The Nymph and the Lamp (20 page)

In the apartment, in reply to her listless questions, Matthew had told her the story of their lives, his own with the rest; and it seemed to her, watching them, listening to their talk, that all they had in common with each other or with her was a mutual imprisonment.

Skane's Christian name was Gregory and he came from a small seaport in Cape Breton where his father, a Methodist parson widowed in Skane's childhood, now lived in retirement. Skane had got into a scrape at college and gone off to sea as a wireless operator. The roving life suited him. He liked the sea and he had liked the sprees ashore. He could drink his shipmates under the bar and walk away whistling. He had that lean vitality which defies the aftereffects of alcohol and which is irresistible to women. There had been a good many women, it appeared. (“Does he brag about them?” Isabel had asked contemptuously, and Matthew had replied, “Never. I've heard it from chaps who'd sailed with him.”)

Skane had served through the war in the merchant marine, and had been torpedoed twice. The second time was a bad one, adrift in a boat for many days, and no one left alive but himself and a messroom boy. After that he was transferred to shore service, in fact he had applied for a post at Marina; and now at thirty-four he was beginning to be an old Marina hand. A good man, a little too short-spoken to be popular with the island folk, but a reliable operator, and satisfied to stay, resigned to the life at any rate, not like the young chaps—not like Sargent, say.

And Sargent? Sargent had no story. Just a kid, a nice kid from Halifax. He was only eighteen and he'd been to sea for three years, enough to get a bit of experience; and then, because he was smart at the phones and could do thirty words a minute on that stiff old-fashioned key, and Hurd was short of men and Marina needed a relief operator, Jim Sargent had been plucked from a collier in dry dock and sent out here. Hated it, of course. Anxious to get away to sea. Only natural. Counting the days and weeks to the time when he could go, like all the young chaps—like MacGillivray, remember?

She remembered, and Matthew's repeated “only natural” irritated her. I'm young too, she thought rebelliously. It was all very well for Matthew and Skane. Skane was only a few years older than herself but then he was not “natural,” it seemed. She watched him as they talked of the autumn duck-shooting, now before them. The first flocks had arrived from the north and soon the ponds and the shallow coves of the lagoon would be black with birds. There were decoys in the store-shed, all carved out of pine ship-timber found along the beach, and during the summer Skane and Sargent had repainted them. A fresh supply of ammunition had come on the boat. Sargent looked forward to the hunting with enthusiasm. Skane on the other hand talked of it quietly, with a calm precision, as if duck-hunting were something to be done, and done properly, as he might have talked of rigging new aerial wires or repacking the engine's oil pump.

Carney, presiding over the discussion, leaned back in the chair with the phones on his head, one earpiece slipped off to take in the talk. He threw in a remark from time to time, sucking slowly on his pipe and blowing out thin streams of smoke through his bearded lips. He had been a keen gunner all his days on Marina but Isabel learned that lately he had lost much of his interest. It was, he chaffed, a good way to kill time but it was rough on the ducks. Isabel was appalled to learn that the men of Marina slew ducks by thousands every fall and winter, of which only a few score came to the table.

“You get fed up with eating wild fowl after a time,” Matthew explained. “At first it's a relief from canned stuff and you eat a lot. But after that you'll take tinned meat or codfish chowder any time. By the end of November you're leaving most of the shot birds where they drop.”

“What a frightful thing!”

She saw Skane's black eyebrows lift. He shot her one of those penetrating dark-blue glances which seemed to her so resolute and so cruel.

“After all, they're as thick as gulls, Mrs. Carney—and you've seen the gulls?”

“Would you shoot gulls for the fun of it?” she returned indignantly.

The three men looked at each other whimsically. “No,” Skane said, “but of course the lifesavers do. They've usually got a gun across the saddle when they ride their patrols and they bang away at anything that strikes their fancy.” He spoke as if that were “natural.”

Young Sargent said, “One or two of 'em knock over a wild pony now and then—for the fun of it.”

“You're joking!”

“It's true,” Matthew said with a mild resignation “You find quite a few dead ponies among the dunes each year—especially in the spring. The old ones and the sick are bound to die in the winter weather. But now and again you see one with a bullet hole.”

Isabel gasped. What sort of place was this, where men indulged such savage whims? And again she had that vision of small stations isolated among the dunes, where men and women lived bored to the edge of insanity in the midst of the inscrutable sea. No wonder they were superstitious! She had heard Matthew's tales with amusement. They seemed to her incredible. But now she could believe the worst. What seemed incredible now was Matthew's firm assertion that the lifesavers, ignorant and superstitious though they were, and cruel in their diversions, could be courageous in manning the lifeboat, hospitable in their homes and barracks, and diligent and watchful in their patrols about the island, even in the most bitter winter weather. It was fantastic.

She thought upon these things when, awakened by the remorseless spark at night, and with rain and flung sand beating on her bedroom window under the thrust of the autumn gales, she lay sleepless in her bed. It was impossible to go forth on one of those nocturnal prowls that relieved such wakefulness with a touch of adventure. She stirred, turning hopelessly from side to side, caught up in the squirrel-cage of her thoughts; and when at last they were exhausted, when she could think no more and still could not sleep, she summoned up memories of Matthew and that night in the hotel.

Those pictures came back strongly and warmly now, and the hideous disillusionment of the night in the ship had lost its sting. She was in a dilemma entirely of her own making. Having drawn an invisible but rigid screen about herself, all mixed up somehow with her pride, she could not bring herself to throw it down or even to withdraw it, bit by bit. As night succeeded night, in the long sleepless hours, lonely, hearing the slash of the storm along the walls and roof, she began to wish fervently that Matthew were more like the other islanders, forceful, even cruel in the satisfaction of his whims and desires. Time and again in the small hours, weary, the prey of longings insistent like hunger that melted away her resolution and all thought of pride, yet knowing that morning would bring pride and resolution back again, she started at every creak of the floor, at each rattle of her bedroom door, hoping to see a new Matthew, aroused and fierce, determined on taking what now she was so ready to give.

She gave herself up to these fancies. She knew the very words she would say; the surprise, the protest, the modest indignation, all whispered because the partitions were so thin; and all the while her shameless flesh accepting the invasion like a town stormed in the dark and thankful for a long siege ended. But he did not come; and as the hours drew on she hated him for his continence as she despised her own flesh for its wants. At first light, with the gray stain on her windowpanes, the yearnings passed in a final whimper, and then came cold reality and all the silly pride back again. Matthew stirred in the kitchen. She heard him splashing at the washbasin. She rose and dressed and got his breakfast with the brisk impersonality of a waitress in a restaurant.

CHAPTER 14

October brought the wild fowl from the north, and frequently the gray skies and wild gales from the southeast. The surf on the beaches, never still, now reached a violence that Isabel found thrilling and terrible. It was weird to sit in the watch room, to hear a great sea break on the invisible north beach, and to see the oil quiver in the glass bowls of the lamps. She had supposed that nothing short of an earthquake could shake a heap of sand. Towards the south from the rain-swept windows she watched the beat of the Atlantic on the bar, that narrow defense of the lagoon. Great waves in ranks like grayclad regiments marched up from the south, moving with a ponderous discipline to the foot of the beach, where they broke their ranks and sprang as if determined to smash this puny barrier once and for all. Each flung into the air a wall of spray stained yellow by the torn sand, and then with a snarl of backwash withdrew to make way for the next. Along the whole length of Marina these assaults filled the air with the boom of a cannonade.

Isabel's mind reeled when she thought how many thousands of tons of water fell in each of these attacks, striking upon the island with the force of the great winds. She wondered how it survived. The winds alone were terrible. When rain was absent and the storm blew from east or west it whirled up clouds of sand and swept them along the island like the storms of a Sahara. It was impossible to venture out when they were at their worst, for a man could scarcely breathe, and the blast of sand in the face was not to be borne.

Then they were all besieged, seeing nothing but blown sand like smoke outside the panes, hearing the vicious sweep of it along the clapboards, and the banshee crying of the aerial wires and stays. Even the wild ponies, those tough and shaggy beasts whose origin nobody knew, inured by generations of exposure to all the elements, withdrew in small herds to the deepest hollows and huddled motionless for hours with their heads together and tails to the storm.

When the winds abated the waves raged on, sometimes for days. Occasionally when a high sea made the beaches impassable they saw a lone patrol, mounted on one of the half-tamed ponies from the stable at Main Station, riding slowly past the radio station, usually with a shotgun or rifle held across the pommel of the saddle. On fine days often there were two or three riders together, and then from the small ponds hidden in the dunes to the eastward came the sound of shots. Sometimes the riders halted at the station, hitched their ponies to the porch posts and stamped into the watch room for a word with Carney and the others. With Isabel they were diffident and uneasy and if she were present they did not stay long. They seemed to her a half wild lot, like the ponies they rode.

Whenever Matthew had the graveyard watch, Skane and Sargent set off with their guns, each carrying half a dozen decoys slung in a bag of old fishnet on his back. They were gone before daylight, following the shore of the lagoon towards the east. Isabel, stirring in her bed, heard them depart, and heard too the whistle of wind and the flick of rain that seemed so satisfactory for duck-hunting. After a time, as the east was lit with a yellow and angry sunrise, their shots came down the wind, and when they returned there were limp and draggled wild fowl among the decoys in the bags. The men stood outside to leeward, plucking the birds and letting the feathers scatter on the wind, and they singed off the finer stuff with a poker heated red-hot in the watch room stove.

Most of the birds were black duck. To Isabel they had a fishy reek and taste that defied the arts of her cook book. She would not eat a morsel. The men devoured the roast duck with gusto at first; but as the days went on, the gusto slackened, as Matthew had foretold. The gunners brought back less and less of their spoil, and at last none at all. But the hunting went on, and hearing the dull crack of guns toward the east Isabel revolted at the waste. She cried once at Matthew, “What a crime! A cruel senseless crime!”

“There's no law against shooting on Marina.”

“Then it's a crime in the face of nature and I'm glad you don't go in for it.”

“You mustn't give me credit for a virtue I haven't got. I just got tired of it.”

“Then why doesn't Skane get tired of it?”

“It's something to do.”

She sniffed. “Must a man have something to do?”

“Most men, yes. You'll understand when you've been here a time.”

“What about women?”

He was making a pencil note on the log sheet with that abstract air she had come to recognize in the operator on watch, with his body in the room and his mind five hundred miles away.

“Women? Oh, they stick pretty close to the houses, I guess. Most of them have youngsters, of course-gives 'em lots to do.”

“And the children—what do they do?”

Matthew knitted his brows. “Nothing much. Amuse themselves. Most of 'em learn to ride a pony as soon as they can walk almost, and they gallop about the dunes and beaches. The boys soon learn to shoot ducks.”

“What happens when the children grow up?”

“Well, the girls usually marry island men, or they go off to visit relatives on the main, and marry there. The chief ambition of the boys is to get a job in the lifeboat crew at Main Station. There's usually a vacancy. The pay hasn't been changed since the time of Victoria—thirty-five dollars a month and found—and chaps with ambition push off to Halifax or go to sea. The crews are a mixed lot nowadays. Chaps who come to take jobs in the lifesaving crew on Marina are apt to be a poor lot—fellows from the city attracted by the novelty of the thing, or ne'er-do-wells from the fishing villages on the main who want nothing but a lazy life. As I've said, a wreck is a rare thing nowadays, and except in winter weather a beach patrol's just a pleasant ride.”