You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.
Damn this pipe, too. It did not draw well and had evidently been manufactured by someone with little love of pipes. The cost of removing its intricate yet absolutely pointless nicotine trap, which had involved breaking its stem once already, had probably been more than the pipe itself for which, partly because he had taken so much trouble with it, or more probably because Jacqueline had given it to him, in all simplicity, he had a sort of singular patience of protective tender love. Well, it was an old one, Jacky had bought it just at the end of the war, but that there’d been trouble in obtaining imported briar seemed no reason why pipes, if there had to be pipes at all, should be manufactured so narrow in the bore you couldn’t get a pipe cleaner through them. He struck another match, tried to light it again. There was something wrong with the match too.
Oh hell! First the cedar, which would stand the dampness, for the pilings and foundations to be sunk. And for the floors. Then the fir for the walls and rafters. He could take it himself to the sawmill to be cut into the two-by-fours for the plates and uprights and rafters, the two-by-twelves…and the V-joint. Yes, if he felled the timber this month, and had it all cut, he could build next spring. Of course, it ought to season longer…There probably wasn’t any shingle mill on Gabriola, but he could split some shakes for the roof himself, the outside walls too. While the inside walls would be knotty cedar, the wood itself, smoothed and oiled by hand until it shone like knotted gold.
Mother Gettle’s Kettle-Simmered Soup…Oh God! there was something alive beside the crow, and godammit if it wasn’t Mother Gettle. Ubiquitous in her way though she was, somehow he hadn’t expected to find her here so soon again.
Beaming, ten times larger than life, from the roadside hoarding, aproned, spectacled, and looking more unctuous than ever, she stirred away at her simmering cauldron, ladling and sniffing, for it was another animated advertisement, this time the gigantic ladle went round and round and then was lifted, neon-lighted, to her nose, as though to say that every drop of the soup was, despite all difficulties and shortages, still being prepared with her own motherly hands just for you alone—as for them had it not!—and moreover even at grave risk to her life, so that by the mere act of buying that relatively insipid concoction one participated in the pioneer danger, for now certain armed and wild figures on horseback could be seen advancing in the background outside the kitchen—Indians—as one approached closer still one saw they were murmuring with one accord: “M’mm, good!”
The damnation on the left had now given way to scattered suburbs beyond which the mountains seemed to grow higher, their tops lost in clouds. They had entered a long straight road, with sidestreets, running slightly downhill between hoardings on either side. It was a road of infrequent autocamps, steambaths and Quonset huts containing neighborhood dentists and naturopaths. On the right the view of the sea was blocked by warehouses and factories, some in process of construction, though the mountains on the mainland were still visible, with the white American volcano rising above, and nearer, once or twice, between chimneys, or moored freighters, tantalizingly, could still be made out part of the island in the Gulf.
She Stirs for the War Effort. Buy War Bonds.
But their bus, caught in a sudden jam of expensive-looking American cars, cars like sulfur-bottomed whales, quite beautiful in their futuristic way, with huge-peaked cap windows at both ends that seemed coming toward you when actually they were going away from you, and which had been emerging steadily from the side roads, perhaps there was a factory making such cars in Nanaimo, and these contained executives going home for lunch, or maybe they were coal miners, their bus was moving so slowly for the moment they could hardly resist peering closer at the hoarding.
Clearly a wartime relic some sign inspector had overlooked, this represented, while still an aproned and spectacled, a far more martial Mother Gettle, wearing the uniform of some unspecified Waac or Wave with even a row of ribbons showing above the apron, while she stirred away with a look of quiet determination; meantime a little procession of walking wounded soldiers could be seen advancing in the background outside the kitchen, where the Indians had been, among whom, from his air of greater alacrity and higher upheld nose, though on crutches, could be discovered Mother Gettle’s own soldier son hobbling along—upon further inspection it could be seen that they too were murmuring, “M’mm, good!”
Now in fighting fettle. Mother Gettle stirs for you. Support the War Effort. Buy War Bonds.
Perhaps it was not an oversight on the part of some sign inspector. Perhaps with canny prescience they thought the advertisement would do as a hand-me-down for the next war too, so the Llewelyns decided…The jam had broken up and their bus was putting on speed.
Nanaimo 3M. Hotel Ocean Spray, Licensed. Where they would live in the meantime, subtle fellow, should he build the house? Commuting to Gabriola?
The American cars, somehow really beautiful, began to disappear ahead or up and down more sidestreets, while now, as they approached the town the hoardings came thick and fast, on either side of the road.
Ethan pointed the billboard out to Jacqueline, the gaily colored yachts, the regatta, going round a headland, it was a pretty and tasteful poster and he was sorry she hadn’t seen it, but it was too late.
It crossed Ethan’s mind again that the advertisements for the Ocean Spray Inn, Licensed, might be illegal, but somebody had got away with it; at the same time he had been thinking what it must be like to walk down this endless road between these billboards, past midnight, when it was absolutely empty, in the opposite direction, under a full moon rising over the mountains, penniless, shoeless, homeless—not to say drinkless, Godless, soupless—with a groaning hangover having been that morning given twenty-four hours to get out of town by an unsympathetic judge, and then later to wake shivering and delirious among these acres of dead burned trees, under that full moon, even if it were a cut above the subterranean dungeon in which one had spent the previous night; but, he said, smiling, and putting an arm across Jacqueline’s shoulders, that it was common to assume that this kind of scenery was modern and represented some awfulness peculiar to American civilization. The dear little pigs bouncing with glee over their reduction to sausages, the irrelevant cigarette posters with their cynical appeal to man’s hidden fetishism, or even secret ambition to be a Guardsman wearing a busby outside Buckingham Palace, or desire to go to bed with a drum majorette—
“Well, isn’t it?”
“—And then for whatever ails you afterwards there’s always the King of Pain…No, of course not…One tends to think of Coca-Cola as a symbol of all this and that the whole thing not only started in America but is typical of American civilization, which seems to me certainly pretty unfair to the States.”
Ethan went on to say that he thought the industrialization of Europe had really started when the flow of gold and silver from Peru and Mexico ceased, of which latter country Vancouver Island—and supposedly Gabriola for that matter—had once been a part. When the galleons no longer sailed from Acapuko and Callao loaded with ingots, in that hour was the stage set for the eventual hegemony of Coca-Cola bien frío. Only it had all begun in Italy, in Europe. There was this Hofmannsthal—or Broch—who said nature had been tamed and the terror had gone into the cities, etc. For with the industrialization on a large scale, so with advertising, the declension of the Lancashire countryside to a grassless slag-heap, and the addition of Carter’s Little Liver Pills to English rural delights.
“Preston, Lancashire, in 1939—I remember this from some old pictures and newspapers my old man showed me—that is, a hundred and eight years ago, if not by billboards, was certainly dominated by advertisements. If you want a good boot go to France. And remedies for That Most Excruciating and Painful Sickness of Man: Tic Douloureux. Come to that I remember another newspaper he showed me with the first news of Nelson’s death in the Bat
tle of Trafalgar. The whole front page of the paper was all advertisements.”
“But some English newspapers still do that.”
“Yes. ‘Noblemen and Persons of Fashion—Immediate supply of money supplied at low interest. Discreetness of primary importance,’ was followed by ‘Cures for bilious disorders and rheumatism and overindulgence in free living—’ for which you were advised to take somebody-or-other’s pill.”
“And when was the fire of London?” Ethan said, “1666, something like that, wasn’t it? Well, you can go right back to then. What about Defoe’s description of the plague the year before: ‘Anti-Pestilential Pills Incomparable drink against the plague, never found out before. Royal antidote against all kinds of Infection.’ They had placards all over London, Defoe says…Actually I’m talking nonsense, to some extent, about advertising-cum-industry. During the plague London maintained a terrific coal trade with Newcastle-on-Tyne…”
Ethan had been talking to cheer Jacqueline up, and without regard to the accuracy of all of his remarks. Moreover he’d been talking in what she called his “court voice,” and somehow it had sounded unreal to him, as though someone else had been speaking. This sense of unreality was now suddenly succeeded by an astonishing, almost preternatural sense of reality. All at once, without knowing why, he felt as if he were seated at the center of the infinite itself, then, that this was indeed true, that the center of the infinite was everywhere, just as its circumference must be nowhere. Everything seemed part of a miraculous plan, in which nothing stood still, everything good was capable of infinite development, everything evil must inevitably deteriorate. Even the billboards and advertisements took on a new significance, seemed even to be existing on another plane, as if man’s spiritual pilgrimage on earth too were eternally between these hoardings, these advertisements for spiritual soup, and the soul’s rest, these drastic remedies for the spirit’s anguish, these fierce warnings and exhortations that concealed a motive of gain, where truths expressed in deceptive guise jostled with statements of fact, profundities clothed in ugliness, lies that must wind down to the ultimate shadowy lies at the end of the endless and always beginning road, until, as the poet had it, God’s great Venite change the song.
(It was hard not to hate Chicken ’n the Straw)
Totumland rotunda—Mr. Blanding’s Dream House and The Long Voyage Home.
Ethan looked again: so it was. Jacqueline had seen it too, and they both began to rock with silent merriment.
Nor did one escape the Borden Cow with the crumpled horn, milked by the maiden all forlorn, who married the man, who owned the dog, who worried the bald-headed sheep, who killed the rat who ate the meat in—
And now at last a kind of triumphal archway, over which was written:
From the Nanaimo Junior Chamber of Commerce. Suddenly they were in Nanaimo itself, which did not look much like a city of the future. The notion prevalent in these last frontiers of the Western world that a town had only begun to come of age when industry moved in and the trees began to be knocked down, and its natural beauty began to disappear, was analogous, Ethan thought, to the popular superstition that one had not reached manhood before acquiring a dose of clap; the only difference was the clap could be cured…Nor did Nanaimo look at all like a mining town. One searched in vain for the slag-heaps, the windlass wheel spinning at the pitheads.
It was a pleasant surprise. Very clear and neat and pretty, it stretched from the foothills down to the curving harbor sparkling in the sunshine, with streets running uphill from the center of town like the spokes of a wheel.
Their bus prowled slowly through the steep streets of the outskirts, or rather what had once been the outskirts, of Nanaimo, its air brakes, as if commenting protestingly or enthusiastically on the approaching end of the journey, making sounds of tearing canvas, deflating toy balloons. The impression made by the town was peculiar, something like in a dream that seems of vast symbolic importance while it is going on but which you already suspect will turn out on waking to have none at all, or a significance wholly other. In dreams too there is sometimes an air of forgetfulness about architecture. Doors appear in the wrong place, rooms have no entrance, windows open on nothing. Such was almost one’s feeling here. But because new houses were springing up on every side, one’s first impression was of a certain new prosperity that seemed to contradict, too, the acute housing shortage one knew to exist. Some of these houses looked as though they never would be finished, while others, more nearly completed, even prematurely inhabited, had exteriors of tar paper striped with lathes, and bare grassless yards. For all their newness they had already an air of impermanence, of the irreparable damage caused by delay. It was as if these houses did not want to be. He turned to say something of this sort to Jacqueline and was stopped by the expression of eagerness and hope on her face as she still gazed out of the window.
God knows how deep was her need for the sense of permanence and stability they all too prophetically never possessed in their cabin at Eridanus, however much they loved it. Yet it was different with her! Ethan was not at all sure, he thought again, he had ever wanted anything more permanent and stable than their cabin had seemed to him at first.
As a matter of fact poor Jacqueline was staring straight at an apartment house, or what was now an apartment house. Ye Sandringham Taverne. No Vacancies…Alas, this was the fate of most of these old houses of stone, of half stone, and solid worth. A decency, a sort of faded wisdom and vision sat there, like an all too palpable ghost. There it sat anyway, the old house, a relic of what was called the late Victorian era, large, solid, secure, serene, evoking still a stealthy half-insane essence of family solidarity, security, safety, personal chivalry, of the days of white flannels and imperial quart bottles, benign summer evenings with white girls and magnificent tennis in tricky twilight, with its domed tower, from a window in which a haunted face seemed eternally to peer, with its porticoes and arbours too, and latticed railings, set in a formal garden of clipped English holly trees; it was the same vintage as some of the beautiful-horrible, romantic, and altogether fine old houses in the West End of Vancouver. It even still had a hitching post in front, while a black cat walked daintily around the precarious edge of the dome. Good luck?
What it came down to, Ethan thought, at the end of this fourth year of the atomic age people had come to disbelieve in the future so thoroughly that the creation of the permanent, or the excellent, no longer seemed worth while. They were like Ethan himself at this moment, who could see no farther than the end of his own nose, over a beer in the Ocean Spray.
Permanence and stability! But a house built to last, one that had lasted a hundred and fifty years, and was sound and strong and more beautiful than ever, could still go up in smoke. And fire! The Barkerville was burning and Ethan closed his eyes a moment.
Vous qui passez
Ayez pitié
d’une Paroisse
totalement sinistre
—par le Fer et par le Feu
—de 6 et 7 août 1944…
…Aidons-nous merci!
And the bell of St.-Malo’s cathedral still pealing through that blackened hush, that shell, beyond which the workmen trundled their wheelbarrows through the acres of rubbish. In 1946 he’d made a flying trip to France for his law firm.
Ocean Spray Inn. Licensed. 440 yards. To the left, just beyond the bastion.
As the crow flies, no doubt; as two crows fly. As one crow plus one black cat flies, maybe. For, with anguished gears, they were going up another hill, almost in the reverse direction, with no sign of the pub.
“Some of these old places, been up eighty years; look at that damned old thing—” someone was saying on the Llewelyns’ right, and Ethan followed the man’s gaze toward the house so cruelly referred to. It was an old shingled house, of beautiful proportions, with a neglected garden full of dusty fading lesser willow herb, fireweed, and asters, that was being pulled down evidently right over the heads of its inhabitants, still living in it. S
agging, hauled out of alignment with its foundations, the steps to its front porch had already been removed, the top windows, that once must have commanded so fine a view, had no panes in them, and as Ethan watched, a child swarmed up onto the porch to join the family apparently living entirely in the one bottom room. Eviction.
And now, over a hump at the top of the hill, a sudden extrusion of mass-produced houses, houses built without hands with a vengeance, built without the slightest thought of what man really wanted and needed—and oh, God, what was it he wanted and needed! undoubtedly he must in a measure have wanted and needed this or he wouldn’t have got it? ugly, standardized houses in a long row, boxes crowded together in an exact row as though dropped there by a conveyor belt.
Yet where one saw how here an effort had been made to plant flowers, there a defiant verandah had been added, it transcended everything for a moment to feel this was somebody’s home, his place for his poor ways on earth.
Pasa Thalassa Thalassa! The beer-dark sea.
In fact, there was no doubt a good proportion of self-built houses going up among these others, a proportion that in years to come was likely to increase with the steady rise in carpenters’ wages. And actually it was not always easy to distinguish the creations of these heroic amateurs from the rest. These were probably the lived-in homes, with exteriors of tar paper striped with lathes. Shortages and delays…Nolle prosequi—a stay of proceedings. It was a case where one didn’t have to ask for an entry of nolle prosequi, one got it just the same.
And with sudden fear he realized that Jacqueline and he were no different, they had never finished their cabin in Eridanus, bought with the porch only half built. Well, the house was on government land, there was an element of common sense in their attitude. But the threat of eviction having actually come, then was the time, if any, defiantly to finish it. They could have left their house as beautiful as it could be. But they hadn’t, and now this troubled him terribly.
October Ferry to Gabriola Page 23