October Ferry to Gabriola

by Lowry, Malcolm

  Could it be that it was rather as if, on our journey through life, some guardian spirit causes our attention to be drawn, at such moments, to certain combinations, whether of events, or persons or things, but which we recognize, as speaking to us in a secret language, to remind us that we are not altogether unwatched, and so encourage us to our highest endeavor, and especially is this true when we most need help, which is almost the same as saying when we most need assurance that our lives are not valueless? At worst, it is true, we fear it might be the devil. But if beneficent, if not diabolic, then what is it, if it is not God, or of God, this eye that hears, this voice that thinks, this heart that speaks, this embodied hallucination that foresees, with more than crystal clarity, and divine speech. Like light, but quicker than light, this spirit must be, and able to be in a thousand places at once in a thousand disguises, most of them, as befits our intelligence, absurd, this spirit that terrifies without terror, but that endeavors, above all to communicate, to say no more than perhaps, “Hold on, I am here!”

  So it was now, as they approached Nanaimo again, gliding, freewheeling over the calm water back to Nanaimo, Ethan had, suddenly, the most extraordinary sense of being watched, a sense, too, as if he were about to encounter, not merely a coincidence, but the most important thing that had happened in his entire life: at the same time, all of a sudden, all that occurred to them during their day, seemed, not merely suffused with a significance, and interrelated, as if part of some unknown system of logic, but leading up to this very moment: the lumber train at the level-crossing, his thoughts and the stranger’s conversation at the level-crossing itself, the difficulties in finding out about getting to Gabriola, the bastion, the bastion itself, the seemingly irrelevant, or perhaps not so seemingly irrelevant, fact that there was a real estate agency in the bastion, the wonderful window at the Ocean Spray, the horrendous Men’s parlour—Henry Knight—the difficulties in getting in touch with Gabriola, and then the further delays, at the auto ferry, the conversation with the priest, the albatross, the poor woman’s hemorrhage—even Edgar Allan Poe’s centenary and now their return—in a way he couldn’t have explained, all of these things seemed leading up to this moment, which was of all moments the most unexpected, their return to Nanaimo itself—why had they returned, and would they—?

  Have you ever seen a bald sheep? Mother Gettle’s Kettle-Simmered Soup, M’mm Good!

  But the moment was already over.

  “Thank you, Tim.”

  “Thank you, Bill.”

  No dogs on Newcastle Island Resort…Smout Ferry Company. Produce of China.

  But the bulwarks of the ferry were flush with the landing stage which no longer skreeked or plunged but was as motionless in the dead calm water as if it had been built on piles and Mr. Neiman had guided Mrs. Neiman onto it, the veteran lumbering after them, happily one hoped just in time to catch the evening boat to Vancouver at the C.P.R. wharf where he had made his mistake, in just the time too that it took a newsboy who must have seen the returning ferry to hurl aboard a bundle of newspapers tied with a string that must have come by the same boat. Seeing he was carrying in his bag some extra copies of the Vancouver Messenger Ethan shouted and tossed him a dime, which he dexterously caught with one hand, while he slipped out a paper, folded it and tossed it to Ethan with the other.

  The next moment the mountains and forests were sweeping past them again on the same wide arc as before, though in a contrary direction. Beginning: beginning again: beginning yet again. Off we go! Once more they were bound for Gabriola.

  Chapter 37

  Uberimae Fides

  FRÈRE JACQUES…

  “So you see—” Ethan turned to Jacqueline with an almost delighted laugh. They leaned on the rail, smiling at each other, half glancing at the newspaper, Ethan taking the first section, and Jacqueline the second, as was their habit. He hated to read the paper, with its possible evening threat of doom every day, but just the same, that did not prevent him from buying it, whenever he had the opportunity.

  “Ethan, my God!—” Jacqueline cried out.

  She folded her paper, which was now flapping in a small breeze, and seemed trying to point, though her fingers were suddenly trembling SO WILDLY STONED BABY DYING. PROBE ORDERED INTO SEX BOOKS, JUVENILE DELINQUENCY ON THE he couldn’t make out to begin with at or what at this moment he thought it INCREASE, GET TOUGH SAYS MAGISTRATE CHIEF CHARGE AUTHORITARIAN GROSS INSULT was at, no doubt what he feared more than death, at a small sub-headline UN-CANADIAN ATTITUDE CITIZENS ORDERED INFORM ON ALL ECCENTRICS SACRED DUTY at the bottom of the page, THE MIGHTY NECHAKO RIVER IS NO MORE! “To see the beavers, on a sandbar. The Llewelyns held each other at arm’s length, they stared into crying like babies because all the water has gone is enough to make many one another’s eyes endlessly, then they flung their arms around each people cry!” HALF A COCKER SPANIEL FOUND ON DOORSTEP. WHOLESALE SLAUGHTER other in bewilderment, ERIDANUS SQUATTERS REPRIEVED…As if he were an angel, or a sea gull hovering over it Ethan saw the inlet in the clear October evening light, the carved mountains with their splashes of fresh white snow, the deep forest with just the tops of the tallest trees catching the sunlight, the row of little cabins beneath reflected in the water, now at high slack. He saw their own cabin, the tame sea gulls still circling over it and now alighting on the porch, wings outspread, and then furled with a little shake, as the great white birds settled down like doves. Down the beach old Mauger would be reading his evening paper, under his oil lamp. Ethan saw him reading thus, and felt his hope and brave joy as he too read this article. Far across the water in Port Boden a lonely bell was ringing, and now a fishing boat with tall white masts swept downstream as the tide turned.

  The Eridanus squatters, among whom are only a handful of year-round residents, mostly fishermen, the rest being the owners of summer cottages or weekend cottages there, and who have been recently a subject of controversy and under the edict of eviction have been reprieved. Certain factions had accused them of holding up the development of the district, but the acting mayor said that after investigation he was convinced they were doing no harm. Plans for a park site have now been abandoned due to a dispute regarding back taxes. “The land these squatters occupy is government land,” he said. “They’re a clean decent bunch of people and they’re not breaking any law by living there. Of course, if someone buys the land that’s different. But so far as I’m concerned they can stay where they are until some definite plan for the property is put into action.”

  “The well!”

  “The boat!”

  “The ducks!”

  “The forest!”

  “Jimmy!”

  “Mauger!”

  “How glad they’ll be!”

  “Can’t you see their faces?”

  “Ethan,” Jacqueline said uncertainly, after a moment. “But we don’t need to find a house on Gabriola now. We can go back.”

  Ethan gazed down at her, he smiled and shook his head. “No,” he said. “We need to find a house more than ever now.”

  “But—”

  “Darling, it’s only a reprieve, the same thing will happen all over again next spring, or next fall, or the next. We couldn’t live there the rest of our lives anyhow.”

  “But we could stay there until they do throw us out.”

  “Jacky dearest, it wouldn’t work. You know, I got so I felt I owned that whole forty acres, I felt just like an English squire. And the more I thought I owned it the more selfish I got about it, and the more I anguished over losing it. And the point is, we couldn’t own it. I mean, we couldn’t own it as it is, and if it ever got so we could, we wouldn’t want it, it would be so different. Oh dear, that’s not very clear I’m afraid, but what I’m trying to say is something like this: part of what’s so wonderful there is that it isn’t properly speaking anywhere at all, it’s like living right out of the world altogether. In Paradise, sort of. In a way…But it wasn’t fair to you in many ways.”

  “Oh Ethan, you k
now I loved it. You know I did, I do.”

  “Yes. It wouldn’t have been good if you hadn’t. But that isn’t quite the point either. Perhaps it’s something like a sunrise: when it’s at its very best you say, oh, if it would just stay like that forever, but if it did you’d never know what full noon was like, or midnight either. No, it was time to leave, however much it hurts. Time to—”

  “Mrs. Neiman, poor soul,” the old-timer spoke again at Ethan’s elbow. “Well, she had all her teeth out today, you know…Strangers here, aren’t you? I reckon you folks were afraid we were going to tie up for the night in Nanaimo. But the wind’s dropped now, we’ll make it all right.”

  Frère Jacques

  Frère Jacques

  “Strangers?” Ethan quickly, rather suspiciously took him up. “But we may not be.”

  “Don’t harass yourself, darling,” Jacqueline said. “Let’s just wait and see what happens. And meanwhile, what about the inner man—?”

  “Would I say that this was in the category of something wonderful that had happened to us,” Ethan burst out with a roar of laughter. “Yes, I certainly would. But I’d rather like to share my drink with someone. I feel almost too good to—”

  “Ask the old man.”

  The crushed-down velour and the mackinaw had turned away slightly but in response to their invitation the old man replied smiling, raising his hat, and every bit as though he’d been expecting it:

  “Does a duck swim?”

  “We’ve just got good news.” Ethan stopped, catching Jacqueline’s eyes that plainly said, “Don’t let’s go into that at the moment.” “—But we’re thinking of buying a house or building on Gabriola.”

  “I’ll take a symbolic one,” Ethan said to Jacqueline. But he took a single generous swallow—downing it, drinking the old man’s health, and then Jacqueline’s—and rarely had the throat-smarting fire tasted so good. And as the gin bottle went round, Ethan declining the next, the old man’s faded but still sharp and twinkling eyes regarded Jacqueline with friendliness, hostility and curiosity. For Ethan himself he had no eyes at all and Ethan had the feeling that he himself had already been summed up, somewhat to his discredit.

  “Eh?” the old man now squinted directly up at Ethan, cupping his hand round his ear, and tilting his head. It was an impish trick Ethan felt to be directed toward their mutual strangeness or apparent over-correctitude or accent, their enunciation, its Englishness though neither had really an “English” accent, nor yet quite a Scottish or a Welsh one: at the same time to him, no doubt, it was not a generic Canadian accent, he missed that rasping burring derivative American tone, and since it was not a Manx-Gaelic accent either, he disliked it on principle as something pretending to a supposed superiority of some kind toward which he preserved both an innate hostility and a tendency to suspect the ulterior motives of its owners, even though he was most clearly and embarrassingly won over by Jacqueline: yes, he accepted it in her, her title to it, and not his, so by that squint Ethan felt himself doubly set aside once more and created outcast.

  “Do you know Captain Duquesne’s place?” Jacqueline asked.

  “Lived on Gabriola Island for twenty years, and know every inch of it,” the old man said proudly, and no, he did not seem to be really deaf.

  Frère Jacques

  Frère Jacques

  Dormez vous?

  Dormez vous?

  Sonnez les matines!

  “Oh, then you’ll know Captain Duquesne’s place?”

  “Sandstone is all right, yes,” said the old man cautiously, after a while.

  Ethan and Jacqueline exchanged a covert glance and Jacqueline was now inquiring, nobly as it seemed to Ethan: “Is there a sawmill on Gabriola?”

  “Mill? Oh, sometimes these mills, you know…cut so many thousand, then they take two hundred and fifty feet for their share of their cutting it. Regular barter business, little mills on the coast, or in the interior, come to that, in Nanaimo…they even have arbutus growing, beautiful it is, on some of the rocks and the bluffs you see it, arbutus growing up to the Seymour Narrows…”

  “Duquesne,” carefully pronounced Jacqueline, “we were thinking of buying Captain Duquesne’s place.”

  “Aye. Wood’s better felled in the winter, for the sap is down. Get it sawn up and stack it in the wind. Some fellow’s here’ll cut fir for planking leave it a couple years, to air dry.” He turned to Jacqueline with again a sort of stubborn impishness. “Well…he could put the frame up, it would dry anyway. If he felled it in October, this month, or November, he could build it in the spring and stack it of course, he could—even though he didn’t get the best results. Aye, wood’ll rot quicker if it’s used when it’s green. Seasoned lumber isn’t so much because of the shrinkage but because it won’t rot so soon. When you paint unseasoned lumber you just lock up the moisture in it.”

  “Yes, my husband—” And then, “Do you know anything about the Lovell lot that was for sale?” Jacqueline asked, avoiding Ethan’s eye.

  The old man chuckled. “Bring a shovel, lad, he told me, I remember that time, t’was in—no matter—bring a shovel, lad, and we’ll go and get some oak. Dig here, that’s where it is. What the plague was the matter with the man?” He chuckled gleefully. “Starting to dig in the ground. Dig it up—what’s the idea, ’fraid of somebody stealing it? I said. No, Lloyd’s said it had to be buried for seven years. Aye. T’was good too. Sap, spunky-like, ivory-colored, you know. Rest of the wood nice, firm. You couldn’t put any sap into the construction of the boat. The wood, well…darker-looking color, but just like a green tree, nice for the adze…Pieces of oak ribs, condemned. Yes, missus,” he added abruptly.

  “But you must know Mrs. Angela d’Arrivée then. She’s lived on Gabriola for fifteen years,” interposed Ethan quickly, thinking: The thin oak plank that separates the mariner from death.

  “Invariably fir. Oh yes.” The old-timer nodded. “Cedar’s soft, the nails go in—but it doesn’t stand any working! Nails pull. Aye, fir’s ten times stronger for the frame, lad. But cedar for the two-by-twelves instead of four. Doesn’t rot so quickly in the damp. You take hemlock now…has to be kept wet or dry. Wet will last forever, as witness my old flume, the wood’s good after eighteen years. But fir’s stronger than cedar…”

  “Captain Duquesne——?”

  “Very nice that way. I had a preemption at Hyacinth Bay and I never could attend to it. You’d love to have the time and fell some of those trees, so perfectly matched, carrying the thickness of the butt way up into the top branches.” He lifted his hand, fingers loosely curled, and gazed upward, smiling. “A definite taper in them you know.” He looked from Ethan to Jacqueline, and back to Ethan again, shaking his head a little, almost dreamily, then suddenly he was very brisk and businesslike. “Well, take some good, straight-grained cedar—make a good club out of a hemlock branch, you can—and split some shakes. When you come to splitting cedar you find such a different nature from one tree to another! Good night, all.” He walked off swiftly, head down, muttering to himself.

  Then he returned. “Good luck,” he turned back toward the lounge (the door of which they held, staggeringly, open) waving at them. “If you ever want my help…I’ll be seeing you.”

  “Good-bye for the present.”

  “Good-bye for the present.”

  Well, time and heart enough to find out about everything now…The Llewelyns were battling out on deck themselves. The little yellow ferry boat was going at a fine speed now. They were already right out of Nanaimo Harbor again, and past the lighthouse on the point—was that Hangman’s Point?—they’d just seen from the window of the Ocean Spray, and were plunging joyfully through the long deep swells. The Aristotle was a scribble of smoke on the horizon. The freighter bound for Newcastle, N.S.W., stood out to sea, outward bound. A fishing boat with tall white masts was running and dashing along behind them, just astern. And mysteriously, there was a little toy boat too, adrift, bobbing there. Lost. There was a boundless
sense of space, cleanliness, speed, light, and rocketing white gulls.

  Ethan turned round, leaning his shoulders against the rail, staring at the deck. He saw the rain falling in Eridanus with the sound of muted ghostly sleigh bells, and the raindrops looking like little balls, then the sun breaking through and two rainbows forming slowly, then it was raining harder than ever and the rain no longer sounded like bells; it was seething, rustling, whispering. Then the sunlight hit the rain again and the sea was covered with silver and diamond sequins, as it rained harder and harder and the sun became brighter and brighter, through a low rift in the clouds, and now it looked as if the sea were smoking, fuming. Then the ecstasies of swallows against the black storm clouds, a white boat sailing into the rainbow, and a far, far white gull, like a disembodied animated whiteness moving…