The Nymph and the Lamp (27 page)

Then came times when the great silent cold of the Pole reached down and gripped the island and the sea and all was still as death. Then the blood seemed to shrink in the veins as the red alcohol shrank in the thermometer. By day the sky had an odd gray tint. The sun, which had long lost its heat, now lost its last thin brilliance and crept like a pallid moon across the southern arch of the sky. The sea had a viscid surface that gleamed and moved with the waves like the skin of some enormous reptile slowly shuddering with the cold; and because actually the sea was warmer than that Arctic air it gave off wisps of vapor that merged and formed a solid bank towards the horizon.

The dunes had a sharp creak underfoot as if each descending boot crushed invisible mice. The boardwalk crackled. At night the very roof and walls of the station seemed to whimper, and the clapboard nails shrank and lost their hold, letting go with the sound of pistol shots. The beaches became tipped shelves of brown cement with a glaze of ice at the upper edge. The grass on the dunes, brown and lifeless, stood as harsh as thorns. The frosty ropes of the aerial halyards went stiffly up the mast from cleat to spreader like slender rods of wood. The smoke of the chimney rose straight in the air and vanished into that strange sky like the miraculous beanstalk in the fairy tale. The engine exhaust shot forth rings of vapor that looked metallic and solid in the bitter air.

Within the wireless station there was no comfort except close by the stoves. The stove in the watch room furnished the only heat in the operators' quarters and the man on watch had to keep the door closed for his own comfort and the efficiency of his fingers. Their bedrooms were frigid. Skane and Sargent went to their beds muffled like Arctic explorers. A bottle of ink on Sargent's chest of drawers froze solid a week before Christmas and did not thaw fully until the middle of April. Several times the water pipes froze in spite of the heat from the engine room, and had to be thawed with the hot breath of a blowtorch and a poultice of rags sopped in a bucket of hot water from the engine's cooling-tank. The very sea lost its energy in the cold, moving in low swells that flattened and slid up the beaches almost without sound.

But then came another sort of cannonade, the sharp and tremendous
boom
of the thick ice on the lagoon, ripped by frost pressure in the frigid hours of the night. Fortunately these spells of polar weather seldom lasted long. Sometimes the thermometer rose to a point where life was comfortable within twenty-four hours. Sometimes it took two days and nights, but seldom more than that. Then the invisible Gulf Stream exerted its mysterious influence. Then over the whole expanse of frosty dunes and frozen ponds arose an indescribable sound like a long faint sigh of relief. For the duration of that pinching cold the air had been too frigid even to snow, but now snow began to fall in slow large flakes, a welcome sight, and the islanders greeted it as the lost Israelites in the desert must have greeted a fall of manna.

For a time after the departure of the November boat Isabel had occupied herself in decorating the apartment with her mail order purchases, ordered by radio from Halifax and sent down in the care of O'Dell. Now the windows looked decent for the first time in prim white curtains that veiled (though they could not hide) the empty face of the dunes and the cold glare of the lagoon. Now there was a new armchair, and covers of bright chintz over the old one and the worn kitchen couch. There were pictures on the walls; for Matthew a full-rigged ship sailing on a bright blue tropical sea, and for herself a pair of landscapes full of satisfying trees and flowers and vistas of flowing water. She had condemned the map of the island with its fringe of wrecks as too gruesome and taken it down. She had put the littered bookshelves in order. She had painted the kitchen chairs and table a cheerful red, and covered the worn board floor with the sleek bareness of linoleum. On the bed in the inner chamber the gray service blankets had given way to some colorful Hudson's Bay things and a bright blue eiderdown quilt. There was a large new mirror in the bathroom and a glass shelf for Matthew's toilet things.

All of these had given a glow of satisfaction for a time, but soon the novelty wore away. The kitchen was still the kitchen with its inescapable odors of past cooking, its too-familiar array of pots and pans. Like Matthew and the others she spent her idle hours in the watch room, the heart and soul of the station. There was no pleasure to be had outdoors. She had ordered and received some extra clothing, chief among the items a pair of khaki jodhpurs, riding boots, a red duffel jacket and a tam to match. But after a few rides with Matthew and the others in the nipping winds she put these things aside. In the cold blast along the beach her feet had turned to stone in the fine new riding boots and her knees in the taut jodhpurs seemed to freeze.

The men shared her dislike of riding in winter weather. It was a nuisance walking to the stable at Main Station to get the ponies and then returning them again. They went forth each day for exercise, usually singly, and they walked along the lagoon shore where the dunes gave some shelter from the northerly winds. Even then they did not go far, and they came trotting back, redfaced and blowing and making straight for the watch room stove.

There was an end to those cheerful little musicales at McBain's house, although Skane still walked there alone, stayed for a meal, and returned in the howling dark. Occasionally McBain phoned to Carney and offered to drive up with the buggy and fetch him and Isabel down “for tea and a bit of chat.” But when Matthew turned to question Isabel she glanced at the fuming dunes and shrugged, and he returned to the instrument offering apologies in his slow voice and murmuring something about “later on, when the weather's improved a bit.” In truth they were prisoners all; from end to end of Marina the people stayed close to their stoves, and only the beach patrols ventured forth. They chatted back and forth by telephone, except when the wire blew down—a common occurrence—and each night they peered forth at the beams of the East and West lighthouses to assure themselves that all was well.

The sound of the spark no longer outraged Isabel. She had grown used to it, as Matthew had foretold. Often it wakened her in the night, but now she could turn and burrow into sleep again. She had learned the code. It was not difficult—much easier than shorthand, she pointed out to Matthew. When the days grew short and the evenings intolerably long she fell into the habit of sitting at the instruments with the man on watch. He would plug in an extra pair of phones for her and explain this point or that in the Babel of dots and dashes that filled her ears.

At first the great passenger liners were beyond her grasp. They shrilled away on high notes like operatic sopranos, and at speeds close to thirty words a minute. The smaller liners and the tramps were more companionable, droning along at twenty or so; and frequently there were trawlers, rolling scuppers-under out there somewhere on the Banks and muttering away to each other at a childish ten or fifteen. The trawlers were Isabel's kindergarten class, and after a time she could follow the drift of tramp steamer conversations, watching her companion's pencil for the letters she missed.

She learned to send as well. She cajoled Matthew into rigging a small key and buzzer at the end of the long instrument table, and there she practiced with a diligence that surprised the men and somewhat surprised herself. The others helped her, Matthew with indulgence, Sargent with the pleased but somewhat lofty air of a young man who sees a woman trying to play a man's game; but it was Skane who took the deepest interest. He would sit listening patiently while she spelled out in wobbly Morse whole pages of some stale and tattered magazine, or a chapter from that bible of their craft, the
Handbook of Wireless
Telegraphy.

“Stop!” he would exclaim. “You're clipping your dashes again!” Or, “You muffed those dots, ‘h' has four”…“a bit more space between words” …“try to get a rhythm into it, as if you were tapping a drum, say.” Or he would snap, “Keep your wrist
down
.”

“But I can make the dots more sharply when I lift my wrist!”

“Sure! But how long could you keep it up on that big key yonder? You'd have telegrapher's cramp in twenty minutes, and then you'd be falling all over your message and the chap at the other end would tell you to get another operator—the way kids in the city jeer at a broken-down car and yell ‘Get a horse!' You want to do it all with your fingers. God gave you a wrist too, or didn't you know? Forget your fingers. They're just for holding on to the knob. You've got to use your wrist and to some extent your forearm if you want a steady style.”

Matthew, looking on, would smile and say mildly, “After all, Skane, she isn't planning to go up for a ticket.” And she would cry, “But I want to learn, Matthew! Greg, show me how to hold my hand again.” And Skane would adjust her fingers and press her wrist down to the proper angle, and murmur, “All right. Take it from there—and don't try for speed. That'll come with practice. Just concentrate on sending stuff that the other fellow can read. It's like handwriting. Keep your mind on writing a good hand and forget everything else. Now!”

The whimsical attitude of Matthew and Sargent nettled her. She determined to confound them. She had taken it up merely to pass the time but soon it became an obsession. She discovered that she had a knack for it. The nervous skill of wrists and fingers that for years had rattled a typewriter at top speed could be adapted to a telegraph key.

One day when Matthew and Sargent had gone for a walk along the beach she sat at the instruments with Skane, copying word for word with him the messages of a freighter bound for Boston. There followed a lull in the phones, one of those dull periods that came in every watch, when all the ships and shore stations fell silent together as people sometimes do in a busy room.

“Greg,” she begged, “give me another sending test—now, while the others are out.” Obediently he slipped aside one of the phones, and she moved to the practice key. Skane stared at his wrist watch.

“Okay, go ahead.”

She tapped out a dozen paragraphs of the
Handbook,
working earnestly, with the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth. “Well?” she asked eagerly, looking up.

“An average of sixteen words a minute, I'd say, and perfectly done, all but the ‘c' in ‘inductance'—you bungled that. But you've come along. Gosh, you really have!”

She flushed with pleasure. “Don't tell the others.”

“Why?”

“I'm still not satisfied. What's top speed?”

“About thirty words, on one of these old-pump handle keys anyhow. That's fast, mind you. A hundred and fifty letters a minute. When you're doing that, you're pounding brass and no fooling. Of course you'll find—don't think I'm being superior—you'll find that fifteen words a minute come fairly easily once you've learned the code. Then with a bit of practice you reach twenty. After that every word you add to your speed comes mighty hard. Mind you, twenty's the minimum for a First Class ticket and most ship ops don't go any faster than that. It's different on busy shore stations and on the big liners, where at times you've got a lot of traffic to clear off.”

“How fast does Matthew send? I mean when he's not rushed?”

“Usually twenty or less. Nobody ever rushed Matt. He's got an easygoing style, nothing fancy, a good clear fist that anyone could copy all day.”

“What about Sargent?”

“Depends on how he feels. He's a smart kid. Likes to rattle it off at thirty when he's working a liner like MKC—that's
Olympic
—where the ops are top-notch. Usually goes along at twenty-five, though. It's much more comfortable if you've got a lot to send.”

“And you?”

“About the same.”

“You're modest. Matthew says you and a chap named Merton at Cape Race are the crack operators on this coast.”

Skane regarded his bony hands and long fingers with the wisps of black hair on their backs. “I can rip it off at thirty, if that's what you mean. But it's only swank to do that when twenty-five or less will handle the traffic. Matt used to say there ought to be a printed motto in every station working ship traffic—
Twenty's Plenty
. When you're young like Sargent you feel the urge to tear it off as fast as you can, and you get a kick out of it when some poor fumbling Sparks aboard a tramp has to ask for a repeat. Gives you a superior feeling; and you repeat at a painful fifteen or twenty, just to show the chap—and anybody else who may be listening—what a patient wonder you are. It's a game called ‘roasting' that every operator knows.

“I remember when the first German liner appeared in these waters after the war. We had a young chap here like Sargent, just out of the navy and full of hot steam and ginger. We had a few messages for the German and our boy had a fine time roasting the ears off the German's junior op. The chap kept asking for repeats, and finally our wonder boy cracked off ‘Get another op.' That's the ultimate insult in this business, you understand. Well, the German fetched his chief, who turned out to be an old hand at the game. He copied our messages all right and then announced he had some stuff for retransmission to New York. His apparatus was one of those Telefunken outfits that warble like a canary, and he had something like two hundred messages, nearly all in German.

“He screwed down his key to the least possible working gap and he zipped those messages at our hero in bunches of ten, going a blue streak. Clinnett—the wonder boy—was sweating blood inside five minutes. He couldn't use the station typewriter because the signals weren't loud enough, so it was pencil and pad, with a duplicate to be made for every message, a carbon sheet to be whipped into place for each new message, and the completed messages to be torn off and marked with the time of receipt—and all that with the German sailing straight on at about thirty words a minute. I know, because I was here in the room and so was Matt, and we plugged in to hear the German's side of the game. The air was quiet. You could sense dozens of other chaps, ship and shore, listening in—because everyone knew what was up.