The Nymph and the Lamp
THE
NYMPH
AND THE
LAMP
THOMAS H. RADDALL
Copyright © 1994, 2006 Thomas H. Raddall
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Cover design: Cathy Maclean
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Raddall, Thomas H., 1903-1994.
The nymph and the lamp / Thomas Raddall.
First published: Toronto : McClelland & Stewart, 1950.
ISBN 1-55109-576-9
EPUB ISBN 978-1-55109-853-1
I. Title.
PS8535.A27N8 2006 Â Â Â Â Â C813'.54 Â Â Â Â Â C2006-901867-7
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and the Canada Council, and of the Province of Nova Scotia through the Department of Tourism, Culture and Heritage for our publishing activities.
CONTENTS
When the
Lord Elgin
set Carney ashore at Packet Harbor he was already a legend on the coast. He was one of the small group of telegraphers who had manned the first Canadian wireless stations in the days when Marconi's invention was brand-new and regarded by most people as a species of black magic. For years he had served in lonely outposts, chiefly on Marina Island, a sandy speck in the North Atlantic eighty miles from the nearest land. It was a desolate place, the scene of many wrecks, and regarded with equal dread by passing shipmasters and the young men of the coastal radio service. Three or four times a year a government ship called with stores and mail for the lightkeepers, the lifesaving crew and the staff of the small wireless station, and then left them to their thoughts.
Among the wireless operators Marina was rated the worst station in the service, and there was an unwritten law that twelve months' service there entitled a man to a fortnight's holiday in civilization and then a more congenial post somewhere on the mainland. For a decade Carney had watched his juniors come and go. From the moment they landed in grim resignation at his station they counted the days and talked of the time when they could go “ashore,” as if Marina were some sort of Flying Dutchman forever breasting the long seas rolling down from Newfoundland but never getting anywhere. Most of them were young, and all were convinced that a year on the island was all that a man could stand without losing his wits. Carney's clear and untroubled mind after all his time on Marina they put down to a freak of nature.
In the service he was regarded as a fixture. In the wireless cabins of grubby Cape Breton colliers, in the smart varnish-reeking radio rooms of liners out of Halifax, in weatherbeaten stations from the butt of Nova Scotia to the peak of Labrador, men spoke of him as “Carney you know, Carney of Marina,” as if he were part of the place like one of the wild ponies on the dunes.
Men who had served at Marina wore that service afterwards like a badge of fortitude. They spoke of it with a wry pride, and their tales of the island and of Carney passed by word of mouth, by letter, and by dot-and-dash gossip from Cape Sable to Cape Chidley. Even inland, on the Great Lakes, young fresh-water radio operators had visions of a giant with a yellow beard and mild blue eyes, a sort of latter-day Robinson Crusoe who lived with two Man Fridays and a morose male cook on the most desolate of desert islands and was content to call it home.
They said that he had gone to sea as a boy and sailed before the mast in square-rigged ships; that he had helped Marconi to fly the kite that picked up the first wireless message across the Atlantic; that he had been in the Arctic with Peary and Bob Bartlett; that he was ill-educated and yet a kind of genius with gasoline engines, dynamos and the mysterious tangle of switches, wires, dials and knobs that made up the world's greatest miracle.
They vowed that he swam like a seal and rode the wild ponies of Marina like a Cossack; that he was the most fearless boatman in a place where the surf had to be seen to be believed; that on stormy days and nights he liked to stride along the beach with his yellow hair blowing in the wind, shouting lines from Byron at the top of his wonderful voice; that he was fifty or sixty and looked no more than thirty-five; that he had been crossed in love in his youth and had never spoken to a woman since.
Some of this was false, some garbled, and some true. The last was a fable. In the year 1920, when Carney left Marina for his first holiday in years, he was just forty-six; and he spoke to the island women as he spoke to their men, in a pleasant voice that did not distinguish between one and the other, as if they were all made sexless by the barren life they lived. His manner was at once friendly and remote, as if he were separated from the other folk of the island by the mysterious spaces of the ether in which for so many years he had lived and worked and thought.
Young operators in the solitude of Marina found this manner irritating. It was outrageous that Carney should not feel as bereft, as restless and as bored as they. He seemed inhuman. The only women on the island were the wives of lightkeepers and lifesavers, too busy mothering broods of children to notice Carney much. They found him “queer,” and, pressed for an explanation, said that he seemed like a man in a dream. It was perhaps the best description of Carney; at least it could be understood.
In the early days radio work had a dreamlike quality that grew upon a man. As late as 1910, when Carney went to Marina, there was nothing to do but sit for hours with a pair of heavy old-fashioned phones clasped on his head, listening intently in a void. Sometimes for the benefit of new operators who took the modern traffic as a matter of course he liked to recall those days.
“Only a few ships were fitted, you know, before the
Titanic
went down. The shipowners considered it a fad. It cost a lot of money and it didn't work very well. Aboard ship you were a bit of a joke, a fellow wearing an officer's uniform who sailed the sea in a chair, sitting in a cubbyhole and playing with knobs and electric sparks. That was what they called you, Sparks, and they grinned and told you how useless you were, you and your silly box of tricks. Oh, it was hard to keep your faith in it, sometimes. You'd sit, watch after watch, hearing nothing but static, and every half-hour solemnly cracking off CQ-CQ-CQ with your sparkâlike yelling âHey, Mac!' down a drainpipe in the dark. If you got a reply it gave you quite a start. Your fingers would tremble on the key. You'd muddle your dots and dashes a bit. You felt like one of those old prophets in a desert somewhere, talking to Jehovah.”
Carney had been at the Marina key when the
Titanic
struck ice and went down like a punctured can. He talked about that a good deal. The
Titanic
affair had made a tremendous change. After that Sparks got a grudging respect aboard ship, he was even a hero for a time. Before the fuss died down governments had passed laws, and shipowners had to install the mysterious apparatus whether they liked it or not. By 1914 the sea air was alive with dot-and-dash talk. Then came the German war and there fell another silence, weird and different, prickling with the strain of all those taut men listening about the sea; a silence so intense that it hurt, relieved now and then by some ship, attacked and desperate, flicking a scrabble of letters and figures across the void; or a shore station, solemn and purposeful like the voice of God, pouring out a stream of mysterious cipher and stopping with the final click of a water tap shut off.
Carney had taken the war years as calmly as he took the sinking of the
Titanic.
There had been some danger. The island, naked and remote, especially the wireless station with its mast thrust into the sky, offered an easy mark for the German submarine gunners. But nothing happened. Bits of ship wreckage came ashore: sometimes a boat or a ship's raft splintered with bullets, and now and then a sodden ruin of flesh and bone rolling drunkenly in the surf with a lifebelt still knotted about its breast.
Supplies and mails were irregular. The regular system of reliefs collapsed from a chronic shortage of trained men. There were weeks and months when the island crew existed on short rations and what was worse, no news. They seemed abandoned and forgotten, and the strain of their incessant vigil in that evil silence put their nerves on edge. They squabbled over petty matters. Sometimes they tore at each other with fists and claws in sudden explosions of violence that cleared the air of the station for a time. There was one who went queer and began to see beautiful women beckoning over the dunes on moonlit nights, and they had to watch him with care until the supply steamer came and Carney packed him off to Halifax.
But now the war was two years past. The phones buzzed with sea gossip again, musical now in the improved modern manner, dots and dashes on every note from the high canary warble of the German ships to the deep drones of Halifax and Cape Sable and the clear wailing voice of Cape Race. Even Marina's hoarse bass had been changed to a shrill treble. (“They've made a eunuch of us,” operator Skane had grumbled.) But of course these were trivial things compared with what was happening “ashore.” The war had thrust radio forward a good twenty years. The wireless telephone had appeared, and now in one or two American cities there was a strange new business called “broadcasting” that promised literally to set the world by the ears.
