October Ferry to Gabriola

by Lowry, Malcolm

  Because it was no more than a threat, if one more than likely to be implemented, to begin with Ethan imagined that from the very life which was now in jeopardy could be drawn the moral strength to meet it.

  “Colleagues, Criminals and Escorts, Spectres and Emanations, Fellow Poltergeists—my God” (putting his binoculars to his eyes and walking out to the end of the pier), Ethan said, “there’s old Mount Baker out this morning, or is it Mount Hood? Out very clear and beautiful, halfway up the air over the middle of the Shell Oil Refinery, very clear and beautiful and just like an American ice cream cone, or an advertisement for one, being served on high at a perpetual soda fountain, perpetual reminder of the high standard of living pertaining below in the State of Washington, with the highest suicide rate in the Union. How often do we think, in this post-antediluvian world, of the significance of this drunkenness of Noah, Noah inebrians. Known better to all we Oaxaqueñian drunkards confined in intellectual reserves as Cox-Cox the Pop-eyed Pilot Man. How pleasant to delimitate this magnificent thickness of things here in America and Canada in this way. How often do we think of the significance of British Columbia? We are not styled B.C. for nothing. For if Christ should ever come down to earth again He can be assured of a welcome in every way as rewarding as His old one. Not because we are to America as Palestine to Rome, unless economically, but because of the multiplicity of Messiahs between Los Angeles and Vancouver who would challenge His priority. What time the British pound, alas, goes spiralling down to emerge as a pistareen. You don’t know what a pistareen is, Jacqueline? You know what it sounds like, but not what it is. It is a debased coin, and as such the best symbol of the age in which we live, all of us together in the soup, under the soupistareen.”

  Yet rarely had he felt less at the mercy of circumstances: besides, it would not be the first time he had met disaster with courage, or with what he could tell himself was courage (and here came all these thoughts again). Moreover they’d never looked upon their little beach cabin, however beloved, as a permanent thing. That impermanence, indeed, the ramshackle tenuity of the life, were part of its beauty. The scene, too, that confronted them through their casement windows was ever-changing; the mountains, the sea never looked the same two minutes on end: why then be afraid of change? A few months before they’d have laughed at the idea—it wasn’t as if they’d meant (till then!) to stay there their whole lives. For one thing, though Ethan had travelled fairly widely, he meant to take Jacqueline abroad and one summer soon they’d planned to take Tommy to Europe, go back to England, visit Greece—

  But it seemed that the threat was worse than any reality could be and perhaps they hadn’t, despite all, thought of Eridanus as a home until they were threatened with losing it. Sometimes he felt they were a bit like William James’ people who might have been so happy living on their frozen lake, merrily skating in the sparkling sun, had they only not known—it was his tragic image for man living without faith—that the ice was slowly melting beneath them. Or, in a waking dream, he’d think of the ancient people of the north, driven out by the Ice Age, and searching for a new Eden, and then it would dawn on him there had been no Ice Age (unless that one in their imagination their first winter), they had not been driven out, they’d left of their own accord. And to speak of Eden, would Adam and Eve who had defied death by eating the fruit of that tree (which The McCandless liked to claim was symbolically no less a transcendent thing than the Tree of Life embodied in the cabbala itself) have fled at the mere threat of being sent forth, of the cherubim and the flaming sword? that glittering sword in the night like a scintillant oil-waste pyre? And yet, it was indeed as if Ethan had heard the dread voice in the Garden: Adam, where art thou?…And they had gone.

  Chapter 24

  “The Wretched Stalking Blockheads—”

  THEY HADN’T GONE VERY far. They hadn’t gone any farther to begin with than, once more, an apartment in Vancouver’s West End they’d sublet while looking for another house, and after a week of that it had been seriously in Ethan’s mind to go back again, eviction or no eviction. But the cabin had been “lent” to a man named Wolverhampton, a schoolmaster at Tommy’s school.

  Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d managed to get their old apartment in the West End, where they’d lived on first coming to Vancouver. Maybe some essence of those old makeshift days of companionship would have been rediscovered there, some essence of that old hope and desperate attempt at renewal, before they’d ever tasted happiness on their beach. For had they only known before, in those dark days, what joys lay so close, awaiting them! That hope had not been illusory, even so, and perhaps some ghost of it still haunted there, to work another miracle…Or so he’d felt until they’d found their old digs could no longer be rented, or exactly called—unless by some outrageous euphemism—an apartment in an apartment building at all.

  So immeasurably happier by comparison, however, did those days spent there begin to appear that Ethan quite forgot how near breakdown had seemed to them both. Dishonor and anxiety had prowled through the ruins of his being like marauding cougars. Jacqueline’s forthcoming operation shadowed their whole lives, while the horrors of the case Ethan was working on had exacerbated everything.

  But Vancouver in May 1945 had been new to them too and then these rooms they’d taken seemed comfortable enough, at any rate a relief after Niagara-on-the-Lake and the Prince of Wales, and even, at times, fun: it had been on the top floor of what must have been one of Vancouver’s first such apartment buildings, a truly majestic old pile (as it still was) whose service elevator shook their bed, of antique patent, which slid out of the wall from a dark recess, from whose depths, in early spring just before they left for the beach, they were continually having to rescue pigeons fallen from their nest down the air vent. The janitor was a friendly soul who let Jacqueline, despite a bylaw to the contrary, put crumbs on the windowsill to feed the birds. Moreover through their windows then they had had a pleasant view of blue shutters and colored roofs, lined with chestnut and maple trees, down which plodded the milkman’s horse with its white wagon, and the rag-and-bones-man’s horse with its green wagon, beyond which, looking westward, they saw church spires sunk in a valley, the white fangs of mountains beyond nearer mountains crowned with evergreen forests, and, from time to time, though they hadn’t known it at first, or attached any significance to it, down a vista of paralyzing grandeur, the nearer narrows of Eridanus’ inlet itself.

  From their windows looking the other way too they saw Nanaimo and the Victoria boat come in and occasionally, when it was clear, Vancouver Island, and perhaps other Gulf Islands, though they hadn’t given it a thought then. Maybe they’d even seen Gabriola without thinking anything of it or knowing its name. Jacqueline had fallen out of touch with Angela. They went for walks through Stanley Park, taking Tommy and their misery past Lost Lagoon, with seabirds swimming on the lake, and the tennis courts where you could play for nothing, and later watched freighters tottering into harbor like drunkards, their arms upraised at sunset.

  Only a block away in one direction was the windy promenade skirting English Bay, with beneath the promenade in a grotto an aquarium housing a tough old octopus, a miserable wolf eel, and the wheel and engine room telegraph of the first paddle-steamer to come to British Columbia (which it had done by way of Cape Horn): above, between the promenade and the bay was a row of delightful ivy-clad old houses with large airy light rooms and shingle roofs, sometimes with cupolas added later, and even stuffed owls gazing gloomily from their upper windowsills, and with gardens full of roses blooming even in November going right down to the sands, on which among the silvered driftwood cows were to be seen wandering, one such house being evidently a sort of farm.

  On the other side of the promenade, in the center of a carefully mown island of green turf sloping up from it, an eternally empty circular bandstand stood alone and locked, from which you could see the indoor swimming pool, whence it was only a two-minute bus ride to the city’s main
street with its neon lights, shops and cinemas and at the end of this, conveniently, were his law office and the law courts.

  What had given this west end of the city its peculiar charm was that there was scarcely one transverse tree-lined avenue or alley that did not open upon some vista of the mountains. This—because this was hardly to be avoided altogether even in those sections of town where people had done their best to avoid it—and something more human, that seemed to inhere in the lines of those first old pioneer-built houses, some perhaps started as shacks, but houses one conceived of as having for so long shared these lovely views and vistas: and in the later but often wonderful cupolaed fantasies and widow’s-walks of the despised “nightmare” Victorian period: it was also the curious surviving air of innovation, of the ramshackle, in the former, upon which age had nonetheless conferred a beauty of weathered dignity and even solid permanence, combined with the once devil-may-care gaiety and enthusiasm evinced by the homes of that Victorian era (upon whose lasting gimcrackery of impromptu aerial ladders and crow’s nests obsolescence had conferred a corresponding pathos) that breathed a certain soul of brooding romance, a Hansel-and-Gretel magic, of watching continuity into the place. Such were the amenities of Vancouver’s West End in their “old days”: a romantic enough place for wandering lovers to be happy in for ten days (or forever) if they knew how, or no better, in any case a place bad or good according to what you wanted to make of it, or your mood, a live-and-let-live sort of section too, like a separate town in itself, where the occasional policeman was polite as a London Bobby and who, when asked what you could do on Sunday, would smile and say, “Well, you can always go to the aquarium.”

  To be just, some of these amenities, including the aquarium, not to mention the octopus and the wolf eel, still survived, or had the appearance of surviving, and were features equally available from or adjacent to their new apartment in the West End, which due to a great influx of population into the city during their years on the beach, was the only place to rent they could find. But to Ethan the changes in the West End seemed so many and disastrous that no doubt he only began to see its old virtues now they were so fast and patently disappearing. For this part of the city was itself evidently in the grip of that same “clean-up” campaign whose tentacles had reached to their hamlet eight miles away as the killer whale swam. CLEAN-UP OF VANCOUVER DEMANDED BY ANGRY CITIENS, yelled the headlines, TREES, EYESORES, MUST GO. And with that down were coming all the horse chestnut and the maple trees lining the beautiful leafy avenues and alleys. Bulldozers grunted up and down the beach of English Bay, long since bereaved of the cows (mourning which pastoral delight Ethan quite forgot how many whole villages had been pulled down in sixteenth-century England and their people evicted to make way for the sheep), rooting away and cleaning up the silvered driftwood that alone to him had lent it character, though to their relief many of the houses with rose gardens going down to the sands still stood, and the Llewelyns feeblemindedly hung on to this fact like a talisman of their own survival. But everywhere else, it seemed, the shingled houses were falling like ninepins, each day cupolas tumbled off the poor old steamboat Gothic buildings being torn down, like the trees, to make way for more soulless Behemoths in the shape of hideous new apartment buildings, yet more deathscapes of the future. No longer was the milk delivered by a wagon and a good-luck white horse but in a vehicle resembling a mechanized death slab. And if there was some economic sense in this change, to regret which was sentimental, the same could scarcely be said of other changes. The fake modern buildings going up everywhere were proving far more deserving of literal cold-blooded condemnation than even were those they replaced. Their roofs leaked, their staircases collapsed, their toilets would not work. And besides a soul-destroying ugliness these new buildings all had in common, both within and without, was a curious-seeming out-of-dateness. Not in the sense that the steamboat Gothic houses could be said to be out of date. It was that those had the aspect of potential ruins, of a sort of rubble, even before they had been completed. So that when, very occasionally, a new building went up of fine modern design, and which might almost have done credit to a Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and with some obvious intent and claim to permanence and solidity it was lent a kind of horror by its crumbling neighbours, as if it were not moored there in a “growing community” but something in a partially dismantled exposition shortly to be moved away, yet which meantime blocks the view.

  Why Ethan should have expended so much emotional energy about these matters was a mystery even to himself. For there was no true correspondence between their past life and that which seemed doomed here; little in common between their little house and any of these doomed houses (unless it was the doom), life in which must have been to him, after their beach, little better than the living death of an apartment. Yet he couldn’t stumble on the demolition of such a house at this time—the bulldozer in some cases pulling out the whole lower story then reducing the remainder to a heap of rubble in a few minutes—without feeling as though something within himself were being demolished, a sickness and sadness and helplessness in his soul that would last all day. To think that that poor house where so many lives had come into being, that had been occupied before most residents of this city had even arrived, should be used in that heartless, and as if deliberately callous fashion. Yes, murdered. And in vain he told himself there might be good reasons, repeating to himself that it was all simply an inevitable progress, that, in the words of the paper’s real estate subdivision promoters were merely carrying out demolitions in connection with replanning in locations where coordinated planning had not been done originally. Bah, who gave a damn about their “coordinated replanning,” especially when in so many instances this did not involve new houses at all.

  One of the blackest desponds caused by their new apartment could not, however, be laid to “progress;” from their windows they had no view of the mountains at all, this being totally blocked by their old apartment house, which was in process of transformation, despite wrathful public protest, into an overflow correction house or subsidiary bridewell for juvenile delinquents, for those, that is, the authorities had decided were in no fit state to be hung, and behind which was going up a new YMCA. They did, though, still have trouble with pigeons, and of two different kinds. First the janitor threatened to call the police when Jacqueline, having innocently disobeyed the city’s edict against feeding birds, pointed to the state of a neighbouring convent roof as for ratification by a higher law; then the janitor and the landlady—they were both Irish Catholics, in which they differed from the more carefree nuns of the convent who were French Canadian of a Franciscan order—turned out themselves to be police informers. Ethan was not surprised. They had made from the start a fetish of the propriety of the place, of how they’d cleaned it up from some former condition of disrepute, and how they only took the most reputable of tenants, inquiries into whose past lives were exhaustive. Never having heard of Ethan Llewelyn the lawyer—and maybe not believing in his existence—they had gone out of their way to make dark references to a certain “disbarred lawyer,” a former evicted tenant who had once lived there with a practical nurse.

  Ethan had been suspicious of their odious landlords from the first, but he’d also been sorry for them until he caught them eavesdropping for the second time. “But even if we can’t feed them, we can’t stop the pigeons from their eavesdroppings,” Ethan said pointedly, at the desk that evening. Informers! It was the vocation of the times, the Communist scare. Set Judas to betray Jesus, you only ended by betraying Christ all over again. And indeed to Ethan at this time, there seemed informers and secret police and spies everywhere, outside each drugstore, lurking at each street corner. The ethos of Vancouver had certainly changed. Meanwhile their landlady whom they been sorry for because she had only one eye, and was known as Old Eagle Eye, would even inform on a passing drunk. The malevolent bitch would sit glued to her telephone all afternoon just waiting for one to pass so that she could call the polic
e…And gone was the smiling happy-go-lucky policeman who directed you to the nearest bootlegger after hours and so English you felt that beneath his uniform he kept the bottom button of his waistcoat undone. Nothing but police cars arriving with a noise of fire engines or storm troopers. Or silent ghost cars and prowler cars with officers in plain clothes. Finally Ethan couldn’t see a priest without thinking he must be a police spy. Vancouver was being cleaned up indeed.