While there was no doubt that Toby understood that his blessings, all his life of them so far, had come from a providential Other, who had involved himself in Toby existence on an intensely daily basis, there was also no doubt that he had otherwise also been in error concerning at least two questions concerning that involvement. One, that the coming and going of the light was common to everyone, and that his increasingly constant dark moments, dark minutes, dark hours, were pretty much of his own invention, inasmuch as he had been determined, at least part of the time, to think that he was bound, as a philosopher, to absorb or even create, now and again, a sort of spiritual nihilism that would not only prove him extremely tough-minded about religion, and personally detached from any need of it - like his father sometimes insisted any real man should be - but was also a form of self-discipline he thought he should undergo before he turned to the commonly known consolations of a faith, church membership, etcetera.
Simply from the regularity of the painful times, he did suspect the Almighty to a degree, and he certainly had a general trust of the process he had been undergoing, quite consciously even before he started university, but he was by no means, as they say, academically sound as a theorist of the mystical life, and now could not seem otherwise than the time when God had chosen to bring him up to the mark, but as I said, not the easy way. No wandering Carmelite knocked on his basement suite door with a copy of the "Dark Night", even the earliest pages of which would have explained with comforting clarity why he so often, and for such healthy periods of time, felt so bloody lousy, without having a cure for it, except to wait for the passing of time in a stew of ignorance, which sometimes led him into trouble.
His first hint that there might be a flaw in this conquest of the Peace did not show up until he arrived at his charioteer's apartment, late of a sunny afternoon - probably a Friday - with his duffle bag and typewriter, dropped off by a taxi. He had said his goodbyes to Jelena in the early afternoon, before she went off to work her afternoon shift at the railway office, and to his new roommate the day before, as he was off to cross the country as a railway porter.
In Toby's experience of travelling, the departure had always been an adventure. There had been either the expectation of seeing new country, new faces, or the cherished familiarity of old places and persons. In this adventure there was new country, one familiar face, and a third traveller he had never met, but easily expected to enjoy as company on the journey. That would be the driver's mother, whose age could not be a disadvantage, but rather a very real reminder of his beloved grandmothers. And, more than that, she was the mother of one of the most distinguished of the men who made the city hum, which gave her an additional status, and therefore a special interest to the novelist.
But the trip began on a negative note. This was not from any external item, such as a misunderstanding over the hour of departure, or the address of the place from which the journey would begin, or a failure in packing and so forth. Nor was there anything personal: the driver did not seem to have regretted his invitation, or the prospect of extra company, and anyway, if he had, he was too much a gentlemen of the old school, with all the discipline of a good education and the experience of a wartime senior officer, to say so. He was thoughtful, welcoming, and eager to set off, with his mother to collect on their way out of town.
But none of this, so promising in every other natural circumstance, could remove from Toby's soul the dawning of the suspicion that there was something wrong in the process that had just begun. He was quite without his usual delight in setting off on a journey, and began to wonder if he had a made a mistake in agreeing to go. But how could this be? It had seemed like such an excellent plan when it was first heard about, and his expectations of this next step in his unfolding life as a catechumen had all felt as reasonable as they were fulfilling. The north would offer him all sorts of new opportunities for using his talents as well as gathering material for stories. It would be better if Jelena were going with him, of course, but that would follow in due time and meanwhile he would have all sorts of other interests to keep his life full, as it had always been full. So what was nagging at him? What was now taking the spark out of a plan that had at first and for the ensuing days seemed so reasonable?
Part of him, in fact, felt like turning back. And yet there was nothing to turn back to. He had no other job, no other place to live, and he would be out of money before very long. It made no sense, in the middle of the river, to suddenly look around for another horse. He simply had to ride it out, and take what came.
The mother lived in an apartment block a couple of miles south. They picked her up and came back toward the north so as to take the Broadway route east. This was Toby's old main road for travelling to and from the university in the years when he lived with his parents, so as with any return to an area previously experienced, it should have provided him with a headfull of pleasant, or at least useful memories, although not of the sort he would have to work to summon up, as they habitually just came to him. He had known the road as his bus route for two years, then as a stretch to drive on, usually with a passenger or two, and either way he'd invariably had an intellectual recognition of his own identity every time he crossed Granville Street: he may have grown up in the working man's side of town, but he was most content in the other, not because of property values but because of the more likely recognition of his capacity for thinking to be found on the university side.
But the problem with this trip was that there was no change. On the university side of Granville he'd felt what he would have called mentally sluggish, given his current vocabulary for his states of mind such as he could identify them, and he certainly felt no pleasant nostalgia for his boyhood on the eastern side. He simply felt quite dead. He did had enough possession of himself to engage in conversation, first with his driver and then with the older woman, who was definitely a lady, but his words seem to lack any of his customary enthusiasm for telling his own stories or asking for those of his interlocutors. He had never felt less useful to travelling companions, nor to himself.
It was not by any means the first time he had been thus affected in the company of others. He had been given his great warning, of no little length in fact, the night before he had flown out of the Homathko country, to return to the city and his family home and the university, and in each of those locations the warning had been fulfilled: the night of the spirit, the dragon that fed itself on the innermost faculties, often with the most excruciating results, had become the most regular of guests, and the great regulator and antidote to the years of the opposite kind of attention from the supernatural. But invariably in the privacy of his own room, or in the company of his closest friends, or if on neutral and public ground, when he was in control of the parameters and conversation. If he had needed to go more or less completely within to deal with the pain, he had rarely been interfered with by the inexperienced and uncomprehending. Not that his friends had any comprehension that he was a mystic, which was something in so many words he did not actually understand about himself, but, as he did, they could put down his sudden mood shifts to the fact that he was a writer and thus all was explained.
One night, not long before he met Jelena, he had really frightened his girl friend of those months, by telling her something of what was going on in his head before and after a movie they went to, but the pain of the experience had not become a habit in her company, although it may have had something to do with her definite return to her previous boyfriend, who was getting his education at a campus far removed from UBC.
But now, the darkness was behaving and feeling and registering with him as if it were his only habit.There seemed to be nothing in his memory, nothing in his imagination that he could draw to himself for comfort, nor did there seem to be anything to look forward to. Never in his life had he known such a painful beginning to a journey.
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