October Ferry to Gabriola

by Lowry, Malcolm

  Chapter 18

  The Element Follows You Around Sir!

  CALLED TO THE BAR

  Once too often

  Barrister Beats Bastille

  CAPTAIN ETHAN LLEWELYN, FAMED criminal lawyer, was called to the bar once again last Saturday night. But evidently he stayed there too long. The ceremony enacted in the courthouse Monday resulted in suspension of his license to drive for one month and a fine of 850. Alcohol impairment charges against him were dropped. The lawyer fell afoul of the law himself on the Toronto-Ixion Thruway where he was questioned in his stalled auto by a passing prowi-car officer.

  True to Form

  Long noted as the “helper of the little man,” Captain Llewelyn, who admitted having had two drinks “at a farewell party for myself,” explained that, true to form, he had stopped five minutes before to give a push to a earful of youths who had also stalled on the road, then in restarting had “conked out” himself. Asked to explain why on the wrong side of the road he replied that his car, of English make, had “apparently run dry too” and had no doubt stopped on the left side “out of habit” or “as a protest” or “simply because it preferred it.”

  Not Sozzled Samaritan

  This explanation apparently being received dimly he was hauled to the Toronto bastille but later released under his own recognizance without bail. Later he explained to newsmen, “I must have been suffering from belated shock, and thought I was still in Europe. Anyway don’t call me the sozzled Samaritan.” Captain Llewelyn has only recently returned from France. The noted lawyer’s house, the Barkerville Arms, in Niagara-on-the-Lake, and long an attraction for tourists, was completely gutted by fire weekend before last, threatening surrounding potential industrial property valued at over $500,000.

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  Elephants may be fed whiskey and warm water in limited quantities on ocean voyages.

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  The pile dwellings of the Nocobar Islanders in the Bay of Bengal are among the world’s most ancient type of homes.

  —No, he had not forgotten that little item in the Toronto Tribune, nor was likely ever to forget, now, that last filler. Nor their towing the MG away—it was still the same one (and one of the few of its kind, that special 1932 four-seater convertible MG Magna “University” model), like the sporting hearse—and taking him to gaol in that very unsporting hearse the Black Maria: nor the gaol itself, so familiar to him from the outside looking in, nor the friendly cop, who knew him, who said, “Don’t worry, Mr. Llewelyn, we’ve had some of the best people in Toronto down here, as you should know, sir.” Nor the unfriendly one, who didn’t, and who, when he kept on talking about the fire, had shoved him in the urine-smelling “tank” for a while. “And what’s your name?” he asked another fellow sufferer there…“Oh, I’m just an old murderer.”

  “Somehow not to go mad…” Yes, but now it was as if the subjective world within, in order to combat that threat, had some how turned itself inside out: as if the objective world without had itself caught a sort of hysteria. Caught it, maybe, from poor darling Jacqueline, who, though she’d been magnificently sporting about his arrest, indignant on his behalf, tender, even managing to be humorous, now became subject to occasional hysterical fits herself, into which she could be startled more and more easily. And there appeared to be no febrifuge against this double sickness, this interpenetrating fever of madness, where effect jostled cause in a wrong dimension and reality itself seemed euchred. As (or was it by reversal?) in those plays where the players mingling with the audience make their exits and entrances over the orchestra pit (as once in those days perhaps, he remembered, when Niagara-on-the-Lake’s old cinema had been an experimental theatre) and watching them you abruptly discover your companion not to be the girl you brought to the show but the Hairy Ape himself—or Claude Rains, in From Morn till Midnight—insanity and nightmare seemed to flow into life and back again without hindrance, to the frenzied infection of both.

  During the previous fortnight at the Prince of Wales, between their fire and Ethan’s arrest, there had been a succession of violent thunderstorms, and it seemed to them they heard the fire engine wailing almost every night. Yet curiously, because there’d been no fires at all in Niagara-on-the-Lake for many years, three more fires, following their own, had broken out in those two weeks, two probably caused by lightning, one quite inexplicable, all three occurring at night, though all, unlike their own, minor. These fires all struck on the side of the old Barkerville ruins remote from the Prince of Wales. But now, on his return from his weekend in Toronto which had ended so ignominiously (a trip, however, which already had as its object the eventual severing of his connections with the Toronto branch of his firm, the farewell party for himself had been no joke), now four more fires struck close to the Prince of Wales itself. Fatigued and tight, Ethan and Jacqueline, who was also, under doctor’s orders, fairly heavily sedated, actually slept through the first of these fires, started by lightning striking a woodshed behind the old stables with the cobwebbed coaches, though it wasn’t fifty yards away. On the second occasion Ethan woke to find the red conflagration raging right outside their bedroom window and Jacqueline already in a frenzy. Shrieking—imagining, she said later, the Barkerville itself in flames—she half dragged and carried Tommy from his room out into the street. Fortunately it wasn’t the hotel, only another woodshed that was burning. Having, with the aid of the understanding Madame Grigorivitch (who, an exiled Ukrainian, was no stranger to such sufferings), succeeded in calming Jacqueline, Ethan helped the firemen put out the blaze, tripped over the hose, gave himself a black eye.

  Jacqueline greeted him back in the hotel room with a mocking smile and half a bottle of gin, where earlier there had been none.

  “So we have to keep ourselves in balance?” she said gaily.

  “——”

  “My poor lamb.”

  “How’s Tommy?”

  “Sleeping like an angel. Now. He kicked and screamed of course and wanted to go to the fire.”

  Ethan observed after a time, eyeing her as well as he could over his glass, she was holding a compress over the other eye: “If Francesca was a girl anything like you, I don’t see that Paolo can have had such a grim time after all.”

  “Did you save anything?”

  “Apart from the surrounding potential industrial property valued at more than five hundred thousand dollars, since you ask, yes. We—we shot a bear—saved L’Hirondelle’s woodshed. Part of it…But it was pretty damned funny.”

  “What was funny?”

  “No one knows how it started. No lightning tonight. No explanation at all, the firemen said.”

  She woke him up later: “Did anyone have anything more to say about our fire?”

  “Nothing new. No one apparently saw it till it was too late,” he said deliriously. “God damn it!”

  After five hours of towering nightmare Ethan woke in sunlight, determined to go on the wagon forever and pull them both together. This determination lasted until midday, when the liquor store caught fire. Nothing was lost save a few old packing cases and a bottle of whiskey blanc vieux Canadian, which exploded. Once more the pyrene-wielding grocer, who’d been talking to the manager of the cinema next door (outside which it said Coming! The Wandering Jew), was the hero.

  There wasn’t any explanation for this fire either, though the fourth one, occurring the next night, in a cottage on the lakeward side of the Prince of Wales, was caused by an overturned kerosene lamp. A terrific thunderstorm shook Niagara-on-the-Lake after this, though lightning did no damage locally that was reported. It would have been uncomfortable, under normal circumstances, despite the minimal damage from these outbreaks, to realize that in this way, living in the Prince of Wales, they had been surrounded by an actual ring of fire. As it was, the effect of the knowledge was devastating. Jacqueline, exhausted and sedated, and often tight, seemed to him to be only partly aware of what was happening. And
what was happening? (How much of it actually had happened, he wondered later. Yes, but all of it had happened, he thought, from some bloodshot sphere behind his closed eyes in the bus. And happened to them.) After all, it hadn’t been called the Storm Country for nothing, had it? Storms were to be expected. Yet the besetting sense of the unnatural, of cauchemar, penetrated even Jacqueline’s wall of defenses. For such storms were not to be expected in May. They were almost unheard of. They were the properties and effects, the Klangmalerei, of the lakeside dramas of July and August. And the conclusion, in Ethan’s state of mind, grossly exaggerated by alcohol, seemed inescapable: not satisfied with having taken their home, it was exactly as if something, some “intelligence,” was searching for them personally, or him personally, all over the town, and preparing to strike again.

  But now its strategy became confused, dispersed. Though storms continued to break overhead, some force seemed to have abduced the lightning, as well as the plague of fires themselves, in the opposite direction, in fact every other direction. Phenomena went galloping and gambolling over the whole countryside, though now and then, as if to show it had not forgotten after all, the “intelligence” would strike a chord again in Niagara-on-the-Lake itself. Now they really did hear the fire engine clanging rebelliously after fires nearly every night; but distantly, those of Queenstown, and perhaps Ixion, and Hamilton as well. Now more than ever, on country roads, the lightning was “peeling the poles and biting the wires,” the lake must more than ever have tasted of sulfur, though Ethan had not the heart to sample it again.

  This was sad, perhaps he thought, because between storms the weather was very hot.

  Sometimes the “intelligence” expressed itself almost benignly. The barber and his wife limped home one Saturday evening from an outlying pub, took refuge under an elm, were struck by lightning, and came home at the double, forever cured of all rheumatisms from that day forward. They had need of their new-won agility because that night their own house, on Niagara-on-the-Lake’s outskirts, took fire. A fireball went bouncing solemnly across their lawn and in through their kitchen window from which Mrs. McTavish sprang screaming, though landing unhurt. The fireball set a few curtains ablaze, then the flames died out of their own accord.

  More of the chief’s famous “ground lightning” felled more trees, or half-felled them, or was reported to have felled them, across the road bordering the golf course. The intelligence was coming back. One night Niagara-on-the-Lake rocked with the celestial tumult overhead as in the grip of an earthquake. Bangs and crashes sounded across the fields shuddering with lightning where Jacqueline and Ethan had gathered sumac and teazle to decorate the Barkerville. An abandoned farmhouse five miles away went up in flames. And a little tree house, without the tree being even scorched. On top of this, apparitions, or “mysterious lights,” were reported to have been seen moving in the many overgrown and neglected graveyards of Niagara-on-the-Lake. Thunder returned to Niagara with redoubled violence as of huge aerial battles above the lake, sounds of celestial snooker. And now the whole town itself (or all but the most level-headed members, among whom should have been included, relatively, Jacqueline herself, and even Ethan himself) became involved in this tumult, this tempest, this kind of celestial disorder of the kinaesthesia. Rumors of every kind started, grew, swelled, and like fireballs themselves, having bounced in through a few kitchen windows, were dissipated. A phantom sailing ship with all its topmasts blazing with corposants was observed sailing in an easterly direction. A sea-monster, with horns like a goat, 119 feet long, was reported cavorting down the Niagara River. Psychic investigators investigated. People left their doors open for Jesus to walk in. The priest sprinkled holy water on the threshold of Jix Gleason’s “Osteopathy and Manipulative Treatment.” And, it was said, “in many homes.” And lastly, M. Grigorivitch’s setter gave birth to a blue dog.

  Meantime Ethan, in order not to remember the exact date of their fire, for in that way he saw himself acquiring another obsession, or perhaps not to have to think of “May” at all, found himself each night in bed trying to think back instead over all the October sevenths he could recall for the last seventeen years, and it seemed to him since Peter Cordwainer’s death there had always been a misfortune, or the beginning of a misfortune, at or near that date. And this, that at least it wasn’t the first fortnight in October, was, apart from gin, one of the few consolations he had at this time.

  In the meanwhile too, he had finally, or almost finally, severed connections with the Toronto branch of his firm, though it wasn’t as yet clear whether he would be able, as he hoped, to join another branch of it in Vancouver. As he hoped? The truth was Ethan did not hope for anything at this period. To go west seemed simply a blind solution, about as good as death. He did not work, had none to do, but hung around the town, himself like some earthbound phantom, haunting the place of his nativity and earthly disaster. Occasionally it would occur to him he was not meeting his ordeal as he should. Yet he really did nothing about it, despite repeated halfhearted attempts.

  Jacqueline, for her part, was alternately sporting and mean. That she might be waiting for him to take a sterner and more decisive attitude himself toward both their lives scarcely ever occurred to him. One night, having upbraided him for not “going on the wagon,” as he had several times promised, when he announced once more he would do just this, she upbraided him instead for his blatant hypocrisy in daring to pretend anything of the kind, so that, in no time at all, he found it convenient to imagine that he was being “driven to drink” by her. While Jacqueline equally, having made similar resolutions, would see herself as “driven to drink” by Ethan. At other times Ethan would suddenly find himself alcoholically unable to comprehend why Jacqueline, having lamented for so long her lack of exposure to anything convincingly supernatural, should now, with the evidence, as he saw it, right under her nose, reject all interest in it. That she might actually be scared half to death by terrors she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, give name to he couldn’t see either. Nor could he see—or see seriously—that his own entertainment of such thoughts at such a crisis might be a presage of almost as complete a breakdown in himself as, complementarily, these very phenomena might seem to indicate in the world of causes about him. Yes, he said to himself again, it’s as though nature herself is having a kind of nervous breakdown. Why not? Human beings have them. Perhaps Jacqueline is having one.

  He went to talk to the pyrene-wielding grocer about it: this indeed—to talk to any human being—was a relief. First, he’d confined himself to talking only about their own fire; then there was the second fire, the third fire, the four new fires; now Christ knows how many fires there were to talk about.