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Island Night
| Shelved | Island Night written by Robert Beattie |
The Insidious Letter |
| From The Canadian Forum, November 1920, p.52 |
When, taking off our overcoats, we touch their outer surfaces, we know that we are as damp, barring actual ram, as we shall be. Indifference comes to our rescue and we stop asking each other at short intervals why we have come. By its brightness the "Casino" beguiles us into an illusion of warmth and dryness, soon dispelled by the waves of mist drifting sluggishly through the door, and by the mackintoshes worn by the few other people in the place. They are clustered at the far end, these mackintoshes. They have before them drinks which in the dominant clamminess no available fire can make hotter than warm. Between them and us stretches a long space, broken by white railings, filled with empty tables and ironically flanked by a long and glittering soda-fountain, looking particularly arctic. Winding between the others there comes to our table, after we have waited certain mournful minutes, a waitress. She recognizes, clearly, at a glance that we are not islanders, and the glance asks us no less clearly why we are here on such a night. We know the scepticism of waiting persons and do not venture to defend ourselves. Fixing our attention on the opposite wall where hangs a bulletin-menu, we ask in succession for three hot dishes there typographically offered. One is "off" and we are too late for the others. Summer fare only remains (after all, it is still summer, the waitress points out) and we fall into disappointed assurance of cold beef and tomatoes.
But not into repose. The explanation of the two score mackintoshes comes to fill up the interval of waiting. It is not culinary. From an outdoor floor, roofed and to-night enclosed in awnings, an orchestra — presumably of three men and nine instruments — breaks out suddenly. It only sounds culinary. There is a jazz orchestra and dancing. The music echoes the weather in its underlying monotony, not to say melancholy, and in its sudden introductions of unexpected tones and pitches seems to try to remedy it through variety; unsuccessfully. The mackintoshes unanimously rise. They have come to this doleful community centre preferring it to their still more doleful tents and bedrooms.. They file out leaving the "Casino" empty of people and [p.53] full of sound, a large space both filled and surrounded by reverberating foxtrot.
The dance, in its customary three sections and its two applausive pauses, completes itself. The mackintoshes and our supper enter together.
The supper is rather as if an ordinary cold meal had been made into ices. The very butter chips disconsolately as we try to spread it on our rolls. Each seed in each tomato injects a separate chill. The waitress is unsympathetic, silently suggesting a righteous joy that we pay the penalty of our hardihood. We put on our coats halfway through, and so fortified outwardly, and by tea inwardly — hot tea so startlingly hot that in replying to our comments "she" offers to bring us iced tea if we don't like it — we get up and go.
A new dance begins as we move away. Before we have gone a hundred feet the mist has stopped it down to a solo on the drum.
A jutting bank of foliage shuts out the lights of the boathouse as our canoe rounds a bend. The mist would have done it in three seconds more anyway. The dark, reinforced by fog, winds about us and wraps us like black cotton wool. We slacken speed and feel our way as we go. The "Casino" drum follows us, but gets always fainter. By this and not by any sense of motion we know that we are passing down the lagoon.
As our eyes get accustomed to the dark we realize that it has its variations. Not solid, but heavy fold on fold less heavy, the mist drifts across the water. Sometimes a movement of air which we cannot feel, nor the leaves of the trees acknowledge, lifts it for a moment. At such times the water about us is no longer an opaque medium for floating canoes, but a green mirror shot with crimson. If we happen to be near to one of the lights on the bank, the mirror has a black frame where the bank throws its shadow, the light is an orange burr of a huge pussy willow still more furrily reflected in it. If there is a tree nearby a patch of its leaves stands out more sharply than the light itself, partly in relief, partly in silhouette; and under it, in bright relief, a space of trampled ground.
A further temporary lift — there is to be only one — shows us more distant trees, shadowy dancers motionless around a misty dancing-floor of green, mist-bordered.
The drum has stopped, or been lost, long ago — our first drum. Another takes its place. For the Island is a merry spot, distrustful of dreaming, however suitable the weather; and its merry-go-round is trying vigorously to ward off from visitors their probable depression. From our murky distance we imagine it deserted and think of animals whirling in a tungsten-lit void, riderless and lonely for riders. But we know we are wrong, though the notion is comforting. They have riders, just as the orchestra has dancers; and in spite of cold and damp their riders in the intervals through force of summer habit are drinking coca-cola(sic!).
A bridge passes over us. In the minute of increased darkness we can see the lagoon in front and behind as a burr of orange and black. The bridge goes, yet the dark does not seem brightened, only changed a little in colour. Another canoe comes suddenly abreast out of the fog and passes within a paddle's length. The people in it, in the second we can see them, look at us severely. Of course we might easily have run into them. In the measureless and solitary lagoon they seem stranger than natives of Tibet.
Someone has turned on the foghorn till now pleasantly silent, or, if not silent, shut off by trees and the fog it is meant to penetrate. Now its blast reaches us raucously, travels the round of the island, crosses to the opposite shore and returns. The custodian is catching up. The noise makes speech, absent before, now impossible. Each blast seems to stop our boat, its end to release it on its way. Between blasts and silence we move on.
The canoe tosses lightly as a series of swells meets it. The foghorn blast, fitful before and echoing, reaches us now direct, over a stretch of sandbanks and open water through a medium of mere mist and air. Again, by light whose source we cannot trace, we can see the folds of the mist moving slowly to and fro; see, too running to meet us, a light too subdued even for a glow, reaching far through the fog into the sky. Some distance off, sundry furry balls of light, like chubby caterpillars, move away from us and quickly disappear. They are the ferries, the cause of our tossing. We can see them no longer, but we can hear them — the thud of their slow paddles, and the chiming of their engine-room signals. Their swells have passed us. We can hear them breaking on the shore behind. They have left us to move, still wrapped in mist, on our level way.
We have no course to steer, except for the centre, as we judge it, of the towering brightness, and our progress, slow on the lagoon, we have to take on faith in the open water. The water is less opaque here, a clear medium like black air, and the orange mist both more infinite and less penetrable. We miss the unseen support of adjacent banks. In the vacancy we are not merely wrapped but held. Paddling steadily, we yet seem stationary as if moored; while around us, fortunately at a distance, move and chime and whistle, in pitches shrill and deep, the chubby caterpillars and the grumbling foghorn.
It ends with more tossing and with rolling too, as we meet converging ferry-wakes. The glow takes on fitful life as we approach the effective zone of the electric signs. The steamers still whistle and chime, [p.54] but not so acceptably as with distance between. Helped by the locomotive whistles, their whistles become shrieks, their bells confused with the locomotive bells become clangings and merge in the racket of the Esplanade. I look up and read in yellow letters bearing the caterpillar glow the flash "Dominion Tires are Good Tires". I put out my hand at the side and touch the wet, gritty boards of the landing.
- Robert Beattie