October Ferry to Gabriola

by Lowry, Malcolm

  Ethan took his pipe out but didn’t try to light it and found that, stooping forward, he was sitting in a deliberately uncomfortable attitude he could not, for some reason, change. But glancing round him he saw that his half-prayerful and uncomfortable attitude seemed native to the other haunters of the place. Sitting on their chairs of imitation leather, covered with new, already cracked paint in bright brick red, as if they would slump off and collapse at any moment in a heap, their neglected beers standing on the swimming steel tablecloths enamelled in fire-engine red and gunmetal blue, they appeared intent on the fungiform carpet, bowed over it, in noisome prayer, or talking to themselves.

  —Well, he shouldn’t have let Jacqueline go alone, that was sure, it was a weakness, perhaps equivalent to a disastrous failure. Perhaps, even thinking of the ferry and no more, he didn’t want to be certain of anything any longer. On the other hand, it was the kind of thing she liked to do; even if, as seemed to him highly probable, they’d have been able to find out all they needed in this pub within the next half hour without going back to the ferry company at all; before that time her longing impatient spirit (which, unlike his, had already bravely accepted and freed itself of the past?) would have flown a thousand times to Gabriola.

  Ethan was not impressed by these excuses, and felt unhappier by the moment.

  Christ, what a miserable place was this. And pretty soon their beautiful Ladies and Escorts too would be “improved,” as the waiter had said. And in a few years…By that time British Columbia’s strange partial prohibition would probably be repealed, but would that make things any better? There would be, in addition to the fifty-inch pipe with the storage dam in the harbor, jukeboxes in the Ocean Spray, though the notice forbidding profane or obscene language, singing or the playing of any musical instruments would remain the same. Still, things would get “better”—as they said—after first getting worse, no doubt, and with saner liquor laws, the Ocean Spray might even get its view back. But Gabriola? What the hell would it really matter, finally, if he bought the vacant lot or the skipper’s house? There too, all too soon, there might be a “view” no longer, though by that view he meant something quite different and something overwhelmingly more irrevocable. The Ocean Spray might have its innings again. It was their own souls, as never before, as finally, that were threatened by this ugliness, these mechanical eyes, this evil fungus, that ash color, that glass of thick corrugated verdigris green.

  Christ, how lonely it was in here without Jacqueline. And though it seemed a little absurd, an unbearable pathos now attached itself to her doing what she was doing, alone.

  Ethan felt a sudden need to strike up a conversation with somebody, even to join in that conversation coming from a group in the corner that looked sinister as a hanging jury, and where they seemed to be saying over and over again:

  “It’s no good, this kind of life.”

  “No, that’s what I said to him, it’s no good.”

  “No good.”

  “No good.”

  “No, it’s no good.”

  “How do you feel there, Shorty?”

  “No good.”

  “Ha ha ha!”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  In addition to the isolated ones muttering to themselves at lone tables, there were other groups of drinkers, drinking together; three hunchbacks, several longshoremen, probably out of work, since it was after the lunch hour, and a scattering of lumberjacks wearing lumberjackets, in addition to the sailors, who in the corridor on the Men’s side, commanded all the view that was left of life, and they had now risen to go. But the acoustics were peculiar; often you could not hear what was being said in a conversation close by, but sourceless voices, volleys of obscenity, would detach themselves in this manner, from the further end of the room.

  “It’s no good this kind of life.”

  “No, that’s what I said to him, it’s no good.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  Ethan now saw that, seated near him (at the next table to a giant of over seven feet in a red-and-black striped mackinaw, with black curled hair flowing down his back, probably he was an all-in wrestler) was a Negro, whose face had been so hideously disfigured—perhaps in a fire—properly speaking he had no face at all; every smile he tried to create turned into a distortion, and Ethan rose, wanting to say something both friendly and wise to him, perhaps about the weather.

  But the eerie system of lights reflected in the columns of broken mirrors produced a vertiginous effect similar to that in the Vancouver aquarium where the arc lamps are so placed their reflections shine up from beneath the water of the tank, seeming to shift positions as you approach, and the whole place becomes fluid and swaying; and having risen and started off, as he thought, to the Negro, Ethan found himself going in the wrong direction, and when he regained his bearings he thought the Negro had not smiled, and had probably not wanted to speak to him after all: Ethan returned to his seat.

  A fatuous presumption anyhow, on his part, interference with another’s privacy. And yet—why did he not have the courage to speak to him? Ah, how could one do it…The Dweller on the Threshold…And, as so often happens when an impulse of love meets some self-created obstacle, Ethan felt the love itself changing into the very force that inhibited it.

  See who it is that watches by the threshold…And all at once he was seized by an appalling, unreasoning fear, not the less intense because, having been at the mercy of a semblance of it from time to time recently, he recognized a further reason for it.

  For life—the mundane or dramatic round, the wanderings into court, the brushes with the bench, the cross-examination of Crown witnesses, the courtroom tragedies and comedies, the arguments on points of law over a drink, even the suspense of waiting an important decision, the sheer routine, all these things were paradoxically, in one “caliginous” aspect, and as if it had all come about by an opposite process to that which had taken place in this bar—life was like this bar, from which you could not see out; take all that away, he thought, remove the barrier, and the verdigris pane, and enter the realm of yourself; never mind the beautiful view, the seas are in—

  Twilight of the Raven. A lonely man is dining on breast of turkey, cauliflower, French fried potatoes, cucumber, tomatoes, celery stuffed with cheese, fruit salad, vanilla ice cream, bread and butter and tea. Only a little piece of cauliflower is left on the tray when it is returned to the kitchen. He drinks too, a two-ounce portion of Hennessy’s Three Star Cognac…But he has no breakfast.

  Twilight of the Dove. Sunrise! The sun, first a bubble of light, then an arrow, then a white forest fire. Then, kite-shaped, 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 one, spilled on the table over morning coffee.

  Sunrise, twilight of the Dove, and a thick morning mist is creeping out of the hollows into the prison cabbage patch. The diner of the night before has no breakfast. Instead, he rises in answer to a summons. He is wearing prison clothes; a faded grey work shirt, blue denim trousers that are too tight for him, grey felt slippers. Outside the cell door he bends to kiss the silver cross the priest raises to his lips. He is not nervous. He walks without a stumble the seventy-five feet to the execution chamber, wrists strapped behind him. A bare light bulb suspended over the trap lights the yellow walls. He fixes his eyes on the wall and does not blink an eyelid. The hangman, Emile Banville of Montreal, dressed in a dark business suit, secures a brown leather strap around his ankles. He places the new yellow noose around his neck. At six five the eight uniformed guards stationed in front and on both sides of the trap turn to face outward. The chant of Latin from the priest is the only sound, and the man, Michael Robert Richardson (or Ethan Glendower Llewelyn), drops noiselessly into the former elevator shaft, painted bright yellow. Death is pronounced, the body is anointed, the rope is taken away; a fine new one, unlike the flag used to drape a corpse’s body at sea.

  Aft
er the inquest the body will be given to a person the hanged man has described as his only friend. At six forty it lies on the stretcher on which it has been carried from the elevator shaft, surrounded by warden, prison doctor, sheriff, and guards…

  —And this ritual murder is, gentlemen, as all of you know from reading your newspapers, no unique or isolated performance. It is all too familiar. One might almost say, from the frequency of the occurrence, that it has become one of our main cultural activities in British Columbia, others being somewhat hampered by censorship and the guardians of our morals. Just as the reports thereof, from which I have drawn freely, the reports which are protests against it in general (but more rarely in the item) are our quid pro quo for creative literature. This ritual, this is our true beginning of a drama, our Tragedy of Blood, our Titus Andronicus. Possibly with the rise of an indigenous literature, or of a drama, a theatre in our province, our country, possibly with our gradual assent into maturity, with the abolishment of our brand of prohibition, the cleaning up of our beer parlours, our slums, our other rats’ nests of vice, possibly with this push forward into maturity, if I may so express it—else we shall sink back into childhood and degeneracy, there is always a moment when the choice is made—it is possible that our evil and horrible deeds may be sublimated to all our civic satisfactions. Possibly, I say possibly, gentlemen, with the rise of a great tragic drama, this vicarious apology for it as expressed periodically upon the scaffold may cease, and the psychologic need for these recurrent tableaux vivants…So it was not to spare your feelings that I have not yet described, far less criticized, the skill or otherwise with which, in real life, the final part of this degrading ballet, this Grand Guignol, is performed. For from the newspapers, to the everlasting credit of the reporters and columnists concerned, this must be fairly familiar to all British Columbians too.

  But I shall remind you—though who could forget it?—of Henry Wade’s appalling description of Danny Schultz breaking away on the walk to the scaffold, and being chased all over the jail by frantic officials, who, after half knocking him out with a thrown chair, then slowly strangled him to death. The lunatic hangman, Charles Arundel, oily, sombreroed, pale eyes glaring, shaking hands with himself and taking a sweeping bow when he hears that staccato crack which denotes the neck is broken. Something, as Wade pointed out, that all too rarely happens! As for instance, the case of Dudley, who hung unconscious four minutes before he began to writhe and twist; then the hangman, who’d gone to have a drink, was summoned back, and wrenched his hands free when he started to climb up the rope, uttering hoarse and frightful cries of terror and despair. Then Arundel mounted the stepladder and tearing Dudley’s hands from his throat, pinioned those frantic hands to the dying man’s sides with his own arms, and stepping from the ladder, swung on the body until the wretched creature was dead.

  I, too, have witnessed events nearly as barbarous. Often the victim takes twenty minutes to die. Sometimes he is decapitated…And there are other horrors, though it might not at this point seem so, too obscene and gruesome to mention…

  But I am not taking your time to present a case either for or against capital punishment in general. I am not going to take your time by prolepsis, gentlemen, either in its literal or chronological sense, or to attempt to seek in my words the all too obvious frontier provenance of this horror, for reforms will undoubtedly be made. One reform, for example, I know, for I have it on the highest authority, to be almost certain: a murderer will no longer have to wait through that last night till the sunrise, but instead will have the privilege of dying at midnight, since for one thing, at that time it is easier to assemble jurymen, less disturbance is caused among the inmates of the prison, and, most important of all, it obviates the necessity of cooking meals for the guards, who have otherwise to come in early for dawn hangings.

  No! What concerns us here, is the next December 13, at dawn, in the year 1949 in British Columbia, a child, a boy of fifteen, is condemned to die in this unspeakable manner, in that former elevator shaft, painted bright yellow, and without, so far, this barbarism having elicited a flicker of tactile public protest.

  Guilty—or technically guilty of a lesser offense, gentlemen—this child perhaps is. But guiltier by far are the adults who condemn him. And guilty are those citizens from whom I have not yet read one comment that shows a desire for a judgment based on unbiased truth. And anything like such comment we are not likely to get from many sources, for the callous and simple reason—why?—why, it is too damaging to our self-esteem. And there is another more potent reason—fear.

  For to expose ourselves too publicly upon such a matter as this, fellow citizens, involves a grave risk. For to speak out in this instance not only might involve an individual danger to the speaker, but to the whole community in which he lives, thus not only laying himself open to the opprobrium that society will fasten upon an outcast, a pariah, but by that outspokenness making outcasts even of his friends, or people who now claim to be his friends, but would then—they would say to themselves, naturally—deny being so.

  That this boy should be condemned to die, by a jury who seem to have arrived at their fateful verdict informed by the crassest sentimentality, and an absence of psychological or even medical knowledge, would be bad enough. But he has been so sentenced for a crime which there is no evidence to show that he committed deliberately, or had any intention of so committing.

  You are of course all aware of the rough circumstances of this tragic case, the seriousness of which there is no need to gloss over; that the boy, Richard Chapman, aged fifteen, caused the death of a girl, also fifteen, a school companion, after allegedly having attempted to rape her.

  But was it murder? Was it rape?

  Were one speaking mainly in legal and juridical terms of defense in regard to assault per se, the fact remains that there were no marks of violence upon the body, and that actual assault had not taken place.

  The girl died by suffocation, but no account seems to have been taken of the probability that death itself was accidental, or that it could have been, say, the result of a reflex muscular action, caused by sheer terror, a terror operating on both sides; that when the girl became hysterical, the boy accidentally suffocated her in an effort to silence her screams.

  There is not the slightest evidence to show that the boy was in any way degenerate or vicious, on the contrary, we are told that he was quiet, a “good boy.” He could easily have fallen victim to a psychological aberration, or simply lack of wise advice on these very points, a victim of his own natural ignorance, in short, a victim of his parents, as, unless a miracle occurs, he must perish a victim to our ignorance, as a martyr to our hypocrisy. For one thing is clear: a terrible thing like this could have happened to any one of us, to the gentlemen of the jury themselves, yes, even they themselves, when Chapman’s age, might have perpetrated in all innocence what has been characterized and so sensationalized as an atrocity.

  Are the people of British Columbia unique in that they have never passed through the fears and bewilderments of puberty?

  Let a more competent voice than my own speak of this period common to everyone, the voice of one of the most distinguished figures in the world, who will, in all likelihood, be the recipient of the Nobel Prize this year or next. I refer to Hermann Hesse, who, in his Demian, says:

  As to every man the slowly awakening sense of sex came to me as an enemy and a destroyer, as something forbidden, as seduction and sin; what my curiosity sought to know, what caused me dreams, desire, and fear, the great secret of puberty, that was not at all in keeping with the guarded happiness of my peaceful childhood. I did as everyone else. I led the double life of a child, who is yet a child no longer. My conscious self lived under the conditions sanctioned at home, it denied the existence of a new world whose dawn glimmered before me. But I lived as well in dreams, impelled by desires of a secret nature upon which my conscious self anxiously attempted to build a new fabric, as the world of my childhood fell in ruins
about me. Like almost all parents, my own did nothing to help the awakening life instincts, about which not a syllable was uttered. They only aided, with untiring care, my hopeless attempts to deny the reality, and to continue my existence in a childlike world which was ever becoming more unreal and more mendacious.

  In the average person this is the only time in their lives that they experience the sequence of death and rebirth that is our fate, when they become conscious of the slow process of the decay and breaking up of the world of their childhood, when everything beloved of us leaves us, and we suddenly feel the loneliness and deathly cold of the universe about us. And for very many this pitfall is fatal. They cling their whole life long painfully to the irrevocable past, to the dream of a lost paradise, the worst and most deadly of all dreams…

  “And so I say to you——”

  “Hooray!”

  “Bravo, Mr. Llewelyn!”

  “It’s no good, this kind of life.”

  “That’s what I said to him, it’s no good.”

  “Ha ha ha.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “Yes, we like that, Mr. Llewelyn. Especially that bit about the irrevocable past, and the dream of a lost paradise. Is it not because you are still clinging to such a dream, to such an irrevocable past, that you, who of all people might have done some good, who would in fact quite possibly have been retained to defend the boy, did not raise a finger to help?”

  “I?”

  “Yes. You. Did you not say, ‘For to speak out in this instance not only might involve an individual risk to the speaker, but to the whole community in which he lives?’ And what kind of community could Mr. Ethan Llewelyn be speaking of, pray, but some unique and suspect community, one against which society is prejudiced, and what community could that be, other than that of your own—you squatters on those float houses in Eridanus? For it is certain that no other community would be risked in such a dramatic manner by intelligent action. Only that which (according to you) comprises your own lost Paradise, your own irrevocable past, in short, that of Eridanus itself. That you were loath to draw attention to Eridanus in such a manner while you yourself were living there, may or may not be an unselfish action. But in any case it is a strange sort of unselfishness that would give precedence to this and allow a child to die.”