October Ferry to Gabriola

by Lowry, Malcolm

  Suddenly a small crowd of people appeared. First came an elderly lady with a bandage over one eye, then another elderly lady leading a child with braces on her teeth. A tall, thin, blond young man, treading carefully, was followed by an attractive dark woman in tweeds, and a man in a smart navy blue overcoat, sunk in thought, carrying a small brown bag. Next a party of youngsters pushed noisily on board. Two men in shirt sleeves, careless of the frosty sunset, carried a washing machine down the ramp. A bewhiskered old man in a mackinaw muttered along by himself. Lastly a young couple about the Llewelyns’ age ran for the boat, laughing and talking. Refugees, with the unanswerable emblem of the enemy God born triumphantly in their midst.

  Everyone seemed to know each other and the anteroom was soon the scene of familiar greetings and inquiries.

  The ferry was moving rapidly away from the landing stage.

  The Llewelyns, seated in the anteroom, looked at each other with the tender, insulated private amusement of man and wife: someone must have cast off while they were stowing their bags more securely. And this despite the fact that Jacqueline had still not seen anyone yet resembling her obliging skipper of the Smout Ferry Company—indeed neither of them had seen anyone on the bridge, let alone at the wheel. Well, perhaps their skipper had been on board all the time and their quartermaster was one of the washing-machine bearers. The engines thrummed steadily…

  And powerfully too, with the deep rolling monotonous song already of a deep-sea ship:

  Frère Jacques

  Frère Jacques

  Dormez vous?

  Dormez vous?

  Sonnez les matines!

  Sonnez les matines!

  Ding dang dong!

  Ding dang dong!

  The old man in the mackinaw stared at them openly. The young couple had disappeared through the door, not shut again, but presumably unlocked, and somewhat embarrassed by the old-timer’s gaze Ethan wondered if that way led to some concealed lounge after all, on the upper deck, where Jacqueline would be more comfortable. But so swiftly, in such circumstances, does the sense of being a neophyte take root in the soil of the uneasy conviction ever ready to receive it, that man owns nothing in this world, is allowed nowhere, that Ethan, whose old profession of all professions might have taught him disregard of such feelings, made no move. There was always the fear too of embarrassing someone with prior rights to one’s own: what if one should open the door and something secret should be revealed? Yet, ah, they had actually started for Gabriola, and Ethan could feel, just as he could feel Jacqueline’s own mood, the strangeness and thrill of this communicating itself to him. Or perhaps he shared in the excitement and happiness communicated to them, rather man him, a happiness in which there was still that shudder of fear, like the anxiety the ferry would roll over too far at this moment and their jug of wine be broken. But which was like—he thought as they happily linked arms again—the mood of the bus once more, a mood of verticity, of active resignation and relief, upheld by the delicious sensation of being truly underway for their goal.

  Frère Jacques

  Frère Jac…

  …They had sailed exactly thirty yards over to the main C.P.R. wharf, where, the starboard bulwarks of the ferry having been paneled back amidships to permit its onset, they were maneuvering beneath a gigantic upslung iron gangway, an appurtenance of that wharf, and the property of the same company where they had inquired earlier for the Gabriola ferry (they could even see the ticket office at a little distance, and even their stationmaster asleep within, dreaming, perhaps, of forgotten campaigns) and now the ferry, sidling and rolling broadside on almost into the position earlier occupied by the toy passenger steamer, now drifting farther away, now nearer, as the gangway jerked and bounced down to fill the space between boat and wharf, and then, high above them, menacing, remained suspended.

  “Let her go!”

  “Down she comes!”

  There was a rattling and a clattering of ropes and chains and pulleys as the gangway amidships, like a medieval drawbridge spanning a moat, settled into place. Bang. But no: it was rough, a tricky operation, and now the ferry—for there was a furiously seaward-flowing current—had rebounded so far away the gangway’s foot was barely resting on the brink of the starboard scuppers…At last it was done. A car was rolling aboard, and they all had to stand back well into the anteroom to keep out of the way. The car was driven by a woman, leaning nervously over the steering wheel; she was scared, and finally the smaller of the washing-machine men still in his shirt sleeves (they were both members of the crew?) had to finish the job of parking it, turning the car carefully, backing and turning, and shouting, above the howls of a large uneasy dog in the rear seat, up at the still invisible skipper to edge his command yet once again closer to the wharf.

  The car was followed by another automobile and a small truck.

  Evidently not wishing that she felt let down by this delay too—and perhaps how much more!—Jacqueline was gazing, not at the cars being loaded, but at their fellow passengers within the anteroom. Jacqueline was peculiar about people, or rather, had become so of late. Both peculiar and inconsistent. “That Anderson Lodge creature.” She never would have said that a year ago of someone they’d never met and who in fact had put himself out to be kind. He saw again, watching her, and with an increased perception, that this was due to an obscure and contradictory loyalty to their life on the beach. She had reacted, momentarily, from her huge relief that they could be put up at the Lodge in Gabriola; and the Anderson Lodge, far more than had been the case with the Smout Ferry Company, was already associated in her mind with the irrevocable. Now, watching her still, and with a new understanding, Ethan saw too why, since the threat of eviction, she had sometimes referred to their old neighbours on the beach with sudden spite: certainly it was not because like the newspapers she looked down on them as squatters and fishermen or worse, really thought them beneath her (Jacqueline was singularly free of snobbery for a woman and her mind was anything but provincial) but rather because they, the Llewelyns, had almost ceased since that blow to be neighbourly enough. They had almost ceased returning kindnesses as they should, and as of old. And they lacked the fatalism of the older fishermen who, long used to evil, grieved, shrugged their shoulders and went on living there till disaster drove them out, because they knew that was what it was to exist. It was a kind of unconscious rebellion against the isolation that suffering, and an inability to live under the inevitable hammer, had driven them into. It was that, as he’d felt once before in their apartment in Vancouver, in the last months, more, alas: it was perhaps her way of casting herself loose from Eridanus itself. But now—and he tried not to let himself be hurt by it if truly there were no hint in it of backward yearning—there seemed no mistaking her look of almost wistful affection. Ah, he could feel she was thinking, the woman in black with the scarf over her face, the woman with the bandaged eye (who, with the other, surprisingly, was reading, in French, La Chartreuse de Parme), the impish old chap in the mackinaw with the velour hat, the man in the navy blue overcoat, the attractive woman in tweeds, would these one day be their neighbours and friends? Perhaps one day they would all be familiar—each separate, each known for his or her special qualities, tragedies or comedies, problems to be sympathized with—instead of merely an indiscriminate group of hats and coats. Even the two nuns, now reading their prayer books, but perhaps still flunking of their ice cream and the country store after their little day’s outing, might be familiar, and the priest with the gentle eyes, and wearing such big shabby boots, and who had just wakened up with a start and was looking round him bewilderedly, as to say, was this Gabriola already? Dear me, I didn’t think we were making as good time as all that.

  And perhaps one day the ferry itself with all its lineaments and sounds and movements would be so much a part of their life that, conversely, they would almost cease to see it, and they would forget this first strange feeling, this first brilliant chilly sunset. Or would this be one of those thin
gs they would never forget as long as they lived? The ropes were cast off. Ethan took Jacqueline’s hand.

  They were away!

  Chapter 34

  Outward Bound

  NOW THEIR LITTLE FERRY really was bound for Gabriola.

  First with the engines off, free-wheeling with the tide, a magic ship, then the engines, starting up again:

  Frère Jacques

  Frère Jacques

  Dormez vous?

  Dormez vous?

  Sonnez les matines!

  Sonnez les matines!

  Ethan and Jacqueline stood near the stern watching mountainous Vancouver Island receding. The town of Nanaimo lay in the indigo shadow of the mountains. But far to the left a lumber pile in a railroad yard caught a ray of sunlight so vividly that the timber seemed to be echoing the autumnal gold of a group of maples growing behind it.

  Oh God, so this was the moment, the moment he’d never really expected could come to pass. And on its own terms a joyful moment. Yet now too it was as though unimaginably, finally, they really were saying good-bye to their cabin, that old, new life on the beach, to Eridanus, and their neighbours there, and now, for an instant, he almost hated Jacqueline for this eagerness and look of hope.

  Near them the nuns were also watching Nanaimo falling astern. Like some of the other passengers they had, paradoxically, despite the sea wind blowing colder, and the declining day, been drawn out on deck by the sudden bright sunshine now they were beyond the shadow of the mountains. Ah well, most people’s idea of an outing from Gabriola Island would have been to go to the town, not the country, like the nuns, and Ethan smiled with slow grief remembering how Jacqueline and he had, from Eridanus, sometimes done a similar thing. They had picnicked in a sunlit clearing in the forest and then, on returning home, picnicked again on their own beach. But now something in the calm of the nun’s gaze touched Ethan to the heart. In la sua voluntàde è nostra pace.

  So he must try to accept this as the working of a higher will, of God’s will? For Eridanus, and the healing peace it had brought him, had come almost like a gift from God, and what that life was, in reality, and in its beauty, could never perhaps be lost: and yet it must be relinquished. And what would the cabin and their life on the beach have been without Jacqueline’s love, the love she put into it? To remain attached to the place, as property, which in any case it was not (unless a few two-by-fours, and nails, a well—), he thought, looking at the planks askew on the poop, seemed a blasphemy. And in any case what right had he to assume that such happiness was intended for one who, throughout his destiny, had done his best to defend, from human law, those who had transgressed the divine?

  Ethan remembered being taught a prayer as a child whose words ran:

  “Grant me, Oh Lord, to know that which is worth knowing, to love that which is worth loving, to praise that which pleaseth thee most, to esteem that highly which to Thee is precious, to abhor that which in Thy sight is filthy and unclean.”

  The childish prayer had been answered, only in middle age, or as middle age approached…

  Well, let it go. Let it all go. Good-bye! Ethan thought.

  The poop, with its yellow-painted lifeboats in their davits, rose and fell, and they stood gazing past its planks standing askew back at the town in the distance Jacqueline had been so impatient to leave; but now she was smiling remotely, her face upheld as though in a dream, or as though the town appeared to her like some town in a dream, under a sort of Gothic spell of enchantment, the post office with its clock-tower and far galloping flag waving farewell, like a turreted castle, even their big beer parlour had to Ethan an air of brooding mystery, as if it were the eternal waterfront tavern. Their happy day!

  And indeed in memory it might seem to have been an entirely happy day, and so in time actually become one…

  Good-bye! And good-bye meant God be with you.

  There was a waterfall with an echo they knew, where, to your Good-bye! an echo always seemed to answer “Abye!” and abye was an Anglo-Saxon word meaning “to atone for.” But it also meant “to endure.”

  The ferry tolled, and shipped a spray, the nuns, giggling, ran for the anteroom, while Ethan grabbed Jacqueline who had momentarily lost her footing.

  “Shall we go amidships and see if that door leads up on the bridge?”

  The door in the anteroom opened from behind just as they reached it, and someone on the threshold stood aside as, tripping everywhere, their steps everywhere overhastened or inhibited by the sea, Ethan still holding Jacqueline’s arm, they found in the sudden thunderous gloom, an interior companionway, with a glimmer of windy light on top, and whose rails rose slowly, meeting their grasp. Ethan helped her up the companion to the upper deck, where for a few seconds it seemed all the wind and spray of the Gulf of Georgia caught them in the teeth.

  The deck encircled the little glassed-in wheelhouse looking out over the bridge, and there at the wheel stood Jacqueline’s obliging skipper of the morning. They smiled and exchanged glances. And smiling too, remembering the bastion, Ethan felt a slight stab of shame as they battled their way forward toward the bridge. Man’s conscience was supposed to be an internalization of outward authority, he had read, but what if it were, on the contrary, a kind of externalization of inward authority, but with whom that authority was hardly in touch, barely within one’s range of perception, almost outside one’s consciousness altogether, a perfect stranger in fact, yet shadowily glimpsed from time to time, a word, just like somebody twirling a wheel in a wheelhouse of his own, coolly smoking a cigar, and exchanging knowing glances with one’s wife? Meantime, however that might be, the young couple were also up here, huddling in the lee of the funnel, and the good little priest, in his big shabby boots, his cassock flapping, and standing with his ear inclined to a windward ventilator, as if listening to an imaginary confession. A single ladder at the port side they hadn’t seen led down to the black-piled foredeck where, indifferent to the spray blowing over the bows, a hunchback in a sou’wester and oilskins was coiling a long thick rope beside the windlass. So nothing was very mysterious after all. “Brrr it’s cold—” said Jacqueline. And there was even apparent up here on the lee side, as they reached it, and looked through the window a sort of lounge, circular, with basket chairs, and a stove, and which connected with the wheelhouse: it looked cosy in there as a tiny back room in an English pub, certainly much warmer than the anteroom downstairs, but its amenities were soured for Jacqueline by its being the theatre at this moment, of a loud altercation, evidently between a new passenger, by no means sober, who had come on board with the cars, and a crew member, a difference of opinion in which seemed mingled in equal parts patience, ferocity, and complete futility, if not actual hebephrenic dilapidation:

  “I’ve fought for all you buzzards for five years in the air force and I’m not going to take any back talk from you. I’m going to Shaughnessy Hospital and as for you, you can drop ezzackly dead!”

  “You’re not going to O’Shaughnessy Hospital, mac.”

  It was true he was not. O’Shaughnessy Hospital was on the mainland in Vancouver. But then he might have meant the nursing home.

  But the tremendous sight from the bridge! The ferry rolled and worked in the cobalt sea with its blinding causeway of sunlight, while all the magnificent scene before and around them, of deep-forested mountains with the sunset fire lingering on their murderous peaks, and far in the distance, the lone snowy peak of Mount Baker, or old Mount Ararat, seesawed up and down before their eyes violently, as if it were taking place in an adventure film on the screen: there wasn’t much to be seen at the moment of Gabriola itself—which, a long thin precipitous island, or as it appeared two islands, it was half hidden at this moment too by a pall of smoke—had changed its shape, as a ship in the distance first seen broadside on seems to have changed shape when now you view it almost from astern, so that you don’t know whether it’s coming or going; the ferry was shipping seas over her bows, the seaman working on the foredeck was
called aft, and this seemed the signal for Jacqueline, who was feeling colder than ever, to go aft too, and she waved her hand at the head of the companionway, before descending to the waist again. Ethan remained alone in the bridge.

  And some old mariner’s ferment in his blood, perhaps, sustained him to consider that he really was standing on a bridge, on the bridge of his own life, of their lives, at one of those moments when lack of continued resolution could wreck them both. Disaster might not come today or tomorrow, but should he revoke the act of will he’d made just now, the act of his casting off, this moment would—

  Ah God damn it…For now a little accident of geography, of direction (the same had disarmed him several times before today) served to confound the courage he imagined he’d just thrown into himself. The ship at present, to avoid a network of shoals, was heading, between lighthouses, not directly at Gabriola, but almost (and almost as it seemed to him secretly) due east, and straight at Eridanus inlet itself. But as if this were not enough, the very elements seemed to have conspired (as before in the bus there had been the trick of geography) in a derisive trick to torment him. For while Gabriola was all but invisible under that pall of smoke (at first this fire had seemed to come from a steamer but now it looked reasonably enough as though it came from an accumulation of autumn leaf fires, or people burning rotten tree stumps off their lands), the mainland, by some sudden shift of dislimning clouds and sunset light now all at once seemed to have drawn very much closer; more diabolical still, mountains that had been far in the background were now, in wild island loveliness, suddenly thrown into bitter bold cold relief, while the nearer mountains seemed vague: Ixtaccihuatelian mysteries of perpetual snows, formerly hidden among the farthest folds of the great mountain chain, enchanted fjords now appeared, though a hundred miles distant, almost before his eyes, and among the former he seemed to see Mount Garibaldi, the sunrise view from their own dear house. And now, there could be no mistake, though some fifty miles distant, minute, yet clear—clear and irrevocably lost perhaps as are those visions of the dead who remembering some aspect of beauty in their old life are drawn to it, and being drawn to it, thereafter haunt it, though perhaps too they can never really find it—