October Ferry to Gabriola

by Lowry, Malcolm

  Ships got lost too, in the narrow inlet. In thick fog they heard them—vessels without radar, sometimes no doubt only long tugs or fishing craft, at other times freighters one imagined ancient and benighted, under romantic flags, Liberia or Costa Rica or Peru, and whose crews called out in Greek—trying to find their way through the fjord by the echo of their foghorns from either bank. This also was like getting lost in the forest: it was as if you went ten steps, then stopped; so you advanced in the inlet if you were a lost ship, so many revolutions of the engine, or sometimes for a period of time. Then you stopped and sounded your whistle and listened for the echo. If the echo came back quicker from one side it meant you were closer to the rocks on that side and you steered away. But if the two echoes synchronized you were in midstream and safe. So, in thick fog, if they heard some craft trying to get her bearings in this way, and she sounded too close inshore, Jacqueline and Ethan stood by on their porch and shouted. Or at night they held lanterns aloft, their gigantic shadows were cast on the fog five fathoms out, high over the sea, weaving and bending. But in a snowstorm there is no echo. Then the ships steered by dead reckoning. And the Llewelyns imagined the horror of steering by dead reckoning, blind, in the storm. For now the snow was bringing on the night and such a storm as shall yield no echo. You couldn’t stop. If you stopped you were lost. You couldn’t even wait for the tide. Again-with lanterns the Llewelyns kept watch, to shout a friendly answer to questioning hail. Perhaps they did not help much but it felt as if they were helping. They seldom locked their front door and they rose at sunrise.

  The Llewelyns (and still, in the bus, going to Gabriola, Ethan thought like this, or thought he was thinking like this) had lived by the inlet for more than two years as squatters; they’d gone there in May 1947.

  But toward the end of this last summer a loud campaign for the eviction of everyone in the hamlet and the destruction of their cabins started in the Vancouver newspapers, their editors having discovered after a quarter of a century, and in the absence for a few days of suitable headlines concerning sex crimes, or atomic war, that by their continued existence at Eridanus the public were being deprived of the usage themselves of this forest, together with its half-mile of waterfront, to say nothing of the beach, as a public park.

  In one sense the reverse was true. The cottages remained, for large sections of the year, mostly uninhabited; and those scattered folk who lived in them the year round were as good as unpaid forest wardens of what was not only a valuable stand of government-owned timber, but, unspoiled as the whole place was, with its paths and old cow trails, and older corduroy roads, here anyone was free to walk beneath the huge cedars and broad-leaf maples and pines, a sort of public park already, the difference being that few troubled to avail themselves of its wild graces, nor had its trees been decimated, or yet begun to commit the slow melancholy mass suicide of those great trees in parks that cannot endure living near an encroaching civilization.

  Nor were their poor cabins “eyesores,” as was cruelly maintained. Many of them, like the Llewelyns’, were beautiful in themselves. But even had they not been so, the hamlet of Eridanus, overtowered by trees, was invisible from anywhere save the water itself whence, with those trees behind, the mountains higher, behind that, and its tall-tackled fishing boats near at hand, swinging at anchor, those despised cabins appeared as nearly the only visible landward creations of man that were not eyesores. Seen in this way they preserved, collectively—so blended with their surroundings were they, and setting aside what they might mean to the heart of anyone living there, nearly all such their own builders—a very real and unusual beauty.

  And how its existence or nonexistence could be of less interest to the inhabitants of a distant city, whose proudest boast was its own possession of one of the largest and most spectacular public parks in the world they were simultaneously agitating to have replaced by two eighteen-hole golf courses and a parking lot for two thousand motorcars the better to observe the wildlife, it was hard to see.

  Nonetheless if one has to be threatened with eviction, to be threatened for the sake of a park is perhaps best. Unfortunately Ethan’s legal mind warned him that even this public park, the thought of which with its concomitant hot-dog concessions and peripheral autocourts and motels supplanting their heaven was unbearable enough, might be a charitable chimaera, held up before the eyes of the public by civic chimaeras (in the sense that the former may be considered a foolish fancy, the latter as related to the sharks) whose real object it was to put a railway through, build a subsection, an oil refinery, an industrial site for a pulp mill, a totem pole factory, or a dehydrated onion soup factory.

  For, on the opposite bank of the inlet some three miles distant, progress was already making its second greatest onslaught on Vancouver since the Canadian Pacific Railway had been finally joined there in the last century. A Shell oil refinery, with its piers on the inlet, had been remotely visible citywards when they arrived. No doubt it had been there since long before the war. But this had been gradually and stealthily enlarged during the last years, a pyre of oil waste, visible once rarely and only at night, now burned night and day, had become two pyres, and there were rumors of yet further expansion, more refineries, preparations for a pipe line to be run through from Alberta. Not till now had these things whispered a terrible perhaps to themselves. For the boom was not quite yet, and from that opposite bank, essentially, more than an age still seemed to separate them.

  Just the same, Ethan thought, having once before in his experience been rendered homeless by what men were pleased to call progress, then by nature herself, in a conflagration where a little more progress in the shape of a competent fire brigade might certainly have helped (the schoolchildren were getting off the bus at the farther end of My God Bay, by another store, with a bit of bay this time glittering blue through the trees, and outside which, leaning across the aisle, Ethan caught sight of another headline from the local paper saying MY GOD BAY LITERARY SOCIETY COMMEMORATES EDGAR ALLAN POE’S CENTENARY HERE—he looked again; it was so).

  The Greyhound started again with a jerk, rallying to it the soul’s cry of “No cede malis.” Had not this threat of eviction begun to make him suffer as though under some ultimate and irreversible judgment?

  Happy, they indeed had been, like spirits in some heaven of the Apocalypse or in some summerland of spiritualists, spirits who had no right to be where they were, which was their only source of doubt, when they doubted it.

  But the reverse of their bliss was nothing like infelicity. It resembled terror, a great wind, or a recurrent suspicion of a great wind, the Chinook itself. What he felt dimly they repressed then was anguish on a greater scale than two human hearts were meant to contain, as though their own heart had been secretly drawing to itself some huge accumulating sorrow: alien sorrow, for which there was no longer scarcely the slightest shred of sympathy to be found in the so-called liberal thought of which they imagined themselves the enlightened partakers. Steam, trade, machinery had long banished from it all romance and seclusion.

  Once or twice they had thought of calling their cabin the Wicket Gate, after the gate in The Pilgrim’s Progress Evangelist showed Christian he must pass, in order to reach the Celestial City, or Paradise. The wicket gate that had been made by the blacksmith to prevent his children falling down on the beach. But why call it anything?

  Often it seemed a magical thing to them that it had been sold to them by a blacksmith, some species of magician or alchemist himself. Once or twice he came out to visit them, took a cup of tea, chopped some wood vigorously as though he were at home again, then went away swiftly. Once he sat for a long time without moving on a big fir trunk washed up on the shore, with his back toward them, so motionless for a moment they thought he might have died or had a stroke. Perhaps he felt sorry he had sold it to them, or was thinking of the time he had built it?

  As a bird wandereth from his nest, so is man who wandereth from his place. Now they understood the meaning of thi
s proverb—with what hunger they always returned to it, saw the pier they had built waiting below the bank, the tide already coming in, their eternal baptistery.

  Ah, but it was their own place on earth, and how tenderly they loved it. How passionately—gladly would Ethan have laid down his life for it. But what was it that gave them this life so free and dear, that gave them so much more than peace, what was it that made it more than an ark of timber? Ah, it was their tree, door, nest, dew, snow, wind and thunder, fire and day. Their starry night and sea wind. Their love.

  Chapter 12

  Niagara-on-the-Lake

  FOR TO SAY THAT the Llewelyns had been unlucky in their houses was an understatement. The first house of theirs in Oakville, Ontario, with its flittering night owls among the Judas trees, in the banging thundery weather, had indeed been swallowed up some eleven years ago, though not before the adjacent segment of lake had become polluted and been pronounced unfit to swim in—and who was to say all this was any more escapable, or less foreseen, than that he should just now, on this day of all days, have had to crane over the aisle to glimpse that ridiculous announcement about the My God Bay Literary Society paying tribute to that other poor devil of Stoke-Newington—and what was the connection—by the expanding borders of, the inevitably expanding borders of yes—and yes, there on the wall was a small advertisement of it as if produced in obedience to his besetting conscience—Mother Gettle’s Kettle-Simmered Soup, M’mm, Good!

  (“All right, Mr. Peter Bloody Cordwainer…Go ahead and do it. Grandmother won’t let you down, I’m sure…She’s got a lot of friends in high office. And besides, the Tibetans say you can be comfortable even in hell, just so long as you’re clever. And you are, if not so damn clever as you used to be. I’ve promised you. I’ll get in touch with you through old Goddo’s wife on Sunday afternoons.” Had he said this? Or Peter: “It’s almost worth doing it just to see the expression on all those old stick-in-the-mud faces at Ixion tomorrow.” “You forget you won’t be here to see them, old man.” “That’s right, nor will I. That’s funny. But I thought you said…” “Not for three days, I think, as a rule.” “Will I know I’m dead?” “Only if you reflect on the subject.” “Well, Schopenhauer does say it’s the one thing a man surely has an inviolable right to dispose of as he thinks fit.” “All right then, dispose. As a realtor for the next world I recommend this choice lot. I didn’t mean that about hell either, Peter. I honestly think things are going to be a damned sight better for you over there. Anyway, you’re going to do it sooner or later, so why not now? Have another spot of gin, old chap.” “Thanks, old man…Ethan, you come too!” “No. You do it. We’ll keep in touch. I’ll come later. The same way.” “Then before you go, I…wouldn’t you—?” “None of that.” “And don’t fail me!” So let the bugger die…The excuse would not do. No excuse would do.)

  Their first house had been the one near Oakville, and they’d lived hardly a year in this pretty home, inexpressibly dear to them largely because it was their first home, when the blow had fallen, just before the war: thirteen months later, while they were still searching for somewhere else to live, Ethan’s father died, and he inherited the old family home fifty miles away on the other side of the lake. They’d moved into his birthplace in Niagara-on-the-Lake—and how should he forget it? (German troops were entering Romania, the Battle of Britain had been in progress for a month and, a volunteer, he had only the week before been rejected for active service due to defective eyesight, the defectiveness, however, seemingly unconnected with his childhood ailment)—moved nine years age this very month, October 1940. And then, that second house—

  Yet not even the catastrophe of this, an event of the sheerest most eerie mischance, or so it seemed at the time; the house, solid, built to last forever by his great-great-grand-uncle in 1790—two years before that amiable old pioneer (or genial old crook, who as though to establish well in advance such an arrangement need not be une fantaésie bien Amiricaine or dependent upon ultra-rapid-or-modern modes of travel, had another more lavish house in what was now Codrington, in the island of Barbados, where, in addition to a mulatto mistress, he kept a pet crocodile) took his seat in the first Canadian Parliament there at Niagara-on-the-Lake—the ancient house of Ethan’s birth taking fire in the night when there was no one in it, while they were away for the weekend in Ixion, and burning to the ground for no reason anyone had been able to determine (unless, as there was certainly some cause to believe, it had been struck by lightning, an explanation almost worse than none), not even this had produced in him such a shocking reaction to the outer world of makeshift and homelessness as had now this threat of eviction from Eridanus.

  Nor had all the six long years they’d spent in that lovely old place given him such an attachment as had the last couple of years to what was not, properly speaking, a house at all.

  And, to save himself, Ethan sought for reasons, trying to tell himself that if he could stand the loss of “the Barkerville Arms,” as his birthplace had locally still been called, together with the irreplaceable material loss that involved, surely he could stand, what was besides only a threat, the loss of their little cabin. But from his reasons he derived less than comfort. These were like the devices they’d half unconsciously employed, without being exactly “unfaithful” to their second house, to try “to get rid” of the fire, foreshadowing, alas, those devices they would increasingly use without success to try “to get rid” of Eridanus itself. Now bitterly they discerned truth in the recalcitrating words they’d never thought at bottom were true. For they found they really hadn’t loved their second house as much as they’d pretended, and to compare that love with their love for their cabin, or their former life with their new life, was an agonizing impossibility. They decided, as though they were the first to make this discovery, that houses like people had destinies, and sometimes fell sick and died. If there were haunted houses, there were also nervous houses, neurotic houses—and the Barkerville had begun, in forced retrocession from the heart, to strike them in this light.

  For a house of the New World, anyhow, it had had a long inning. Built and rebuilt, and added to by five generations of Llewelyns, its graceful facade was dignified with a long imaginative sweep of roof over a wing and a second storey put there by old Lloyd Llewelyn’s son in 1800, the original house having been just the cavernous cellar and the four back rooms, three steps down from what had become for them the front of the Barkerville. This sort of palimpsest method of building had produced in the end an enormous wooden edifice of narrow corridors with black stovepipes threading and elbowing everywhere through innumerable rooms and connecting with deep fire-boxed gluttonous Quebec stoves, oak beams so massive and inlaid hardwood floors so thick the place appeared constructed to withstand earthquakes and tornados, as it was, and had: trapdoors, beneath which were oubliettes of obscure motive, where British soldiers were romantically supposed to have hidden during the War of 1812; winding concealed stairs; and an attic, attributed to the third Llewelyn, a front and back parlour—ah, that word “parlour” again!—while even their woodshed in its kind of lean-to was not without its historic interest, having once been an outside kitchen. One trouble was, and this not only in retrospect, the house was all too big for them (save maybe for the windows, which were too small, even from outside, as to rebut this implication, the house seeming to say “Look at me,” rather than “Live in me”). His father had indeed, in many respects, left a neurotic house, an angry house, impatient of what modern conveniences it had, which, though many, were continually breaking down as though deliberately, or as though the whole place were like some rebellious patched-up old freighter that longed to have done and be broken up. What was still known then as the “servant problem” hadn’t improved matters. The Barkerville was too big to run easily without them, but during the war, they could not be had, or would not stay, and Ethan began to find the idea of even one servant in the house so unendurable that Jacqueline (whose original secret ambition might have bee
n to recruit the very snow-shovellers to bring them pure snow to cool their rationed gin) at last counted it simpler to agree with him. The old Negro Pullman porter, James, a man better read at that time than was Ethan himself, stayed on a while as a general factotum, at length died in a bout of canned-heat-drinking, consumed with grief at Ethan’s father’s death, and refusing to the end to be persuaded, while drinking this hostile beverage, which he strained through an old sock, from that ex-outside kitchen to any more congenial quarters. Ethan himself became devoted to him but when he died was at first almost relieved. For what, he kept asking himself, had there been in his father, which he had missed, to inspire so much affection and respect in another? And, looking back, he seemed half to remember dreams forgotten at that time, dreams of guilt in which his father’s loneliness in that house he had done so little to assuage and his own childhood loneliness was merged, dire dreams of infantile uprootings, and night journeys across the sea, even imaginings of his own conception in the house, taking place now as a horrendous violation, now as an act of tenderest love; other dreams where his mother or grandmother seemed pleading with him, gently forgiving, impossibly to undo something already done; which, waking from them always with remorse and sorrow and helplessness on his soul, and always through some fading image of a house, appeared to him as though they must have somehow concerned their first home, and so led back in consciousness in those wool-gatherings of day which were more sinister, sometimes when driving alone to Toronto, or at moments of suspense or boredom in court, or of gaiety on another level, when helping Jacqueline wash dishes after a few drinks, led back in his mind to Peter Cordwainer again, the following out of some insane pattern of beginning retribution, though never to the understanding of it, or the complete desire to understand, or the sincere desire to forgive himself: or to seek help. But Tommy was a healthy, happy child and they thought their own happiness great. Meantime if Jacqueline had rendered the house far more lovely, it did not, in a sense difficult to explain, seem grateful to her for her taste, and its coats of new paint, any more than it was grateful to Ethan for removing its operose porch, stuck on by Ethan’s grandfather when he “renovated” it during the Victorian-Gothic era, an era of relative romance and vision one felt the house secretly halfapproved, as perhaps did Ethan himself, chronically unable to see that if our era proves capable of being looked back upon at all, it may seem to have been far more so. This much was true: the house could no longer see the wide fields and forest and sweep of lake (where, beneath the ice, according to the local legend revived each winter, lay the two betrayers of the Masonic secrets) and it no longer cared. And if they’d loved it, they now saw, despite the luminous beauty of remembered Christmases, of miraculously wrought Spanish mahogany and family silver within, and falling snow without, that mahogany furniture another redolence of the West Indies, sea-borne hither on sailing ships during sugar-trading days, the house had given little in return and did not love them. Yet how speak of any house as living, apart from its living inhabitants, or their memory, for good or evil, surely an unfructifying object at best, save perhaps to the imagination? Or, without becoming involved with sentimentality, indispensable and most human vice, and that at its rankest, call this object alive, responsive, changeable, sometimes detestable, yet always loving, and with a heart that could break! Or—animism. Men often love their ships (God be thanked) like this: his mother’s father, the skipper of a three-master, had gone down with his, rounding Cape Horn. And it was easier to speak of machines in this way: Ethan felt now and then he must have loved his first car something like this, which he had bought himself, after having been denied a car for so long by his father. Yet their feeling for their cabin on the beach at Eridanus was nothing like their feeling for the Barkerville Arms, though sentiment played a part, and pride in ownership (the more strange since they could never really own it) and it was a thing compounded of happy memories of love and summer and the laughter of children, or a child, like any other house, and, like any other, dependent on these for its life to some extent on that plane. But on another, their cabin seemed to possess a life of a kind wholly different from this, of a kind that couldn’t have been called forth wholly by its owners, or its past owners. One had come to love it like a sentient thing (and here it was more like a ship) with a life of its own, not that one just imagined as living, or that it flattered and amused one to consider doing so, because one had given it life oneself (unless Jacqueline had bewitched it with magic, in secret, by some spell of her father’s). And the trouble was Ethan felt it still did live, even after they had abandoned it, which was something that couldn’t be dismissed either, or accepted, at least by him (he hoped, even if it was), as merely some sort of fixation, that term most helpless to convince a hanging jury. Well, this was animism certainly…Even Ethan could see their feelings, and more particularly his feelings, involved this, and animism in one of its most extreme and primitive forms—would have been glad to admit it indeed, for by the way weren’t all men animists at heart? But what if your animism were occasioned by tactile causes that have almost gone out of the world? by peripheral causes that to you, now, in a different age, had become almost all that made life worth living? by, conceivably, some of the first rationalities of love’s survival—or his life’s survival—as were those very queen-posts and straining pieces to that section of roof being built over there, visible beyond some birches the bus was passing, but which now looked abandoned and left a skeleton? What if your animism were a matter of life or death. And here was the mysterious fact: yes, this much to them about, about their cabin. It was less than a house. But it was also far more than a house. And so now, when they tried to compare the Barkerville with it—not, now, just the two “lives” the competitive “loves” but the two houses themselves, laugh as one might, the poor dear old Barkerville with their little cabin and its great nine-light windows that came, like the Wilderness’s, from a dismantled sawmill, and what it gave; one thing it gave, at the highest tides you could dive straight out of one of those windows into the clearest, what seemed the deepest and most life-giving water Ethan had ever known. Those high tides rising to the moons of summer, each one higher now rising like the threat of eviction (and the little cabin at this moment, bereft of them, if it was still there, deep in just such a rising tide of October)—their cabin which always seemed gazing outward at the tides; high, slack and rip tide, the first of the flood and the offset to southward; or to the last of the ebb with its weak variable currents; or the smashing whiteness of the surf at low tide in the night in winter (themselves in bed perhaps, listening to the roar of the surf they couldn’t see, far below, for the beach fell off steeply); or gazing at the sunrise or moonrise or star-rise, or these reflected in the tireless waters of the inlet, calm or turbulent, but even when resting always in motion, the stars too in motion on that dark or quicksilver stream, ever-ebbing, ever-returning, the inlet that was neither sea nor river but partook of and gave the best in both; their cabin whose mirrors and mirrored windows reflected alike the flow and counter-flow, flux and reflux of those tides, and the steamers passing upon them (Ethan thought of the engines of huge invisible tankers at night hugging the opposite bank that telephoned through the water to them in bed an aberrant commotion like submarine motorbikes), and at the back of the house reflected too the green forest itself bending in the wind; why good God, even those garbage removers of theirs, the sea gulls, had the wings of angels! No, comparison was impossible. Moreover objectively they must have known themselves half blinded by illusion and Ethan himself more in the devil’s clutches than he was; or had become? But this, and irony was the word, he thought again, gritting his teeth in the bus—they had been trying in vain for some time to pass a slow-moving, shabby high sedan tottering before them straight down the middle of the road, with a boiling knocking engine, and a large legend in white letters on a black ground beneath its British Columbia rear-number plate, reading from left to right: Safeside-Suicide—was the very thing that made any idea
of the loss of their house and their life there so Christ-awful. That he might have been capable amid the circumstances of fostering such an illusion, had it been one, he knew only too well; but then for the same reasons that he had fostered it he must have prevented it reaching near-tragic proportions, for even an illusion was better than, the infantile solution was better than, could indeed be the only alternate—to—