October Ferry to Gabriola

by Lowry, Malcolm

  Yes, but hang it all, it was as if the whole world were beginning to fear eviction, to reason like this, he thought all over again, striking another match and trying to light his maddening pipe. And had there ever been a time in the world when disaster of some sort did not threaten? It was better to finish your agony square and true, and hurl your challenge whole in its teeth!

  They were passing a Catholic church, simple and beautiful as the Protestants criticized them for never being: white, dainty, and unpretentious as a humble birthday cake. Church of the Guardian Angels. Outside there were several taxis starting off: a funeral. Ethan thought of his first important case he had defended, one of manslaughter, and purred. Delay…For some time, without his knowing it, they had been following the funeral itself, that had left the church to precede them through the tilted narrow streets. Now he saw the great elongated hearse ahead, the five black shrouded cars, the mourners inside.

  Circum ipsam autem libamina omnibus mortuis.

  Their bus, still frustrated in its efforts to pass, wailed like the wind in the rigging of a ship. They had been going by some sensible, really charming and homelike modern houses, and a few fine and prosperous old houses with lawns and rhododendrons blowing in the sea wind that had sprung up. A pleasant residential section. A new wing was being added to one old place: the house, half-timbered, as in Cheshire, England. Edwardian, false, but handsome. Ah, why so large a cost, having so short a lease, dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend? Still, a grave. There was something permanent for you at least, you would think. Not a bit of it. Not even in the grave would you escape the machinations of real estate. You’d think you couldn’t be evicted from a grave, but you could. In Niagara-on-the-Lake it happened all the time.

  Ethan watched the long, jet-black, sinister, purring hearse ahead, on the roof of which two sea gulls, perhaps mistaking it for a coal barge, had, ludicrously, almost just alighted; on either side of the intervening cars in mourning, in the manner of the ever-receding phantom candles hovering among the pines in the funeral scene in the French film of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Jacqueline and he had seen last winter at the Vancouver Film Society, numerous foaming and ghostly glasses of beer, ever withdrawing from reach, seemed importantly to be bobbing. Nearer my bier to thee. Roderick Usher rose at six, and found himself in a hell of a fix…

  On their left a pretty girl wearing a short scarlet coat, her hair blowing back in the wind and a big dog galloping beside her, came tripping down the sidewalk. She crossed behind them (the scarlet tanager) going down toward the sea that spread far below to their right again.

  “That’s a pretty color. I always like color. I liked to work with color. Aye, that’s vermilion, that is.”

  The speaker was an old man, with impish features and an alert blue eye, wearing a mackinaw and a velour hat whose brim barely grazed the top of his seat’s back before Ethan, so small was he.

  “Vermilion, we used it for trimming the coach wheels.” He was speaking to a much larger and more powerful old man seated in front of Jacqueline, with the cropped bullet head of a Dane or German, who was listening intently, and after a moment Ethan became possessed by a strange feeling that every word the old man was saying—whose remarks had probably been elicited not merely by the color of the girl’s coat, but also by the contrast between that purring mechanized contraption of death ahead, and those majestic, if no less sinister, hearses of old drawn by stately horses tossing their funereal plumes he must have remembered (room for one more inside, mister!) these and the screaming tires of the bus itself—that all the old chap was saying was addressed mysteriously to Ethan himself; and moreover that almost every phrase had another meaning, perhaps many meanings, intended for his ears alone.

  “That was in the days when I was an apprentice,” the old man went on. “And they still had coaches in the Isle of Man. And how—well, you’ve seen the old wheels with an iron tire—well, they shrink them on. Now the wheelwright has delivered the wheel to the blacksmith, and the blacksmith builds a ring of fire—sometimes for a big coach wheel it has to be twenty feet when you think of the circumference—now they have the iron welded together and they put it in the fire: they don’t let it get quite red-hot, it’s still black, they have to get it just right. Then, when it’s ready the blacksmith with his two helpers, they take it out of the fire with tongs, and they force it over the edge of the wooden wheel, and then it smokes something awful, it damn nearly sets fire to the wheel. So then they run like mad pouring water on it. Now you understand it has swelled in the fire, and now it shrinks quickly, and now it has clasped the wheel forever—”

  Chapter 29

  Just Behind the Bastion

  GABRIOLA?” THE MAN REPEATED, the checking-room clerk in the bus station, “Hey, Ed, where’s the Gabriola boat?”

  Ethan was inquiring, while checking their bags and waiting for Jacqueline, about the Gabriola ferry from the attendant who, standing on a platform slightly above him, seemed unnaturally tall, so that Ethan, himself a tall man, had to look up at him. (Like the bar man, the drawer, now in the Ocean Spray, required by law to stand on a dais, the better to observe that none of his patrons were adding a bit of the creature.)

  …Suppose one were to throw a professional, a truly profound McCandless expression into one’s face, as though one weren’t so much concerned with merely looking at the forecasts (it need not be so shameful, it could even be unselfish to steal a glance at Jacqueline’s “horoscope”) but were pondering at the same time, like a gnostic geometrician of the Middle Ages, the duplication of the cube, or the trisection of the right angle, not to say the Symbol of the Divine Trinity in Unity. No, it would be almost as embarrassing as being caught weighing oneself. In fact, the two occupations seemed mysteriously to be related. For here a weighing machine offered: Your weight and your destiny…

  Slut machines…

  And the Colonist: probably the Vancouver papers hadn’t arrived yet. He was always half afraid to buy one, too. CHILDREN SINK IN $10 MILLION TYPHOON. MOUNT ARARAT IN ERUPTION. YOUR WEIGHT AND YOUR DESTINY. Time and Life…Why in heaven’s name Canadians should read these magazines was beyond him but they did, he did, Jacqueline did. Well, why was he reading the damned thing if he didn’t like it? He had a choice of other magazines more disinterestedly devoted to one’s fate, an enormous number of them indeed, more than he ever remembered seeing on one newsstand before. In addition to Astrology magazine, there were Astrolabe, Ephemeris, Nostradamus Today, The American Astrologer, Astrology and the Atom, Astrology After Hiroshima, Canadian Astrology, The Canadian Astrologer, Canada’s Destiny, Canada’s Coming of Age, Oman’s Almanack of Warnings, Nanaimo’s Horoscope, British Columbia’s Rising Sign, Your Destiny, Astrologically Speaking and Birney’s Predictions. And once more Ethan found himself thinking of old Defoe’s description of the days at the beginning of the plague—not of the preventive medicines this time, but the prognosticatory literature. There wasn’t much difference even in the titles. In those days it had been Lilley’s Almanac, Gadbury’s Alogical Predictions, Poor Robin’s Almanack, Fair Warning, and Britain’s Remembrancer, and, Come Out of Her my People, lest you be partakers of her Plagues.

  The sea wind blew in their faces as Ethan and Jacqueline walked down the main street. Nanaimo all at once was as strange as Port-au-Prince. But that Nanaimo had a beautiful setting had little to do with this. The feeling was, or was at the moment, that of themselves as lovers setting forth in any new town, however drab. There was also a certain dismay, as though the sinking sensation when the bus stopped—no matter that you were physically longing to get out of it, for it to stop—and you were obliged to get out, had been protracted, mingling with this sense of strangeness and adventure. Yet when all this was shared with the person you loved, these moments, even if filled with some immediate irritation, even a sort of fear, were looked back upon with an inexplicable desire: these were the happy times.

  They came to the post office with its flag galloping slowly from
a tall clock-tower: ten to twelve: and there, at the foot of a wide, steeply sloping ramp, the approach to a long cavernous grey building resembling an English railway station, mounted on a pier, built on piles marching far out into the harbor, was the “dock.” C.P.R. was inscribed across the building’s forehead, set in the middle of which another clock said twenty to twelve. Men with masks over their faces were working on the roof, spraying it with grey paint.

  A mighty ocean liner, with three slanting maroon and black funnels, and six harmoniously raking masts, lay, half a cable’s length away, dramatically moored alongside.

  The prisoner in the dock…

  No Smoking on Pier. Auto Ferry This Way. No Dogs on Newcastle Island Resort. But there was no sign about Gabriola.

  And the prisoner in the dock was a liar. It was not a mighty ocean liner. It was the little passenger steamer for the mainland, built in an exact replica of an ocean liner. And for some reason, today, Ethan felt disenchanted by this familiar legerdemain, which seemed like a trick played on him personally. For this was the sister ship to the vessel on which they’d crossed from Vancouver to Victoria, should they take it they could be in Vancouver in a few hours, thence “back home” in Eridanus before nightfall.

  Outwardly, taking Jacqueline’s arm, Ethan felt himself responding to her mood of excitement, being amusing, considerate (though she recognized the island boat she saw no significance in it, and he did not invest it with any for her) and interested in everything: on the other hand, as the harbor steadily withdrew itself from sight the nearer one approached it, and the mainland boat disappeared, and, as reaching the foot of the ramp they entered through a sort of bar door, an enormous baggage room filled with crates, boxes and trunks, leading to another vast windowless room with three ticket offices all closed, he began to feel out of touch with himself again. His soul might have been walking far away somewhere, in a snowstorm, through a street of dolls’ houses. It was haunting Eridanus perhaps…And now it has clasped the wheel forever…

  But equally he was aware—what seemed to be an open ticket office, now appeared far ahead at the end of another long room with glass windows—that he was being haunted by himself again, though this time in a different way. He was being haunted by a tune. It was one of those odd times when the guardian mnemonics of ancient records, ever waiting their opportunity, in the brain’s packed lumber room, and finding, as they suppose, their master absent, prepare to have a field day. Their first number was “Aunt Hagar’s Blues,” played by the Virginians, on His Master’s Voice. Probably he hadn’t heard the record for over a quarter of a century, back in English days. One of the greatest of American blues, its sombre recording by the Virginians made, as it were, a funereal yet majestic accompaniment in his head to their steps echoing through this depressing endless building, in which they hadn’t yet encountered a single soul. But Aunt Hagar’s final effect was exhilarating, it made you happy.

  The record reminded him strongly and poignantly of his youngest brother, who had been lost at sea on that trip in 1931, off the Norwegian island of Aalesund, with a Norwegian timber freighter on which he was working as a coal trimmer, a vessel in ballast out of Preston, Lancashire, bound for Archangel, though she’d originally been destined for Newfoundland, which was why Gwyn signed on, he wanted to come back to Canada. How young Gwyn had loved this record! And how happy it had made the boy when Ethan had brought it home from school for him, that time eight years before that, shortly before Ethan himself had left for Canada again. “But you haven’t forgotten ‘Aunt Hagar’s Blues,’ Ethan?” “No, you little idiot, it’s in my trunk.” The record had been broken, to his brother’s bitter disappointment, but Ethan had managed to patch it with the gummed back of an envelope so successfully “Aunt Hagar’s Blues” played well, though always punctuated by this regular click he still could almost hear now, as the needle passed over the crack. Clickety-clack, te-clock, te-cluck. And ah, how well Ethan remembered the last time he’d seen poor Gwyn; it had been on a short visit to England some three years before he was married, the two of them drinking beer after beer in Exchange Station, Liverpool, till time for Gwyn’s train to leave for that fatal port, Preston. Skibets Reisefra Prester til Arkhangelsk in his mind’s eye Ethan could still see the hyrkpntrakt his brother had displayed so proudly. If only he had dissuaded him from going! When, after all, he was not going where he wanted to go, to say the least. And what was it young Gwyn was trying to say to him now?

  “Gabriola? Sorry, we don’t run the ferry.”

  A kindly-looking official resembling a stationmaster, who nonetheless spoke sharply—behind whom, on a littered desk, was a small alarm clock that had stopped at half past eleven—and who was wearing on his coat a ribbon denoting, Ethan recognized, a high Canadian reward for valor—was looking up at them questioningly through the glass window with the little semicircular hole at the bottom.

  “Where is the office, please?”

  “Don’t think they have one.”

  “We were told it was on this pier.”

  “Couldn’t tell you, lady. Don’t think they run it in winter time anyhow. There’s nothing there.”

  “But we have friends living there,” Ethan said.

  “Oh? Well, I guess you know more than I do then.”

  “We could phone the hotel there?”

  “No hotel on Gabriola, mister. Oh, might be one in summer, sort of camp, but there’s nothing there this time of year.” The man was drumming with his fingers on the ledge. “Why don’t you phone your friend?”

  Ethan listened to “Aunt Hagar’s Blues” for a little while. On the other side was “The Hooking Cow Blues.” “The Hooking Cow Blues” was not quite so good as “Aunt Hagar’s Blues.”

  “They don’t have a telephone.”

  “But there must be a ferry!” Jacqueline cried.

  The man gazed at her with interest. “Don’t hold us responsible for it. The C.P.R. doesn’t run the ferry.”

  “Then who does run the ferry,” Ethan said patiently. “Perhaps we can find out from them.”

  “Well, perhaps you can,” the official turned away, “but they don’t even like to give us their schedule.”

  “But who are they?”

  “Oh yes, just a minute…Smout Ferry Company.”

  “Smout Ferry Company. Well! Where are Smout Ferry Company?”

  “Back up the ramp. You’ll find them—just behind the bastion.”

  “The bastion?”

  “Yes. You can’t miss it. They’re just behind the bastion.”

  “But what’s the bastion?”

  “You can’t miss it. Just go along the waterfront.”

  “But—” Ethan began, then stepped aside. A small line of people was beginning to form behind them, evidently to buy tickets for their minuscule Leviathan for the mainland, that at this moment, after three attempts, managed to put a stop to their conversation by emitting an almost life-sized roar.

  “You’ll see them! Behind the bastion!”

  Ocean Spray Inn. Ladies and Escorts. Gentlemen.

  At the top of the ramp Ethan stood a moment, undecided, gazing up at the great windows (in one of which, like a ghost, a lone waiter hovered, motionless) of the massive beer parlour leaning above them on the cliff. Temptation resisted. He took Jacqueline’s arm and they began to walk along the waterfront, but seeing nothing that might be taken for a bastion climbed a staircase between houses leading to a street on a higher level. This maneuver shortly brought them back to the Ocean Spray, so they retraced their steps along this street, from which the sea was visible only in snatches between houses.

  The Llewelyns, this time avoiding the staircase, gazed about them with interest. At first it seemed, hopefully to Ethan, like a whole street of old English pubs, many with their signs creaking outside in the wind. Then one saw that while these possessed the mien, the half-timbered zebra look of certain old English pubs, they were all tea shops, coffee shops or cafés, called Ye Olde Lygone Arms, Ye Coach and Ho
rses, Ye Olde Cocke, and the like. But the street had little need to fabricate for itself an extraneous romance of the antique, any more than might have had, say, the alchemist’s quarter in Prague, during the Middle Ages. For it was a street of calculators of nativities and dreamers of dreams.

  Ethan now thought with pleasure of Daniel Defoe again. In the Journal of the Great Plague, he seemed to recall, Defoe had expressed wonderment as to where, after the pestilence itself, all those prognosticators, not to speak of their literary works, had gone, if they had not indeed vanished from the face of the earth altogether. Defoe’s curiosity had he been alive today and in British Columbia, Ethan said to Jacqueline, would have been satisfied. For obviously they had not vanished: they had, after sojourning, with metaphysical aid, for several centuries underground, all turned up in British Columbia. And those who were not functioning in Vancouver or Victoria were very evidently practicing in one way or another, in this very street in Nanaimo.

  Certainly a large number of the houses, as well as cafés, seemed occupied—Madame Q. Messages From Flowers. Please Knock at Window—by spiritualists, clairvoyants or seers. But it was in Ye Olde Cocke and Ye Coach and Horses, to judge from the cards in the windows, that they plied an important part of their trade, as though, while their homes might be their consulting rooms, these were their clinics, practical and diagnostic experience. Ethan remarked it was a pity the cards were not more consonant with the signs, that neither Friar Bacon’s brazen head, nor the sign of Mother Shipton, nor yet that of Merlin himself were in evidence, something that would have combined the signboard idea with a more accurate evocation than that provided by Ye Coach and Horses of what was to be found within, and would have been, besides, more historically consistent…Madame Zog, Famed Albanian Seer, in this tea shop, 1-3, 4-7 daily. Teacup readings or crystal.