“…Last ship to pass through the Panama…down to New Orleans…country where you can have some standard of living, like the U. S. A….
Sailors. The voices came from next door, from the Men’s side; Ethan, peeping, thought he could see the speakers through a crack in the partition dividing the two rooms.
“Cargo of lead ore from Patagonia, in Argentina, for Trail, B.C.…Vancouver…lumber and general cargo…”
These partitions were usually movable, for at crowded hours the Men’s side was much fuller than the Ladies and Escorts: the parution would thus often be found slowly moving in on the territory of the latter, producing, sometimes, if you were obliged to leave your lady for several minutes, on your return a certain eerie feeling of perichoresis. An isolation that was, at the same time, begotten by an interpenetration. But this arrangement seemed an exception, though Ethan could make no sense of it. Alterations were evidently in process on the other side, as the bars appeared not really contiguous, but divided by a corridor, on the farther side of which was yet another partition, or maybe a wall, Ethan couldn’t make out. The sailors, either by choice—there seemed a full sea wind blowing through this corridor that may have made it seem a home from home—or because the Men’s bar was full, were sitting thus at a table in a kind of no-man’s-land between the two.
“I’m English and I hail from Manchester—and don’t forget it!—but I’m married to an American girl in Mobile, so when I’m outward bound I’m homeward bound too.”
“Outward bound…” the voice came from their first meeting, in the little movie theatre, in thunder and snow…“But are we going to heaven or hell? But they are the same place, you see…”
Voyage, the homeward-outward-bound voyage; everybody was on such a voyage, the Ocean Spray, Gabriola, themselves, the barman, the sun, the reflections, the stacked glasses, even the light, the sea outside, now due to an accident of sun and dislimning cloud looking like, a luminosity between two darknesses, a space between two immensities, was on such a voyage, to the junction of the two infinities, where it would set out on its way again, had already set out, toward the infinitely small, itself already expanding before you had thought of it, to replenish the limitless light of Chaos—
Blue, blue, deep blue: a white fishing boat slid across the foreground, which telegraph wires just outside the window intersected; and holding up the glass to the light and drinking the beer, one might have felt, forgetting everything, as though drinking down the day itself, and having drunk that the day was still there (there was another beer, this time Jacqueline’s) in its inexhaustible coolness, its prospect of happiness to be engulfed once more.
But Jacqueline had scarcely finished her first glass of beer and now—Ethan had just drawn her attention to the scarcely perceptible kaoiling kaoiling of another very distant freight train—an expression of supplication came over her face.
“I’m sure we’ll find a place on Gabriola, sweetheart,” Ethan said.
But even as he said it, hoping it was true, he was aware of a certain sinking sense of fear that had been with him all morning, as though part of him did not want to find it, to commit himself finally, something of the feeling one has at the moment of commencing a long voyage (however much one has dreamed of and longed for it) or the feeling he had had when he finally resigned from the law firm in Toronto and started west with Jacqueline, and he knew she felt this too, though if Gabriola proved impossible he felt already their exhausted and bitter disappointment at the same time. And yet, finally to leave Eridanus, even though they knew they must, they had been warned of the new park that would encompass that stretch of forest and waterfront, warned that they were to be evicted, and even though they had never intended to live there permanently, still, to leave—
“Ethan,” Jacqueline said, taking his hand.
“Yes.”
“Do you remember, ‘when you see the light in the sky, you’ll see—’ ”
Two years ago last spring, in May, the Llewelyns, having followed the path through the forest (“follow this trail through the bush until you see the light in the sky, then you’ll see the cabin you folks are looking for, at the bottom of the steps,” the old fisherman had instructed them), and there below them, beneath a wild cherry tree in full bloom, its chimney capped by a bucket, shingled roof needing repair, its strong cedar foundations standing right in the sea, for it was high tide, they saw, for the first time, their third house, their beloved cabin. It was shimmering, awash in light; the reflections of the sun on the water sent forever millwheel reflections sliding up and down its weathered silver cedar sides. They stood there, looking at one another, in the lightness, greenness, the heavenliness of the forest, and always this first glimpse of their house was to be associated too, perhaps from memories of the carillon-sounding Sunday mornings of Niagara-on-the-Lake, with the unearthly chiming of a church bell through the mist. Actually the sound in Eridanus came from a freight train walking along the embankment on the other side of the inlet, its warning bell…
Entering the house with the key they had received from the owner, they gazed round the two rooms, slightly dusty, damp smelling from disuse, but essentially clean, and bare of all but necessary articles: the wood-burning cookstove, table by the window and two plain wooden benches, the cupboard for the dishes; the second room with a bed like a ship’s bunk set into the walls, and chest of drawers in one corner. Could they possibly—could Jacqueline—live in such a place, without electricity, without plumbing, without even running water?—There were two pails to be filled at the well. Jacqueline gazed round her, pulling off her white gloves she looked totally out of place. Ethan walked out on the porch, leaving her still gazing, with mute abstracted nods and astonished eyes round the rooms. But a moment later she joined him on the porch, and looking across the water toward the mountains: yes, she had said yes!
And then—“I know how you feel,” Sigbjørn Wilderness said to them, last summer.
“God knows we’ve thought about it enough, but if you bought it would you like it?”
“Why not?”
“Well, we couldn’t keep our houses on the beach then, we’d have to build houses back from the water twenty feet, I think it is—”
“Oh God, I’d forgotten about the Harbour Board.”
“And then we’d have to cut it up into lots and chop down all the trees over twenty feet high and put in water mains—in short, you might as well just go round the point and buy a lot in the subsection. But hold on, we’ve been here ten years…”
But Ethan couldn’t hold on, not like that. For between knowing that you are going to die, and knowing that you are going to the sometime within the next year there is a difference.
And once more, that day, the warning bell had sounded through the mist, more frantically, and it had been high tide, and afterward they had stood in the house in anguish—and oh, my God, how was the house now? Perhaps at high tide the logs were banging underneath with a chewing breaking ruinous sound (and they not there to protect it) so that the house shook, hearing this, the house hearing this, for it was as if the house knew, with no sentimentality about it, knew its every timber and crossbrace precious to them, as if the house had heard that bell too, coming over the water, till the sound had driven in its last weary nail, the sound which was also like the cathedral bell—
Vous qui passez
Ayez pitié
Chapter 31
Twilight of the Raven
WELL,” JACQUELINE SIGHED, RELEASING Ethan’s hand, “I guess we’d better go and see if the skipper’s back from lunch.”
“Let’s wait a little longer, sweetheart.”
The post office clock struck the half hour: one long deep solemn note. Ah, but to go, suddenly seemed now like a final treachery.
Yet what held them still? Why were they sitting here in the Ocean Spray Inn? What were they dreaming about? Was it the dawns, the delight of swimming at sunrise, the strangeness and marvel of looking out of a window almost level with t
he sea into the sunrise, the smells of coffee and bacon around them: the dawns like burning cathedrals too, like bonfires, and always the three trees held in the frame of the sun…Jupiter and a half-moon at rising…
Sunrise! Twilight of the Dove. He remembered a sunrise in early spring: the sun first a bubble of light, then an arrow, then a white forest fire. Then, kite-shaped, silver, the upper segment enormous, gleaming, the lower appearing as stars in fog, shining through the morning mist as points of diamond light, like the particles of sugar before them spilled on the table over their coffee. The group of trees on top of the mountain were silhouetted gigantically against this upper part, and for a time there was nothing to be seen in the whole world save those giant firs high in the sky, against this segment of white light. Then the fog began to drift shoreward and the complete sun appeared, higher and naked of the trees, like a faceless moon for a moment, then, suddenly brilliant…
Or was she thinking of last November, the frost melting in stripes on the porch, yet her chrysanthemums and even a few roses still miraculously in bloom; or the rain, and how, sitting at the table by the window, she loved to watch the rain falling into the sea.
And the great storm-driven mounting dark tides of January when they thought they would be washed away to sea—it was the day the killer whales came crashing and cavorting down the inlet and they had been working all afternoon getting in a load of wood and repairing the stove—to wake before dawn of that next morning, to save the house from the battering of logs, waking, as he told her after, from one of those queer dreams when you seem to be reading, a dream of wheelbarrows and watering cans, whales, woodashes, tinsnips, asbestos and salt water. And what again of the house without them, of timbers battering at the foundations—broken into perhaps, windows shattered, abandoned by the Sea-Centaur, leaves drifting in over the sill, incursion of damp, rats…
Or was she thinking of the windy evenings of this month, October at the little house, evenings of clouds and sea gulls blowing four ways at once, the black sky above the trembling alders, jingling their delicate green jewelry, and the gulls, white, white, soaring against the darkness, wild ducks doing sixty downwind, and golden-headed kinglets feeding in swift chiming multitudinous flight through the leafless bushes in autumn. Or in summer, how once in their forest they had come upon a city of foxgloves in long grass, in a wild clearing, the slender spires and the sun-greened leaves…
“No, I’ll go,” Jacqueline said all at once, getting up. “You stay here, darling, and drink your beer.”
“Damn it, no, that does seem a dirty trick.” Ethan rose, though it was a fact their waiter was coming with more beer.
“I’m away,” Jacqueline said, brightly patting him on the shoulder, and she was gone.
Ethan stood at the window and Jacqueline, pretty, dainty, below in the street, turned by the bastion and waved her green-gloved hand, then turned again and, smoothing her fur coat and skirt down over her knees against the strong wind, turned yet again, kissing her hand, and went into the alley, steep, falling away into steps leading seaward, their staircase between houses of the hour before, but which from above looked quite different—she had disappeared amid the scaffolding—the scaffold—as if it might once have been the glacis of the fort itself, down from the forgotten counterscarp of a dream. Bastion. The final bastion of human consciousness…
Ethan stared after her with a sudden dreadful pain: what if she should never come back again? Simultaneously he became aware of two unusual things happening below in the street, where a man on crutches, supported by an extraordinarily pretty girl, were approaching, a touching sight. Ethan now saw that these two people were drunk as geese, the man had dropped one of his crutches and was hopping, trailing his bandaged foot to a wall to balance himself: both were roaring with laughter. And Ethan was surprised to find that he was regarding these people and this attitude with the most intense curiosity and approval, at the same moment, reserving his astonishment for something yet more unusual. For the bastion, so it would appear, was speaking.
“A vast expansion by land, sea, and air,” it was announcing proudly, “is hastening Nanaimo’s destiny. The huge multi-million Harmac Kraft Pulp Mill is making marked progress. A multi-million dollar expansion program—in three years.”
Ethan had just made out that the source of the voice was a loudspeaker mounted on its cockloft, when another waiter appeared officiously at his elbow.
“Sorry, sir, you’ll have to move into the Men’s if your wife is gone.”
“Gone? She’ll be back in a few minutes. She’s just gone to inquire about the ferry to Gabriola.”
“Sorry, it’s not that—it’s just that we saw the goddam inspector, sir,” the waiter said.
Ethan took his two remaining beers through the no-man’s-land.
“—potential outlay of twenty-two millions,” the bastion roared, “a three-hundred-eighty-foot wharf and a fifty-inch pipe with a storage dam—” past further evidence of alterations in progress, and stepped into a fluorescent floodlit scene of such astounding hideousness he nearly lost his senses.
Though its boundaries seemed yet to be determined, if the purpose were not to leave them flexible as now, this newly renovated Men’s section proper of the beer parlour appeared to be finished to the satisfaction of whatever inverted genius had created it. Finished. It was the end.
Ethan swam toward a seat, against a noise like a boiler room. It smelled like a recently but not very well-disinfected public lavatory, and accustomed as he was to the huge viewless ugliness of beer parlours—at worst, at night, on the crowded Men’s side, little better than anterooms to the “tank” at the police station—this one appalled him. But it was the color scheme that was really remarkable. Jacqueline was good at describing such horrors and unconsciously he began to think of it as if through her eyes. But it struck him that these colors were new to him, and must have been new to her, brewed, perhaps, in some infernal, more than Mother Gettle’s Soup cauldron, containing a hitherto unimagined amalgam of pigments and abominations, to create an ugliness the world had not thought of before. Considered as a painting, as a work of imagination, on the other hand, Ethan surmised, a modern master could scarcely have improved on it, for the room seemed to be the perfect outward expression of its own inner soul, of what it meant, of what it did, even of what awful things could happen in it. What made it all wrong was that the creatures that inhabited it were alive, though at first one was not sure even of this, alive, were moving, or almost moving, seemed to be, however cancelled by it, human beings.
But the colors. “Vomit yellow and ashes of raspberry,” he could hear Jacqueline saying, laughing, with fastidious hatred (she had once described a similar scene); and how he missed her already, with a sharp sense of pathos and self-reproach at having let her go out alone; “criminal grey, decayed salmon, and exhausted orange, with a dash of little shit brown.” And the same effect repeated in columns of mirrors, carefully designed to look broken, under a ceiling of dried blood.
The light turned the denizens of the place into corpses, their flesh a yellowish grey, with purple lips and cheeks. Near the lavatory, under a neon cerise floodlight, something sat in the corner; a sack, it looked like, under those macabre lights; not a sack, it was square, more like a wardrobe, and draped with a spotted filthy wrinkled grey canvas under these cerise ceiling lights that glared down like three pairs of mechanical eyes. And the carpet, for there was a carpet, seemed to be composed of some sort of evil fungus, in which growths struggled with each other, ash-colored and slime black. The windows were either boarded up, like those of prisoners, he thought, in the citadel of Parma, against the view, or the glass was a thick corrugated verdigris green.
“Well, some folks objected to the windows,” another waiter came up with Ethan, saying. “You know, walking by outside and seeing folks in here drinking.”
From without, the flesh must not be tempted, nor, from within, the soul invited, even if limited vice were legalized. But Ethan rec
alled that some years back the Reverend McCorkindale, Prohibitionist, was of a different opinion: he complained that he could not see into beer parlours from the street, this, he asserted, being his right under the Act, which stated that the interiors of beer parlours must be visible from outside, a defection that moved the reverend gentleman to threaten that churches might hire detectives and lawyers to enforce the law.
“Yeah, they’re going to fix up the Ladies and Escorts too. Put in improvements, like this here, soon’s they get around to it.”
“I’d like two more beers, please…”
“Well, they didn’t make these improvements for the peace of mind of you rub-dubs in here, and that’s a fact,” the waiter added cheerfully, giving Ethan his change and looking round him. “Glorious, isn’t it?” Ethan followed his gaze toward a pane of corrugated horror the color of certain wilted cabbage roses, but still bright and hard, within a door, to a sinister divertissement arising in one corner like a black box with two ship’s ventilators facing away from each other like cocked eyes, and now a serpent of livid light swimming so savagely around a clock you could almost hear it hiss.
“Glorious,” the waiter repeated. “Suitable to the age, I sometimes think.”
Ethan, chuckling, now observed a mural on one of the boarded windows which, Pompeii-wise, was evidently intended to express the lost scene outside, and that a row of electrically lit imitation medieval English lanterns, perhaps as some kind of concession of “atmosphere,” contributed not a little, apart from the floodlights, to the ghastliness of the pervading light. The gentle sun, idling among the swift waters of the Gulf, could never have thought, every time he unwontedly entered here, through gangrenous glass or door, or by refraction, what an awful thing he had done.
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