October Ferry to Gabriola

by Lowry, Malcolm

  YOU’RE A HARD MAN MCBEAN! it stated in the window of Ye Olde Cocke Tea Shoppe, and the Llewelyns paused.

  —MCBEAN, and so are many of life’s simple problems, Methodology is interdependent with astrology because the success or failure in all human effort is influenced if not actually controlled by planetarium, thus methodology cannot succeed if in direct conflict with planetary movements. From childhood Draco the Druid had been fascinated with celestial complexes, studying the travels of many “wandering” stars and their influence on all humans born at a time when the “wanders” return to certain established proximities to nonmoving planets. With this knowledge Draco the Druid is frequently able to dissolve difficult perplexing problems which are always creeping into human affairs. This year may contain “good luck” for you. Why not consult Draco the Druid personally or send for your horoscope at a cost of only $1.00. Give day, month, year and place of birth. Address Draco the Druid Diviner. At Ye Olde Cocke each day 4-6:30 P.M. 43 Main St., Nanaimo. Personal appointment by phone. Marine 777.

  “That’s good stuff, isn’t it?” Ethan said. “What would The McCandless think of it, Jacky?”

  “It’s marvelous,” Jacqueline murmured, giggling. “But I rather think Father wouldn’t approve, you know.”

  “Scientific too. Oh yes. I’m absolutely scientific, that’s why I’ve got such a big practice. And I’m on the level too. I don’t just tell people anything, or just from the month they were born in, like some of these crooks. You gotta get the day and year and place…” The Llewelyns crossed the street, laughing, probably a bit hysterically though the fresh sea air had revived them, and began to walk back on the opposite sidewalk, always keeping an eye out for the bastion. “Of course when I do a real horoscope like that—I mean what with all those ‘wanders’ creeping into human affairs and all—it takes time, you understand, and I gotta charge for it…Cigarette, ma’am? Trouble is, I half believe in it, don’t you? Though naturally, as in other professions, it rather depends on the talent of the practitioner.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Draco. You seem to have quite a going concern here…No thank you, Ethan dear, not in the street…But tell me, won’t you lose some of your—ah—clients by hibernating out here rather than operating in a bigger city?”

  “Bound to, either way. We always count on losing nearly all of them or they wouldn’t consult us in the first place.”

  “Pardon me,” Jacqueline was saying, “but we’re trying to find the office of the ferry for Gabriola Island.”

  “Eh?”

  The elderly man who had turned to them might well, at first sight, have been Draco the Druid Diviner, or even The McCandless himself had not one instantly recognized him as a species of military British pensioner, and in fact this did not entirely let out the possibilities. He was dressed in a large loose cloak, a kind of tweed domino, a deerskin Sherlock Holmes-like cap giving the effect of a hood, knickerbockers, black stockings, and heavy hobnailed boots: the cloak imparted a lairdish McCandless quality to him too, now one thought of it, and in features and carriage he reminded Ethan not a little of Jacqueline’s father: the physical effect was impressive, even fierce, though the voice was jovial, reassuring, as if its old colonial imperiousness had been mellowed down through long practice addressing squirrels and ducks in the park. Holding himself ramrod straight he narrowed his eyes at them, cupping his hand round his ear as Ethan repeated Jacqueline’s question.

  “Ah yes, yes. Well, old boy, it’s just behind the bastion, what?”

  “Thank you,” Ethan smiled. “But where is the bastion?”

  “Why, there, old cock.” The sympathetic fellow directed a punishing yet somehow chivalrous look across the street, toward the gap opposite at the head of the staircase they’d climbed from the waterfront. “There,” he repeated, pointing with a sort of shooting stick. “The bastion, of course. Right behind the bastion.”

  “What is the bastion? Bastion of what? Where is it?” Jacqueline cried.

  “I’m sorry to appear stupid, sir, but we’re strangers.”

  “Why the bastion, of course, old boy.”

  “We’re sorry to appear stupid, but we’re strangers here,” Jacqueline repeated.

  “Why the bastion don’t you know…We English built the bastion, old boy, Hudsons Bay Company…defense of civilization, all that sort of thing. Historic landmark.”

  Ethan reflected it was not unusual for those North Americans who’ve never read Dickens to think this type of exaggerated, and still much mimicked, and, to him, almost touchingly nonconformist British lingua franca, or pidgin-Blimp, had originated fairly recently, even as recently as the British vogue for imitating the speech of P. G. Wodehouse’s characters, but all at once he found himself thinking of Mr. Brooke, in Middlemarch.

  “A museum, that’s what it is now. Museum, you know, all that sort of rot.”

  Twitching his shooting stick under his arm, the brave old bird pointed once more with a skinny yet swollen forefinger straight across the street where, sure enough, not thirty feet away, to the right of the staircase, set back a little from the sidewalk, but half-hidden under the lee of some overshadowing scaffolding erected against the building behind it—where a board said NANAIMO TOWING COMPANY—sat, as it must have been sitting in fact for the last hundred and fifty years come to that, all the time, an ancient white structure like a tiny sailless windmill, hexagonal, with two tiny cannon not over two feet long, crouching on little wheels on a grass plot, guarding its ancient doorway, above which hung an anchor.

  “Right there, old boy.”

  The Llewelyns gazed at each other, suddenly seized as by a stupor, a sort of momentary, mutually helpless catatonia.

  “You say the Gabriola Ferry Company is behind the bastion?”

  “Yes, there it is, old boy.”

  “But I don’t see—you mean—” Jacqueline wailed, “that building with all the scaffolding up in front is it? But that says Nanaimo Towing Company.”

  “That’s right, madam. The Smout Ferry. Behind the bastion…God bless you.”

  “God bless you!”

  Ein Festerburg ist unser Gott.

  Finding the door ajar they walked in. They stood a moment behind one of two desks in half-guilty silence, guilty because there seemed nobody in the office, which made in sudden retrospect the manner of their arrival, clambering absurdly over and under the scaffolding, almost felonious. Just like a prisoner in the box, Ethan thought, preparing to voice his se defendendo. He now suspected someone might be in the back room that was hidden by a filing cabinet, and rapped on the desk sharply. Order in the court…No one. Everybody was evidently out to lunch and the door, on which it said SMOUT FERRY, GABRIOLA TICKET RESERVATIONS, and REAL ESTATE, had been left open by mistake.

  Oh Mr. Smout, please show your snout.

  But it was certainly the right place. Doubly, or too much the right place, because, like those barber-cum-watch-repairing establishments (Ethan saw no clock here at all) in Oakville, Ontario, it combined two offices at once. They might even find out definitely about their prospects for a house in Gabriola itself here, as well as the ferry, but this idea for some reason frightening him he tried not to grasp its significance.

  The immediate impression, however, was that while the real estate side of the office was in operation (there were stubs in the ashtrays on the other desk) the “ferry” side, where they were standing, and where there were no ashtrays on the desk, only a calendar with the September leaf still not torn off, had suspended operations during that month. Well, that needn’t mean the ferry wasn’t running either. He looked at Jacqueline, who was rouging her lips in a mirror on the wall. How pretty and fresh she looked!

  But no, the glow of excitement had faded from her face and her eyes, she looked suddenly tired and despondent, almost heartbroken, like a child; she was trying to conceal it, and suddenly he took her in his arms as she began to cry softly.

  This five-year-old bung, has two rooms only but these rooms are nicely de
corated, large, bright and cheerful. This is a grand opportunity for retired couple or young married couple trying to get a start.

  This much loved bung, nestled under lofty poplars, so tastefully dec. such cute light fix.…

  Very cute and clean older type bung…

  This attractive 4-rm. bung, situated on very lovely double landscaped lot with fish pond. Only $18,000…

  But in fact the office was enough to make one gloomy, darkened by the scaffolding—the scaffold!—outside, and now it grew still darker. All at once there came a distant, and as if waterborne, but protracted sound of shunting—gods playing snooker—thunder: Well, that needn’t mean a thing either. Thunder in October rarely did. Already it was brighter. It was rather as if the day—like the extraordinary Aztec Tiger Flower whose petals began to fold every time a cloud came over the sun, and died at sunset, though next morning, from another stem, there was another flower—had started to close, then opened again, its petals. Garden of Eden. This won’t last long. He kissed her and then to cheer her up set the little jingle running through his head, despite “Aunt Hagar’s Blues,” to a murmuring tune of “Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean”:

  Oh Mr. Smout, please show your snout!

  Oh how is it that you’re in, and yet you’re out?

  This made her laugh and cry at once as they gazed round them at the walls: at the pictures of sailing ships, steamboats, the S.S. Beaver, the first steamboat to come to British Columbia, in 1850, round Cape Horn, perhaps also of the Gabriola Ferry itself, certainly the Princess Guinevere, the prisoner in the dock, and the Mauretania: photographs of houses for sale, bastard-mansard, big bow-wow windows, some quite pretty, with swimming pools, apparently in the Yukon: though they saw none situated in Gabriola: a newspaper clipping pinned to the wall: Rules in House Buying. Be Practical about Your Dream House: and in a frame, behind the “ferry” desk, a nautical verse, of jaunty motion, decorated with suitably marine embellishments. Suddenly it seemed of first importance that the ferry should be running, and his longing to get to Gabriola became, in the instant, greater than that even for a beer. The verse ran as follows:

  What of the night, watchman, what of the night?

  Cloudy, all quiet, no land, yet all’s right!

  Be watchful, be vigilant, danger may be

  At an hour when all seemest securest to thee.

  How gains the leak so fast, clean out the hold

  Hoist up the merchandise and heave out thy gold—

  Now the ship’s right—

  Hooray the harbor’s near! Lo, the red light!

  Crowd all thy canvas on! Cut through the foam,

  Christian, cast anchor now, Heaven is thy home!

  Chapter 30

  The Ocean Spray

  INSIDE THE OCEAN SPRAY Inn, on the almost empty Ladies and Escorts side, the view from those same big windows looking straight out over the harbor and the Gulf of Georgia toward the mountainous mainland must have been about the best in the world, Ethan thought. Nothing could have been fresher, swifter, more wholesome, more brilliant. There was a tremendous sense of sunlight, and even sitting here, inside, you could feel the fresh sea wind and smell its sea salt.

  Not a cloud in sight, so the thunder must have come from the mountains of Vancouver Island itself, behind them.

  The sea was blue and rough, striated with lighter polar blue, the horizon line jagged with deep indigo and white peaks of the mainland mountains.

  And there, far beyond a lighthouse in the immediate foreground, whose tower rose waggishly from its substructure of red roofs and white walls, lay Gabriola Island itself, the bartender was saying, or its tip, maybe seven miles away, shimmering like a mirage under the noonday sun.

  The Llewelyns sat looking at this happy view without speaking. Anything like it these days was almost unique in Canadian “beer parlours,” which tended to combine the more lugubrious elements of the funereal and the genteel.

  “Yes, that’s Gabriola, sir,” agreed the waiter. “Just beyond Hangman’s Point there, sir.”

  “Just beyond——”

  “And there’s a ferry that runs to Gabriola Island, of course?” Jacqueline put in hastily.

  “Ferry? Oh, absolutely—Four?”

  They gave themselves over to the enjoyment of the view again, sea gulls and lighthouses, blue sea and mountains—how grand it was! It touched your heart, too, filling it suddenly with a wild pride in your own country, a giant, yet so youthful, a clod of springtime mould after all. You felt proud even to be looking at such dramatic beauty, as if you participated in all that dignity and cleanliness and sense of space and freedom; were, in some manner, clothed in this wholesomeness yourself, were what you were looking at. Do you see those mountains? That is ourselves, part of us.

  It was a sudden feeling of love for one’s land that had little to do with patriotism, but seemed part of a true pride. Ethan felt a pang: they were both looking past Gabriola, from which their toy passenger steamer was keeping an offing, straight over in the direction of Eridanus. And at the same time he became aware that this was perhaps the main source of his pride. Perhaps the view, even though not their old view, really was part of them, its beauty they somehow deserved, had earned (so it seemed in this mood, until one remembered again): those wild forested mountains and the sea were the meaning of their whole life in the little house in Eridanus. In a way he couldn’t have explained, they weren’t looking at the view, but at something in themselves. Or that had once been in themselves. It was what they meant when they turned to one another, crossing the Second Narrows Bridge some stormy winter afternoon to stare through the streaming windows of their bus down the inlet through the wild weather, with the clouds sweeping low over the evergreens and only the lower slopes of the mountains visible, so that no place on earth seemed more grim and desperate and tempestuous and impossible, and looking forward to the lamps of evening still half an hour distant in the house to say, half-humorously, with such longing: “We live there!” And now?

  “Hangman’s Point,” Ethan said aloud.

  “I never saw so many lighthouses in my life.”

  “Nor I.”

  They counted seven from where they sat, planted on rocks near and far, the white towers of vigil all rising from port-wine-colored roofs and white walls of their keeper’s houses, all with much the same pretty architecture. A lighthouse was surely the last thing you associated with a home: yet these scattered beacons on the rocks, these farolitos testifying to the extreme danger of the coast (and the extreme danger of living in such isolation: in his experience Ethan could remember more than one tragic crime committed in a lighthouse) not only were homes, but quite obviously and obstinately loved as such—around the nearer ones they could even see where efforts at gardens had been made, and among the rocks of the nearest lighthouse, roses still blooming, in defiance of the spray. And on a near island they saw a lovely little white house, built on piles: they looked at it, shining there against the bronze, russet and burnt gold of its maples (Jacqueline loved to name the colors) faded sage-green of alders and dark bottle-green of pines.

  Flying shadows of herring gulls, glaucous-winged gulls, violet-green cormorants swept across the big C.P.R. building at the foot of the ramp. Their passenger boat for the mainland was now no more than a smudge of smoke, but a sister ship was coming in, her three yellow funnels, white bridge, foxglove-flower-shaped ventilators moving straight against the blue sky.

  To the right, a half-mashie shot below the window, in a small sequestered harbor at the foot of the staircase, threescore freshly painted fishing boats with spiky masts swayed meekly at anchor, or were lying against a wharf. An old freighter was anchored out in the roadstead, just before them, an empty ship with water being pumped out of her side, riding so high she looked gigantic, API∑TOTEAH∑. Two men were working aloft, on the cross trees of the mainmast, doing something to the topping lift of a derrick. Derrick, it was a derrick because of the first hangman. It certainly was a curious place to meet A
ristotle. Far to the left, remotely, a sea-weary-looking steamer with a great list, not much more than her stern visible, was taking on cargo.

  “Loading coal for Australia,” said their waiter, arriving at this moment, a tray of beer balanced on his palm, “and the funny thing about that there coal is, it don’t come from Nanaimo at all, but from somewhere in Alberta, I heard.”

  “Oh?”

  “If you ask me, Nanaimo’s getting too big for its boots these days,” the waiter said, “ashamed to be among common working people like anyone else.”

  “And you’re quite sure about that ferry to Gabriola?” Jacqueline asked again, shyly, as the waiter was going.

  “Sure, there must be one, ma’am,” the bartender, a stout, fatherly man called over from the bar. He had been rinsing glasses, and was now drying them. “Only question is, is it running?”

  “That’s right,” said the waiter, “they might have stopped the summer service by now.”

  The bartender, glancing from time to time out of the window at the scene outside, began to pile the glasses one within another in a stack on the counter, a dull-seeming occupation, about which, Ethan now understood from the bartender’s glances of satisfaction at the stack, the position of which he altered now and then, evidently to suit some aesthetic whim, there was, on the contrary, something almost godlike: it was a creative process, an act of magic: for within each glass lay trapped the reflection of the window, within each window the reflected scene outside, extended vertically by the glasses themselves, the reflected windows flowing upward in a single attenuated but unbroken line in which could be seen a multiplicity of lighthouses, seabirds, suns, fishing crafts, passenger boats, Australia-bound colliers, the minuscule coal rushing audibly down the minute chute, minute S.S. Aristotle with minute Greeks working on the derricks. Ethan touched glasses with Jacqueline and drank.

  It was now the end of the luncheon hour. People strode in the wind up and down the ramp. A bearded man in a bright red and black plaid shirt riding a chestnut mare stopped at the top, right under the window, to readjust the horse’s blanket and cinch. A dark sedan with some faded gilt lettering on the front door—DEPARTMENT OF MINES AND RESOURCES—also drew up, revealing within, next the man driving, a stout dowager in a seal coat lighting a cigarette. Ethan touched glasses again with Jacqueline and took another draught of beer watching, with one’s eyes, where, diagonally across the street, sat the bastion.