October Ferry to Gabriola

by Lowry, Malcolm

  Whatever point they were heading on, every revolution of the engines, every stroke of the propeller, was taking him nearer his beloved and lost home. We live there!

  Good-bye! And the echo comes Abye!…Was the word in a dictionary? If so, some part of his documental mind informed him, it must be found next to the word “abyss.” God help me! But now he didn’t want to be helped.

  He thought of the last time he’d seen their little house, their last day, that day of moving, only about a month ago, but it seemed five centuries, that day after Labor Day, with no one on the beach any longer save a few fishermen, and some of them not returned yet, but a day far wilder and more autumnal than was this. They’d risen late to find the sky scalloped in Van Gogh-like fierce waves, but remote and silver, one thin dark cloud formed with the top of the mountains a sort of frame for a different, darker movement of the same things into which the paler scallops wildly swirled, and against which the mountains showed an almost shocking serge blue, as in Labrador; a little later, moving the bags out, leaving the boat, the planks askew on the porch—the well!—above them the same sky was even more sensational, great whirlpools and whorls like seashells, suggestive of tremendous wind, and great forces, and much brighter, almost white-silver, with already, low in the west, at midday, a primrose-like brightness, telling of sunset. And later, while they took their last look, these same curdling clouds were dark blue, blue clouds, and an airplane slow as a 1918 Handly Page training plane struggling against the wind, and the sea gulls soaring, and an old gasoline can banging under the cabin in the choppy sea of high tide.

  The wind wailed in the rigging. And now Ethan, finding a spot on the bridge where he was hidden from the wheelhouse, near a coil of rope, felt all the fear coming back with redoubled force; fear of the future, fear of himself—how could he fight it? It was as though his whole soul were shivering as great waves of cold fright rushed through it. He felt inwardly like a man who freezes halfway up the rigging, or on a mountain pinnacle, petrified by his own tremors. It was like one of those times when one had wakened up in the morning saying: Ah, I am refreshed, myself at last. Yes, I am renewed and about to jump out of bed to greet the day with courage. But a little later one had not jumped out of bed. And the familiar clothespin tightened on the nose, the ice boiled in the heart and it was only the bed that had taken on a new and terrible significance. For worse than the fear it was this hopelessness that seemed the enemy. Well, he had the mickey of gin, cassia from China, fragrant coriander from Czechoslovakia, spicy juniper from Italy, Valencia peel from Spain—what did he want?—who could resist it? But the screwcap still resisted him. He couldn’t budge the damned thing, try as he would. It seemed held in a vise.

  Try harder. He had bought the gin bottle, hadn’t he? Presumably they meant to drink it, or didn’t he? He couldn’t say he’d resisted the temptation because he couldn’t open the bloody bottle. Ethan was half tempted to throw the bottle overboard. No, Jacqueline would like a drink when they got to the Lodge. And so might he. And so why not now. And what had opening a gin bottle got to do with his will anyway, false or true? The gauge was worthless but the metal was priceless: or was it vice versa? But if he couldn’t open the gin bottle and have a drink, how was he going to fight this fear, this hopelessness. Ashamed now simply of failure to open the thing he placed the bottle wearily back in his overcoat pocket.

  How to fight this fear. Defiance…But standing on the bridge again his defiance seemed to blow back on him like ashes flung to windward. Nonetheless he continued to stand on the bridge, facing into the wind with something intended to be a defiant look. Then he walked to leeward and watched the bow wave foaming up to meet him.

  Ethan looked toward the mainland again. Yes, it would have been easy. What was not easy was to realize that he’d just evaluated himself as of less worth than a bottle of gin, that the impulse to the act, the abandonment of Jacqueline and his son, and life itself, had not been a velleity, but a genuine impulse, of which he still even could feel the sickening and desperate volition. Great God, had he no courage at all? What of the courage showed every day, every instant, by fishermen, by real pioneers, by soldiers, by sailors, by the shipwrecked, by Jacqueline, by everyone else in the world except him? Well, he had been shipwrecked himself once in a storm on Lake Ontario, on a yachting trip with a couple of partners in his law firm. He had acquitted himself well. He had saved a young couple from drowning in the Niagara River. He possessed a Humane Society medal for it. There had been plenty of opportunities for showing courage just in living at Eridanus, where he had been forced to deal with hazards that were unfamiliar. The great majority of people were courageous on occasion, even out of habit, since they took their lives in their hands every day. But this? What was this? What different kind of courage was required here, in this invisible struggle of which he did not know the real nature.

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

  “Yeah, I am too…And you can drop ezzackly dead!”

  The ludicrous argument still proceeded. And perhaps at last here lay the trouble, that he was as directionless as that unwitting, or unwitted, passenger. Worse: for their passenger at least thought he was going somewhere. Or rather, all his aspiration seemed to draw him back to a place he had not only already left, but on the acceptance of whose loss, and its transcending, his very sanity appeared to depend—

  Had one of those appalling things happened to him that one read of in ancient manuscripts of the Rosicrucians, but never really believed, whereby he had actually been deprived of his soul? Parted company with it, left it behind? which was to say, right ahead, forever in the realm of the forgotten sunrise! Had Jacqueline and he betrayed the mysterious trust by leaving simply because they were going to be evicted? Man faced the possibility of eviction from earth itself, but still went on living without making such a fuss about it. Surely his attachment was not sentimental, however pathological. And if pathological, why was it that now his loss seemed to connect with another loss, with something humanity had lost—that he felt at one too with the homeless and evicted everywhere, yet at the same time as if he were fighting some sort of spiritual battle for them, even without the right weapons to fight it, and even without apparently fighting—with something dark, tragic, overwhelming, inexplicable.

  And still Gabriola drew nearer, though not much nearer. Baffling heavy seas, and a head wind, the ferry had not traversed a quarter of the distance yet. And still Eridanus and the little cabin drew nearer, though ever farther away.

  Chapter 35

  The Perilous Chapel

  —“PRAY FOR ME, Father.”

  On a sudden impulse Ethan had gone to the priest whom he’d caught sight of again and they were standing together in the lee of a ventilator.

  “Will you pray for me?—Excuse my speaking to you like this.”

  “Why yes, my child…Gladly…”

  Ethan was so nervous he could not meet the priest’s eyes. But one thing astonished him. The priest was not wearing a cassock at all, just a black overcoat. He had simply imagined the priest was wearing a cassock when, in fact, there was only one place in all Canada where priests wore cassocks, which was in Quebec. Once Ethan had attended a hanging in Quebec, a Hungarian whose few words of French were mostly obscenities, a confessed and unrepentant murderer for whom there had been no adequate defense. Nevertheless Ethan had attended at the request of the murderer’s mother to give him what comfort he could: the Hungarian had declined all religious solace. Yet a priest had insisted, despite all insults, upon being present and ready to administer such solace, even if at the last moment on the scaffold—when the Hungarian had suddenly clasped the priest’s hand with the words “I believe, Father.” One tended to be skeptical of such last-moment repentance and one had heard of similar things before. But to see it happen before your eyes was another matter. The memory was ineradicable in its dramatic mystery, the horror of what was to follow almost obliterated by the inerrarable sense of the mirac
ulous. And it must have been of that priest Ethan was thinking, for though he’d been French-Canadian and was nothing like this priest, Ethan almost felt he was standing on that scaffold again beside him.

  “But you are going to Gabriola, you are going to live there?” the priest went on, without waiting for an answer. “With us on Gabriola?”

  Ethan kept his eyes cast down; his gaze was now wholly inward, he was terribly ill at ease, moreover he was already beginning to feel slightly ridiculous. They started to pace up and down the deck.

  “I don’t know, Father,” he said at length. “I’m not sure I really want you to pray for me. It’s for others. Many others.”

  “God will know who they are.”

  “But that’s my trouble. I don’t think I believe in God. Nor does my wife.”

  “But if you are truly seeking—? Then you’re not a Catholic.” The priest smiled.

  “Scarcely. And I don’t think that I am truly seeking. I feel I’ve failed in both my duty to God and man,” Ethan stammered. “I can’t explain even now why I spoke to you…I feel like a hypocrite. All I know is I want passionately to want not to be a hypocrite!”

  “You can come and see me any time on the island, you know, if you’re going to stay there for a while, and speak your mind freely.”

  “I didn’t know a Protestant could. You mean, Father, you would even hear confession from a Protestant?”

  “Of course…Come and see me, bring your troubles, that’s what I’m for. We all have to approach God in our own way. Now Buddhism,” mused the priest, “there is a very beautiful religion.” The priest was silent for a moment, then he said, “Why look, there’s an albatross.”

  “I don’t think I ever saw one so close inshore before.”

  “It must have strayed down from Cape Flattery.”

  “Yes, or Juan de Fuca Straits.”

  The albatross was following the now outward bound steamer by whose wash the ferry had just been redundantly caught and which, a cable’s length away, seemingly unvexed by the sea, was steaming beneath a gigantic column of smoke. Ethan wanted to go and call Jacqueline but it didn’t seem good manners. Moreover he now felt comforted by the priest’s presence and by this conversation which he might not have the courage to resume should he break the thread. They watched the beautiful flight of the bird that was not really following the freighter. The albatross had already, without moving a wing tip, far outdistanced it, and now returned sweeping across the Greek freighter’s bows with its tremendous sabre wings, like some embodied symbolic fusion of angel with its sword, and now recrossed them, banking, rigidly skimming ahead, buoyantly gliding, toward Gabriola. While the Aristotle, high out of the water with thrashing propeller visible, plodded and thudded and thundered after it. They watched until the bird was almost out of sight.

  “I’m not sure I know what my deepest troubles are, Father,” Ethan said.

  “Nor do any of us, my son…But God knows.”

  “I want to want to have faith. It sounds childish, doesn’t it?”

  “Why not?” The priest was silent again, pausing in their resumed walk, then said: “Why not childish?…You could repeat the Apostle’s Creed, my son, like a child.”

  “I’m not sure I know what the Apostle’s Creed is. Anyhow, if I didn’t believe it, what would be the good of repeating it?”

  “That’s what I meant. Children repeat it, without even understanding it, let alone believing it.” The priest looked at him quizzically. “But it’s possible that you’re one of those to whom dogma in any form is so inimical it would have the wrong effect. Well, you can’t be damned for that.”

  Ethan told him he’d been brought up a Swedenborgian and was perhaps more likely to be damned according to the other’s tenets than the priest thought.

  “Now he,” said the priest benignly with a smile, “was really an expert. You can’t say he didn’t have faith. He’d actually been places and done things, as the Americans say. He had a pretty rugged line of damnation himself, too.” Ethan laughed. “But,” the understanding and humble old priest went on, “a belief in the supernatural—even based on experience—is not necessarily faith. How shall I say it? For I am well aware that I should probably not say it. It is faith—and nearly all faiths should be respected—and can lead to true faith, but it’s not the kind of faith you mean. Even though true faith can bring abiding proof of the supernatural.”

  “Then what is faith?”

  “You might try thinking of it as a messenger. Yes, a kind of messenger.”

  “I thank you from my heart for talking to me, Father.”

  “You must pray to the Holy Spirit to help you, my son…Everything involves self-sacrifice too. You find that out, sooner or later…If you and your wife remain on the island, come and see me any time,” said the priest, his voice almost lost in the wind, “I have a pretty little chapel on Gabriola, but not many parishioners…In fact, at one time I was almost alone there…Some people even think that the Spaniards…In fact they even believe…It’s quite a dangerous spot too, perched up there on the cliffs, but people climb up to it. They climb up to it.”

  Ethan, having failed immediately to find Jacqueline, stood leaning against the bulwarks on the lower deck again watching the bow wave foaming sternward, and a few sea gulls, steadily following the ferry, crying. But for some reason now their cries aroused no answering melancholy within him. It was true that if you suffered long enough and died enough and defied any event completely to cut you down, in the end everything could change very suddenly. Then, just as he’d seemed on the brink of complete despair, the priest had supplied him with a measure of reassurance, indeed a kind of goal. Should they establish themselves on Gabriola, Ethan would visit him, would visit his chapel, would discuss his problems, and Jacqueline’s problems, and their problems. Never had Ethan felt more in need of advice from an older man, be he priest or no. And with this reassurance the priest had given him Ethan found he had attained too, on the sudden, a measure of acceptance. One had to take what might come. And life’s very uncertainty was exciting. It was exciting to see what was going to happen next, just as William James had pointed out…And with this realization, this acceptance, while with one part of his mind he may have been half congratulating himself that the priest was indeed praying for him, in effect he forgot the priest altogether. No, in a word, he was in a mood of strange self-congratulation. He began to walk up and down the deck with his hands in his pockets and even managed to inject a certain jauntiness into his stride. He began to whistle. Ethan had an impression of self-mastery, though upon what, precisely, it was founded, was none too clear. Positively, or almost positively, and for the first time in a long while he felt in tune with his destiny and that of the universe. The feeling was not unlike one of triumph.

  Ouch!

  “Hail to the sea gull, in the empyrean!

  Who man’s head useth, as a spare latrine.”

  “Returned man?” The old-timer in the mackinaw and the velour hat, which he bravely had not removed, was standing beside Ethan, who, startled, once more tried to incline his ear to the rich nostalgic breath that was suddenly like that of the old pensioner who had directed them to the bastion, and no doubt very much the same as his own.

  “Been in the cavalry, may I ask?”

  “No, I’m in the lavatory at the moment…That is, I mean one of those sea gulls apparently thought I was one.”

  “There’s only two kinds of people walk like you do, with that swagger. I just said to Mrs. Rountree, you were either a cavalry officer or a sailor.”

  “You can tell Mrs. Rountree I shall be damned careful not to swagger again when a sea gull’s looking at me.”

  “So you’re a sailor, eh mac?”

  “I’m a lawyer…Turned would-be carpenter,” Ethan added, smiling and rubbing his head with his handkerchief.

  “Carpenter. Ah, that’s something more in my line. And you’re going—”

  Ethan turned: some incident was taking pla
ce behind them in the anteroom. “Excuse me, half a moment, sir,” he said to the old man.

  In the anteroom the pale woman in black with the scarf sat on one of the benches. But the scarf, though still wrapped around her head, was no longer wrapped over her mouth. In its place the woman was holding a handkerchief pressed to her mouth—the handkerchief was stained with bright blood. The woman’s dark frightened eyes were turned up to her husband who bent over her, his arm about her shoulder, his face, under his soiled drooping hat, strained with tenderness and anxiety.

  The two shirt-sleeved crew members stood by, there was a low-voiced discussion, then one disappeared through the door that opened on the companion to the upper deck. Other passengers—but where still was Jacqueline? where the nuns? (and the good priest, wasting his time praying for him on the upper deck!)—even the youngsters wanting to help, the lady with the bandaged eye and La Chartreuse de Parme under her shiny coat sleeve, stood, hesitant to embarrass, but perhaps also from grim common sense, and experience, in the background, like compassionate figures in a Greek chorus waiting for their cue, so that Ethan had time to be impressed by the touching tragic dignity of the scene, even while it dawned on him he might be called upon to act as choragus himself.

  “What’s wrong here, mister,” he whispered, knowing the worst, to the remaining crew member.

  “It’s poor Mrs. Neiman, buddy. She’s had all her teeth out this afternoon.”

  This did not alter the tragic dignity of the scene, though just for the moment it had seemed to: there was nothing funny about having all your teeth out.

  Ethan now approached the husband.

  “Can I help, Mr. Neiman?”