The Nymph and the Lamp (25 page)

“And there's always Sara,” she teased.

“Unfortunately there's always Skane.”

“I suppose.” It was odd how the talk came back to Skane. “Well, if that girl's as mad about him as you say, it's a wonder she doesn't find some excuse to see him here. I would, in her place.”

“Oh, she used to come here a lot—all the time. After all it's not far, eight miles each way, and you've seen the way she rides. She knew our watch schedule and when Skane was on duty she'd ride up and hitch her pony to the porch post, and walk into the watch room and sit down, as if she owned the place. Visitors aren't supposed to go in there but nobody cares a hoot about that on Marina, least of all Sara. You see, if she'd come when he was off watch it wouldn't be any good, because he'd be in his room asleep or off somewhere with Carney or me. By coming like that she sort of had him cornered—he couldn't just walk away. And you know the way we can keep radio watch and carry on a conversation with someone in the room at the same time, with one earpiece slipped off. She'd sit and talk to him when he wasn't actually receiving or transmitting messages, and he'd answer in a bored sort of way until he got a call in the phones. Sometimes I think he used to pretend a lot of important phone-listening, just to ignore her. I've heard him say to Carney that he ought to tell the girl to stay away, that there'd be some nasty gossip if she kept it up—a flapper of seventeen hanging about a station with four men. But you know Carney. He just grinned and said he and Vedder were safe from the gossip at any rate.”

“And you?”

“Oh, I was right on deck whenever she came. I'd sit in the watch room playing gooseberry. When Skane wouldn't talk to her, she'd talk to me. Sometimes she'd be quite nice to me and of course I lapped it up like a hungry pup. That sounds a bit goofy I suppose but I'm not a blooming hermit like Skane. I like girls and it's something to see and talk to a girl on a place like this.”

“Of course it is. But what do her parents think of it—this passion of hers?”

He shifted uneasily. “Seems to me they encourage it. I daresay they consider a wireless operator's rather a catch for Sara—'specially a fellow like Skane, who's content to stay here and not apt to go wandering off to sea, like me.”

“But she's only half his age!”

“I don't think that matters much to them or to Sara,” Sargent murmured. He added, “It often happens after all,” and suddenly looked embarrassed. Isabel saw at once what was in his mind. For a moment she was annoyed. Nevertheless it was interesting to realize that in the eyes of Marina she herself had made a catch. Poor Matthew!

“Why doesn't Sara come here any more?” she asked composedly.

“She does sometimes, but only when you're not here.”

“Oh? Why?”

“She doesn't like you.”

“But she's never seen me!”

“She saw you on the beach, the day you landed.”

Again that memory of the landing place, the staring women in the outlandish clothes, the air of instinctive hostility. Sara must have been one of those busy trousered figures about the boat.

“Skane still goes to Number Three, doesn't he?”

“Oh yes. So do I. Makes a nice break in the routine. You hike there by the shore of the lagoon. Takes a bit over two hours, walking briskly. You stay for supper—Giswell keeps hens, and you get fresh eggs and sometimes roast chicken—and after supper you sit around the table with the whole family playing cutthroat forty-fives, yelling out the trumps and whacking down the cards. The ace of hearts you play with an extra thump, and of course the jack of trumps you give a better one. But when you play the five of trumps—that's the top card in forty-fives—you shove the card up over your head and bring down your fist from there. You've probably played forty-fives—after all it's practically the national game of Nova Scotia—but here on Marina there's a ritual about playing the big trumps. You've got to make the table jump or it's no fun. The kids love it. Well, ten o'clock's the Giswell bedtime, so you shove off for the wireless station. Giswell lets you have their pet pony, a knowing beast called Sam. It's pitch dark as a rule and you can't see your hand before your face, so you head Sam west along the beach or the shore of the lagoon and let him pick the way. When you get here you simply dismount, tie the stirrups over the saddle, give him a lick and yell ‘Home, Sam!' and off he goes for Giswell's stable like a homing pigeon.”

“I should think he'd stray off with some of the wild ponies along the way.”

“Not Sam—not any pony that's been broken in. Once they've had a taste of oats and chopped hay, and good warm shelter in the winter nights, they never want to go back to the dunes. After all they don't have much work to do. It's a soft life for a pony. I'd feel the same, wouldn't you?”

“I wonder,” Isabel said. She returned to her kitchen to prepare the belated dinner. Poor Sargent! She felt not the slightest qualm over the way she had pumped that artless youth, and she had enjoyed his talk and especially that bashful vote of confidence. I must talk to him more, she decided. I've not been curious enough about their comings and goings. That business of Skane and the girl from Number Three for example. It was like Matthew not to have mentioned it. But how strange—and how interesting!

CHAPTER 17

The people who most loudly profess a love of the sea are seldom the ones who live at grips with it. Even romantic young men who go to sea, the Sargents of this world, become in a few years the Skanes who have discovered that all the romance lies ashore, and that every voyage is a travail to be endured between one port and the next. The people of the North Atlantic coasts and islands, where the winds are strong and the waters cold, have no illusions about the sea. It is their enemy. Their lives are fixed in its grasp, they must battle for an existence, each day's survival is a little victory; but like all wars their struggle is in great part a monotony, an eternal waiting for tides to rise, for storm to subside.

So it was with the inhabitants of Marina, entrenched in their barren ravines like a beleaguered garrison, and climbing the ramparts daily now to watch for a sign of relief. At last it came, for even the North Atlantic must grow weary now and then, and pause to catch its breath for the next assault. Matthew sent the message himself, and smiled at a vision of O'Dell grumbling over the familiar SEA GOING DOWN BAROMETER THIRTY WIND LIGHT NW EXPECT GOOD LANDING CONDITIONS MORNING. Anything could happen at this time of year—even the barometer could lie, or change its mind in a moment.

But the weather held. When Isabel walked with Matthew and Sargent to the landing place in the first streaks of sunrise there was barely enough surf to make a splash on the beach. “You could land in a canoe,” Carney said. The
Lord
Elgin
appeared far out, rounding the tip of the west bar, coming in at half speed and anchoring as usual at a safe mile from the beach. A bleak air out of the northwest searched the beach like a draft in some icy tunnel, and Isabel shivered in spite of her trousers and jerseys and the hooded lammy coat that Carney had found in an empty ship's boat washed up on the south bar during the war.

She admired the fortitude of the island women, dressed in their quaint Edwardian fashions, determinedly feminine and decorous, even to those preposterous hats. She moved among them, shaking hands, murmuring greetings, while Sargent and Matthew hustled with the other men about the boats. Mrs. Kahn was there, shouting right and left in her penetrating voice, and Lermont's wife and the others, less familiar and more constrained in their talk with “Carney's woman.” Only Mrs. Giswell was missing; she was sick with a cold and had not been able to face the long drive on the open beach.

Captain O'Dell came ashore in the second boat, muffled in a bridge coat, wearing a black fur cap and mittens, and looking more than ever like an animated corpse. He greeted the men and whacked Carney on the back, and stood for a long time in sober conversation with McBain. Then he passed up the beach to the women, shaking hands with each one and calling them by name very gravely and courteously. Suddenly Isabel knew why they dressed up for these occasions. To them the Department of Marine and Fisheries was a thing all-powerful and remote, to be worshiped afar, the God from whom all blessings flowed; while Captain O'Dell was the Department's prophet, who came three or four times a year to deliver them from want, to hear their supplications and complaints, and to receive their respect, which to Isabel seemed curiously like worship.

In the home port, when the
Lord Elgin
lay dwarfed by the great liners and idle among the busy tramps, O'Dell was as insignificant as his ship. Her errands about the coast were barely noticed by the newspapers except when there was something dramatic to report. Even the folk whose windows looked upon her jetty merely observed that from time to time she disappeared and then, mysteriously, was back again. To the Department, a complex machine that performed its functions all the way from Cape Sable to the Arctic (and had on its payroll no prophet of whatever sort) O'Dell was just another captain in the lighthouse-supply service who got things done very quietly and efficiently; but here and at the other posts along his beat he was the whole Department and he played the role with dignity. He lent a grave attention to the problems of the island men; he chatted with the youngsters, wearing the smile of a patriarch, patting their heads and pulling bars of chocolate from his bridge coat pockets; he addressed himself pleasantly to the women, giving each the impression that her life and interests were of his deepest concern. It was in this manner that he came to Isabel; but there was a glint of curiosity in his sunken blue eyes.

“Well, Mrs. Carney, how does it go?”

“Very well, Captain,” she returned calmly.

“D'you know, when I saw you go over the side last summer I felt sorry for you?”

“I felt sorry for myself—then.”

“Um! And here you are, looking happy and extremely well, if I may say so. Marina's done you good, by Jove! You're another woman.”

“A bit of tan makes a lot of difference,” she laughed; but she felt uneasy under that old shrewd gaze. What was he thinking?

She would have been mortified had she known. To O'Dell, long past the passions of youth and able to regard them now with a quizzical eye, Carney's bride had seemed a rather frigid creature in those brief glimpses on the voyage to Marina. In truth he had felt much more sorry for Carney than for her. It couldn't last, he had told himself; and all the way from Halifax on the present trip he had expected a radio message from Marina saying that Mrs. Carney would be a passenger on the return. It seemed the logical end to that midsummer madness, a setting-in of marital cold weather after the brief August heat.

Now he beheld the young woman still cool and self-possessed but changed in some vital way. She looked—he searched his mind for the word. Awakened? Ripened? Experienced? Something like ripened. Three months of marriage had transfigured the pale spinster as three months of sunshine would transfigure a fruit long in the shade. It was in her eyes that he saw the greatest difference. Something had gone, something doubtful and fearful—the virginity, no doubt—and in its place was the look of a woman who has found rapture in the arms of a man and calmly expects the marvel to go on, for ever and ever.

O'Dell did not think of it in quite those words. He said to himself: she's taken to marriage like a duck to water; fine well-set-up gel, probably first-rate in bed; thinks she's married some kind of god and that makes Marina some kind of heaven. She's wrong, of course, but how lucky for Carney! His glance strayed down the beach to Carney's big figure, active as any of the younger men unloading sacks of coal from the boat. By Jove, she might be right at that! Carney
is
some kind of god. And when he thought of the Carney he had known so long, the hard clean man, innocent of women, the bearded eking of Marina with the body of a warrior and the soul of a boy, it came suddenly to O'Dell that this slim gray-eyed young person before him had been given an experience that a lot of other women would have envied or at any rate admired. In the light of this discovery he gave her another shrewd glance, a nod of congratulation and approval, and then passed on for a word with young Mrs. Lermont. Isabel, with her face unaccountably warm, resumed her watch on Matthew and the boats.

With so calm a sea there was none of the excitement she remembered in her own landing on Marina. The boats came and went without incident, the men moved up and down the strand with sacks and boxes, the stores at the beachhead grew in their separate heaps. The business of watching all this was dull and cold. O'Dell, having made his round, pronounced his last benison and withdrew to the warmth of the ship, leaving his purser, a sharp young man with a dissolute face, shivering in a lammy coat, to check the stores.

The sky was naked except for a scarf of gray cloud drawn along the southern horizon, and the cold November sunshine struck from the sea a sparkling blue—not the soft tint of summer but the hard deep Prussian blue that comes with autumn and can change so quickly to gray, almost to black, under the canopy of winter storms. Conversation amongst the women at the beachhead languished for lack of anything new to say. There was in them a quality of stolid endurance now. The sight of the friendly ship, the arrival of fresh stores, the ritual with Captain O'Dell, the novelty of being together after months of isolation in the various stations, all these phenomena had been observed. Patiently now they waited the climax, the distribution of the mail.