To All Appearances a Lady

by Marilyn Bowering

  Robert nodded, and she laid a hand on his arm. “We are all God’s children, Mr. Haack, and we mustn’t forget this. Although I myself am a Methodist, we welcome anyone, anyone at all who cares to help us, even the Catholics. Why, the early missionaries to Tibet saw Buddhist priests using censers and the crosier and mitre, and beads for saying their prayers, and thought that Tibetans were instinctive Catholics! Instinctive Christians, possibly, although I wouldn’t go so far as to say so myself. But whatever your persuasion is, Mr. Haack, you are welcome in our house.” She gave him the friendliest of smiles.

  Robert cleared his throat. “Actually, Miss Powell,” he said, overcoming his hesitancy, “I’m not a religious man at all, although my mother was a teacher and used to read to me from the Bible. It is a private matter I’ve come to see you about. I’m searching for someone, and I hoped that you might help. It…she,” he corrected, “is a child I knew some years back. I’m asking for a friend who wants to find her.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Miss Powell coolly. Haack felt the temperature in the room drop by several degrees. “Whatever you have to tell me will, of course, be kept in strictest confidence, although we do have to take some measures to protect ourselves.” She regarded him severely. “Many men come to us to make restitution for the past. Some feel better if they make a small donation to our running costs.”

  “No, oh, no,” protested Haack, appalled. “It is nothing like that. Why, I never in my life….” He stopped, for he saw he could only make things worse. He started over, hoping that this time she would believe what he said.

  “Please, Miss Powell, I truly have come at the request of another person, a woman. The case is nothing to do with me at all, except that I had met the girl when we removed her from a star house. I was assisting Miss Thackery at the time.” Haack took out his handkerchief and wiped his face.

  Miss Powell put her cup down. “Miss Thackery I have heard of, naturally, in this work, but of you I know nothing.” She clapped her hands to gain the girls’ attention, then, raising her voice, called, “Toy Kee? Would you come here a moment please?” Obediently, a girl stood up and, feeling her way with her hands—for she was blind—came to stand in front of the directress.

  “Go ahead, Kee,” said Miss Powell turning her towards their visitor, no one can harm you here.

  The girl stepped forward and placed her hands on Robert’s face. She drew her fingers slowly down from his hairline to his chin until she had thoroughly mapped his features. “No,” she said at last with a sigh of relief, “it is not him. I do not know this man at all.”

  Robert let his breath out.

  “You must forgive us our caution,” said Miss Powell, now smiling again. “But, as I’m sure you’ll understand, Mr. Haack, there have been some terrible incidents.”

  Robert swallowed and tried not to imagine what the incidents had been. Toy Kee felt her way back to her seat. “This girl,” said Robert returning to his purpose but with shaken confidence, “we just want to see if she’s all right. She vanished seven years ago without a trace. Seven years is a long time, Miss Powell. I myself doubt that you’ll have heard of her.”

  “You say ‘we’, Mr. Haack,” the directress observed, “who is this other party?”

  “My employer, Mrs. Sing. She thinks she owes Gook Lang an apology.”

  “Lang, you say?” said Miss Powell. “Gook Lang?”

  “That’s right,” said Robert. “She’d be grown up by now. Or dead, maybe. Long gone, anyhow, I’d think.”

  Miss Powell appeared tired. She placed her cup and Robert’s side by side on the tea table. She patted her lips with a handkerchief. Then, briefly, she covered her eyes. Haack thought she might be praying.

  “The Almighty works in mysterious ways, Mr. Haack,” she said, looking up. “There’s no telling who can be His instrument.” The girls, at Miss Powell’s signal, stood and filed out.

  Miss Powell took down a short jacket from a wall hook and began buttoning it over her blouse. “If you would be so good as to come with me, Mr. Haack,” she said. “I’d rather not go alone.”

  It nagged at him, as he held Miss Powell’s elbow and steered her, at her direction, through the streets he’d already walked that morning. From Cormorant Street along Government Street to Fisgard Street; past Sing Yuen’s restaurant, the Place of Ten Thousand Occasions, and down the alley next to it. What was it about the situation that bothered him? It was like swimming upstream, a feeling of moving against the current, of overruling his better judgement. Yet he allowed himself to be carried along.

  What was it about this place, these creaking wooden steps that they climbed, this broken door opening inwards into a dimly lit hallway? Whatever it was, it evaded him, though he saw the shadows of pigeons scuttering across the skylight, and a door cracked open on the left as Miss Powell knocked at another on the right.

  She was saying, “We are so lucky in this country, Mr. Haack. We have an abundance of natural resources, our mines, our forests, our unsurpassed scenery. But what about people, Mr. Haack? Can we let them take second place while we build sawmills and fisheries? Jesus said, suffer the little ones to come unto Him. He meant all mankind, Mr. Haack, no matter in what condition.”

  She waited a moment, then opened the door herself. It was not until they were actually in the room, not until he was peering at the figure seated by a table at the window, that his mind released its hold on his memory and he realized where he had come and to whom.

  “Lang!” cried Robert Haack in wonder. “Lang!” he repeated in astonishment as the familiar profile turned slowly towards him. “I never thought…I never dreamed…. How have you been?”

  For despite the conditions of their last meeting, he was genuinely happy to have found her. It would please Lam Fan and Sing Yuen. And perhaps he could make amends, explain to Gook Lang what had happened: for he did not like the thought that she had known him at his worst.

  He moved towards her, but Miss Powell gripped his elbow and pulled him back. “It is so sad,” she was saying. “There is nothing to be done. It is a loathsome infection.” Her words meant nothing to him. But something in Gook Lang’s attitude did. He knew, even before he was near enough to see her clearly: for it was a kind of nemesis—justice with hindsight, justice retributive—that the young woman who regarded him bore the unmistakable hallmarks of leprosy.

  Gook Lang, whom he had mistaken through a partly closed door for India at a crucial moment in his life. Gook Lang, the living image of Haack’s self-blame.

  The magnitude of the cruelty overwhelmed him. Not just to Lang, but to him. How was it that everything he did went so terribly wrong? How was it he could find no way out? How was it that he was caught in a loop that had started with a falling coal bucket; and that had led to a woman named India onboard a sailing ship, and from there to a profitless robbery and worse? A loop that had passed, on its way, a child named Gook Lang. A child who had once been rescued and who had now come to this.

  “What should we do with her?” Miss Powell asked him, as if he were the one who knew. “We can’t leave her like this,” said the mission directress, “we have got to take her somewhere: but where? She can’t go to D’Arcy Island; only men live there. And it would be a terrible shame to introduce her among the other girls in the rescue home.”

  Haack was afraid to move. He blinked his eyes, half hoping that the vision of Gook Lang would disappear: but although she slipped in and out of focus, her ruined head floating like a pale white disk above her body, there was no denying her presence. A sudden shift in a heap of rags on the floor then caught his eye. The bundle rose and turned into a human. It advanced towards them, opening its mouth and crying, “She is a good girl! She works very hard! You no take her away!”

  It was all Robert Haack could do not to faint. “Tai Ho?” he cried in horror, recognizing the old woman from whom he and India had taken Gook Lang so long ago. “Not you here also!”

  Miss Powell tugged at his sleeve. “This is a diffi
cult woman to deal with, we had better leave,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, Lang,” said Robert weakly. “I didn’t know. I’II try to do something. I’ll tell them. It will be all right.” But he was backing out, his legs trembling under him as if they would break like sticks.

  Outside, Haack, having managed to say goodbye to Miss Powell, who had another call to make, and having given her Lam Fan’s address so that the two of them could consult as to Gook Lang’s fate, stood, shocked, on the boardwalk. He could not stop shaking. Each breath he took made him choke. But as he wheezed and gasped, the blur of impressions that swirled through his brain began to achieve a focus. It then moved to his heart. More than regret, it was grief that he felt.

  Wasted time, he thought. And cost. Even now it could be as late for himself and India as it was for Gook Lang. He had no way of knowing.

  Cost, thought Robert Haack as he stumbled along the boardwalk. You build for years, then it all goes up. Gambling debts, Smiling Jimmies, jail sentences, lost opportunities. And Gook Lang’s visage. That’s what it cost to live a life.

  He saw himself as a small boy in his California valley home. He heard his mother’s voice. He met the poet R.L. Stevenson once again and was given a poem. He walked through summer nights with India Thackery. He found the life he wanted, then he lost it.

  In the beginning there was a man of mixed character who had come to many turning points in his life; who had taken every avenue he could think of, and yet had found that whatever he did he achieved the same result. A man who, as the sun set brilliantly in a smoke-coloured sky, was once more face to face with himself. A man who had seen the truth at last, and with no illusions left. A man who would do what he had to because he knew nothing else. A man who could no longer delay.

  And so he made his way through a familiar labyrinth, but with no more mathematics and no more weighing up chances. No further attempt at balance. There was no more time to consider right and wrong. No time to hedge on the future. It had to be now, and it had to be first things first. He would do what he must to get money in order to find India.

  —

  We are sitting, Lam Fan and I, among the low hills of Sechart as a sea breeze begins to whisper and to shift the mist. The track we have followed is slowly revealing itself. I think about what Lam Fan has said about how we came here—by following the whaling ships. As if their well-worn routes from the open sea through the islands were like a path through the woods: trodden down and flattened, worn to bedrock. So that all who chanced this way could read the history of the whaling ships ever after. Is it possible? Have both sea and land a record to keep? Do ship lanes and whale migrations and the blood trails left by the sea ravages of men—just like roadways and railways—tie strings of traffic round Mother Earth herself? And can these be observed by those with the eyes to see them? Like the light sent out by stars, which light-years after its origin is made manifest to earth?

  It makes a sort of sense, I suppose, at least to a ghost. Who need not concern herself with what is now and what is past. It is all one line she treads.

  It makes sense, of course, in the light of death.

  The death of lepers on a tiny island. The death of a girl and her grandmother because of my actions. The deaths of fellow crewmen when the Silverbell went down near the Canary Islands; and the multitudinous deaths of whales and other fellow creatures, up and down this coast, for the sake of commerce. Sing Yuen dead in the frightful trenches of France; my mother dead not long after my birth. Even Robert Haack, who seems to me to be as alive as any man I know because of the pain he causes himself. And my father, of course, whoever he was, is long dead as well. It is only I, Robert Lam, who lives.

  And who watches in anguished suspense as the lifting drapery of fog reveals a figure on the path. And then there is not just one, but several, and I know them all. Not the dead as one might expect in this desolate place, but those who have recently helped me: Joe Alexander from Granite Bay, who had walked from Siberia, so he said, and who gave me a coin for luck, good or bad; and the doctor at Coal Harbour, riddled with guilt for the Japanese destroyed by the atom bomb; and the Indian woman at Zeballos who had taken a whale for a lover; and the boy who made me pay for my vision at Friendly Cove by taking a drug, and who had sent me out to do battle with whales with the weapons of his fathers; and Brian Chapman, who had lost a son and now spent his time saving other men’s children; and Doctor Annette, a refugee from Europe, who breathes a brief puff of life back into herself by trying to heal others. People with stories more important than mine, who had given me something; whom I would always take with me, like it or not, who had traced, for a way, with me, my path.

  They pass by me quietly, not looking around, and in a minute or two they are gone. “I think I see now, Fan,” I say softly as I watch them go. “If I could observe myself, I’d be in line with them, too.”

  She nods. Then she touches me on the elbow. “Look, Robert Lam,” she says. I turn my eyes reluctantly from the place where my visitors had vanished. The fog has risen foot by foot, and now it has revealed the hills, and the trees that body out the forest behind them. But the hills, the hills are not what I’d thought at all. They are made, every one of them, of the broken bones and skeletons of whales. We are in a dumping ground, a rubbish heap, graveyard, if you like, of beings that once lived and swam and breathed and birthed in the oceans. And sang. For so I believe I have heard them, time and again.

  Thousands and thousands. Tens of thousands. Mute, and yet vibrant still with the life that once flowed through them. I reach out a hand and trace the rough filaments of one of these relics of bone. Fishermen won’t have whalebone onboard their vessels. It causes wrecks, brings bad dreams, ruins the catch. But sailors take the bone and polish it, then carve upon it the memories they want to keep: desert islands, Caribbean docks, beautiful women; plus sailing ships, storms, sharks, even their fights with the whales themselves. We sailors are made orphans of the world by our need to roam it. And we are not at home on land, and are restless at sea, and are half human only. For our souls cry out to join with something better than we find in our own species. Or if not to join it, then to kill it.

  Leviathan. Sea monster. A seascape of dreams we cannot see beneath.

  I sigh and put the whalebone back where I found it. “Well?” says Fan with an anxious look.

  “I guess that’s it, Fan,” I say, “we should say goodbye to the whales here. It’s time we were heading for home.”

  —

  “Jimmy Carroll did it,” said Robert Haack to the customs officer with whom he had made the appointment. For he had realized that the only thing he had to sell was information—even if he had to make some of it up. “He planned the whole thing. I knew about the robbery and did nothing to stop it, but that was the extent of my crime.”

  The police officer, who had been asked by customs to sit in on the interview, rolled his eyes. He could not keep quiet. “Jimmy Carroll is dead,” he said. “We thought of him from the first, but before we could question him he was killed. You could accuse Carroll of whatever you wanted; there’s no one to say any different.”

  “Yet you spent seven years in jail, Mr. Haack,” added the customs officer, “without telling us any of this. Why have you changed your story now?”

  Robert Haack looked wistfully out the window of the room in the St. Nicholas Hotel, in which the three men had gathered, to the street below. Along it men and women sauntered at leisure. The customs officer was waiting with pen poised above paper. “Conscience,” said Robert Haack at last. “I wanted to make a new start. I didn’t want this business left on my mind. Besides, Sing Yuen, the factory owner, is a friend.”

  “I see,” said the customs man. The policeman unbuttoned his collar and tugged at his jowls.

  “You said on the telephone,” said the officer—for Haack had called him up from the Trounce Alley office of the telephone company—”that you might be able to tell us what had happened to the opium. A great deal, a
very great deal, as I’m sure you know, was stolen. Naturally we would like to get it back and return it to its owner, Mr. Sing. Or, at the very least, have duty paid on it when it is sold. But there has been no trace of it in all this time. That is unusual, Mr. Haack, wouldn’t you think?”

  “Quite so,” said Robert, who was surprised to hear that none at all had turned up. Usually some of it trickled through, one way or another, into the customs net. This was better than he’d hoped, and he adjusted his story accordingly. “But there are many ways it could have been hidden, it happens all the time.”

  “Yes,” said the customs man, “I’m sure it does.”

  “Sometimes,” Robert Haack went on, warming to the topic, “the opium goes from Victoria to Vancouver, where it is shipped on the Canadian Pacific Railroad to Fort Hope. From there it goes to the Similkameen Mines near the American border. From the mines there is a trail leading into the United States. A great deal is smuggled into the country by this route.”

  The police officer closed his eyes and gave a small groan. The customs officer gave him a sharp look and said, “We know all that, Mr. Haack. We have checked that route, and none of the Tai June opium is there to be found.”

  “Other times,” said Robert Haack, soldiering on, “the opium goes from here to Golden, then to the Kootenay Mines, and, once it is considered safe, from there to Bonner’s Ferry in Idaho. From there it is taken to the Northern Pacific Railroad and thence to a number of destinations.”

  “Indeed, Mr. Haack,” said the customs man with infinite patience. “But this is hardly news to us.”

  Robert looked somewhat taken aback. “Do you know then,” he asked skeptically, “that opium is shipped as Chinese wines or merchandise? And it is often billed to Winnipeg, then taken across the border there into Montana and Dakota? Or sometimes on to St. Paul and Minneapolis? Or it is carried by railroad to Port Windsor and ferried across to Detroit.”

  “Yes, yes,” said the customs officer, nodding calmly, but taking notes furiously, “we know all that.” The policeman was fully alert. “But what has this to do with the Tai June opium in particular?”