October Ferry to Gabriola

by Lowry, Malcolm

  The mephitic blasts of steam heat, the feline omnipresence of the janitor always halfway upstairs or outside your door, scenery withdrawn behind the YMCA, the gesticulating shadows of the juvenile delinquents, the miserable and tyrannic rules, that interdict against feeding sea gulls, always remembered at the last moment, and the beak beating against the window, the carefully silent drunks downstairs—the telephone!—the disastrous thud on the door of the evening newspaper, always picked up with the sickening fear it would bring news of the irrevocable and final eviction, the injured Venetian blinds in the kitchen always half-shut against a glimpse below of a single monkey tree in a garden bordered by monstrous chicken croquettes of shrubbery, the wretched policeman, who being in uniform was perhaps not a policeman, strutting and skulking past the Safeway Store, where the clean-shaven old man had said to Ethan, as he drifted round with Jacqueline, steering the perambulator, the reference being to the beard he’d let grow again for the first time since Niagara-on-the-Lake: “Are you trying to set us a new fashion or what, young man?”

  “I don’t know…I grew it for a joke. Then I got kind of attached to it and I didn’t like to shave it off. But I’m going to just the same.”

  “That’s right,” said the old man, who obviously had once had a beard himself. “We all have to get attached to something, else,” he added, “we go down, down—!”

  Chapter 25

  But Still the Old Bandstand Stands Where No Band Stands

  AND DOWN DOWN IT was anyhow, what with Time and Life on the table with their bouncing advertisements of a bouncing life with Big Cousin that never was on land or sea, or if it was, in his opinion shouldn’t be, haunting you each weekend, and criminal slanting of the news, which Jacqueline absorbed with guileless interest, as without knowing it, so increasingly did he, so that their conversation began unconsciously to reflect these opinions, or disgustingly react from them beyond all fairness and judgment, whereas in the country the magazines simply seemed a welcome weekly joke, to be treated in large with the same amused contempt that intelligent Russians presumably reserved for Pravda. And the horrible expense. Christ Jesus how he hated it all. Where had their life, their time gone, where was the sea (it was just outside round the corner, but still where was it?), the forest? the smell of salt, pines, and evening smoke? Where were his beloved chores, objects, tools? The stars, the seabirds, their boat, their companionship, the well, the sunrise? And from the top of the steps between the wheelbarrow and Jacqueline’s watering can, a sudden view of cavorting whales…Two advantages alone was Ethan able to see in their return to civilization, you could take a hot bath in more comfort, and there was a good gas stove, and both of these seemed equally—the latter irresistibly so and daily to someone somewhere in the city, if the paper was to be believed—temptations to suicide…Let the bugger die. He often felt like killing himself out of sheer boredom. Yet it wasn’t that time went slowly. The days passed with a terrible meaningless swiftness, like the pages of a book abandoned in a garden, blown over by the wind…

  Like a real book, perhaps, left behind in their garden…

  Sometimes he stayed by himself in the apartment, letting Jacqueline house-hunt alone, afraid to go out, but also afraid to stay in, not daring to show himself at the window. He had the idea increasingly that he was being watched, and maybe he was quite right, he was:

  “Anyhow you’re quite right about your landlord,” the public prosecutor told him over the phone.

  The occasion of Ethan’s calling him was an unpleasant incident of the night before wherein an old and valued friend of the Llewelyns’ having dropped in at their apartment, had, on leaving, mistaken the janitor’s car outside for the taxi he’d hired for the night—which had pulled around to the opposite curb, whereupon the friend had found himself being arrested for trying to steal the car even before he had time to see his mistake, so swiftly had the police arrived in screaming force at the behest of the janitor and Old Eagle Eye following his movements, which, since these were not altogether steady, it had needed some fast talking to explain away. “Not two days go past without your landlord making a complaint to us about some tenant in your place,” the prosecutor went on.

  “Even anyone who calls there with one over the eight, Ethan, we get his car number right away, though we don’t pay much attention to it any more.”

  “You don’t eh? Then how come you got your strong-armed stinkweasels there so quick?”

  “I guess the bastard’s so proud of having cleaned up the joint from what it was,” the other continued, disregarding Ethan’s question. “Or rather afraid we’ll forget he has and raid it again.”

  “What was it”—Ethan heard the prosecutor purring a while.

  “An abortionist’s clinic,” he said finally. “For the ladies of the West End. Hell of a scandal about it a year before you came to the coast…But probably he thinks you’re a Communist, living out there on the beach like all the rub-dubs and canned heaters.”

  “I’d like to know what the hell——”

  “You’re not, are you, by the way.”

  “Yes. And an anarchist too.”

  “Look after yourself, my boy.”

  A house of abortions! What could be more appropriate, it characterized their new apartment perfectly and for all time. And their old one become meanwhile a house of correction for juvenile delinquents. Perfect!

  Now they had had twenty-four days of drought; nothing could grow, not even weeds in the vacant lots. There was a shrill cold dry north wind and it was half cloudy, half cold sunlight; there was a sharp metallic smell and the mountains looked like steel.

  Then came the other wind, cloudy and different; a soft sky, a soft day, with a big wild boisterous damp wind, but soft, it was almost like spring and one thought one could feel things growing; bits of Scotch mist hovered in the air when the sun came out, a moist south wind with a different smell, silky and fragrant.

  The first thing that happens in a city is that the weather dies in the soul, though people may talk of nothing else, using it as the only medium for conversation, much as people still will talk idly, gossip in the terms of long-forgotten heresies, mysterious codes of honor, not knowing the significance of their own metaphors. “Depositaries of marvels,” The McCandless said, “which they do not understand.”

  Their first spring on the beach Ethan had understood, even if vicariously at first, the infinite pathos of weather, of a day, and in this the difference between himself and Jacqueline. In her there was always the tender balance between inner and outer weather. But as for him, he had had to go to a movie to become aware of it. Spring for him had been the Shaftsbury Pavilion, where a film would use the music of migrating birds to the sight of blowing grasses. For the first time in his life that spring he had seen Blake’s angels in the cherry trees in bloom.

  Few writers seem to be aware of this. True, it was the lyricist’s stock in trade. But usually so far and no further. Nothing was more unreal than a novel, even a realistic novel. Think of the vast French tomes dealing with all the intricacies of love but which never would mention the anguish of waiting for VD to develop: the bad weather of love which, even if counteracted, would be found to exist in some other spiritual form.

  But a house of abortions! In this very room life that was to come into being had been stilled forever by one prick of the knife: in every room in the place it was as if sordid murders had been committed…Women had writhed, screamed, become hysterical—they still did for that matter. Even as such he could not help thinking it must have sometimes been a jollier place than it was now “cleaned up,” and greeted from time to time, by someone at least, with a sigh of relief.

  With these gruesome reflections Ethan, half hidden by a curtain, was watching the antics, down on the sidewalk of the street, of exactly that kind of drunk known unkindly by the police and the newspapers as a rub-dub or deadbeat, who had evidently strayed from the skid road (where he perhaps lived in a shack under edict of eviction) into this part of
town and lost his way, poor devil, in a mental blizzard of canned heat, watching the circumspection of his movements, his piteous attempts to control himself, to maintain his equilibrium, asking the way of a child now.

  He thinks he is not seen: not a bit of it, from a hundred windows malignant eyes are watching, and already Old Eagle Eye herself is at the phone, ringing up the police, a real orgasm of ringing, and even though he had done nothing but ask a child the way to the nearest beer parlour, probably he was dying to take a piss, tomorrow he will find himself in a line-up with some poor devil facing a ten-year sentence and a whipping as a sex maniac.

  (And this kind of train of thought was quite genuine with Ethan at this period. It had not taken long for what had become so precariously balanced within himself to be overpoised again.)

  Ethan thought to warn the man, to shout. But it was too late. Here the police car came braying already. No, they hadn’t seen him. But they would soon. Poor fellow. Yes, that was it. Confident no one could see him, now he was peeing blithely against the convent wall. And that would never do. Sea gulls might do worse on the roof, and men pee in calm legal collective security against the side of Antwerp Cathedral, but to piss against a convent or any other wall was downright stupidity for a human being in Vancouver, even when your bladder was bursting, and there was not a urinal visible for five miles, for though they’d build anything else, it was a well-known fact the inhabitants of West End were so pure that they preferred to think they had no natural functions at all.

  Well, maybe that was funny (Ethan had prayed and the bum, piloted by a kindly Chinese, and buttoning his buttons where no buttons were, had got away down a side alley), as well as half true. But, as Jacqueline told him, the imbalance had set in. Ethan not only began to hate the apartment house of abortions but Vancouver itself with an almost pathological savagery.

  Its soul seemed to him like one of those sportsmen who count their civic reputation of the highest value, are noticeably quiet, sober pillars of the church, object publicly to risqué movies and symphony orchestras on Sundays, neither drink nor smoke, and call the police themselves on the slightest provocation. And certainly, Ethan could point out to Jacqueline, who often was only too glad to have a good bout of loathing for Vancouver too, this wasn’t just imagination. That the city could be seen as, was, just such a strangler and murderer was no more than truth. So miserable a place had it apparently become to live in that at this period literally not a day passed without a suicide, usually by gas, or a murder of the most horrible type.

  The trouble with Ethan’s sweeping indictment was not that it didn’t contain some objective truth, but that it was based not so much upon his experience as on his personal reactions to the current articles in that dreaded Vancouver Evening Messenger, with its eternal rapping and probings and so devoted to tolerance and freedom of thought that, having lost interest in the evictions on the North Shore for the moment, it was running a series of leading articles urging all public-spirited citizens to turn into the authorities the names not merely of those of their neighbours who evinced “dangerous un-Canadian leftward tendencies,” but “personal eccentricity in any form.”

  Poor old Vancouver! That there were columnists on that same newspaper who took anything but that point of view and who sincerely were interested within their limits, in “tolerance and freedom of thought,” was beside the point to Ethan; that the newspaper’s pages might be open to the expression of almost any opinion whatsoever, however fantastic, a personal and complicated frustration; and since he had not noticed these fair-minded writers had ever carried their tolerance to the pitch of being tolerant of the squatters who lived on government beaches, Ethan found himself reacting mostly to that which aroused his own venom, which, being aimed nowhere, or at an abstraction, ended only in poisoning himself.

  The city authorities, however, had not lost interest in evictions.

  For one day they saw the sinister men against the skyline on the ridgepole. They were pulling down the most beautiful of the old houses between the promenade and the bay. It was the first of thirteen such houses whose demolishment would permit the widening of the approach to Stanley Park. A five-car lane instead of the narrower avenue than at present, where the promenade proper merged with it, was divided from the bay by these houses and their rose gardens sloping down to the sands. Nor had the Llewelyns been spared on that first day, for they could not resist going closer to look, the sight of the few remaining effects in the house being moved out, and the naked scaffolding so white: the poor cedar two-by-fours, though more than half a century old, still looking so new, so fresh. This was no bulldozer’s job where the house-wreckers smashed the house to smithereens in one grunting blow: they were taking, torturing, the house to pieces, it seemed bit by bit. It was almost as if they meant to eat it; piling neatly its strips of white flesh to one side in the trampled garden, as though the house were a carcass they meant to carry away piecemeal and devour at their leisure. Then, next day, the roof-tree demolished: the calamitous wrenching sound of clawbars ripping nails from boards, a scalariform scaffold to windward and a few last bookcases carried out, and the workmen with saturnine heartless smiles whistling back up the front steps—left intact for that purpose—through the empty door frame, into the empty shell. And the next day without its ridgepole, without its front door, where once had hung a Christmas wreath, the house so demolished it had almost lost its tragedy, so bowed down with tragedy was it; and the next, a heap of boards by the waterfront; and the workers’ clawbars smacking their lips for the final demolition. Ah, dead Tie-Beam, dead King-Post, dead Wall Plate, dead Pole Plate, dead Purlin, Christ, how he hated the heartlessness of man who could do this without ever having known what happiness was, Christ, how he hated his country, how he hated all men, and so felt the warning, that he himself was going to die, lex talionis, and a good thing too. Better that he should than Tommy. He felt this warning and saw, in his mind’s eye, all the other houses being pulled down, one after another—but perhaps they would get a reprieve—a boy was whistling to his dog from the last doomed house…And what made it worse, it had turned out that Jacqueline had been led to believe she could rent from its owners what was now this heap of boards. Hoping to please Ethan, she’d kept this unselfishly secret from him, divulged only a few days before they saw the men on the ridgepole, when she’d found out her hopes had been too high (like the rent) of having a pied-à-terre for their house-hunting that was not an apartment but a beach home from home where Ethan could swim. Worst of all, the owners, who were shortly to depart for California, and had now gone, demanded a huge deposit of $500 before being willing even to consider leasing the house, so that at one stroke, since they must have known what was likely to happen, all sympathy for them was now lost. Amid the wreckage a woman could be discerned darting about, wringing her hands, and crying heartbrokenly, and speaking in loud angry tones to the workmen in a language like Russian, possibly. But maybe the owners, descendants of the original builders, could be forgiven; unlike their forefathers, money being the only language they knew, they had made one final assertion of their home’s worth in terms that could not be met.

  Well, gone was another piece of life. And what were they going to put up in its place, in the name of God, a five-car lane: but who wanted a five-car lane to a park that would end by being logged and a five-car lane itself. More deathscape, more potlust—bah! cleaning up the place! Because the poor houses could be surprised in a state of dishevelment, because they would give a bad impression of backwardness to our cousins south of the border (which, on the contrary, American tourists would welcome), because they were not new. It would soon be the same everywhere. Canada’s beauty was in its wildness, and if you like, untidiness. It was the only originality it had. If one loved it, it was because it was—Ethan had been going to say—a sort of bastard. There might be beauty in the effort of trying to tame it, but the result was something else. Final success would be its death—or the work would have to be undone, the strivi
ng start again—

  While Ethan in his confused emotion advanced such loose arguments as these, which were, he saw, perfectly useless, not to say irrelevant, and probably meaningless too, and had the effect only of irritating Jacqueline, they were walking along the promenade in the gale that met them after they were out of the “shelter” of the doomed houses, walking in the direction of the park, toward the still empty old bandstand on their right (it would have been empty this time of year anyhow but no band had obviously played in it now for more than a decade)—trying to get some feeling of the beach back, of an old beach walk, from the sea gulls shivering with blowing feathers farther ahead on the steep grass seabank or hopping backwards there at the onslaught of sea and spray against the seawall, under-propped by those waterlogged snags beach-dwellers know as “dead men,” walking past the sweaty chill aquarium, smelling of bath houses, where the octopus, now grown much older, still lived out its sour existence of disused bagpipes, and the terrible wolf eel, now much more miserable, with its expression of sadness and the attenuated face of a prostitute by Edvard Munch, uncurled its slow damnation, or hid its grief beneath a stone.

  As they came abreast of this bandstand itself Ethan suddenly announced with triumph he had been composing this jaunty ditty in his head for the last five minutes, with the object of cheering Jacqueline up.

  They are taking down the beautiful houses once built with loving hands,

  But still the old bandstand stands where no band stands

  With clawbars they have gone to work on the poor lovely houses above the sands

  At their callous work of eviction that no human law countermands

  Callously at their work of heartbreak that no civic heart understands