The Nymph and the Lamp (34 page)

They passed into a severe little parlor furnished after the fashion of McBain's, and chatted over cookies and tea. Lermont's face was still the weathered brown of last autumn. Isabel thought of the winter patrols, and the lone man and his pony facing the blast along the beach. In contrast Mary Lermont looked sallow and it seemed to Isabel a little worn, as if the vacuum of months shut in this lonely hole had drained her soul and her complexion in a single process. She had one topic of conversation, the topic of all the island women now—The Boat.

“You heard anythin' about the
Elgin
over the wireless? No? Pretty near time we heard somethin', ain't it? I got my mail order list made up days ago. You got yours made up? There'll be some changes in the hands at Main, three of the lifeboat crew got enough of it this winter—goin' off to Hal'fax. And the lightkeeper's assistant out at East, he's poorly, thinks he'll take a spell ashore. Ma wants Sara to go off, too, to git a bit o' schoolin' for a year or two. Stay at Ma's sister's place at Port Bickerton. Sara won't have it, o' course. Great girl she's gettin'. And wild as a pony, roamin' up and down.”

Mary's large blue eyes rolled as she said this, and flicked from Skane to Isabel, and back again. “Ridin' out quite a bit now, ain't you, Miz Carney? Sara says she sees you quite a lot. She's always up West. Don't know why, I'm sure.” You do, though, Isabel thought. Skane was putting aside his empty cup and rising.

“I think we'd better be getting along, hadn't we?”

She nodded and rose, brushing crumbs from her jodhpurs and buttoning the bright red coat. There were polite murmurs, and then they were climbing out of the hollow with the Lermonts watching them from the doorway. As they passed over the crest the house and shed vanished with the suddenness of a conjuring trick. They were alone in the wilderness of dunes. To the north, hidden but close at hand, the surf clamored on the beach, and far away on the other hand came the subdued murmur of the south bar. Behind them only the tip of the radio mast could be seen. Before them the telephone poles and wire ran on and vanished in the mirage towards Number Three. They rode for a time without speaking. The saddles creaked, the feet of the ponies whispered in the sand.

“Why doesn't the sand fill up hollows like that?” Isabel asked, to break the silence.

“Like Number Two? Well, if you'd noticed, those dunes around it are well anchored by tufts of marram and creeping stuff like beach pea. The bare dunes, like those over there”—he pointed with his whip—“are the roving kind. A wind from one quarter blowing steadily for days will shift 'em bodily. That's why from time to time the patrolmen find bones and bits of old wreckage that must have been buried for years, centuries perhaps. Look here, let's ride over to Old Two. It's only a couple of miles.”

“All right. What's Old Two?”

“The original Number Two. You'll see what happens when a big dune shifts. The house was built in a hollow, secure from the weather, and for years it was all right. Then somehow the wind began to eat under the grass tufts to the east of it. Probably some of the wild ponies had kicked a hole there and given the wind a start. Anyhow the sand began to shift. Not much at a time, you understand. A few tons, perhaps, whenever a gale blew from the east. The chap at Two battled with it for a year building a fence of driftwood to hold it back, and so on. Might as well have tried to fence off the sea at low tide. Then the Governor got alarmed—it was fifty or sixty years ago, before McBain's time, but everyone knows the tale, it's an island classic. The whole island crew had a go at stopping that dune—even tried shoveling it back. Finally they had to give up. The government built another station farther west—that's New Two, where we've just been. They cleared everything out of Old Two and let it go.”

Skane led the way past a succession of small ponds edged with reeds and a thin turf covered with cranberry vines. They passed under the telephone line, ducking their heads, and rode up the shoulder of a bare sand hill. Skane reined up, and Isabel, drawing abreast, saw, in a shallow ravine below, the gable end of a roof. There was a glimpse of beach at the mouth of the ravine and a white flash of surf. She regarded the protruding bit of house and laughed. “It looks a bit silly, doesn't it? Like something you'd see in a child's sandbox.”

They rode down to it and dismounted. The dune had buried the house all but that end of the roof and the gable, where an empty window frame stared like a square black eye.

“That's the attic window,” Skane remarked. “Sargent and I climbed in there one day and went down inside the house—like going down a mine. All the other windows are intact—they'd nailed boards over 'em as the sand rose about the place, hoping I suppose that some day the dune would hump itself east again. Sargent thought it a fine lark. He was like a kid exploring a cave.”

“I'd love to see it, Greg,” she said impulsively. “Do take me in.”

He fastened the ponies to a stout balk of wreck timber and crawled inside the window. Isabel followed, and as she scrambled to her feet Skane lit a match. In its yellow flare she could see a drift of sand along the attic floor, blown through the open window. They passed down a narrow flight of steps and explored four small bedrooms. The walls were covered with a simple flowered paper, stained with damp and peeling away in rotten strips.

“They took out all the furniture when the house was abandoned, of course,” Skane said. In the musty atmosphere of the empty rooms, where every floor had a layer of fine sand and all the timbers of the frame were held in the dead grip of the dune itself, Skane's voice had the dull hollow echo of a grotto. The fuzzy radiance of the match threw their shadows across the farther wall, a pair of giant grotesques.

As they passed on down the main stairs to what had been the ground floor Isabel exclaimed, “Now I know what a diver feels like inside a sunken ship! These stairs—they're built like a ship's companionway—so steep and narrow.”

She laughed nervously. “I find it a bit eerie. It's so cold and the air has such a wet feel. I wouldn't be surprised to see an octopus or something else slimy and horrible coming out of a corner.” She slipped a hand in his arm and kept close to him as he moved about the rooms, plucking matches from his jacket pocket with his free hand and striking them. In the lowermost cavern, dank and chill as a tomb, Skane rattled the knob of the kitchen door. “You know it's quite right what you said about it being like a sunken ship. That's the way it impressed me before. You feel as if you could walk out of this door straight into Davy Jones's locker.”

“Don't!”

“Oh, it's quite all right. Sargent and I opened the door out of curiosity, half expecting to see the corpse of a sailor with his hand on the other knob; but there's a heavy storm door beyond, nailed shut from the outside.”

“Ugh! Let's go back, please.”

“Let's give it a good look while we're here. See that shelf in the corner. That's where they used to stand their water buckets—you can still see the round mark on the paint. They didn't have kitchen pumps in those days—had to get all their water from a small pond, back there towards the south. Sargent and I found an old puncheon sunk flush with the sand at the edge of the pond, where they used to dip their pails.”

He wandered about the lower rooms, striking matches, examining walls and ceilings with an interest that Isabel could not feel. She was aware of a chill horror creeping through her flesh. She moved step for step with him. On the wall their shadows were one.

“Those old chaps didn't leave a thing when they cleared out, did they? Not even a picture on the wall. Natural, of course. When you've lived for years with anything, even a simple object like a stool that you could replace in twenty minutes with an ax and a sharp knife, you wouldn't leave it in a place like this to be buried alive.”

At these words Isabel quailed. She tried to force calmness into her voice.

“Do let's go, Greg—now! I'm frightened. It's silly but I actually am.”'

“Eh? Oh, nonsense! There's something I want to show you. Sargent and I found a bit of old newspaper somewhere down here. Where did we chuck it? Quaint thing—a Boston paper with a column headed ‘Latest News from the War,' and a long account of the battle of Bull Run, July, 1861.”

He stepped away from her to look in a corner, holding the match low, and in that moment it went out. The darkness was intense. It was something wet and solid. Isabel stepped forward and groped uncertainly for the comfort of his touch. It was not there. She stretched out her arms. He had vanished. She listened. There was not a sound. She screamed “Greg!”

“Yes?” he said, quite near at hand, but slightly behind her, not where he had been before. “It's so dark—it's horrible! Why don't you strike another match?”

“I'm sorry, I haven't got any more.”

She heard him step towards her and she turned and caught hold of his jacket. She clung to him, shuddering and sobbing, “Take me out! Take me out!”

Skane put an arm about her and they groped their way to the main stairs. She could scarcely breathe. It seemed to her that the walls were closing in. Under the mass of sand, in the sinister darkness of the house, she seemed to feel the cold clutch of Marina itself, the evil sea-monster with its belly full of wrecks and dead men's bones and still unsatisfied. She was almost fainting when at last they emerged in the fresher air of the attic and saw the shaft of sunlight through the empty window frame. In a few more moments they were outside, regarding the patient ponies and the blue V of sea between the dunes.

Isabel leaned against the curled and rotten shingles of the gable as if she dared not trust her legs. Skane's arm was still about her. The draft from the sea blew cold on her damp forehead. It vexed her to think that in a spasm of claustrophobia she had behaved like a nervous child. The fear had gone, but now there was another sensation running swiftly through her nerves. She turned to Skane instinctively, not moved by fear any more but as if those frantic moments in the darkness had released some other emotion that required his presence close to her. She did not try to think what it was. The face she turned to him was the wondering face of a dreamer absorbed in a vision still obscure but of an immeasurable importance, and whose end she must know.

Skane did not speak. His arms clasped her swiftly and his lips found her mouth. Isabel stood in an attitude of utter submission, with eyes closed and hands at her sides. Skane's lips were hard and fierce. All the repressed hunger of his long monkhood on Marina seemed to find expression in the kisses he wrenched from her trembling mouth. At last he paused. She opened her eyes and met his dark blue gaze. There was no hostility in it now, no smiling cynicism, no cool appraisal, none of the things she had seen and hated in the past; only a need that tortured him, and a demand that was not to be denied. Even had she wished to deny, there was nothing in her experience to enable her to cope with it easily and expertly as Miss Benson might have done; and all her cool integrity of other days, the inheritance of a Presbyterian conscience, the very knowledge of good and evil, were submerged and lost in a quick surge of emotion. Her one conscious thought was that the long frustration of the winter months had led in some mysterious way to this encounter and this moment, and now that it had come to crisis she might find relief.

She was aware of a new and urgent caress, and she closed her eyes.

“Not here,” she said faintly. “Not in this awful place.”

Skane slipped an arm beneath her knees and carried her slowly up the ravine. The murmur of the sea receded. She felt herself carried up a slope and down another that seemed to fall quite steeply under Skane's feet. She opened her eyes for a moment and saw a small pond in a sandy bowl. It was one of the innumerable and nameless ponds from which the wild ponies drank and where they took shelter from storm. The dunes sloped down to it in an almost perfect funnel like the crater of a small volcano, covered with spire-grass and beach pea. The water was shallow and clear and fringed with reeds, and the margin was pitted by the sharp hoofs of wandering ponies. For a distance of perhaps four yards about the rim of it a thin peat had formed in the course of ages, now covered with short grass and cranberry vines and already showing a hint of green. In one place a gleaming disc in the grass revealed the sunken puncheon of which Skane had spoken. It was the former well of Old Two.

The turf by the pond was soft underfoot and Skane set her down carefully upon it. She did not move. She lay relaxed and quiet in the grass, with her face averted and eyes closed, the attitude of one wearied of struggle and submitting herself to the Fates. There was no further word. Everything had been said in the look that passed between them at the gable of Old Two. The afternoon sun fell hot on the grass where they lay. The sea breeze merely stirred the spire-grass on the crater rim. A diminutive sandpiper, one of the spring arrivals, flitted among the reeds and watched them curiously. Isabel was not conscious of her clothing, or of being unclothed. There came a moment when she felt the sun's warmth on her thighs and then she was caught up in Skane's passion and her own wild longing for oblivion.

An hour passed, or it may have been two. Like a man long parched in a desert Skane drank deeply of the spring he had found, relaxed for a time, and drank again. In the toss and quiver of these ecstasies there was nothing to mark the passage of time. Once in a supreme moment with her head flung back, Isabel opened her eyes and saw framed in the blue circle of sky a lone gull, very white and noble in the sunshine, wheeling slowly and then dipping towards the west. Her eyes closed, and after a time Skane saw tears running down her cheeks.