To All Appearances a Lady

by Marilyn Bowering

  —

  “At which point, do you think,” I muse aloud, as the Rose enters Johnstone Strait on the morning of the fourth day after our arrival at Granite Harbour, “does the outward journey end and the inward one begin? I mean to say”—I am addressing Lam Fan, who is gazing awestruck at the mountains that rise from the southern shore—”there is always a moment when you cease to be interested in what will happen next and just want to get it over. You want to arrive.”

  Fan answers without turning her head as an icy wind drops down through the snowy passes. “There is no such point, Robert Lam. At least not for me. Whatever journey I am on I am always at the start of it.”

  “Then you’ve never had a bitter or a boring moment, Fan. Because the way to get through it is to look ahead, hope that what comes next will be better. Want to start over.”

  She shakes her head. Mist lies over the calm surface of the water, despite the wind, which blows steadily. An unnatural wind, which I can feel in my bones and see in Fan’s swirling black hair, but not otherwise sense. Fan sighs. “Have it your way, Robert Lam,” she says quietly. Then the journey is over.

  We pass the light at Rock Point. We see the square summit of Mount Eldon. Ripple Point goes by, with its west-going tidal stream of about three knots: from Camp Point westwards the shore is steep and cliffy, and in Race Passage we encounter a faster current and strong eddies and swirls, but the Rose takes them on like a dream.

  We pass the mouth of the Salmon River and the settlement of Kelsey Bay, the terminus of the highway that connects to home. From now on there is no safety net. There is no way back but in the Rose.

  “What’s next?” asks Fan. She is jiggling the flower rock, which she has picked up from the compass table, in her hand.

  “Whirlpool Rapids and a dozen other hazards. And safe anchorages,” I answer.

  “So you assume,” she says.

  —

  Thermopylae approached the coast of Vancouver Island, holding southwest of Tatoosh Island before opening up the entrance of Juan de Fuca Strait. She had been sighted by the West Indian on the Wednesday afternoon and sailed into Royal Roads about midnight. On the morning of the following day, June twenty-fifth, she was towed by the tug Pilot to the Outer Wharf.

  We dream, we imagine, in ignorance. And so the greatest dreams are born, unhindered by reality. There had been time to dream on that voyage, time to hope. At sea there were no familiar landscapes, no houses, businesses, no daily routines (at least for the passengers), no undermining neighbours to whisper of failure. All seemed possible: freedom, for example, uncluttered by prejudice or conflicting philosophies. A dream world indeed, in which the reformer could work unhindered.

  Expectations, in short, which could not be lived up to.

  The Pilot pulled them from one grey-green shoreline to another. Along the coast the vague, bent shapes of oak trees, topping the rock, stood out in the mist. Lam Fan and India looked down on calm grey waters and up at seabirds calling and wheeling above them. When the mists lifted, they saw forest, and a meadow where animals grazed: they saw shadow change to substance, and were disappointed.

  The sea, the land, those birds, that cow—how were these any different from what they had left behind? But as day filled in the outline of the wharves and other boats; as officials came on board to clear them of quarantine; as the stale, dirty ship rode at anchor, and, with the loosening discipline of the crew, as the routine delays of landing were met, that disappointment muted. For what mattered, of course, was not the land, but the people in it.

  Mr. Redford, son and namesake of Thermopylae’s new owner, came onboard to inspect the cargo. Once he had done so, he asked to meet the passengers. He carried in his hand an explanatory letter that had been sent ahead by Jardine Matheson. What was in it he didn’t indicate, but it was clear from his face, when he saw the two women, that it hadn’t explained enough.

  Mr. Redford, with a kindly nod at Lam Fan, offered India his arm, and they took a stroll around the deck. It was not that he was unkind—far from it, he was the most liberal-minded of men—but there was a question of the laws of the land. He knew about the major and that he had left no money; he had been glad to let the major’s daughters have free passage. It was just that no one had thought to tell him that one of the daughters was an Oriental. And the fact was that the laws of the new land were rooted in the old, and the fact was that all Chinese entering the province had to pay a fee. A head tax. No doubt there were reasons practical, economical, and social for the arrangement, although it was not the type of regulation he would have thought of, but as far as he knew there was no way around it.

  India looked at the meadow a little ways distant; she watched the dockworkers and the horde of male onlookers.

  “Did you not know about the tax, Miss Thackery?” Redford took out a handkerchief and patted his brow. It was, by all accounts, a humid morning.

  India’s eyes adjusted, until they no longer absorbed the scene before them, but examined circumstances: fear, prejudice, habits, the baggage that the New World settlers had carried along with them. She sighed.

  “If you’ll forgive me for saying so,” said Mr. Redford as his companion remained quiet, “I think that you don’t have the money to cover it. Please don’t take it amiss. I am going by the letter that was sent me. If I am wrong, please correct me.”

  “How much is it?” she asked. Not that the amount made any difference. Whatever it was they hadn’t got it.

  “It’s fifty dollars,” he said. “Everyone has to pay it. All the Chinese, that is.”

  They both examined the scenery: the trees bent landward, the tug that was approaching to tow them to the rice-mill wharves in the inner harbour, for the quarantine officers had cleared them at last.

  Now it was Redford’s turn to sigh. “Look,” he said, speaking softly. “Give me a little time, let me see what I can do. You’ll be all right on board the ship for another day or two?”

  India nodded. What else could she do? She glanced at King Leonidas, the figurehead, with his unsheathed sword. He stared straight ahead, weapons at the ready, fully prepared.

  Small broken-down boats scuttled across the waters in front of them as they moved into the confines of the inner harbour. The city itself clustered close to the skyline dead ahead. There were six church spires, the pagoda-shaped bird cages of the legislative buildings to starboard, and coming up to port, Deadman’s Island, the Indian burial ground. Sculls put out from a rowing club at the water’s edge below the government buildings, and parties of walkers and riders could be seen along the roadways fronting the sea.

  As the ship slipped onwards on the first leg of the inverted “L” that formed the harbour, they saw buildings—hotels, clubs, offices, and theatres—all built of stone.

  But as the ship eased northwards, up the inlet towards the rice-mill docks, the scene changed. Westwards were the white canvas tents of the Indian encampment on an open muddy flat, and along the eastern shore, stone changed to brick and brick to grey wooden shacks stacked next to each other, on top of pilings, on top of nothing—so it appeared—but thin air.

  There was a crowded, tumble-down, dirty huddle of buildings from which white clouds of smoke issued. In and out between them, and up and down around the pilings, hurried Chinese laundrymen carrying baskets slung on poles, or with firewood gathered in their arms. It was, to Fan and India, a familiar picture, much like the Hong Kong settlement, also called Victoria, that they had recently left behind.

  A divided city.

  From Churchway to Pandora Street, land cost from $225 to $450 a square foot, but from Pandora Street north to Chatham Street, from $90.00 down to nothing. And what marked this boundary, this change of value?

  “The colour of skin, Robert Lam. You know that, why ask?” says Fan, crossly. We are passing the last of Hardwicke Island, making our way towards Blenkinsop Bay where I shall look for an anchorage. Fatigue has caught up with me, perhaps the aftermath of Lam Fan’s death and all
the business of clearing up; not to mention her reappearance, and whatever I am to make of that. I am coming down with a cold, caught, no doubt, from my Granite Bay visitor, Joe Alexander. Perhaps that was the price of his coin—a day or two of sickness.

  I button my flannel shirt and put on my jacket.

  “Too late for that,” says Lam Fan unsympathetically while I sniffle. “I’m not asking for much, Fan,” I say between sneezes. “I want to be well, I want to get on with my journey.”

  Waterfalls dropping from great heights, splashing onto the dark rocks of the beach; thick coniferous forest; indented coastline; Indian summer villages built on middens of shell; rock paintings; petroglyphs—of many-legged insects, angle-legged men, women, and children; direction posts, signs and signals pointing heavenwards, whose meaning is lost in history. A coastal world with no inference, for there is no one to interpret it. It slides by, atmospheric blue slipping to grey to paler hues: each deadhead a possible canoe or drowning sailor; each small island a ship going down. My eyes shift back and forth along the shoreline, over the waves, up to the sky and down to the deck of the Rose. Scanning, trying to understand shape, identify. No whales for days. But dark blue kingfishers, young eagles, schools of herring. Attempting to make sense of the world I have known since childhood and passed by.

  “It takes no print,” I say out loud to Fan. “It looks like no one’s touched it.”

  While she, in her own world now, says, “Little Foochow faced Little England in the new place we had come to. We had seen it all before, but there was nothing to be done about it.”

  —

  By the time the crew had been in port for two days, Mr. Redford was forced to advertise that “Hall, Ross & Co. will not be responsible for carrying debts contracted on account of ship or crew.” For the crew, let loose in town, were making up for lost time: spending wages they had earned plus money they didn’t have. But Redford had been active in other spheres as well, as he’d promised, and with the rice and matting safely on shore in storehouses, his emissary, a tall and well-built man, but a little pale in appearance, and rundown, was making his way from Chatham Street, along Government Street, down Fisgard Street, in the direction of the rice-mill docks.

  He was a man, let me suggest, who was full of promise, but whose talents remained largely in the abstract; that is, neither he nor the world had found a use for them yet. He was a man who scanned the horizon, a sailor at heart though he lived on land; a man who was capable of almost anything, except discipline.

  A charmer, a legend in his time.

  (“Don’t overdo it,” says Fan. “I am warning you. Please listen to what I tell you.”)

  This man, as I was saying, who was a little down on his luck, living in a hovel on the wrong side of town, near the Chinese market gardens, because he was recovering from an accident.

  Although even then, in the split second between the time he’d seen the descending coal bucket and the moment he was struck while working on one of Mr. Redford’s barges, he’d known it would turn out all right. So that what passed before his eyes in that instant of insight was not an ending but a new beginning; so that when he awoke in hospital with a cracked skull and with bandages thick as newspapers round his head, he was not especially surprised to see Mr. Redford bending over him. Nor to see the expression on Mr. Redford’s face change to one of relief as he saw that Robert Louis Haack—for that’s who it was, the originator of my name, my mother’s future husband—had regained consciousness.

  Yes, this man who could not now return to his former heavy labours, who had become Mr. Redford’s right-hand man and jack-of-all-trades, was on his way into my mother’s life.

  For Mr. Redford dare not take the necessary steps himself. But if a third party were to intervene, and if, under his influence, justice, fairness, chivalry, and compassion were to be served, that is, if they could find a way to evade the Chinese head tax, Mr. Redford would not object.

  And so Robert Louis Haack, alert to the workings of destiny, adjusting his thinking for the task ahead, stepped off the boardwalk on Fisgard Street, waited for a tram to pass, then ambled across Store Street and down the ramp behind the rice and flour mill. Here, in the finger of commerce that crooked round the west end of Chinatown, was also an ironworks, a shoe factory, and matchworks. The smell of wheat, of dust, mouse droppings, and rust combined with sulphur and leather; so that the stevedores wheeling sacks of grain to the tied-up Thermopylae breathed in air from which the sea, lapping at the dock pilings, had been excluded.

  The ship itself was relatively quiet, as the crew, like children set free from school, had gone rushing up the ramp towards the town some hours earlier. Left on board, attending to the loading, were acting Captain Wilson and his mate, as well as Lam Fan and India.

  Haack’s plan was simplicity itself, and like many simple programs had evolved from a lack of alternatives. The facts were as follows: when a ship arrived in port it was inspected by quarantine officers, who then turned it over to customs. At every stage goods and passengers were checked against the manifest, and the passengers interviewed to be sure that their answers corresponded to what was on paper. Thus, it was not possible to hide Lam Fan’s existence: customs was already waiting for payment of the head tax. All that could be done was to try to change the customs officer’s mind about what it all meant.

  And hope of accomplishing this difficult task lay in Robert Haack’s pocket, in a whiskey bottle from which only the smallest amount was missing.

  Robert Haack approached the customs shed. The officer, sleepy on this warm summer’s day, sat inside, paring his nails, waiting for the signatures and money that would release him at day’s end to his family. It was a lonely job for a sociable man, and having finished his manicure, the officer was more than ready to answer Robert Haack’s greeting; which was to the effect of, “Sure is a nice day. Sure is a fine place for a man to keep himself company.”

  And it was pleasant, pleasanter then, I think, than now, when the air is thickened with smog from the mill up-water, and rusted automobiles stud the stagnant waters that once flowed freely round the ships at the docks. But then as now, water, especially in sunlight, is like a poem, imbuing us with feeling; and the sunlight on the trees on the far shore, and on the distant blue-green hills further west, produced a tranquillity of mind, internal music, that made men under its spell seek a common bond.

  Few words are needed. Only a smile and a nod to establish the beginnings of friendship. Moreover, in a city where hundreds of men are out of work, foraging through the waste produced by other men’s employment, the customs officer felt that generosity of spirit that comes from being on salary.

  He offered Robert Haack a bite of his apple, and Haack took out the whiskey bottle. Thus, in a few minutes, during which the scenery and the boats were examined and a little local gossip was exchanged, mostly about that aldermanic worthy, that notable speechifier, Noah Shakespeare, one thing led to another. They toasted the prime minister, John A. Macdonald, a well-known friend of the bottle; they drank to history, to their parents and grandparents who had brought them to this country; to the children yet to be born; to business ventures. Even a possible partnership in import-export was envisaged: for so it is that we try out possibilities, speculate in land, dig mines with strangers. Sharing a vision of self-improvement unsullied by commitment.

  Drink by drink, Haack’s hopes of success improved.

  Until at last, made inevitable by the falling level of the liquid in the bottle, Haack brought up the critical subject—the customs law, the Chinese head tax, and certain exemptions from it.

  “See here,” he began, throwing his arm around the shoulder of his new friend, “isn’t it a fine thing, when local business is in sore distress, when, for crying out loud, we are desperate for jobs and overseas investment, that right in front of us, onboard that ship there [Haack pointed to Thernwpylae], we should be throwing away an opportunity.” Haack shook his head in disgust while the customs officer looked
on, bewildered.

  “Right in front of us,” Haack repeated, “are two fine ladies who want to start up a factory here in our city.” He shook his head again, sadly, while the customs officer blinked and tried to keep up.

  “See,” he explained, “these Hong Kong people have got money. You’ve heard of Jardine Matheson, haven’t you?” The customs man nodded. “Well, they say that company is setting these ladies up. Thirty jobs to start with and more after that.

  “The strange thing is,” Haack went on with an air of puzzlement, “somebody’s told them, even before they can get off the ship, that because one of them is Chinese they have to pay the head tax. Why, it’s an insult! If I was them two I’d turn right around and go back. They’re here to give us jobs, and what do we do? We stand in front of them with our hands out. I think it’s a shame!

  “No!” cried Haack, amending himself, “I think it’s a crime, and, by God, you and I won’t stand for it!”

  The customs man, a kindly man, it is true, was upset. His troubled eyes wavered over the beautiful lines of the ship before him, and he struggled to his feet to stand before his newly risen companion.

  As to what would have happened, if he would have broken or bent the regulations or done nothing, we cannot tell. For as the moral battle was being waged, the first shouts were heard of the sailors returning from their spree, having worn out their welcome, having run ahead of the law and a number of outraged citizens.

  They flung themselves aboard Thermopylae like a wave. They fell into the fo’c’sle, sprawled in companionways, tripped, fell over, were trapped below. At which the master and mate got out the belaying pins and set about with vigour, raining down a frightening storm of blows on the miscreants.

  It was the last of a number of such episodes, and Thermopylae’s officers and crew were soon fired by Redford and shipped back to England as distressed British seamen.

  But in the midst of the melee, as Haack and the customs man looked on with amazement, two female heads appeared above the teak railings, like swimmers in danger of drowning. At this sight, without a moment of doubt or hesitation, Haack and his officer friend sprang into action. They leapt on board Thermopylae, fought their way through the confusion to the women, and rescued them.