The Nymph and the Lamp (33 page)
She gave a receipt and called Halifax. The spark screamed through the station and over the dunes,
dit-dit-dit-da, da-dit-dadit, dit-dit-dit,
the dots cracking out like musketry, the dashes blaring, an immense all-powerful sound. She exulted in it now. The sensation was marvelous. And when the deep drone of Halifax answered, buzzing a peremptory “K,” she rattled off that humdrum message swiftly and expertly like an old hand at the game. Halifax droned “R,” and there was a momentary pause. Then, “WO?” A smile played over Isabel's lips. She had half expected that. In the gray building at the harbor mouth, which she had seen blurred in the dusk as the
Lord Elgin
carried her to sea, the operator had detected a strange hand at Marina and was curious. She answered crisply, “C's wife.” Another pause. Then the drone again. “Well done.” That was music.
March came in, half lamb, half lion, with a strong blustering wind and a warm rain. The back of the winter was broken. True, the nights were still zero-cold at times, and there were snowstorms thicker than any yet seen; but now the gray folds of the winter sky were swept away more frequently, and when the sun broke through it had a warmth that could be felt on the naked cheek. Each clear day the shadow of the mast, like the lean and silent finger of Time, traced a slightly wider quadrant on the sand from morn to night; but each day the shadow itself was shorter. Sargent amused himself by marking the tip of the shadow at noon, whenever it was visible, with a small bit of driftwood thrust into the sand. He began in February and by the Ides of March his irregular line of sticks was like a midget fence that began and ended nowhere. “When it gets
there
,” he shouted, kicking a spot in the still virgin sand towards the mast, “I'm off for Halifax. Think of that!” Carney shrugged, knowing how far poor Sargent's sticks had yet to go. Skane's dark face had a tolerant smile. Isabel was filled with nostalgia, not for Halifax but for the countryside.
In the valley where she was born and first taught school the apple trees were still black and bare, and so were all the shrubs and the hardwood trees. There was deep snow still in the spruce forest on the mountainsides and thick ice on the lakes and ponds. But now the south face of every farmhouse would be shining in the sun, and the furrows of the fall plowing glittering where the snow had thawed in the fields, and the wet red soil looking as rich as blood. The brooks would be running bank-full, swollen by the thawing snow on the mountain. Boys and men would be going up the slope to tap the sugar maples. The first robin would be whistling on the pasture rail, and flocks of juncos working over last year's weeds in the fields in quest of seeds, and crows flying in slow squadrons to the pine woods in the last of the sunset light. The roads would be rivers of red mud where the farmers' carts and buggies wallowed and no car could stir at all. In the woods the mayflower was in bud, and in sunny places a few in blossom, and children picking them on the way to school, and teachers like the young Isabel Jardine accepting them and sniffing the fragrance that every Nova Scotian knows to be the finest in the world.
The wild geese would be passing north and sometimes you would hear them from your bedroom window, an urgent and poignant sound far up in the night. Flocks of wild duck would be passing, too, flitting over the valley sky like the shadows of wind on the sea. By the mouths of the rivers small boys would be watching for the run of elvers, and dipping them, and taking them in glass jars to school; and teachers like the young Isabel Jardine would regard the silvery transparent things and seize the moment for a grave lecture on the habits of the Atlantic eel. Now, too, the shad would be going up the Fundy streams to spawn; and all along the coast the lobstermen would be making a daily round of their traps. At Lunenburg the cod fishermen would be setting out in their lovely schooners for the first trip to the Banks. Already some of them had been seen off. West Light, fishing on the Marina Bank or passing on towards Quero or the Grand Bank itself; and Matthew had been moved to say, when told of this, “There goes the last of Sail in our time.”
Apart from Sargent's hopeful sticks there was no sign of spring on the face of Marina. The snow had vanished; but the lagoon was still sealed under thick ice, the dunes stretched their brown length east and west without a sign of green, and there were no birds except a hardy flock of herring gulls that had stayed through the winter. When other signs appeared they were a paradoxâa flare of northern lights more brilliant than any seen since autumn, and a white invasion from the northwest, a vast ice field that crept over the horizon and came down upon the island under the thrust of a three-day gale. For miles the sea was invisible under this white mask; and when the first floes touched the beach, closing the last gap of open water, the eye was dazzled by the broad sweep of reflected sunlight.
Isabel walked with Matthew and Sargent to West Light and watched this glittering spectacle from the plate-glass windows of the lantern. Along the north beach the weight of the pack thrust its foremost floes up to the edge of the dunes, but there all progress stopped. The floes groaned, squealed, cracked with the report of cannon, but could not budge the brown rampart against which all the fury of the winter seas had been so impotent. The west bar was another matter. The long spit ran out for miles barely submerged, and sinking gradually into deep soundings. Here the floes inshore touched and held, while those in deeper water moved on. The wind, shifting towards the east, began to press the whole field over the bar and around the west end of the island, a whirling movement that sent the big cakes slithering one over another in the shallows, mounting until sometimes a whole floe rose on edge into the air, swayed, buckled and collapsed.
This struggle, made the more violent by the strong set of current around West Point at half-ebb, filled the small world of Marina with a confused and mighty uproar. To Isabel, even in the safety of the lighthouse, clutching Matthew's arm, the spectacle and the sound were frightening. With amazed eyes she watched the ice field piling up in masses like a spilled pack of cards, grinding its own ruins underfoot and pressing on. And again she wondered, as she had wondered through the winter gales, how Marina, made utterly of sand, without a rock, without even a pebble in its composition, could withstand such assaults for even half an hour.
Walking back to the wireless station she exclaimed, “And this is a sign of spring, you say!”
“Well, you see,” Matthew said in his slow reasonable way, “the pack ice gathers in the Gulf all winter and then spews out to sea. We get some of it every spring. In three weeks or so the first steamer will pass up the Gulf and dock at Montreal, and the port bigwigs will be down on the dock to present the skipper with a gold-headed caneâthey really do, you know.”
“And what about the northern lights? They're so much brighter now. Isn't that a sign of colder weather?”
“A sign of change. They always seem brighter at the equinox, in this latitude anyway. Remember them in September?”
She thought of those unhappy nights when, with a coat over her nightdress, she had slipped down to the shore of the lagoon. That seemed ancient now. She wondered at the passage of experience no less than the passage of time. She had not roamed in the dark since the evening party at McBain's, the first time she heard Skane play, and the spell of his music sent her weeping and passionate into Matthew's arms. She had passed some sort of equinox herself that night. The winter had brought an uneasy pause, a brooding sense of coming storm. And now spring lay ahead. According to the almanacs the vernal equinox must bring great gales and rains before one could enjoy the sunshine and the flowers.
She remembered a mild night in September when, awake and restless, she had crept past Matthew's sleeping form on the couch in the kitchen and stepped out into the dark. It was nearly three o'clock in the morning and the night operator had left his phones and gone to the engine room to pump the water tank. Isabel could hear the dreary suck and clank of the pump, and in a whim of curiosity she had turned along the south wall of the station and peered at one of the engine room windows. What she saw was arresting.
The engine room was an uncomfortable place, for it was always very hot, and usually the windows were kept shut lest sand blow in upon the machinery. In one corner stood a tall cylindrical tank, kept full of water, from which the engine's cooling system circulated. The top of the tank was open, and in the short space between it and the ceiling appeared the overflow pipe of the domestic water tank, which stood in the attic above. Thus when the domestic tank had been filled the overflow began to run into the engine room tank. It marked the end of the operator's nightly labor at the pump, for a few strokes more were enough to replace the water evaporated from the cooling-tank during the day.
On this almost windless night, with no sand blowing, Skane had opened the west window to catch the faint stir along the dunes. But the air in the room was stifling for all that, compounded of a hot reek of grease, of lubricating oil, of gasoline, a smell of warm varnish from the dynamo armature and the queer sharp tang of ozone given off by the spark in the course of the day's work. In this stokehold atmosphere Skane stood naked at the pump. Sunburned by those free and easy summer months when they had “all lived like savages,” and wet with sweat, his figure shone like polished bronze. The pump handle rose to the height of his breast and he stood with one foot advanced, and with one arm thrusting the handle back and forth.
Isabel's impulse was to retreat in haste, like a modest woman, but she was held by the expression on Skane's face. He faced the cooling-tank, looking up towards the ceiling where, any moment now, the overflow pipe would begin to gush. One lock of drenched black hair lay over his forehead, and the light of the single lamp on the wall fell on his upturned face and revealed the intent, anxious, eager look with which he awaited the end of his slavery. All the tense rhythm of his lean body, unconsciously poised in the attitude of an athlete at some crucial moment, seemed to flow into that ardent face.
In a few moments the water appeared overhead and began to splash into the steaming top of the cooling-tank, a thin stream, bright in the lamplight and pulsing with the movements of the pump. Skane uttered an “Ah!” of satisfaction and thrust the handle away from him in one final stroke, made with a savage force that conveyed all his hatred of the thing. He turned towards the door, and in that moment Isabel fled.
Now, walking silently between Sargent and Matthew, and wondering what the end of winter would bring forth here, where nothing ever really changed except the sky and the clouds that passed across it, she thought of Skane at the pump. There was a symbol in the picture that remained so clearly photographed on her mind. We've all been at some sort of pump, she thought, ever since winter came, and that's the way we'd all look if the masks were off. We're all waiting for something to happen. We're all watching for something to break the spell that binds us. For the thousandth time she asked herself, What is it? And again there was no reply. But now a new question formed itself and remained, insistent, in the undercurrent of her thoughts. When?
Sargent's absurd pegs crept towards the mast. There were mighty winds and sandstorms, there were drenching rains. But in the sunny intervals a benign warmth came upon Marina. On bright afternoons the sand hills shimmered and brought back a phenomenon not seen since the last days of Indian summer. Now in the distance the dunes writhed like the folds of a slowly shaken blanket, and wild ponies wandering over the slopes appeared misshapen and immense, like buffalo. Lifesavers riding their patrols from Main Station or making a visit “down East” became giants mounted upon impossible beasts as they drew away, and then in a moment, in a blink of the harsh light, changed to mere dots or disappeared. Bits of old wreckage along the beach were endowed with a weird life at half a mile, rising, twisting, swelling, shrinking, now resembling houses, now trees, now ships. With the return of spring Marina exchanged its last hold on reality for the fantasy of the mirage.
The ice on lagoon and ponds turned dark and rotten. Long fingers of sand blown over the surface from the nearby dunes now caught the sun and burned into the ice and opened channels of blue water; and one wild night at the last of March a westerly gale wrenched at the veined and rotten sheets, tore them to rags and flung the gray tatters along the shores. The last stranded floes of the sea ice, like the dead of a polar invasion beaten off the beaches, changed in the sun to a queer fibrous mass that collapsed in a heap of crystals at a touch, and then melted clean away. Wild duck appeared in twos and threes, and then in hundreds, drifting like dark rafts on the surface of the lagoon.
And now on sunny afternoons Isabel began to ride again with Matthew or Skane or Sargent, whoever was free to get the ponies from Main Station and amble about the dunes and beaches in her company. One April afternoon she and Skane rode east to Number Two and called on the Lermonts. Their station looked very small and lonely, a house and a shed tucked away in a cup of dunes so neatly and so thoroughly that only the telephone line betrayed its presence. Lermont came out of the shed and took the ponies as they rode into the hollow, and plump Mary Lermont threw open her kitchen door and welcomed them.
“Thought at first it was Sara back again!” she cried. “She was here only a minute ago, didn't you see her?”
“No,” they said.
“She must have rode out of sight awful quick. Been down this way every day since the ducks came, with Pa's old seal-rifle, huntin' amongst the ponds. Says you can't git near 'em with a shotgun, they're that wild. Come on in.”
