, when for the first time in his whole existence he had found this ecstatic joy simply in living, the summum bonum and the reality of heaven as physical pleasure, as Berkeley (not yet then Bishop) said, had come this bloody awful threat of eviction.