October Ferry to Gabriola

by Lowry, Malcolm

  STOP! LOOK! LISTEN!

  MOTHER GETTLE’S KETTLE-SIMMERED SOUP. M’MM, GOOD!

  It must have been there all the time of course, the advertisement staring him in the face; perhaps the mist had obscured it, or the high-piled timber on the open cars trundling by, while now there were some curiously meaningless empty cars that he could see right over; but it had been in his mind anyhow, all the time, he had been expecting it sometime or another all morning, but not this one, not the one with Cordwainer himself on it, not this comparatively rare one, showing a twenty times life-size cartoon of Peter, a lively, handsome, grinning youth of fifteen, gulping a great bowl of steaming soup and saying, “M’mm, Good!”

  “Don’t, Ethan! Oh, don’t look like that.” Jacqueline took his hand. “Remember what we said this morning? Please, darling, dear Ethan.”

  “But my God, you haven’t—”

  “Of course I saw it. I hoped you wouldn’t.”

  “It’s the one of Peter as a boy. That’s the absolutely final…That’s the bloody last straw. We might just as well cut our throats now.”

  “Ethan…”

  “But don’t you see, Jacky? I’ll never get away from it. They’ll probably put one up across the road from any house I try to live in.”

  Jacqueline withdrew her hand. “Oh, undoubtedly. They must have heard you were coming and put that one there on purpose for today.”

  “Please don’t be harsh. I can’t stand it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  And at this moment, as abruptly as the machinery of a phonograph with self-changing records clashes into action, it was as though within him a totally different consciousness had taken over. Since the first full awareness of a hangover (or of its total extent, its regressive downward economy and meaning, of the steps too, also no doubt downward, that are going to be taken to “recover” from it, since this awareness is in effect often the beginnings of a new drunkenness), this other consciousness, familiar and feared, had been swiftly rising to the surface of his mind and had now taken command. It was as if the mind of another person, coexisting with the first but utterly independent of it, had begun to work over much of the same material, but with what a different viewpoint!

  For up to now, Ethan’s method of thinking—that is the way he had been flunking, or thought he had been thinking this morning up to this point—involved a process akin to composition: not as though he had been composing a brief, exactly, but had been loosely composing a mental dossier, preparatory to making a brief on behalf of an accused he proposed to defend. But the actual and frightening and certain knowledge at this moment that he had been consciously deceiving himself all morning, actually suppressing and misrepresenting the very events of his life for the sake of making them fit into a bearable pattern, came with the force of a revelation. If the first consciousness was the counsel for the defense, this second was the counsel for the prosecution.

  Nor that this second consciousness or self was any more rational than the Jesuitical and selective one that had just abandoned him, it was less so, and equally selective. But so implacable was it, in its voracious accusation, that Ethan, when in its grip, almost excused that other half-lying and plausible consciousness for existing, in an effort to keep him sane. For no one could endure the battering of this second consciousness very long without giving way, if the nature of its activity, its repeated and dreaded assaults, were not a symptom that he had long since done so.

  “De-clock de-clack de-clock de-clack de-clonk de-clonk de-clonkety-clack!”

  “—clunkety-clunkety-click! clunkety-clunkety-click!—”

  Mother——Gettle’s——Kettle——Simmered——Soup.

  The isolated words leaped at him between the snag-heaped cars, now passing again.

  Symptom: But what if, speak harsher truth though it might, there were latent or arrested or even actually present in the remorseless and vindictive motion of this mind—washed up like driftwood tortured into obscene shapes by these waves of suffering glutting some cavern within—the symptoms of mental sickness?

  This might actually be his soul with which he was not thinking, a soul that had become sick almost to death, that perhaps had been sold to the devil, a soul that could only plot the most merciless revenge on him for what he had done to it, and that sick though it was, and speaking though it did partly with the accents of insanity, also spoke true.

  Mother——Gettle’s——Kettle——Simmered——Soup—M’mm——Good!

  But it hadn’t been till after their house in Niagara burned down that Ethan had begun to see—or imagine he saw—a certain hideous pattern in his life, a sort of curse, and even then he had connected it less with the house burning down at first than with the bottle of gin that was left. He thought it was perhaps during that ghastly night at the police station that his obsession (could he only believe it an obsession) had really begun to take hold of him. No, he did not believe that it was until then that he had really seen any “significance” in the manner of their losing their house in Oakville. At the time the simple sorrowfulness and unhappiness of that event cancelled all else. No doubt he had remembered that Peter Cordwainer had been the only son of the advertising manager of Mother Gettle’s Soups—from the horrible to the ridiculous is but a step, and vice versa—but that was as far as it went, or rather, that was another reason for forgetting it, least of all attaching any significance to it, for whatever the facts, Peter (whenever he’d thought of him, which was, mercifully, rarely) remained a painful and ravaging memory. Now, in this mood, it seemed inconceivable that he could ever have thought of anything else, from the day Peter died. And this, October seventh, was the anniversary of the day Peter had died, exactly twenty years ago. As he had known of course even before he opened his eyes this morning, waking in the hotel room in Victoria. He had lain there as if made of stone, partly trying to get control of himself, partly not wishing to wake Jacqueline, for it was barely dawn. But presently he had known she was awake and was gazing at him, though he still kept his eyes closed; then, suddenly, she took him in her arms, tightly, trying to give him her will and strength and comfort. He lay quietly for a moment, then he tore away, turned his back and half sitting up began to pound the table beside the bed with his fist.

  “What’s the use! What’s the God damn use! Why, of all days, have you dragged us out today to look for a house? Can’t you see there’ll be a curse on anything we find?”

  The devils, the sickness, in full possession, he had raved, cursing her and their life with every obscene and violent term he could conjure for their destruction…Jacqueline had given him a phenobarbital, and he had fallen into a heavy, nightmare-ridden sleep. When she woke him gently, a few hours later, sitting on the bed beside him, he was still under the calming influence of the drug, and they had talked quietly, even hopefully; they had agreed, or some part of him had half agreed, that if they did find a house today it would mean they had “turned everything around,” that the curse would be vanquished. Over a hearty breakfast, her high spirits (real or pretended) and half a benzedrine tablet had brought him, cautiously, to a state of mind where he almost could forget the day, until some casual mention of Edgar Allan Poe had reminded him: it was the day Poe had died too, one hundred years ago.

  “—clunkety-clunkety-clink clunkety-clunkety-clink—” and the train was past, appearing to go much faster as they saw it from behind, receding, and folding up, like a concertina, running into the future. What future? OCEAN SPRAY INN, NANAIMO 6 M. LICENSED: he now read with satisfaction on a hoarding on the other side of the grade crossing.

  What was so fascinating about grade crossings, even frightening—far more so at night in inter-urban districts with their gasping stammering stop signs swinging aloft like the be-davy-lamped vizored heads of decapitated coal miners in a nightmare, the warning bell shrilling in endless hysteria—or, as they occasionally still called them here, level crossings, where two distinct forms of destiny, under separate control, each fractionally assum
ed the other’s field? That did not account for their eerie, and for motorists too often, it would appear, fatal hypnotic fascination. In this respect they seemed stamped with a similar damnation to crossroads—why did they once bury suicides at the crossroads?

  Stop! Look! Listen! Or it was as if one had been waiting for something to pass out of a wholly different life, a Behemoth flashing for one brief breadth over that luminousness which is our own life, to disappear into another immensity.

  But disappeared, at least audibly, the train had not. For all its melancholy cargo it was a train and meant to let them know it. And now as their bus trampled the highway again, through the forest across an intervening field, with a sudden noise of speeding wheels on iron, came an impassioned hullabaloo—that familiar barking drum-roll, swift harmonium-peddling sound as of violent accident in the organ aloft, accompanied too by subterranean pertussal whoops, diatonic supplications, echoing of expiring concertinas—which was transforming itself, was transformed already, into that powerful protracted chord of the emotions known as nostalgia. The train was yelling insistently as a baby. To the other alarums was now added the frantic beating of a bell. At last the train seemed as if winding the whole pandemonium up and hurling it into space like a discus thrower. The wailing went bounding from mountain to mountain, slithering into silence. Eurydice! Eurydice!

  But the frantic beating of the railroad knell had become the bells of the University of South Wales, twenty years ago on the night of October the seventh.

  “It was a freezing night,” Ethan said suddenly. “With a red moon, like November.” He heard Jacqueline beside him take a quick, faint, indrawn breath as she turned toward him from the window, but he wouldn’t look at her, wouldn’t meet her eyes. “We were at school together too, you know, Boy Scouts together too, Peter was an expert on knots, even then…He was the patrol leader of the Tigers. That was about the time they made that drawing for the billboard.”

  “I know.”

  “It was right at the beginning of our second term at the University. I thought he looked rather strange and wild-eyed when he opened the door, but I was a little tight already, and when he first told me I didn’t pay much attention, I was playing the phonograph, I had a new record of ‘In the Dark.’ ”

  “Ethan, please stop.” Jacqueline spoke urgently, her voice rising a little.

  “Once I’d got it in my head, or half in my head, that he was serious I tried to argue with him. At one point I was quite dramatic, warming to my subject, as I pictured for him his poor mother and father…Of course it was going to be a bloody mess anyhow, he had driven his car away without stopping, and the man he hit had bloody died. And he’d have been sent down, right enough.”

  “Ethan. You were only nineteen, a boy. You can’t go on the rest of your life like this.”

  “I could have stayed with him, all night if necessary, I could have stayed, I could have stopped him.”

  “He’d have done it the next night. He was going to do it whatever you did or said.”

  “You think so, do you? You don’t know anything about it. I tell you, in the end, I talked him into it. I told him to go ahead. It gave me a sense of power. Of course, that was after I went out for the second bottle of gin. It was terribly cold for October, that night, there was a heavy frost on the grass and ice crunching underfoot like broken bones. They were all tight in the pub—‘Let the bugger die!’ they said—and the barman said, when he sold me the bottle, ‘I’m doing you a favor.’ I’ve often thought of that. When I got back Peter had the rope out and was tying knots in it. That’s when I got fed up and began to sell him real estate in the next world. A la Swedenborg: ‘My grandmother,’ I said, ‘will be a great help to you. I’m sure she has friends in high places.’ ”

  “For God’s sake, Ethan, stop it! You’re indulging yourself, you’re simply wallowing in a pathological sense of guilt.”

  “—But he declined the gambit, he lost his nerve when I offered to help him.”

  “You know perfectly well you’re distorting this. For all you know when you left he’d promised not to. You don’t remember.”

  “Quite. I don’t remember. For all I know he may have promised that he would do it. I don’t remember.”

  “Well then—”

  “The next thing I remember I was running back to my digs and the clock was striking twelve. I was staggering and running and gasping and I recall passing the hospital, where they held the inquest the next day. I had to be in my digs by twelve, you know, and I just made it. I was still blind tight and raving hungry. I stuffed myself with cold ham and passed out with my clothes on.”

  “And once during the night,” Jacqueline said, in a cold voice, “you woke up with your heart pounding, and decided the whole thing was a nightmare and went back to sleep.”

  “And toward dawn I woke again. A heart seemed beating in my ear, a heartbeat that was growing fainter and fainter.”

  “And you thought: Well, if I went and roused my landlord, and got the police now, Peter’d be indicted, maybe imprisoned—”

  “And would certainly be sent down. And as a consequence would certainly commit suicide anyhow. So I went back to sleep. Next morning I found his farewell letter in my coat pocket. I had a shocking hangover but I noticed he wasn’t at our first lecture so I went round to his rooms and found he was dead. They had already cut him down…Of course I didn’t tell the truth at the inquest, partly for Father’s sake, partly to defend myself.”

  “And partly for Peter’s parents’ sake. Oh, Ethan!” Jacqueline put her hands over her face for a moment.

  “But to almost everyone else except Peter’s parents I was perfectly frank. I accused myself, somewhat unnecessarily, they all said. Because the point was I didn’t know. Or did I?…”

  There was just that blank, and what it did was murmur to him, what profundities reiterate as refrain for him, beneath its poetic and disastrous undertones of the soul, what, indeed, but these words:

  Mother…Gettle’s…Kettle-…Simmered…Soup.

  And this, October seventh, was the anniversary of the day Peter had died. Ethan would like to have forgotten it too but was bound to remember it for a wholly irrelevant reason: it was the day Edgar Allan Poe had also died.

  Ethan had often been told he looked rather like Edgar Allan Poe…And his reflection in the rearview mirror, now opposite him, leaned forward, out of the past, as if to corroborate this. Yes, yes: there was the dark, the Byronic resemblance: but he didn’t like those red veins, those broken blood vessels in his nose. Did Edgar Allan Poe have a red nose? In any case his was a healthier face. A compassionate, burned, dissolute strong face, his face nodded in approval. But his face could not see those veins; he had some kind of disease perhaps…Perhaps. Suddenly he saw his whole life had been like one long malignant disease since Peter’s death, ever since he’d forgotten it, forgotten it deliberately like a man who assures himself, after it begins to disappear, that the first lesion of syphilis is simply impetigo—like Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus, in fact—forgotten it, or pretended to have forgotten it, and carried on as if nothing had happened. The face in the mirror, a half face, a mask, looked at him approvingly, smiling, but with a kind of half terror. Its lips silently formed the one word: Murderer!

  Chapter 28

  Wheel of Fire

  ETHAN TOOK A DEEP breath and, as Jacqueline turned from the window, he smiled and took her hand. Well, anyhow, even if Captain Duquesne’s house was no good, or Jacqueline didn’t like it, their house wouldn’t have to fall down, that was sure. Failing the skipper’s place a new house would be built of good timber, cut on their own land, if they bought the lot, each tree selected by himself and felled where it would not leave a slash to desecrate the forest.

  He produced a pipe. The mist had rolled away, the sun was shining brightly once more, and a slash was precisely what they were passing. Though on the other side was a pretty park. Or it was worse than a slash which, strictly, is the fire hazard created by l
oggers who leave huge logged-off areas uncleared and full of inflammable brush. Here fire had already created a disastrous ravagement. As far as the eye could reach there seemed whole mountainsides of burned and dead trees, whole forests that looked as though they would never grow again. The abomination of desolation sitting in a holy place. It was too easy to judge the loggers. Man makes the mistake of thinking that because life is so prodigal in expenditure of itself that its resources are everywhere inexhaustible and that there is no such thing as death without rebirth. Velleities and portentous thoughts. Who was to blame? The monopolists claimed that the original foresters were all socialistic and paternalistic. The loggers thought their business was to log and move on, and the government theirs to clear away and it would, but never did, or never chose to, never having the money. Only big business enterprise would, it was claimed, have the money and the forethought to do that. Ethan didn’t know the truth or where the blame lay. Interacting causes: but then, whoever thought emotionally of interacting causes?

  But whoever was to blame you couldn’t imagine anything much more dead than this dead death. The only live thing Ethan could make out in the whole scene was a crow, fluttering above a blackened stump, and it was hard to see what that was doing there, unless it had been sent on purpose to depress him as a bad omen. One crow sorrow, two crows joy, three crows a wedding…But Ethan, wherever he looked, could not find a second crow.