Chapter Three

    When they had left Vancouver five years earlier it had been with great expectations and only one problem: what to do with all their books. Throughout his earlier student years, Toby's library had not been extensive. What he had collected for himself was respectable, no junk, and only some of classics ancient and modern that a serious writer requires to read over a lifetime. People loaned him books they thought a writer should read and he used the university library. But Jelena had gathered her volumes from the time she became literate and had shelved a lot more along the way. Her basement room in her parents' Vancouver home had been a modest library in itself - from which Toby had been given A.A. Milne, to test his qualifications for fatherhood, which obviously was to include reading to his children - and all of these had come to their joint stock after the wedding, to be moved into their first home together, a sub-rented apartment close to the beach in Kitsilano, which they held down until the middle of August and their departure for Jelena's teaching job two hundred miles up the Coast.
 
     For the week previous to the move the apartment living room had to be a sorting station. In the middle of room stood three piles of books: those which could definitely stay behind - a friend had offered a basement - those which had to go with them, and the maybes. The first made the smallest pile, while the second and third began fairly equal, only to have the traveling section grow much faster than the remainder pile. In the end, four boxes stayed and nine headed north. The rest of their freight was wedding presents and Toby's trunk, which held, among other things, his typewriter. The only furniture was Jelena's modest record player. Toby also owned a guitar and a tenor banjo, and each of them had a three-speed bike. Toby had bought his months earlier, having given up his car, and Jelena had asked for hers as a wedding present from her parents. She had ridden it to work, getting to her downtown office, over the Burrard Bridge, in much less time than those going in their cars.

    The modest guitar had been replaced by a better, and the tenor banjo succeeded by a five-string Toby had found in the little music store in the Flats. There were also more books, of course, some of them even coming from correspondence study with an Eastern university, but the only additional furniture had to do with the children. For five years they had lived in teachers' quarters provided by their employers. They'd had no need to buy furniture. Wisely, they had bought a collapsible crib, which had flown before, and flew again when they headed forever out of the north. Except for their personal luggage, all else went by train, to lie in a freight shed until they could decide what to do with it. Jelena took a handful of novels from the family store to tide her over the mystery interval. Toby latched on to his Carmelites.
  
    They were by no means worried about the future. They would unquestionably land on their feet somewhere. Providence might be puzzling, but it also possessed an impeccable mind for getting the round pegs in the round holes. Yet, at the same time, they were not agreed about where they should go.
  
    Toby, in his heart of hearts, was pretty much for Hastings. In the long run, it had to be Hastings, if visions meant anything, but of course it could be later than now, especially considering how fond he was of Sitka Flats and the life there, so much of the arts as well as teaching for the Church. And visions had always to be scrutinized, no matter how wonderfully they might possess one, how delightfully, how irresistibly, they broke the heart and let in some further insight into the mind of Christ and the Virgin Mary, to say nothing of that spiritual companion who was forever hovering about and sprinkling salt and light on everything, one's guardian angel and whomever he brought in his wake. Of course they would wind up in Hastings one day, because he was a mystic and a Thomist and in Hastings there was a new, young, Catholic university named after the Mother of Christ. But Jelena knew the town. She had grown up there. It had been, for all its charms, a catch basin for small minds, stupid factions, and a provincial mentality that just might drive her cosmopolitan husband bonkers.
  
    In the beginning, of course, it had been nothing of the sort. In the beginning, in the 1880's, Hastings was the principal city - by frontier standards - of one of the richest mining regions in the world. Only the diamond mines of the Transvaal had a greater lure for investors, writers, romantics, traveling actors, musicians and prostitutes. The ore in the mountains - silver, lead, zinc consistently, and gold and copper in certain locations - stared at the prospector from the rock in his hand, peeled in shards under the stroke of his knife or chisel, and wove fantastic dreams in the minds of those with any amount of money for shares in the bonanza. Along with the same kind of ore bodies immediately south of the line, the products of these mines, run through the American smelters, provided ten percent of the gross national product of the United States. This was too generous to the Americans, naturally, for Canadian financial interests, and thus came a huge smelter north of the Forty-Ninth, and some more railway. So, in those days, Hastings was notable on the world stage.
 
     But like so many mines, hers dwindled. So then lumbering became the larger employer, and orchards were also a substantial form of wealth until irrigation made the warmer Okanagan the queen of the fruit growing trade, and then Hastings settled, like British Army officers retired on half-pay, into restrained gentility. When people are no longer rich, unless they possess some other genius in their midst, they resign themselves to thinking provincially, not expecting too much of each other, and become more and more suspicious of excellence. This does not stop them, generally, from being respectable, but it does make them resist having their personal boundaries widened from forces within their own community.

    Then, toward the end of the Depression, Rome created a new diocese out of the south-east corner of the political province and made Hastings the see. There were no other towns in the region appreciably larger, and Hastings lay in the centre of the territory the new bishop would have to supervise, travel within for confirming children, bucking up his clergy and religious, and so forth. Besides, the Anglicans had already done something of the same. No new cathedral building was required, because the founder of the original parish, backed by the faith and generosity of his flock built as the initial church a modest basilica, against the day of the inevitable designation.
  
    What is of concern is what, or who, went along with the creation of the diocese of Hastings, that is, a bishop to rule over it, in this case the Reverend William Walter Michaelson, at the time of his appointment rector of the cathedral in Toronto and a genuine priest in every way; prayerful, kindly, and reasonably firm. He was also a builder, and as he had no need to erect a cathedral, he eventually created an old folks home and hospital, setting it under the care of the nuns of those days, a children's camp, and as his last creation before his obvious talents took him to a larger responsibility, a small college. He had never been flooded with vocations to the priesthood, and Rome had suggested that if the sons of immigrant miners and woodsmen could be persuaded to study at the university level, some of them might study themselves into the priesthood. This was working in Africa, so why not in British Columbia?
  
    The college had begun in utter modesty in Hastings, in very small buildings, at the time Toby was then in high school in Vancouver, and it is a fact, interesting to ponder as the future unrolled, that when Toby read about this beginning in a small story in the newspaper, he actually wondered what it would be like to go to university in a confessional situation. And then when he was going on to the classrooms of the ten thousand, sprawled all over the western end of the Point Grey peninsula, he was comforted by the knowledge that if he were in danger of losing the faith he did have among the high-powered cynics of the secular institution he could always take his battered soul to the Kootenays, or south to one of the American church affiliated schools. He had excellent memories of his two months, in grade four, in a church run private school in Ontario.
  
    Now in all truth, although Toby was no Aloysius Gonzaga in his youth, and totally unschooled, thanks to the wonders of modern secular education in the matters of philosophy, theology, and mysticism by book larnin' of the formal sort in those areas, he was about as much likely to lose the actual faith he had in the general Christian scheme of thing as Caesar or Alexander or Bernard Montgomery were to lose their grasp of military science. There are degrees to the metaphysical intensity that make up the operating efficiency of different angels, and in Toby's case his invisible guardian not only came about as powerful as such creatures can be, but he was not entirely invisible. Since Toby's earliest childhood memories, his hidden sidekick had a way of turning up the lights, literally, on any situation, and around the university, given all that steamy intellectual ferment over constantly contradictory concepts, he seemed never to turn them off. Or at least not until Toby left. Occasionally returning in subsequent years, Toby was always put to musing as to why the campus seemed so drab, in comparison with how he had known it.
  
    And as for having his faith threatened, it was really the other way around. He challenged his company. Within his first weeks as a regular on the campus paper, he had found himself one evening at home inspired to crank up his noisy old typewriter and bang out a piece comparing the poisoning of Socrates to the crucifixion of Christ, left it the following morning on the editor's desk, and opened the next day's paper to find it printed therein. He was never moved to write anything like it again, but it was a clear indication to everyone of what basically ran up and down his backbone. Following this little publication, his English lecture referred to the subject of mysticism one rainy afternoon while the class was encountering the metaphysical poets, and there was a significant show of light in the classroom, but Toby prayed that none of it would identify him, and kept his mouth shut. Nobody but nobody was to intercept his own journey to whatever it was he was to write about when he finally, really, simply had enough life and study experience to know what he was up to.
  
    This was a specially intense display of the light. Most of the time, at home, on the campus, elsewhere in his travels, it was of a lower key, but definitely pleasant enough, and reassuring him that he was in the place and amongst the people he was supposed to be with.
  
    Then, after four years of this light and accompanying spirit and all the adventures that went with them, had come Jelena, who doubled everything. And she had grown up in Hastings, in the Kootenays, which had intruded an image and a spirit into his sometime musings on his future, and that also had a doubling effect. Yet these effects had been something he never seemed to get permission from the Muse to write about. At twenty-two he had insisted to Jelena, vehemently as was his wont, that as Hemingway and Fitzgerald had been published at twenty-five, he was sure to do the same, if not sooner. Yet here he was three years older than twenty-five, , stuffed full of experiences with man and God neither of those two had ever dreamed of, let alone been able to write and publish, and yet neither could he write of such things, no matter how much his typewriter might clatter over other subjects, and no editor or publisher had ever nodded contractual approval over the lesser items he had sent them.
 
     So, was he now a teacher out of a job for the sake of his writing? Once could, after all, go back to the city and hang out with the very dear old literary friends and maybe get some inspiration, some direction, and some clarification. Yet why was his first concrete act of looking for a new placement the writing of a letter to the bishop of Hastings, with the result of an encouraging reply saying they should meet as soon as he was settled in the place? Jelena had not been overjoyed, but then she knew that he could speculate, and even make profoundly involved approaches to people and projects and then do an immediate about face. They would work this out, just as they had worked everything out.

    Sister Principal and the pastor and some of their friends came to see them off at the airport. Father Clancy put a wad of bills in Toby's hand, as had his father the day Toby and Jelena got married, and their plane climbed into a clear sky. They were to start the search for the new life staying with Jelena's parents. And perhaps on the flight south they would get a look at the Waddington Range, the mountains Toby had lived amongst the summer before he met her.