The Nymph and the Lamp (47 page)

There was no difficulty on any point. The fortune wheels clicked merrily, the housie-housie games collected a shower of dollars and gave out cheap Indian blankets and aluminum ware, a game of Crown-and-Anchor did a roaring business with the war veterans; and the Hawaiian young ladies twanged their ukuleles, waggled their bosoms and bottoms, and shivered in the air of three frosty Canadian nights.

It would have been entertaining to hear Brockhurst's comment on these matters. Isabel saw and spoke to him several times in connection with the school art exhibit. She was friendly but distant and he did not attempt to close the gap. He had his old satirical manner. As they went over bundles of drawings and water colors she had a clear impression that he regretted ever having made that confession of bourgeois sentiment.

Fair Week reached its climax on Saturday when the entire population of miles of farmland came to town to do its weekly shopping, to see the prizes awarded, to take a last look at the exhibits, to submit to a final fleecing in Faker's Row, and to watch and applaud the fireworks that brought the show to its brilliant end. It was a busy day for everyone, especially the Ladies' Aid of the church, who had set up a dining room in a shed near the gate. The profits were for church funds and the ladies did a tremendous business from noon until late in the evening. Mrs. Hallett as a zealous member of the Aid was there all day. Hallett himself was in charge of the field crop exhibits in the main building. He turned up at the farm to milk his cows just as Isabel was making a lone meal in the kitchen.

He looked in the kitchen doorway. “Goin' up to see the fireworks, ain't you? Want a ride in the buggy? I'll be off again as soon's I'm done milkin'.”

“Don't bother about me,” she said, pouring tea. “I've got to change my clothes. Besides the walk will do me good.” She made a leisurely meal of it and washed up the chinaware and put it away. It was a relief merely to be able to do something slowly after the long rush; and the quiet of the empty house was balm for the past week's clamor of voices, the furious clatter of the typewriter and the constant jangle of the telephone bell.

She went upstairs, washed, and changed into a new tweed suit, with a pair of warm stockings and her walking brogues. She had decided lately to do her hair in a new way, with two thick plaits drawn forward like a gleaming brown coronet, and like every woman who clung to long hair in this postwar era she had found it very difficult to get a hat to fit over it. The craze for bobbed hair was almost universal and the millinery trade was turning out a tight felt helmet that made any gathering of women look like a parade of the Amazons. She put on her brown tam and wondered if she should take a coat.

Hallett had finished his chores and she heard him washing up in the kitchen. On her way along the upper hall towards the stairs she heard his voice at the front door, shouting, “Man to see you, Miss Jardine!” The door slammed. As she came down the stairs she heard his retreating steps on the gravel walk. She was smiling to herself and wondering what she should say to Brockhurst when she saw a tall figure in the light of the lower hall. She stopped sharply. She gasped. It was Skane. Skane in a well-tailored blue suit, in a crisp white shirt and a smart winecolored tie. Skane tossing his hat and topcoat on the hall rack and turning, smiling up at her with his teeth very white in the dark face. Skane with his black hair neatly trimmed and parted and brushed. A handsome and urbane and incredible Skane standing there in the Hallett hall as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and as if he had known that she would be coming down the stairs at that moment and must walk straight into his arms.

Isabel's knees felt weak. She put a hand on the rail. She could not bring herself to move further or to speak. In the painful silence the clock in the parlor made the loud hacking strokes of an axman in the woods.

“It's been years,” Skane said.

Isabel came down another two steps and halted again, breathing deeply and quickly as if the effort had been violent. She could not take her eyes from that eager upturned face. Skane moved to the foot of the stairs and put a hand on the polished oak ball of the post. The staircase was steep and narrow in the style of country houses and she was suddenly conscious of the shortness of her skirt. She was in what Brockhurst in one of his military humors would have called an exposed and untenable position and she must either advance or retreat. She came down swiftly to the third step from the bottom and paused again with a hand stretched back on the stair rail, as if she were ready to fly at a touch.

Skane gave his head a quick short toss and chuckled. He had always understood her better than anyone she had known and she saw in the whimsical set of his lips a recognition of her dismay and a promise of forbearance on his part.

“Well, Isabel?”

“Greg!” She poured out her breath on the word, so that it was not a name at all but a long-drawn cry of reproach. “How did you get here?”

He shrugged his elegant blue shoulders and grinned. “That's quite a story. As good as Sherlock Holmes.” He cast a significant glance along the lower hall and then up the stairs behind her. “Are we …er …is there anyone else around who might be interested?”

“I'm alone, if that's what you mean,” she answered reluctantly.

“Then suppose we sit down somewhere like civilized people.” There was a note of the lordly male in that and she felt a little indignant, as if she were a child being delicately reproved for sulking on the stairs.

“Very well,” she replied haughtily, and walked down the remaining steps and past him into the parlor. “Will you sit there?” She indicated a chair and took another well removed on the farther side of the room. Skane sat, with his hands in his trousers pockets and stretching out his long legs. He still wore that curious smile, and his eyes had a look that she remembered too well for the dignified calm that she so desperately wanted now. Hallett had lit the tall brass lamp on the parlor table before going out, and its shade cast a warm yellow glow upon the lower part of the room. Through the west window as Isabel walked to her chair she could see the distant glow of the fair.

“I'll tell you how I found you,” Skane said crisply, “and then perhaps you'll tell me, darling, why I had to look so long for you, which is much more important. I'll begin at the beginning and state that I left Marina in the
Elgin
on August thirtieth—a detective story must be precise—and arrived in Halifax on the following evening full of joyous anticipation, as you may suppose. In the morning I bought a suit of hand-me-downs and slicked up a bit, and then I made straight for the office. Hurd gave me the full treatment—the right hand of fellowship and the keys more or less of the city. I had to give him a full account of things on Marina and then listen to a long discourse on modern trends in radio before I could get to my point. Please don't look so alarmed—I was very discreet. I said quite casually that I'd an important message for Mrs. Carney and if Hurd would let me have her address I'd be on my way.”

He paused and put his head back, gazing at the ceiling. “I should have known what the answer would be. It was in the way you'd said good-by to me. It was in your face and manner that afternoon by the pond when you refused to face the issue between Carney and me, when you asked me to leave the island. Still, I couldn't believe it. And when Hurd said he didn't know where you'd gone, that you'd disappeared from the hospital without a trace, I thought he was lying. It was a temptation to slam my fist into that smug face of his. But that wouldn't do, of course. On the way out I stopped to speak to his secretary—that blond creature, you must know the one I mean, she has a come-hither look—and I told her what I'd told the boss, that I'd an important message for you, that sooner or later you'd get in touch with the office, and she must let me know at once. I said I was going to spend part of my leave with my father in Cape Breton and I left the address.

“Before I left the city I phoned all the hotels asking for a Mrs. Matthew Carney or a Miss Isabel Jardine, and I drew a blank. Then I got from the city directory a list of boardinghouses and I waded through it. Where there wasn't a phone I called in person. It took me nearly a week and made me the friend for life of half a dozen taxi drivers. The only thing I got out of it was at a place on the shabby end of Hollis Street…”

“Ah!”

“…where a woman with the face of a third-rate Lady MacBeth told me that a Miss Jardine used to rent one of her rooms.”

“What else did she say?”

“Nothing, except that you'd left almost exactly a year ago.”

“Then she slammed the door. I played with a notion that you might be there and had told her what to say, but something in her manner…”

“I see,” Isabel said coldly. “And what then?”

“As a last resort I went to the hospital and talked to the nurses you'd had, but they knew no more than Hurd. So I shoved off for Cape Breton. I spent a week with my father, and visited a number of old friends and relatives. Father lives a quiet life—he's a retired parson, I think I told you that. Most of the time he's fathoms deep in books, translating Gaelic poetry and that kind of thing. He's been preparing for years a collection of verse and folklore of the early Highland immigrants into Nova Scotia. A good many people up there still speak Gaelic, I suppose you know that. Well, after a week I couldn't stick it any more. I'd been away too long. Everyone seemed a bit strange. The place was as lonely to me as Marina before you came. There was no word from Halifax. I had two months' leave and a quarter of it was gone. I'd told Hurd I wasn't going back to Marina and he'd offered to get me a station up the Gulf—as O-in-C, you understand. But the more I thought of it the less I liked it.

“There's a lot of sense in Hurd's raving about the future of radio. I couldn't help feeling that there might be something in it. And I didn't want to end my life like Carney, pounding brass in some Godforsaken hole for the rest of my days. Anyhow I went to Montreal and hunted up a fellow I used to know, a former op named Hartigan. He'd quit the sea and gone into some sort of electrical business, selling toasters and irons and fancy lamps and that kind of thing; and there was a sort of workshop at the back where he had two men busy putting radio sets together, from his own design. It was a cluttered little place; the back windows were shut in by high buildings, there wasn't much daylight, and among all that radio apparatus the two chaps looked like gnomes in a wizard's cave. But Hartigan was enthusiastic. His sets were selling like hot cakes and the craze was spreading all the time. He said there was a fortune in it.

“He talked about getting in on the ground floor and using our technical know-how and so on, and it didn't take him long to convince me I should quit pounding brass and go into the business with him. There's one thing about service in a place like Marina, you can't spend money and you gather a bit of good green moss in the bank. I had nearly thirty-four hundred dollars and I put it into the firm. I put myself in, too, working away with the others. It's interesting stuff—it's pure H. G. Wells compared with that antiquated gear on Marina—and the basic principles are the same as in radiotelegraphy. We got another shop right away, with a better show window and a good-sized place at the back where we can put the sets together. We've got three men working there now besides ourselves, and we've got a couple of girls in learning to do the soldering.”

During this recital Isabel sat erect and tense, gripping the chair arms and pressing her knees together, the picture of a woman surprised and cornered and watching warily for some chance to escape. But the old revealing flush was on her face and it seemed to envelop her whole flesh; she had a dismaying sensation of defeat from within, and of Skane's complete awareness of the fact. He talked on easily and pleasantly, meeting her gaze now and then, as if he had merely dropped in for a chat. And between them, all but visible, hung those passionate memories of Marina which were so much more real than anything else in the room.

“It isn't all work,” Skane went on lightly. “There's quite a bit of fun in the game. If you want to sell radio sets you've got to give the public something to listen to. Of course the Americans are going strong with WGY and KDKA and there are a good many smaller outfits that you can pick up here, but you've got to have something local for the benefit of the little crystal-set listeners. So Hartigan had got together with two or three other people in the business, and they'd fixed up a small broadcasting outfit on the top of an office building and got a government license. It's not much of a thing, mostly built around an experimental army radiotelephone transmitter that they got cheap from surplus war stores, but it works. There's no paid staff. They broadcast in the evenings, impromptu stuff, phonograph records, talks, news, that sort of thing. One or two girls come in, and I play the piano and we sing ‘Alouette' and ‘En Roulant Ma Boule' and ‘Shenandoah'—all sorts of things like that, that haven't any copyright. It's a great lark. You'd enjoy it—like one of those evenings at McBain's. By the way, you don't seem to be quite enjoying this. I'm not boring you?”

Isabel stirred. “No, it's all very interesting. But none of this explains how you found out I was here.” Skane waved a hand.

“All in good time. But I'll get on towards the point. You were constantly in my thoughts. It was maddening not to know where you'd gone. There was a picture on the wall of my bedroom, a cheap reproduction of a painting of Rossetti's; you've studied art, you must know it—a thing called Manna Pomona. A young woman with a pale face, rather striking but not a bit pretty, wearing a green thing. A basket of flowers in the offing and one or two roses in her lap. Her left hand toys with her necklace and underneath her right hand she's holding an apple in an odd sort of way, as if she's trying to keep it out of sight. Monna Pomona caught my eye every time I came into the room and she fascinated me. I couldn't think why, at first. And then it struck me that she was rather like you. There were times when she looked exactly like you—as you're sitting now, for instance, with your face turned partly away, and that chin of yours so firmly lifted. “Well, I needed nothing to remind me of you but there it was anyhow. Meanwhile time was getting on. Hurd would soon expect me back from leave. I sat down and wrote out my resignation, and posted it the same night. Some days after that a brilliant idea occurred to me—old Sherlock Skane. I knew the
Elgin
would be making her autumn trip to Marina about the end of October, and that any mail for Carney would be coming into the office to be forwarded. I was certain that you'd slipped away because, well, because you were torn between your loyalty to Carney and your love for me.” He paused, and asked suddenly, “That was it, wasn't it?”