Gleaming white cedar siding home Clean as a pin from stem to stern Living room dining room kitchen with
Sun room off and two bright bedrooms
“Only ten thousand dollars down!”
“Aedes flammantes vidivit!”
The observation, breaking a silence that had fallen on them, came from one of the children, whom Jacqueline was regarding, no doubt remembering her own days as a schoolteacher, a boy of fifteen or sixteen who’d sat down in front of two slightly younger girls, not pretty, with imitation-Ginger-Rogers hair, and dressed in jackets, skirts, bobby socks, flat-heeled shoes. The boy had now turned round in his seat, leaning on the back, and proudly addressed the girls, and Jacqueline gave Ethan a sudden smile. The boy, tall for his age, thin, had a lean, alert, smart face at once young and rather mature, and about which also there was something faintly familiar. Where had he seen that face before? Observed that manner so completely self-assured, casual, and even cocksure, cruel but indifferent? To the girls, who murmured shrilly, piping their adoration, he was clearly a hero. Probably he was a “good enough lad.” What would Tommy be like at that age? Acute Housing Shortage Rapped, he saw again outside another store, THE BOY CHAMBERS WILL KEEP HIS DATE WITH THE HANGMAN ON DEC. 22.
“I figure I got seventy-five—maybe seventy-four, no, I definitely got seventy-five out of a hundred and twenty-seven questions,” the boy was saying. “Not good, but I’ll pass Latin.”
Ethan turned to Jacqueline and whispered: “I’ve not forgotten I was your twenty-third pupil but I learned that before I was ten,” and then aloud to the boy, without quite knowing why he felt constrained to say this:
“You might have got seventy-six, youngster, if you’d said vidit.”
The group was silenced and turning round, a youth at the far end of the bus, not meaning, doubtless, to be overheard, said, “What did Old Somebody back there say?” and the boy, already turned toward the. Llewelyns, stared and said, neither politely nor impolitely:
“Yeah. That’s right too, isn’t it? Video—videre—vidi…Aedes flammantes vidit. He saw the house blaze.” The other schoolchildren laughed.
“Did anyone?”
“Naw, not us. We live the other end of town. But we heard the engines going in the night.”
“No one hurt or killed?”
“Nope. But one of our teacher’s head of the volunteer fire brigade—that’s why we got off school early today. Been up half the night and has to make a report or something. What the heck…Just one of those old firetraps of houses like. Should have been pulled down years ago.”
When the children got on the bus Ethan had been pleased with the Island Limited for not being as limited as all that. He was more often terrified of children, but these kids had seemed to add a note of lightheartedness to the trip, and besides he couldn’t help thinking of his own son with tenderness. But he had not liked being called “Old Somebody” in front of Jacqueline, and now this bit of seeming callousness on the part of the boy, who in fact was probably just repeating what his father who lived in a house of stone (if not like Don, Giovanni) had said at breakfast, both hurt him and made him angry, though it hurt more. So that when he heard the boy once more showing off to the girls with the words: “Ad morte eunti obviam factus sum,” Ethan again interpolated, and with more acerbity:
“You might have got seventy-seven if you said ad mortem…” And could not stop himself adding (really there was something wrong with him today) “Maybe you’ll get a hundred next time if you can say correctly: ‘After mounting his horse he galloped off to the camp.’ ”
“Gee up. Got on his old horse and rode off in all directions,” put in one of the girls half impudently. “That’s our famous Canadian author, Stephen Leacock, you know.”
Jacqueline was beginning to look slightly embarrassed, yet Ethan somehow had to persist and tell the boy he must use guum with the pluperfect subjunctive. “It seems,” he heard himself saying sardonically, “between us it’s a case of ‘vocabulis discrepamus!’ ”
“Crap anyway——” put in the same youth who’d referred to him as Old Somebody, but instantly clapping his hand over his mouth, tittering.
Quite suddenly Ethan felt overwhelmed with humiliation. It was not that the boy he’d been addressing had meant to be rude. He was simply indifferent, and was already talking boastfully about something else to the two girls. But what on earth had prompted Ethan to get into this ridiculous conversation in the first place with the brat? And why should he, a grown man, have so much resented him, have, so to speak, and almost as an equal, set himself up in competition with him? It was preposterous. And worse…And worse still, why should he feel so crushed? Ethan, unable to look Jacqueline in the face, stared at the floor. That he was singularly equipped to speak about elementary Latin composition was a fact. As a boy himself, before his eye trouble, he’d always been good at parroting whole chunks from Latin grammar or composition books. The ability had often stood him in good stead during that very time of darkness and misery at prep school, exhibiting, in those early Stoke-Newington days, and long before he found he had a truly encyclopedic memory, his feats on every possible occasion, much as another boy, socially crippled by shyness, might use his skill on the ukulele, later to become a dominant principle, even, that touching and underrated little instrument, a kind of secondary sexual characteristic. But he was no longer still aged ten. Or twelve. Or, by God, was he? Ad mortem eunti obviam factus sum. I met him as he was going to death…Had stood him in good stead, yes, until—And then, gazing up at that obdurate, alert, too mature, callous, indifferent face of the boy still turned the Llewelyns’ way talking to the girls (that cocksure, yet finally so unsure, finally so tragic face), he knew. Peter Cordwainer. The face was that of Peter himself, not Peter at nineteen as he last remembered him at the college of Ixion, at the University of Ely, had last seen him, nineteen years ago tonight, October seventh—that date which had wrapped itself round his memory like a cancer strangling the upper bowel—nor yet the Peter of the hoarding, a portrait of a slightly older boy than was this, a Peter that never was perhaps, save in an agonized parent’s heart, forever preserved at seventeen in touching posthumous dignity, on the hoarding that thank God he hadn’t seen now for a long time—indeed he’d been mercifully spared too much objective reminder in general of Mother Gettle, in turn that ridiculous and ghastly mnemonic, here so far in British Columbia, who if she’d carried out her threat to come west to this province, had not been too ubiquitous on the mainland, his eye having fallen rarely enough on an advertisement even in the Vancouver Daily Messenger; no, it was the face of Peter Cordwainer before he’d become his friend, when he was his worst enemy indeed, the Peter of Stoke-Newington days, the dreaded all-corrupting face seen dimly through dark glasses or from beneath a double eyeshade, when such scornful casual indifference, always presaging something far worse, had been one of the instruments of Ethan’s own torture. The boy was now telling the girls how he’d spent his summer vacation; he had contrived some position as a waiter on one of the transcontinental railways apparently; Jacqueline was smiling to herself, and Ethan had to smile too, even while this also was not without its nightmarish side. It was all merely due to some psychological aberration—God, what if it were not?—but this was like a reincarnated Peter Cordwainer, who had done, in a measure, the only kind of thing that might have saved him. How often had not he, Ethan, and before the end, and yes, at the end too, until he gave up in desperation, tried in vain to persuade Peter Cordwainer completely to reorient himself, give up booze, to immerse himself for a time in some new reality, to take some job requiring physical labor, no matter how monotonous, go to sea as a common seaman, as Ethan himself had gone to sea, anything to get away from the viciousness that was leading him to destruction. But though Peter had admired Ethan’s own spirit in this, he had, a Canadian in exile, self-corrupted in his own soul, lacked finally that very courageous native sense of adventure, rarer in the British of that period, which, “the gr
eatest asset of North American youth,” as they say, might have permitted him to do so. And yet, great God, how could he be said to have lacked it when he had not shrunk from the most terrifying journey of all?
“Yeah, I’ve traveled twelve thousand miles already,” the boy was saying. “But some of the men, the old-timers, why they’ve traveled billions of miles. Billions. They’ve been on the railroad all their lives. Maybe forty years. They’ve traveled billions of miles. Isn’t that great stuff?…No, you never know where you’re going when you go down to the station. I’ve been across the country twice now.”
“Do you know,” one of the girls spoke up, “I’ve never been on a train in all my life. What’s it like?”
“What’s it like? Why, you’re just on a train. It’s swell!…Yeah, I had a six-hour layover in Calgary last time through. Calvary’s all right, a swell place (had Ethan heard aright, Calvary?), but it was full of American sailors and they’re terrible. They’re a disgrace to their uniform. Most of the soldiers are bad enough but the sailors are terrible.”
“What’s wrong with them?” piped the girls.
“Well for one thing they were so drunk they were falling all over the streets, full of that cheap wine, bootleg stuff, I guess. The Canadian sailors are bad, but the Americans are terrible. Boy, the navy’s a good place to stay out of!…In Calgary I went into a little beer joint with another guy who was working on the train with me. It was a lousy joint though, just full of drunken American sailors banging around…And there wasn’t a single pretty girl in Calgary, yeah, I looked them all over and I can tell you there wasn’t a single good-looking one in the whole town.”
“It’s your privilege,” said Ethan, at this point directing at the boy a glance meant to be punishing, “to criticize the girls in Calgary till the cows come home. But to go around insulting Americans is another thing. Especially when there might be some on this bus. How do you know I’m not an American sailor?”
“Because you’re a Limey!” someone said.
The boy, who had lit a cigarette, looked up at Ethan through blue smoke a moment, neither chagrined nor unchagrined. But he retreated an inch or two.
“Coming back last trip through the Rockies there was plenty of snow, you know, and we had some Aussies on board,” he continued his conversation with the girls. “They’re mostly pretty bad too, though some of them are all-right guys I guess, but they’d never seen any snow before, and boy, they had fits. We’d stopped in a little station for a while and I was out running errands, up and down the platform in my shirt sleeves rolled up and just my little white coat on, you know, and these Aussies came out. They’d put on their great overcoats, and hats, and everything but earmuffs. They were wrapped up to the eyes. So they stood there just looking like a bunch of kids. Then they picked up some in their fingers and then handsful of it. ‘Look! Snow!’ one of them said. ‘Oh boy, isn’t it wonderful?’ ”
“The Australians might have seen snow. Perhaps they were homesick, that’s all,” Ethan said.
“Is that right?”
…Homesick, yes; but only latterly, since they’d been living in an apartment, in hotels, in the city again, had it been borne in upon Ethan, and with increasing sorrow, yes, with despair, the extent, the spiritual plenitude of that happiness which had been lost.
Homesick!—And yet what had been lost, on another plane, had only been a fisherman’s cabin on the beach, beneath the forest, under a wild cherry tree.
(Ethan Llewelyn looked out of the window at Vancouver Island. He saw nothing at all. Or nothing by which he could have given any form. He supposed that somewhere alongside the roads and in the mountains and on the sea people were doing universal things, but it was too great an intellectual effort to remember what. Suddenly the landscape began to take on a sort of reality but it was not its own reality, but the reality of a landscape seen from a train window, in the sunset, in a film. The film had been called Looping the Loop, and he had seen it on a ship going to Gibraltar as a passenger. Now the only reality he could think of was the reality of his cabin. He thought of asking Jacqueline what she saw out of the window but it was too much trouble to speak.
Films had more reality to him than life until he had found his little house, but novels possessed secretly no reality for him at all. Or almost none. A novelist presents less of life the more closely he approaches what he thinks of as his realism. Not that there were no plots in life, nor that he could not see a pattern, but that man was constantly in flux, and constantly changing. He woke up a Buddhist, was a Catholic at breakfast, a Hater of Life with the morning paper, and then a Protestant, and then by the time he got to the library was something else, all on account of things he had read or heard influencing him on the way.)
And scarcely more pretentious, he thought, turning to Jacqueline and saying, “Do you remember the night in Toronto I didn’t want to live on Gabriola?” And the old waterfront squatter’s shack he’d once visualized the drunken Hindu of the Niagara that night living in.
Chapter 11
Eridanus
THEIR HOUSE, LIKE THE Venetian palaces, was built on piles, on government-owned Foreshore land down an inlet over on the mainland, in the tiny village of Eridanus; they had two rooms, oil lamps, a gold rush cookstove, outside plumbing, a small boat painted yellow, the color of the sun, with a red rim around the gunwale and red oars. In the mornings reflections of the sun on water slid up and down the time-silvered cedar walls; seagulls came onto the porch, demanding their meals, taking crusts from their fingers. Like the fishermen, the Llewelyns paid no taxes, and behind the cabin, which had been sold to them lock, stock and barrel for $100, were forty acres of forest to wander in: sometimes at night curious raccoons came right into the house, and in spring, through their casement windows, they watched the deer swimming across the water, above which hovered, in the hot air of late summer, an endless wayward drift of fireweed-down.
Sometimes too, in the summer evenings, bears stood down on the beach and crunched cockles.
The Llewelyns drew water from their own well: and at the head of a trail through the forest so precipitous it made the trees growing along the dusty main road look three hundred feet high, was a store where they bought their food. Hidden away down below in the little bay of their own within the larger bay, they enjoyed almost complete freedom and privacy, peace and quiet; they swam and sunbathed and if they wanted to sing at the tops of their voices at four o’clock in the morning, or Ethan play the clarinet wildly as the early Ted Lewis himself—it was the flute in Virgil’s Eclogues—no one would hear them save maybe a heron croaking eerily by on some moonlit fishing trip.
Old Indians on a neighboring reserve said where they lived no two winters seemed the same. The Llewelyns’ first had remained mild as spring, or like an extended Indian summer, until spring itself arrived, when snow fell, and the pent-up season spent itself in a week’s wrath amid the very buds bursting into bloom. The winter before that, living in the city only fifteen miles away, though they kept physically warm, they had thought dreary beyond measure. But last winter had been tempestuous. Then, the life could be terrifying: at flood tides, in gales and snowstorms, the tumult from sea and forest appalling. The ferocious winter climate of Ontario, whose meanest houses had nightlong-burning Quebec stoves, seemed nothing to that of “Canada’s Evergreen Playground on the Shores of the Blue Pacific.” Their thin little house was not much more than a summer cabin, without an overnight heater, and almost without insulation. Snow, and of an awe-inspiring new intensity, fell. A new Ice Age descended. The trail became impassable. They wore gunny sacks over their boots, got lost in the dark, and went to search for each other through the forest with lanterns. But rarely when they were together did they ever feel their isolation. Those tempests or mishaps were rare that did not bring them finally some sense of peace, however childlike.
October Ferry to Gabriola Page 6