The Devil's Making (5 page)

When a complaint comes in – someone knocking at the courthouse door late at night howling that a man is getting killed – the other duty constable and I throw our capes over our blue brass-buttoned tunics and set off into the rain, truncheons in hand. (Long-barrelled pistols are available but we seldom carry them). If the brawl is not over by the time we arrive we separate the combatants and haul them off to jail in handcuffs. This is easier than I had feared. The men are usually too drunk to be effective and are often pleased to have the excuse to stop fighting. The other night I did have to call for reinforcements. A sailor went berserk after rejection by a girl and attacked the entire population, male and female, of the Olympic dance hall. The reinforcements consisted of Sergeant Parry himself. He cracked the berserker's skull with his truncheon. The man survived.

A dance hall is a relatively genteel version of a brothel. Parry says they are modelled on Almack's Rooms in London, but I hardly know London. A long room lined with tables and chairs for sitting out with an over-expensive beverage, a small orchestra at one end, and a number of over-dressed young and not-so-young ladies with whom the men dance – for a fee (not apparently the practice at Almack's). There are further fees for a visit to the next door ‘hotel'. The dance halls give no trouble in themselves, and we keep away from them unless an altercation occurs, which is not often, since minor quarrels are dealt with by a ‘chucker-outer'. There are two dance halls: the Olympic (25 cents a dance) and the more elegant Windsor Rooms (50 cents).

Prostitution still embarrasses me. I have never seen a naked woman, after all – outside drawings and daguerrotypes. I can only imagine what the barmaid, Susan, would
look
like ‘down there.' Resistance to temptation comes naturally, as a rigidity backed up by probably too much thought. Sometimes a ‘lady of fashion' will ‘give me the eye'. But I remain stone-faced, indifferent, as at Oxford when I strolled past the much less attractive sluts of St Ebbes, nose in the air.

The great enterprise of the winter was a raid on ‘immorality'. Because of the small-pox scare, the authorities, in the form of August Pemberton, decided to enforce the bylaw which makes it illegal for any Indian woman to reside within the city limits. The only exceptions are Indian women registered as household servants, but there are few of these. They are considered to be dirty and, yes, immoral. There are, however, no less than two hundred Indian prostitutes informally resident in an area between Cormorant and Fisgard Streets, near Chinatown, in shacks and shanties rented to them by ‘Celestial' landlords. They ply their trade with seamen and the riff-raff of town, and usually we leave them alone. But now they had to be cleared out. We knew they would trickle back over the winter months, but at least a step would have been taken in the interests of public health – a blow against smallpox and perhaps, temporarily, against the other pox which provides over half the cases at the hospital.

More on Indians: I have applied myself to learning Chinook from the ‘Dictionery' (spelling is not so strong in the Colony as oral fluency which is considerable) published by Hibben, the stationer. Chinook, also known as Jargon, is a lingua franca or pidgin which was developed before the coming of the white man, among the coastal Indian tribes whose languages are mutually unintelligible. Its basic vocabulary of words from various Indian languages has been added to by French Canadians and Englishmen working for the HBC. It consists of only about 600 words. It's easy to learn since it has no grammar. I think it is a remarkable human achievement, and I wonder why no such useful common pidgin has sprung up in Europe.

My reading of Darwin makes me want to feel a kinship with the Indians. But it's hard. They seem inhuman. Thoughtful people such as Begbie and Pemberton acknowledge that the Songhees in particular have been degraded by their contact with us, and weakened by venereal disease – the ‘fire sickness' which is endemic in them. The Songhees are short-legged. (The story is that this has been caused by generations of sitting in canoes, but this implies a too literal interpretation of Larmarck's theories – which cause even Darwin difficulty.) Their skulls are compressed as babies, by being bound into sleeping boards, the squashed effect being seen by them as a sign of beauty. The colonists say it makes them stupid, by crushing their brains. I doubt this. They usually look expressionless, brutish, and sullen. But this is just for us. I remember the Indian who so expertly mimicked my expression on my arrival at the Argyle. In their religious rituals they act out their history through drama, though I haven't seen this yet. Occasionally a few organise themselves enough to come into town and sell basket-work which is really of exquisite skill. If a sailor in funds tosses a Songhees a sovereign, he'll take it away, beat it flat, and mould it into a perfect gold ring, which he'll give back honourably, for a few pennies or cents.

*   *   *

The smallpox raid was carried out at dawn on a frosty morning by almost the full police force, eight constables and two sergeants under the direction of Superintendent Parry, along with a dozen naval police, who would gather up as much of her Majesty's Navy as would be found. I was assigned with a another constable, a middle-aged Scot, Agnew, to clear out an alley of one-room shanties, like wooden boxes on the frozen mud, with wisps of smoke coming from their stove pipes. The procedure was to bang on the door then open it. If it was locked we banged again and waited for a moment, then kicked it down. The object was not to make arrests – an easy procedure since no warrant is required – but to tell the inhabitants to clear out.

From one of the larger shanties came the sound of singing and shouting, so we decided to deal with it first. The door was opened promptly by a beardless man in trousers and a grubby vest, with tattooed arms. We pushed past him. It was foetid with bodies, liquor, urine, tobacco smoke and tar (this brought me back for a moment to the
Ariadne
). Three other men, stripped to their vests, were sitting around a table, strewn with bottles and cards, as if the night had hardly begun. It was hot, from a pot-bellied stove. There were a number of sullen-looking squaws – entirely naked.

The sailors were singing lustily, not a sea shanty (associated with work for them), but that lovely West country ballad,
The Keys of Heaven:

Madam I'll present to you a fine silver ball

To tumble in your garden on the finest day of all,

If you'll be my joy and my only sweet dear,

And walk along with me anywhere …

They finished the verse, then stopped, looking at us dopily.

I told them they'd have to leave and addressed the women in Chinook: ‘Mesika maha maha house hyack hyack…' (‘You leave leave house hurry hurry…') I began to explain about the danger of sickness as best I could.

‘Come on you! Clear out!' Agnew ordered the sailors, who had not moved.

‘Easy, Matey', one of them said. But they stood up and turned to find their clothes. ‘It's cold out there', said the one who had come to the door. ‘You sure we can't stay for one more bang?' But he reached for his pea-jacket which was lying on a big brass bed-stead.

The women merely sat sullenly.

‘Maha maha, hyack hyack', I repeated.

‘Wake' – (‘No') – one of the women said. I had not expected this.

Agnew stepped over to one of the women and pulled her by the shoulder to her feet. ‘Move along you slut', he said.

‘Watch out, mate', said one of the sailors. ‘That's my Betsy, that is. Come along now, Betsy, do as the Peeler says.'

But the woman hung heavily on Agnew's arm, so that he had to let her drop back to her seat.

I went over to one of the other women and stood beside her. She had an intense fishy smell. ‘Maha house', I said as gently as I could. In Chinook, politeness or any emotion has to be expressed not by words but by the tone of voice.

‘Nesika mitlite yakwa' (‘We stay here') she said stubbornly.

I appealed to the sailors. ‘Why don't you give us a hand? We have orders to get these ladies out of here. Couldn't you persuade them to come quietly.'

‘That's your job, Matey', one man said. ‘They's nice girls. You didn't orter put'em out in the cold.'

‘You want to be taken by the naval police? They're out there.'

‘Bastards!' The sailors then, with good humour, began to turn the occasion into a joke. ‘Come on, Betsy, get your rags on.' They led the women over to the assorted blankets and skirts which had been cast here and there. They even helped them get dressed. Then they all shuffled out into the cold.

The other shanties were easier. Usually two or three couples who went quietly. Some respectable citizens who hurried furtively away. Squaws aroused naked and shameless from filthy beds. I did not look closely. Agnew did, stepping up close and yelling to them to make it quick.

The shanties were padlocked and stayed empty for a few weeks until quietly broken open and moved into again. The only obvious victims were a couple found one morning who had apparently had no shelter to go to: a sailor and a squaw, frozen into the mud in a permanent embrace.

*   *   *

What do I make of this? My sleep is disturbed by that night. But I was acting so quickly all the while, that I didn't look long at those women. I would have liked to study them. The hair between their thighs seemed sparse, their breasts not big. Although short legged and squat in figure, perhaps they were young girls. There was a story I heard at Oxford – that hotbed of jokes and ribaldry about sex, though of course it was denied us: we could be sent down, banished in disgrace from the university for ever, if the least relation occurred, even walking down the street hand in hand with, a young lady. If members of the university visited St Ebbes after dark, perhaps it was not unlike Cormorant Street. There was much talk of the St Ebbes whores. But I doubt if many visited them, it was too risky. Instead the colleges were rife with sentimental relations between men, which included who knows what. Wadham College was taunted in the song ‘Wadham, Wadham, Sons of Sodom', but it was probably not exceptional. Luckily I had not gone to a boarding school, but to the venerable day school for boys in our local town. Anyway the story was that the writer about painting, John Ruskin, who had his marriage scandalously annulled on the grounds of non-consummation, had been horrified to find that his bride had hair between her legs. Another story in Oxford was on a similar theme, I now realise. It was about Charles Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church, and a lay preacher in the Church of England. As I came up to Oxford his Alice in Wonderland was published. It was a bit of a sport to look out for him, as he had become famous, as Lewis Carroll. Whenever I walked down from Merton Lane into the Meadows, I would pause at that grilled gate in the stone wall beside Christ Church and look at the croquet lawn, where it was supposed he had imagined that game using flamingoes as mallets. Although various Christ Church men were there, Dodgson was never to be seen. It was said he had fallen out with Alice's parents, Dean Liddell and his lovely wife Lorina. I know she was lovely, because although I never saw Dodgson on the croquet lawn, I did once see the Liddell family promenading down Broad Walk – the pompous old Dean (though he had been a doctrinal rebel in his day) with the three pretty daughters all in pink and white, and I must say the quite glorious Mrs Liddell. The story was that Dodgson had taken photographs of the girls naked, or nearly naked, and that he liked little girls more than he should. If so I realise this might be, as in the case of Ruskin, because he could not tolerate the reality of women as hairy animals like ourselves, hairy men. Unless another story was true: that in fact he was enamoured of Mrs Liddell and merely making love to her through her daughters. Rather filthy minds there were at Oxford.

Another reason I suppose the Cormorant street raid is so vivid in my mind is that I have often heard The Keys of Heaven sung at the Trout – by some man or other making up to the barmaids. At any rate I know I am not like Ruskin or Dodgson. I liked, I trembled at, what I felt under Sally's dress. I desired the whores I rounded up on Cormorant Street.

*   *   *

With the New Year the weather has turned clear and frosty. I supervise seven prisoners in the ‘chain-gang' (without chains, in fact) repairing the James Bay bridge. I work too, lugging beams and hammering nails. On Sunday afternoons my iron-mongering friend Frederick and I hire horses and ride over to Cadborough Bay, through stretches of enormously high firs and cedars, with melting frost dripping into the gloom from sagging branches, then through patches of more open and park-like landscape of grass, scrub, brambles, native Garry oaks, ‘arbutus' (madrona), and cottonwoods whose fallen yellow leaves clog the streams. We carry shotguns in holsters by the horses' saddles, and though the horses are gun-shy, they can be tied up in a patch of woods while we circle around on foot, rough shooting for grouse which are numerous and so tame that they wait on a branch after a missed shot for the deadly second. It's easy to bag a couple of dozen which I give away to the married constables, all housebound.

*   *   *

Frederick has suddenly lost interest in these Sunday expeditions and become busy with something or other which he does not want to talk about.

I've written to a friend in London asking for the latest text-books in criminal detection, but it will take months for them to arrive. In the subscription library I found a book by a Scottish-Irish detective, James McLevy, called
The Sliding Scale of Life
– a title which I relish for its ironical application to myself. McLevy writes about the ‘stews' of Edinburgh, known as ‘The Happy Land' – ‘a world by itself, with no law ruling except force, no compunction except fear, no religion except that of the devil.'