The Nymph and the Lamp (19 page)
Finally, satisfied, she rummaged in her handbag for a cigarette and lay upon the bed, blowing out smoke slowly towards the ceiling. The racket of the transmitter had subsided for a time, indeed Sargent had stopped the engine itself in order to save gasoline. The sea wind made a whispering sound in the sparse blades of the dune-grass outside her window. She had a strange sense of peace after storm. Now that it was settled that she should have a room of her own it seemed possible to resurrect a little of her old life. She saw the bedroom as another little citadel in which she could cherish her integrity, as she had so long regarded the room at Mrs. Paradee's. There was a mail-order catalogue in the kitchen. On the next boat she would get the things necessary to soften the harsh lines of the walls and furniture, to make the bedroom a sort of nest to which she could retire and be Isabel Jardine as distinct from Mrs. Matthew Carney, the wife of the O-in-C. She ground out the cigarette butt in one of the quahaug shells that served as ash trays in every room of the station, and in another moment fell asleep.
Within a week the station had settled into its new routine like the sand on the dunes after a flurry of wind from an unexpected quarter. As most of the food came in tins, even the butter, Isabel found the art of cooking simple. With the aid of Vedder's book, and after a few unfortunate experiments, she managed to bake tolerable bread and biscuits and to achieve an occasional cake or pie. Only the boxes of dried codfish and salt herrings baffled her. The author of the cook book apparently had been above such lowly fare, and it was Matthew who showed her how to prepare chowder, and salt codfish fried with pork scraps or shredded and mixed with mashed potato and fried in cakes, and the simple dish of boiled salt herring and potatoes that he so strangely loved. He told her once, “I used to say, after I got away to sea, that herring-and-potatoes drove me away from Newfoundland; but it wasn't true, and there's been many a time since when I'd have given a day's pay just for a dish of 'em.”
Each evening she made up his bed on the kitchen couch, and in the morning before the operators came in to breakfast she whisked the bedding out of sight. She felt entirely justified in her resolve to sleep alone but she had a dread that the operators would find out. She foresaw Skane smirking over it with young Sargent, uttering quips about the finicky bride and the unbedded groom; and to preserve the guilty secret further she put on, in their presence, a solicitude for Matthew's every want that pleased but rather puzzled him. He accepted her wifely smiles and touches at the meal table with a fond air, and sometimes when she had been especially charming, and after the others had gone, he turned to her with an air of naive expectancy that embarrassed her. But her embarrassment gave way before the cold indignation that had possessed her ever since that fatal night at sea. At his slightest advance the deceptive vivacity fled from her face, her eyes became the cool gray of a clouded sea, and she turned away briskly to some household task or reminded him in a casual voice that the coal-box wanted filling or that the hot water tap leaked or that something else must be done.
Commonly in stations where the chief operator had a wife he chose day watches for himself, as was his right, leaving the others to divide the night between them. But Carney insisted on the old routine they had followed when they were bachelors all. He had always regarded the custom of married O-in-C's as “a bit of swank” and would have none of it. Thus every third day he took the dreary “graveyard watch” from midnight to eight o'clock in the morning, and Isabel had the apartment to herself. After midnight the radio traffic subsided, and by three in the morning the operator of the watch was able to leave the phones and perform his other duty, filling the station water tank with monotonous strokes of a tall hand pump in the engine room.
Sometimes Isabel heard this at night, and she was astonished to learn from Matthew that all their water came from a pipe and filter thrust deep in the sand beneath the station.
“It's rain water, really. The dunes sop up rain like a big sponge and it settles down to sea level and sits on top of the salt-water table. That's why, wherever there's a deep hollow amongst the dunes, you find a fresh-water pond. The water's a bit brackish, of course, but you get used to it. Soap won't lather properly in it so we keep a rain-water butt under the eave-spout for washing our clothes.”
“The water you pumpâit must come very slowly, through the sand like that. How long does it take to fill the tank each night?”
“Depends on what's been used during the day. An hour or two, usually.”
“Why don't they let you have a motor pump of some kind?”
Matthew grinned. “That's what Skane says, especially after a long session at the pump on a hot night. The engine heats the place like a Turkish bath, even in winter. It's quite hard work. In summer we strip to the skin.”
“You should have told me before. I use so much water. I've been running a bath full every night.”
“It doesn't matter.”'
She frowned. “It must matter to the one who does the pumping.”
“My dear, don't give it a thought.”
But she did. Thenceforth she was more careful with the taps, and when she bathed it was on Matthew's night at the pump, lest the others find her passion for cleanliness a nuisance. The comparative calm of the graveyard watch, filling most of the night, was for Isabel a blessed chance to sleep. In spite of Matthew's assurance she could not get used to the great electric spark. The steady chugging of the engine was not so bad, indeed after a time it had a soporific effect and often she was able to enjoy an afternoon nap. The uproar of the transmitter was another thing, especially at night. Frequently she was startled out of a deep sleep by the sudden crash of the spark. She sat up in the bed quivering at each terrific ripple of dots and dashes as if under the strokes of a whip.
Worst were the brief intervals of silence, and the waiting, knowing that in a few moments, in two minutes, or an eternity of ten, the man listening at the phones would slip a hand to the key and release once more that screaming giant in the engine room. Always she found it impossible to get back to sleep, even when she heard the final blasting
dit-dit-dit da-dit-da,
the signal SK which meant the end of each transmission and which she soon came to recognize. With jangled nerves she sat on the edge of the bed, smoking cigarette after cigarette; or she lit the oil lamp and tried to read one of Matthew's old books. Far on towards morning she fell back as if drugged, and awakened to find the lamp still burning in daylight, or gone out and giving off a stink of burnt wick.
One night after such an awakening, and feeling an intolerable restlessness, she thrust her bare feet into slippers, threw a coat over her shoulders and stole along the boardwalk. The dunes were shrouded in a thick fog and the lamps of the watch room put forth bright fingers, one stabbing the gloom towards the north beach, where she could hear the steady booming of the surf, and the other picking out the white butt of the mast. At the north window she paused. Matthew sat in profile with the phones over his lank hair, staring past the receiving apparatus towards the mast with the curious intent gaze of a wireless operator at work. He wore no jacket, his shirt was open at the throat and his sleeves were rolled as if he had just been wrestling with the engine or the water pump.
In the mellow glow of the kerosene lamps at each end of the long table his bearded face was stern and alert, his strong figure sat erect with a pencil in the fingers, an image of watchfulness, of faith and duty. For the first time, curiously, she saw the romance of his profession. She was aware that a shore station watched over and controlled the sea radio traffic within its range, in the case of Marina an area of thousands of square miles; and she saw him now, the lone man in this remote outpost of the continent, listening, considering, weighing the voice of some ship far out in the enormous Atlantic. His right hand dropped the pencil and went to the key. Across the hall the whirling spark disc uttered a succession of maniacal screams. She pictured the engine room windows lit with a blinding blue flash at each outcry, and the operator on the distant ship, a young man in blue and brass and twisted gold braid, listening in his turn for the far high bugle note that was for him not merely the voice of Marina but that of Canada itself.
She thought of going in, of chatting with Matthew for a time, until she felt more restful and could sleep; but on second thought she turned away. She had no business there, especially attired like this. The boardwalk on this side passed the bedroom windows of Skane and Sargent, both open and both set so low that the men often stepped out upon the walk when coming to meals. What if one of them were wakeful and saw her there? What on earth would he think? She fled back to her bed feeling chilled but strangely elated, as if she had discovered a new freedom that still remained to be explored.
After this, in the warm September nights when she wakened and was restless, she stole out to enjoy the dark. It was exciting. Matthew had described the islanders as a superstitious people, and he related with gusto their tales of drowned women, naked or clad in a wet shift, walking about the dunes with hair hanging long and dank about their shoulders; of sailors in queer costumes visiting each other's graves; of a rider on a great white horse, quite unlike the island ponies, who roamed the island singing songs in French. Isabel had no fear of the dark herself and she found something comic in picturing what would happen if one of those credulous men, returning late from a visit to Number Two, say, and letting his pony seek its own way in the dark, should chance to see her pale form gliding about the wireless station.
If Matthew was at the key, that shatterer of sleep, she went along the north side of the station, past the cook's vacant room, past the operators' bathroom and the engine room, and spied upon him with the mischievous feeling of a child peering over the banisters after being sent to bed. There was an odd fascination in watching him at work, so utterly unconscious of her presence. With the final crashing “SK” he put off the phones and walked across the hall to shut off the engine. She heard it wheezing to a stop amid the faint slapping of the generator belt, and then he was back again, putting on the phones, marking something on the long yellow log sheet with his enormous childish scrawl. He turned once more to his book or his game of solitaire, placing the cards carefully with his big fingers, or shuffling them anew with the immense deliberation of a man who has a long dull night to kill.
He never seemed inclined to read in their apartment, preferring to sit and watch her at the household tasks, to talk with her when she was in a mood for talk, and when she was not to pull on his sea boots and disappear over the dunes towards the north beach for a walk, or down to the lagoon for a swim. The pleasure of reading he reserved for the lonely watches of the night, and then always the book appeared to be something immensely technical, with intricate diagrams, for it required the aid of an old-fashioned magnifying glass clutched in his right fist. He turned the pages slowly, taking up the glass once more with the quaint air of a bearded scientist searching for diminutive molds amongst the leaves.
On wakeful nights when Matthew was not on watch but lay sleeping on his couch, breathing with the sighs of some huge and gentle animal, she stole past him and went down to the shore of the lagoon. Fog was rare in these early autumn nights. Often there were fine displays of the northern lights, marching along the horizon like the shouldered spears of an army, or waving like a gigantic luminous flag in a mysterious breeze. Usually the sky was afire with stars, as she had never seen stars before except in small glimpses through the orchard trees as a child on the farm. Between the rooftops of the city they had always been dimmed by smoke and the upflung glare of the streets.
Here the sky had no limit but the round edge of the sea, it was enormous, and she found a joy in being alone beneath it with the cool hands of the night caressing her skin. Matthew kept a dory at the lagoon shore. She sat on one of the thwarts, putting back her hands to grasp the gunwales, and tilting her face to that intricate display. A few of the groups she knew from her school-teaching days: the Milky Way, of course, and Castor and Pollux, the Pleiades, the Square of Pegasus, and the Big Dipper with its pointers toward the Polar Star. The rest were nameless, a sackful of diamonds spilled over the roof of the world as once she had seen gems strewn with an artful carelessness upon black velvet in a jeweler's window.
On windless nights the lagoon like a sheet of black glass reflected the glitter of all this wealth, so that there were two skies, one overhead and one at her feet, divided by the thin black line of the south bar. At such times the prolonged stargazing gave her a dizzy sensation of suspension between two worlds, to neither of which she belonged. And how true! she thought. The regret for the old life which had come to her so sharply in those seasick hours aboard the
Lord Elgin
had dimmed since in the remembered shadow of Mrs. Paradee. The new life had a certain novelty but she knew it could not last. Soon the weather must turn cold and there would follow months of imprisonment in the narrow confines of the station with the three men. She writhed when she thought of that. And always a melancholy voice emerged from its recess in her mind and asked, What is the end to be? She did not know, and thrust it back. When she asked herself, What do I want? there was no answer.
After six weeks all sense of novelty was gone, and there was nothing to take its place. Matthew's efforts to amuse her, his invitations to ride on pony-back, to sail down the lagoon in the dory for a bathe, to picnic beside one of the small ponds in the dunes east of the radio shack, or to pick a winter's supply of cranberries in the hollows there, she turned away with excuses or merely a shrug. She was prepared to be bored and at times it seemed that she was determined to be bored, like those discontented ladies in Russian novels whom she had once so heartily despised. The operators were no longer strangers. Even her dislike for Skane had lost its pungency. She heard without interest their laconic conversations at the meal table or in the instrument room where, when Matthew had the evening watch from six to twelve, she sat knitting or pretending to read.
