October Ferry to Gabriola

by Lowry, Malcolm

  Ethan took her hand, sighing, as he slowly sank down into his seat beside her, at the view through their windows which seemed impossible after the Men’s bar, like an emergence from hell, the sea, the lighthouse and the sea gulls, the sapphire Gulf, the steamers—there were now two more freighters anchored out in Departure Bay, for that was its name, the drawer, pleased at their return, had just told them—the ships with their air of Quand partons-nous pour le bonheur?

  “Not until five o’clock, eh?…Well I suspect you’re hungry. Themistocles also ate before the Battle of Salamis. Or will you have a beer?”

  “Why not? Oh Ethan, how exciting!” Jacqueline leaned on the table, chin on her hand, obviously quite unconscious of the beer parlour itself, which had filled up slightly on this side, though they had not lost their old places, and gazing at him with that clear bright candid look, her dark eyes at once earnest and half laughing, so often conjured to his mind whenever they had been separated, even if for a short time. This time it had only been half an hour, though it seemed longer.

  “In which time, however,” Ethan said, “it is possible to drink quite a number of beers. But as the glasses only hold five and a half ounces, have a dummy bottom, and are only filled three-quarters full, the stimulus can scarcely be said to be commensurate with the apparent quantity.”

  “It’ll do you good, my poor lamb, you’ve been under such a strain.”

  “That should be preserved,” Ethan was saying, “in the thesaurus of unlikely remarks by modern women,” as Jacqueline gave the order to Henry Knight’s brother.

  “Four, please.”

  “Only I have an excuse. Sort of an excuse.”

  And leaning over Ethan told her in lawyer’s whispers, cupping his hand over his mouth and speaking directly into her ear, of his encounter with Henry Knight. Jacqueline had never met old Henry Knight, but long ago his name had often kept them awake. It took them back to Oakville and the year Tommy was born. Strangely, for all their recent jocularity, the convention of legal reserve, as an old banker client of Ethan’s liked to term it, would still have forbade introductions: in fact, the presence of the brother, whose privity he could not assume, almost forbade recognition, without some further sign from Henry himself. It was a startling, yet eminently reassuring anomaly, in a world of bad manners, that after all their low comedy on the subject he had to behave as if it were one of Henry’s most closely guarded secrets, and himself a total stranger.

  “Well, as you were saying, Jacky, Captain Smout—”

  But at his name they had to laugh for awhile.

  The captain had still been out for lunch when she arrived, but Jacqueline had talked to a pleasant girl in the office till he came back: the captain was a very obliging person, and he’d given Jacqueline the cerise schedule she now handed to Ethan—”All sailings subject to weather and tidal conditions and change without notice.”

  “You didn’t ask—” Ethan took the package of cigarettes she was trying to open from her.

  “No, they don’t know anything about the skipper’s house, it isn’t advertised for sale.” Peering into the tiny mirror in her purse Jacqueline took off her hat and smoothed her dark hair with her long nervous fingers.

  “What about the other lot?”

  “H’m-um,” Jacqueline shook her head, putting on lipstick, “we have to go to Gabriola to find out.”

  “Hemlock,” a voice suddenly broke out. “Hemlock has been despised for some time, hadn’t got that pitchiness—Oh, t’was good for making seats—”

  “It splits too easy, when it’s ‘drive a nail into it’!…Lasts for ever and aye in a flume, though.”

  Jacqueline smiled, meeting Ethan’s eyes. The men were carpenters, or boat builders, seated beyond the partition in the place lately vacated by the sailors, talking about wood; and since they couldn’t help hearing, the Llewelyns listened a moment, while Ethan thought: how much longer in the world would one hear such conversation as this?

  “Arbutus—tried making an axle for a wheelbarrow at one time…Wore away with the sand and wet…Wore away quite then where it was turning in boxes…”

  “…Fir in the rowboat’s thwart—”

  “…little spits would come out like freckles, in fir.”

  The Llewelyns sat drinking their beer, smoking, and looking through their beautiful windows. A plane, high up, flashed like a day star. Another passenger boat from the mainland was steaming into harbor. A girl wearing a short scarlet coat tripped down the ramp happily, her hair blowing back in the wind, and a big dog galloping beside her—it was the same girl they’d seen from the bus, and now Ethan recognized the dominant voice beyond the partition as that of the man who’d been seated in front of them in the bus, and who’d been prompted by the color of this same girl’s coat to talk about coach wheels in the old Isle of Man.

  “Aye, cedar is very soft and kindly that way…”

  And now it has clasped the wheel forever.

  “Do you think Tommy’ll like Gabriola?” Jacqueline said all at once.

  “I think he’ll tolerate it as long as it serves his dramatic purposes. From the way he pores over dramatic criticisms these days I rather think his ambition is to be a second George Jean Nathan—and God knows Canada could use someone like Nathan. Who incidentally said the last word on the subject of nature from Tommy’s point of view. ‘I suppose the country is great stuff for people who’ve been born in it and don’t know the difference, but for anyone who can’t tell a redwood from Hendrik Willem Van Loon I’m not so sure!’ Well,” Ethan added laughing, looking through the window toward Gabriola, over a sea that seemed, in the last few minutes, to have become much rougher, spray was drifting right over the road and there were whitecaps beyond, only a cognation of impassive ducks, scoters, rising and falling on the billows inshore, apparently fast asleep, prevented it from seeming actually menacing.

  “What I think should concern us is not the five o’clock ferry going over to Gabriola, but whether there’ll be one coming back. What if we can’t find Angela in a pinch? Do we sleep on the dock?”

  “But there’s this hotel, too. I told you—didn’t I tell you? But we have to phone for reservations.”

  “Well…Are you happy now?”

  They clasped hands across the wet rickety table.

  “Oh yes!”

  “You bet your life I’m happy too,” Ethan said.

  Through the window they watched an eagle shooting downwind until it was out of sight.

  “Oh? Thank you, operator. Well I’ll try again in a minute,” Jacqueline was saying, and Ethan heard the operator’s faint voice rattling as his wife held the receiver a moment longer.

  “You know how it is,” the voice was saying, “these places, he’s probably gone off somewhere.”

  The phone booth, chairless, stale-cigar-smelling, was in a narrow dark hall wedged in between the Ladies Rest Room of the Ocean Spray and the clattering kitchen of a restaurant, in which could be made out, every time either one of them stepped into the corridor, through which the wind sucked in a freezing draught, four Chinese cooks darting up and down the narrow space between stoves and counter, slapping food on the plates.

  Why on earth was it so difficult to find out about Gabriola? They had taken turns at the telephone trying to make contact and there was something eerie in this attempt to communicate with an island across the water that only a moment since you had actually been able to see, something disturbing too, in the disparity between the cramped smelly booth and the sense of the rough sunlit sea, with the lighthouses and the white peaks beyond, the windswept blue gulf across which, or under which, their voices must travel in order to be heard. Should they be heard.

  “Wait a minute, they’re answering,” said Ethan, who had taken the receiver. Or it was like one of those strange telephone calls between the villages of Wooler and Yetholme, famous in a point of criminal law, calls which, though the villages themselves were only fifteen miles apart across the Scottish border, nevertheless
had to go three hundred miles through Newcastle, Edinburgh, Galasheils—“Yes?” he said.

  The voice on the other end sounded more as if from Siam, across a howling hurricane; a wraithlike voice, like one’s idea of a spirit voice in a séance, or one of those forms in Dante, grown voiceless from long lack of speech, a ghost that cannot speak at all unless addressed first. “Yes,” Ethan repeated, “but you’re a hotel, aren’t you?”

  “…nobody here…”

  “What?”

  “…gone…I’m just the caretaker.”

  “What! You mean we can’t get a room at all?”

  “Nobody here…Andersons all gone…Sorry.”

  “Oh dear! Wait a minute, please wait,” cried Jacqueline, snatching the receiver from Ethan. “Can you hear me? I can’t hear you at all.”

  “Yep. I can hear you fine.”

  “Please speak a little louder. Can’t you possibly put us up for the night? We’ve come a long way—”

  “…All gone away. I’m just the caretaker…Did you want to eat? You want your meals? I don’t know…”

  “Oh, just anything! It would be so kind of you. We’d be so awfully disappointed.”

  “I don’t know…But I hate to see anybody disappointed. Might fix you up somehow.”

  “Thank you. Oh, thank you!”

  “And I bet you never seen a ship that was really taking coals to Newcastle before, missus,” said Henry Knight’s brother to them, when they came back for another beer after lunch, less with a desire for a beer than for the view. “Well, there she is.” And he pointed through the window to where, on the left, the rusty vessel was still loading coal into her hold.

  “But I thought you said she was going to Australia,” Ethan said.

  “That’s right, sir. So she is! Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia.”

  Libra’s year ahead. Difficulties of the Fourth House…Time and Life. Have you ever seen a bald-headed sheep?

  Chapter 33

  The Dock

  ON THE POST OFFICE the flag was galloping more swiftly in the fading light and the clock said a quarter to five, as once more the Llewelyns went down the ramp; they had had just enough beer and were in a highly good mood.

  Walking with his arms held straight down at his sides, Ethan carried their suitcase in one hand, in the other a jug of wine (Grape Wine, it stated bluntly on the bottle) in a shopping bag.

  “This way,” Ethan turned left.

  “But it says Newcastle Island.”

  “Never mind, it’s the Gabriola ferry, darling.”

  No dogs on Newcastle Island Resort. No dogs allowed on Newcastle…Product of China…They were hurrying down another lesser ramp, a gangway, whose foot rested precariously upon a floating landing stage beneath, to which this last statement, inscribed upon a large empty packing case pitching with the stage, lent a note of exoticism, of mystery, overshadowing for a moment, perhaps because the float seemed almost to have risen above it, the presence of a small steamboat, wallowing and pitching alongside.

  The pitching boat, its gunwale now above, now below, now rolling away from the clanking rising and falling landing stage, was scarcely more than a launch, had no discernible name, and had been newly painted yellow. Mingled with the smell of fresh paint a terrific cleanly harsh smell of salt and fish rose to their nostrils from the harbor. Taking things all in all Ethan reflected that they ought at this point to feel sick but the smell was so violent, as if everything putrefying had been purged out of it by the sea and wind, that instead they were exhilarated.

  Trespassers using this dock—the prisoner in the dock!—do so at their own risk. Smout Gabriola Ferry Ltd.

  “They do. It is.” Ethan helped Jacqueline on board from the crazily scending and skreeking pier. Skreegh, skreigh, shreek, skrak.

  The ferry had a tiny funnel, a broad flat afterdeck, and a kind of open anteroom under the bridge, with narrow benches running down the sides, to which they now made their way, bracing themselves against the thrust and swing. A few bags and one or two wooden crates were stowed casually in here, among which Ethan now set down the shopping bag with the wine and their suitcase.

  But there seemed nobody aboard. Nobody at all. Well, well; and not even the lifeboats had names on them. No mystery about that; perhaps it was because of the ferry having been recently painted. Yet could this really be the ferry for Gabriola? Apparently. Apparently. It was. For here, on the bulkhead, in the anteroom again hung the cerise Gabriola Island Ferry Service-Schedule, a duplicate of the very one Jacqueline had been given by the skipper behind the bastion, while beneath that appeared a notice of a school meeting on Gabriola Island, with, below that, some quoted extracts from the Public Schools Act. In addition there was a blackboard covered with indecipherable chalked figures—Forge—they made out—possibly they were tank soundings: while between an axe and a pyrene extinguisher was pinned an advertisement: Gabriola Convalescent Home, Mrs. R. Tullyweather, R.N.

  Skreegh, skreegh, skreek skrak went the landing stage.

  “What’s the female Royal Navy doing here?” Ethan asked.

  “It means Registered Nurse.”

  “I know. But it never occurred to me they’d have a convalescent home on Gabriola, somehow.”

  “Do you object?”

  “To the contrary.” Ethan lit a cigarette. “One’s glad to know people go there to recover from something.”

  They were walking around their ferry boat which besides being nameless appeared to them unfinished. At the stern was nothing but a gap, across which stretched a chain connecting the bulwarks. Above rose a sort of pseudo-poop, just the skeleton, like a roof in progress of building with planks set at random for the workers to move around on. Nameless lifebelts, like strange white millstones against the prevailing yellow, hung here and there. While the two yellow-painted nameless lifeboats were suspended from their davits on either quarter. So might Charon’s boat have appeared, Ethan thought, when hell was nearly brand-new.

  For Charon himself there seemed merely a little glassed-in wheelhouse forward of the funnel on the bridge above the anteroom itself. The door was locked. There was an alleyway on the port side of the anteroom but a sign, No Admission Except on Business, and an instinctive caution forbade one investigating further, even though there was not the slightest evidence even here of anyone actually on board. The fact seemed to be that they were for the moment in the unique position of being absolutely alone on a vessel that negotiated responsible waters. With a little skill they could have commandeered the ferry and sailed her anywhere they pleased, even to Australia.

  Ethan laughed at this fancy. Well, actually they couldn’t have got beyond Cape Flattery before the Mounted Police would have nabbed them. But a sense of adventure, yet of cold fear had possessed him for a moment. It was difficult to say where this fear came from, but could it be that in life we sometimes have intimations of an after, or another life? I am here. But by the way, am I here? Were they here? No, nothing certainly could have been (despite the strangeness) more mundane. The poop, the lifeboats, the chain, the bridge, and now the anteroom, the locked door, even the accident of being alone on the ferry—if they were alone—didn’t seem unusual when you thought about it, the anteroom again with its crates and notices, the harbor behind, the town of Nanaimo. And perhaps nothing could be more common than this fear: perhaps man feels it every day but merely says: “Well, but I have a train to catch and old Jones to see. I’m too busy to think about the immortality, or otherwise, of my soul.” But this seemed only part of it and now Ethan thought he knew where the fear came from, and this too was a common experience. It was that everything had become, all of a sudden, so extraordinarily familiar. From the main wharf building the painters spraying paint had disappeared. The passenger boat had long since gone. The big ramp was empty. The little ramp was empty. The words on the schedule, “All sailing subject to weather and tidal conditions and change without notice,” were here for them to read over again. This scene, with the empty ferry
pitching ominously with its clanking of subterranean chains, the landing stage rising and falling beside them, wallowing and groaning and creaking, and Jacqueline now beginning to walk nervously by herself about the open deck. Had he experienced it before? stood right here many times before, wondering: would the Gabriola ferry perhaps not sail at all? Or had he dreamed it? And if a dream, had it an unhappy or a triumphant solution. Was it a nightmare from which he woke in a cold sweat, and which was never finished? And why did he have such a sense of adventure about this, a sense of destiny, as though the gears of decision were really being engaged—

  Jacqueline was shivering and Ethan helped her wrap her scarf more closely about her throat. The sun had dropped behind the mountains, leaving the town and the wharf in shadow, though it sent a glow into the sky, and light was still dancing on the sea a little way out from shore. But if they didn’t start soon, it might be dark before they arrived, once the sun set the dark came quickly in October…

  “Don’t they want it, do you suppose?” Jacqueline asked, delighted. They were standing in the anteroom before another notice, a petition, from the British Columbia Power Company, on behalf of the inhabitants of Gabriola Island, for the installation of electric light and power; but no signatures were affixed to the petition and the Llewelyns smiled with private understanding, and pleasure mixed with a sudden sharp pain: their cabin in Eridanus had given them a romantic attachment to oil lamps. On the other hand too, more practically, it reminded them that they had no flashlight.

  “Ah—!” cried Ethan, and he lit his pipe triumphantly as now two people, a shabbily dressed man wearing a drooping hat, and a taller woman with a heavy wool scarf wrapped round her head and drawn up over her chin, came down the ramp to the plunging and whining pier. The woman, likewise shabbily dressed, and all in black, seemed pale and sick; she was helped on board by the man, evidently her husband.