Sea of Tranquility

Once in Halifax, Edwin stays at a boarding house and watches people and boats at the harbor through his window. Eventually, he takes art classes and learns to sketch. After six months, a man named Reginald arrives.

Edwin follows Reginald to his newly-purchased farm out west in Saskatchewan. They travel by train, and Edwin enjoys the scenery until it becomes endless prairies. The farm is muddy, and Edwin feels unsettled. The men drink and talk about reaping, Edwin having little idea about how to run a farm.

Chapter 3 begins a month later, during which Edwin has been drinking on Reginald’s farm. Edwin rides a train to Victoria, marveling at the Rocky Mountains along the way, and meets up with Thomas, a friend of his brother, Niall. They have tea in a hotel, talk about Niall, and Edwin thinks about Britain owning the wilderness outside the window.

This chapter is a flashback to the dinner party where Edwin shared his radical ideas. His parents were born in India, and his mother romanticizes “British India” (14) over dinner. Edwin notes that Indian people are not fond of colonial rule and expands into condemning British colonialism generally. His brother, Gilbert, mentions that their ancestor was William the Conqueror, which Edwin derides. His father takes offense to Edwin’s jabs at their ancestry and sends him to his room.

Later that night, Gilbert comes to Edwin’s room to tell him their father’s punishment. Edwin is to leave for Canada earlier than expected—in a week—and his remittance is conditional on his staying out of England. Edwin calls this exile. Gilbert believes their father will relent eventually.

In Victoria, Thomas is snubbed by the British transplants—the other second sons. He decides to go north, up Vancouver Island, to his uncle’s timber company, and Edwin decides to go with him. Edwin is homesick and overwhelmed by the forest and ocean. The two men take up residence in a boarding house.

While Thomas goes to the logging camp, Edwin hangs out around the beach and the porch, sketching, watching boats and people, and playing chess. He does this for several weeks, rejecting Thomas’s invitations to the camp.

One day in September, Edwin meets two Indigenous women on the beach. Only one returns his greeting. The other looks at him coldly. He wants to speak out against colonization but cannot come up with the right words. Edwin decides to walk 100 paces into the forest.

When Edwin enters the forest, he decides to walk to a clearing with a maple tree. There, he sees a priest. They exchange greetings and names, and the priest, Roberts, invites Edwin to visit his church in Caiette. Edwin moves forward, and the chapter ends in an em-dash.

This chapter begins with an em-dash, continuing the previous sentence. Edwin’s sight is overwhelmed with darkness. He feels like he is in a large place, surrounded by people, and hears a violin. Next, he hears a strange sound, and the chapter ends in an em-dash.

Edwin regains his senses on the beach after stumbling out of the forest. He vomits and then wades out into the water to wash himself. A wave knocks him over, soaking him. When he returns to the beach, he sees Roberts enter his church.

Edwin enters the church and talks to Roberts, admitting he felt something strange in the forest. However, Edwin doubts his experience of the darkness and sounds, recalling how he fainted as a child in school. Edwin also has his doubts about Roberts’s story and starts to inquire about the lack of boats bringing him to or taking Father Pike, the priest Roberts has told him he was filling in for, away from the island. When Edwin leaves the church, he sees Father Pike walking in the distance and Roberts fleeing. Later, the reader learns that Roberts is Gaspery, the time traveler, in disguise.