October Ferry to Gabriola by Lowry Malcolm

Author:Lowry, Malcolm [Lowry, Malcolm]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-4532-8630-2
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-10-07T19:47:00+00:00

Chapter 24

“The Wretched Stalking Blockheads—”

THEY HADN’T GONE VERY far. They hadn’t gone any farther to begin with than, once more, an apartment in Vancouver’s West End they’d sublet while looking for another house, and after a week of that it had been seriously in Ethan’s mind to go back again, eviction or no eviction. But the cabin had been “lent” to a man named Wolverhampton, a schoolmaster at Tommy’s school.

Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d managed to get their old apartment in the West End, where they’d lived on first coming to Vancouver. Maybe some essence of those old makeshift days of companionship would have been rediscovered there, some essence of that old hope and desperate attempt at renewal, before they’d ever tasted happiness on their beach. For had they only known before, in those dark days, what joys lay so close, awaiting them! That hope had not been illusory, even so, and perhaps some ghost of it still haunted there, to work another miracle…Or so he’d felt until they’d found their old digs could no longer be rented, or exactly called—unless by some outrageous euphemism—an apartment in an apartment building at all.

So immeasurably happier by comparison, however, did those days spent there begin to appear that Ethan quite forgot how near breakdown had seemed to them both. Dishonor and anxiety had prowled through the ruins of his being like marauding cougars. Jacqueline’s forthcoming operation shadowed their whole lives, while the horrors of the case Ethan was working on had exacerbated everything.

But Vancouver in May 1945 had been new to them too and then these rooms they’d taken seemed comfortable enough, at any rate a relief after Niagara-on-the-Lake and the Prince of Wales, and even, at times, fun: it had been on the top floor of what must have been one of Vancouver’s first such apartment buildings, a truly majestic old pile (as it still was) whose service elevator shook their bed, of antique patent, which slid out of the wall from a dark recess, from whose depths, in early spring just before they left for the beach, they were continually having to rescue pigeons fallen from their nest down the air vent. The janitor was a friendly soul who let Jacqueline, despite a bylaw to the contrary, put crumbs on the windowsill to feed the birds. Moreover through their windows then they had had a pleasant view of blue shutters and colored roofs, lined with chestnut and maple trees, down which plodded the milkman’s horse with its white wagon, and the rag-and-bones-man’s horse with its green wagon, beyond which, looking westward, they saw church spires sunk in a valley, the white fangs of mountains beyond nearer mountains crowned with evergreen forests, and, from time to time, though they hadn’t known it at first, or attached any significance to it, down a vista of paralyzing grandeur, the nearer narrows of Eridanus’ inlet itself.

From their windows looking the other way too they saw Nanaimo and the Victoria boat

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