The Nymph and the Lamp (22 page)

“You see?” Matthew turned to her and smiled.

“I'll think about it,” she answered, but with so much doubt in her tone that McBain gave his head a shake and passed on to the rocket house.

“Not much to see here,” he declared, throwing open the door and pointing out and explaining boxes of rockets, coils of rope, breeches-buoys and Lyle gun. Isabel lent him a polite ear until, her eyes getting used to the dim light of the single window, she saw a row of objects on a shelf at her right shoulder. They were skulls, each the color of old ivory and polished like ivory by the sands in which they had long lain. The shadowed eye sockets regarded her with a concentrated stare and the teeth had that chilling suggestion of a grin which is the final mockery of human existence. She sprang back, startled, and uttering a cry that stopped McBain's drone like a pistol shot.

“They can't bite,” he said.

“What are those horrible things doing here?”

McBain turned and spat a brown stream through the doorway, “Oh, the boys see one, now and again, riding their patrols, and bring it in for the collection. Bones, too. There's a big dune east of you people that's always been called Frenchmen's Hill. Few years ago some of the boys took shovels and dug on the top of it. Found a man's shank-bone and foot complete, with a wooden shoe on it. Brought it in—it's here somewhere.” He peered into a barrel. “Ah!”

Isabel shrank away. The air of the gloomy little shed had a sudden chill.

“I'd rather not see it, Mr. McBain. Really! Shall we go on and look at the other buildings?”

Outside, she drew in a deep breath of the sunny air. She could not help saying in a shocked voice, “Why couldn't they have left those poor things where they were?” McBain answered indifferently, “Oh, just something to do. I suppose it seemed an idea at the time.” She frowned and walked on. But she was no longer bored.

The boathouse proved the most interesting part of Main Station. The interest was not in the pair of surfboats nor the big lifeboat perched on its carriage, ready to be dragged by ponies to any part of the beach, but in an array on the walls. McBain explained that the “boys” had always tried to salvage a “nameboard” from each wreck; and here they were. It was a strange collection. Some were whole bow or stern planks bearing the ship's name in crumbled gilt; some had elaborate scrolls at each end, some were plain; some were merely stenciled letters on part of a boat strake. For variation there were several ships' lifebuoys bearing their name and port.

“I guess,” McBain said, “you've seen that map in the wireless station with all the names of the wrecks. Of course there's a lot we don't know about. Marina had a bad name in the old times. Some queer yarns—pirates, wreckers, all that. The lagoon had an entrance, those days, and small vessels could shelter inside. People used to come here from the main, fishermen, sealers, chaps after walrus, and find bodies laying about the beach stripped of everything—women with their fingers cut off to get the rings—all that. 'Course a Marina yarn don't shrink with the telling. You don't know how much to believe. Ghosts, I mean to say. I'm not superstitious myself. Nor's Matt, eh? Your husband walks about the beach at night—you know that, I daresay. Something very few of my boatmen would do, I tell you. Alone, I mean to say, and afoot.”

“How do the women feel about it?”

“Well now you take Miz McBain, Janie, she laughs at the tales. But I notice she don't hanker much to go outdoors after dark. I guess they're all about the same way. When you tease 'em about it they bristle up and say they ain't a bit scared. But they are. This here's the house for shipwrecked fellers—what we call the Sailors' Home. Nothing much to see. Cots, blankets, tables, chairs, all that. We keep it clean and ready but it ain't been used for years. We won't go in. But I want you to look in our own crew house and meet the boys. You'll find 'em a bit shy but you must give 'em a chance to say how-do.”

It was a large two-story building newly shingled and not yet repainted. The raw shingles made a sharp contrast with the weather-worn rest of it, especially the old-fashioned windows, whose small square panes were misted as if by a faint breath. Matthew explained that the panes had been roughened and robbed of their glaze by the sandblast of God knew how many winters—the house was the oldest on Marina. McBain threw open the door and they passed along a passage and entered a long room furnished with a trestle table and a number of plain wooden benches and chairs.

A dozen men sprang up and regarded her with the unabashed curiosity of the islanders mingled with that air of faint resentment which is best seen on the faces of troops disturbed in their quarters by an officer making rounds. Isabel achieved a nervous smile, feeling absurdly like visiting royalty. McBain called out their names and each man murmured and ducked his head in her direction. She supposed they had been warned of her visit, for each was clean-shaven and had his hair soaked and combed, and each wore his best trousers and a white shirt open at the throat.

Their ages ran from seventeen to perhaps forty and they were lean and sunburned to the tint of old mahogany. At first glance they were much alike, but as her sensitive gaze ran over the faces she seemed to see the mixed qualities that Matthew had remarked. The island-born, at once bold and shy; the college boy taking out a year to earn expenses; the sailor out of a berth and drawn to Marina by curiosity; the coastal village ne'er-do-wells, the loafer from the Halifax waterfront; and one or two whose faces and fortunes were not to be read, who might have been anything from a preacher dismissed for tippling to an unhappy husband fleeing from a shrew. The wild island life had set its stamp upon them all however; they had behind their boredom an air of coiled energy that could be released in a moment by a call to man the lifeboat, a quarrel, a pony chase, or any sort of mischief to be found between the West Light and the East. It was the note of lurking mischief that impressed her. They were like schoolboys bored with the long summer holidays who sit lethargic in the sunshine and hope for something, anything, to happen.

There was something else about them, something that made her skin feel strange as if she stood unclothed in a hot wind off the sands. As she turned to leave it came to her that the crew house was a little monastery, and she had come into their seclusion, a strange young woman, presumably desirable, and had brought them an awareness of the great lack in their lives. The next thought amused her. She had a vision of Miss Benson. It was a situation that Miss Benson would have loved. But her final reflection was a sober one. All these men, even Matthew and Skane and that shy boy Sargent, were castaways really, condemned to a womanless existence in terms of the most deadly monotony; and this sexual and mental starvation gave them their callous attitude towards all other life (and death) about them, and created the eternal need for “something to do.” She seemed to hear the echo of Matthew's voice in that phrase she so detested on the lips of McBain. And again she had that uncomfortable notion of herself as the Eve who had robbed Carney of his innocence, the innocence that alone had made this solitude endurable.

These reveries, which held her silent as they walked back across the grassy hollow to McBain's house, were swept away by the sight of Kahn and his wife riding over the rim of the hollow from the west and pulling up with all the flourish of movie cowboys in the loose sand before the “Governor's” door. The West Light keeper was a brown man of middle size with quick sure movements and a mild clean-shaven face. His wife was more remarkable, a rather lean woman, taller than her husband. Her face, long and yellow, the face of a woman who has lived too much in a kitchen but who sometimes goes out in a hot sun, was lit by a pair of fierce green eyes that gave Isabel the impression of a farm cat gone wild and peering at her from the top rail of a pasture fence.

The woman made an extraordinary appearance, dressed as she was in her best prewar garb, even to a pair of worn high button boots, a whaleboned lace collar and a broad hat trimmed with artificial roses. She sat astride like a man, with her heavy black skirt and cumbrous petticoats tucked above her lean knees. As the pony came half leaping, half sliding down the steep sandbank her long figure rose and sank in the saddle with movements inelegant but utterly assured; and the great hat, secured to her tightly coiled hair with a pair of long jet-headed pins, flapped its brim faithfully at every leap.
There,
thought Isabel ironically,
go I in ten more years.

There were loud greetings, and while they were all shaking hands the Lermonts appeared in a buggy lurching over the rim of the hollow from the direction of the north beach. Inside the McBain's parlor, with hats and coats off and Isabel's walking shoes exchanged for the slippers, they inspected each other carefully. The Lermonts were younger than the Kahns, who appeared to be about forty. Lermont, whose wife addressed him as Charlie, was a tall fellow in the late twenties with a strong-jawed face and large light gray eyes. Mary Lermont was twenty-five, and although they had been married since she was nineteen they had no children. She was island-born, she told Isabel, one of the Giswells at Number Three. Her figure was that of a well-filled young woman who in a few more years would be inclined to flabbiness. She laughed loudly at trifles, she appeared to have one of those shallow minds that reflect each passing thought like mirrors; but when she smiled at Charlie there was in her heart-shaped face an expression of tenderness that was touching.

Conversation proved much easier than Isabel had expected. She had only to ask a question about some feature of island life and she could relax and hear an answer at great length, compounded of all the voices in the room, but chiefly of Mrs. Kahn's. The lightkeeper's wife talked in a loud voice approaching a scream, and at every statement she leaned forward and thrust her clasped hands down between her knees, giving Isabel the full blaze of those feral eyes. In spite of her sallow features and bony person she gave an impression of great vitality, and it was clear that she was the ruler of West Light. She told a story of several years before when her husband and Joe, his assistant, fell ill with ptomaine poisoning. She had felt ill herself but she was able to get about, and for six consecutive nights she had clambered up the steps of the lighthouse to rewind the mechanism that revolved the great mirrors around the lamp. The weights ran down every three hours and it took five hundred turns of the crank to bring them up to the top again.

“But,” cried Isabel, “you have a phone—why didn't you ask Mr. McBain to send someone to help?”

“What!” screamed Mrs. Kahn. “And have one o' those fellers from the crew house messin' about our light?” She threw herself back in the chair and laughed, slapping her knees and sweeping the room with that restless and furious stare. And everybody smiled and nodded, McBain with the rest, as if the notion of anybody but Martha Kahn climbing those endless winding stairs and cranking the heavy weights were too funny for words.

The talk went on in this effortless way. They were eager to tell Isabel all about Marina, and when they moved to the adjoining dining room the flow of gossip continued over the food. Isabel found a keen relish in both. It was wonderful to eat something that she had not cooked herself. The lifesaving establishment did not enjoy the quality and variety of the rations that came to the wireless station. It was one of the reasons why, apart from Carney, the islanders envied and despised the wireless men, who got such high pay and such fat rations and did their work sitting comfortably indoors. Yet the people at Main Station lived well. The cows provided fresh milk and cream and butter. They kept hens and had fresh eggs. From time to time McBain and some of his men went off in a surfboat and caught a supply of codfish and halibut. The dish of the evening was in fact baked halibut, served with a sauce of thick cream and chopped hard-boiled eggs; and it was garnished with potatoes and turnips and parsnips grown on the island, and not brought withered and tasteless in sacks from the mainland as the wireless station's vegetables were. For dessert there was a shortcake, heaped and drowned in a rich flood of wild strawberries, picked and preserved by Mrs. McBain in the summer past.

It was all delicious; and when the company removed once more to the parlor, and Skane appeared, Isabel sat back in her chair with the comfortable feeling of one who has been well fed and is now prepared to accept the evening's entertainment in a benign spirit of tolerance. Skane wore the soiled duck trousers, the sea boots, the worn radio-officer's jacket with the frayed sleeve braid that she had seen him wearing so often. He was shaved and his hair was combed to a thick gleaming fall at the back of his neck; but she was a little indignant that he had made no effort to dress for the party when even McBain had gone to the trouble of a boiled shirt and a carefully pressed suit of Sunday clothes. She felt that Skane owed it to the prestige of the wireless station to make a better appearance on occasions—and surely this was an occasion?

She was surprised to see him falling into animated conversation with the Kahns and Lermonts. She remembered Matthew saying that the island people disliked him, considering him “uppity.” On this point she was agreed, for she could not dismiss the feeling that Skane considered himself Carney's mental superior and resented the presence of Carney's wife. And now suddenly he was another creature, entering into the cross-talk with easy energy, sending the ebullient Mrs. Kahn into screams of mirth with some quip about sidesaddles, rallying McBain about the quirks of the island telephone system, telling a good duck-hunting joke on himself. He spoke in the crisp educated voice that set him apart from everyone else on Marina, but in telling an anecdote he slipped easily into the pungent island idiom and used it with effect. Isabel suspected a subtle mockery in this, and felt uncomfortable, glancing about the room to see how the others were taking it; but they seemed to enjoy it, and when she looked again at Skane and met his sea-blue gaze she saw only a man genuinely happy and eager to share his warmth.