The Nymph and the Lamp (5 page)

“How do you get back and forth?”

“Ride, mostly. The lifesavers catch a few wild ponies and break 'em in for riding, hauling the supply wagons, the lifeboat carriage and so on. Everybody rides on Marina. The kids can stick on a pony's back almost before they can walk.”

The waiter brought his order, a platter of fried potatoes and codfish cheeks, and Carney attacked it with vigor. The girl watched him, amused.

“You know,” he said cheerfully, “they serve what they call fish inland, but they mess it up in fancy ways and it tastes like nothing that ever swam in God's good water. I went into a place that advertised ‘Sea Food' somewhere, and asked the girl if they had tongues-and-sounds, or fried cheeks, say, like this—and she looked at me as if I'd asked for something out of the garbage can.”

“But Marina,” she persisted. “You said it had a meaning for you. What?”

He frowned at his plate. “It's hard to put in words. Maybe it hasn't a meaning at all. Maybe it's just the only place where I feel at home, because the people out there are the only friends I have. For weeks I've been knocking about eastern Canada like a lost soul, from city to city. Everybody scrambling—what for, I wonder? You'd think the world was going to end tomorrow and all hands had to get another dollar before the last trump stops the works. Everyone shoving someone else, and eyeing each other like a lot of sulky sled dogs on the Labrador, ready to snap at the first wrong move. Well, we're not perfect on Marina. A few people thrown together on a sand bar, little jealousies, squabbles made up out of nothing, for a bit of excitement more than anything else—something to do. But on the whole we take life quietly. Clothes don't mean much. Money's nothing. You see? Nothing to shove each other for. Anyhow, you can't go in for petty meanness on a place like that. God gets too good a chance to look at you.”

Miss Jardine pushed out her lips. “I don't think I'd like that. It sounds like a fly under a microscope.”

“That's because you've always lived indoors, in this kind of madhouse.”

“Wrong! I was born on a farm, and before I came to the city I taught in country schools for several years.”

“Why did you leave?” He was astonished.

“Ambition, Mr. Carney, just ambition. I wanted to earn a lot of money and wear smart clothes and go to theaters and dine in those wonderful places I'd seen in the movies on Saturday nights.” She looked about the drab little restaurant and her gaze came back to Carney, rueful and amused.

“And did you find them?” Carney said.

“For the past seven years I've worked at a typewriter for sixty or seventy dollars a month. I've a bedroom over a small restaurant, very much like this one. I can't afford the kind of clothes I used to dream about. My notion of a good time nowadays is to take the tram to Point Pleasant on a fine Sunday afternoon, and sit on my favorite bench under the trees behind the old Point battery, where I can watch the steamers going in and out of the harbor, and the yachts slipping into Northwest Arm.”

“Why don't you go back to the country?”

A pause. “I couldn't,” she said slowly. “Teaching's the only living there, and that's not much. Besides, I wouldn't want to. I've got used to the city now.”

“What do your folk think about it?”

“They're dead.”

“I'm sorry.”

Miss Jardine shrugged. She opened her handbag and thrust a coin under the saucer. “I must get back to the office. Shall I tell Mr. Hurd you're in town and ready to go back to Marina? He likes to have everything tidy.”

“I'll report to him tomorrow.” Carney jumped to his feet politely as she stood up and adjusted her hat. She gave him a nod and walked over to the cashier. Then she was gone.

For two days Carney roamed about the port. He bought a new pipe for Skane, cigarettes for young Sargent, a blood-and-thunder novel for the cook. He sat for hours in the Public Gardens, feeding peanuts to the greedy pigeons. He reported dutifully to Hurd, who greeted him with the same effusiveness, as if he were the one reliable man in the whole division, and promised “action” (whatever that meant) on his request for a new stand-by engine.

The tall typist was not at her desk and he came away with a vague feeling of disappointment. She did not appear in the restaurant. He wondered if she were ill. On Sunday afternoon, when the city was stifling and deserted in the summer heat, he took the tram to Point Pleasant and in a spirit of idle curiosity made his way to the old battery. And there she was, on a red bench under the pines, on the slope above the carriage road. It stood by itself and was approached by a path through the trees. As he drew near he saw that a book lay open on her lap, but the shell-rimmed glasses dangled from the finger tips of a hand laid across her knee. She was gazing towards the east, where the harbor mouth glittered through the trees. She looked cool in a white dress with short sleeves. A white hat, a fragile thing of net and wire, very wide in the brim, lay on the bench beside her; the sea breeze had blown some of her brown hair out of its pins. She did not hear his approach on the brown carpet under the trees and dropped the glasses, startled, when he spoke.

“I was afraid you were ill,” he said gravely. “I didn't see you in the office.” She picked up the glasses, flushing. “I'd probably gone out for the mail.”

“You haven't been in the restaurant since.”

“I don't eat there very often. I usually get my meals in the cafe below my lodgings—it's only a little way uptown.”

Carney paused uncertainly. The breeze rumpled his bare head. One lock fell across his brown forehead like a handful of hemp, lifting and falling with the stir of air.

“Won't you sit down?” she said, diffidently.

He sat carefully, with the broad white hat between them, and fumbled in a pocket. “Mind if I smoke?”

Miss Jardine shook her head. Her eyes were fixed once more upon the water. He lit his pipe and regarded the scene, clasping one knee in his big hands. It was a peaceful spot. He had seen it before and he admired her choice. The bench stood on a small rise above the road, well shaded by the kind of trees he loved. Below, on the farther side of the road, sat the squat bulk of a fort built in Victoria's time, and now abandoned. It was surrounded by a tall fence of red iron pickets, each running up to a forbidding point. Inside he could see the crumbling stone casements. The grass on the rampart was long and unkempt, and weeds rose knee-high from the chinks in the small flagged court behind. He remembered seeing soldiers there, smart young Tommies in striped trousers and tight red jackets and pillbox caps, back in the days of the Imperial garrison. That was in '93—no, '92. He was eighteen, ashore for a stroll after a voyage in a malaria-ridden brigantine from Demerara. Jingo! How time flew!

The young woman held her pensive attitude, silent, absorbed, as if he were not there. He had a guilty feeling that she did not want him there.

“Look here, Miss. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done this.” He started up, but she turned quickly, saying, “Please don't go. I didn't mean to be rude. I was just thinking.”

“Barging in like this, when I don't even know your name!”

“Do sit down, Mr. Carney. I'm the ‘J' you see at the bottom of Mr. Hurd's letters. My name is Isabel Jardine.”

He resumed his seat, but with a dubious air.

“This may sound strange,” she murmured. “I was thinking of you.”

“Me!”

“Well, I was looking at the sea and trying to picture Marina. You seem to like it but I've heard what the operators say. It's always seemed to me a lonely and awful sort of place. I suppose that's why it came into my mind. I've felt rather blue, the past few days.”

“I don't quite like the sound of that,” Carney said defensively. “When I think of Marina, I'm happy.”

She was staring towards the sea again. “Ah, but I'm not like you,” she said impulsively. “I can't accept the way things are, not so calmly anyhow. You said you'd found a meaning in Marina. I can't find a meaning in anything. It's not just those silly notions I told you about. Every country girl dreams of a wonderful life in the city. And if she goes she usually finds herself working in an office or a shop, sleeping in a cheap room, scrimping on clothes and meals, and after a few years wondering what it's all about.”

“Oh, but look here,” he protested. “You're young. The best of your life's in front of you. You mustn't talk like that.” The words came easily. He had said them before, in the same Dutch-uncle tones, to young operators fed-up with his island, with the radio service, with existence. That was the trouble with being young; you saw yourself as the victim of a tragedy whenever things got dull.

“How old do you think I am?” Miss Jardine said.

He pondered, turning the pipe in his fingers and regarding her averted face. “I'm not much good at guessing. I'd say, well, somewhere between twenty and twenty-five.”

She gave him a swift glance and looked away. “You don't know anything about women do you? In another year I'll be thirty.”

“That's young.”

“Not to a woman. You wouldn't understand.”

He was mystified; but something in her attitude, the closed eyes, the melancholy set of her mouth, the bent shoulders, the hands lying palm upward on her lap with the slender fingers half opened as if in appeal to a destiny against which she had no defense, gave him a pang. His simple soul, which could bear his own woes with philosophy, was touched by this sadness of Miss Jardine's. In Hurd's office she had seemed so cool and efficient, so perfect an illustration of the modern young businesswoman he had read about in magazines, that the change in her confounded him. The sea breeze freshened and made a pleasant swish in the pines. The grass on the old rampart bent and swayed. On the blue background of the harbor reach a small yacht flitted between the tree boles like a swift white moth. A coil of Miss Jardine's hair fell apart and blew across her face in long brown strands, hiding that strangely pitiful mouth. The light stuff of her dress, long and full in a fashion killed by the war, lifted and fell with the gusts, billowing sometimes to her white-stockinged knees. The closed eyelids gave her the look of someone in a trance.

Carney, slowly sucking on his pipe, inspected her profile with puzzled interest. She seemed very young, for all the weight of nine-and-twenty years that she seemed to find so terrible. Her figure had a look of vitality about it, the good long bones and firm flesh of the country-born. Her pallor came obviously from years in offices, in dim little restaurants, in the perpetual shadow of buildings, and too much reading of books in the stuffy air of poorly heated bedrooms.

She startled him by saying, “I suppose you're wondering what's the matter with me?” She had not moved. Her eyes remained closed.

“Yes.”

“Do you know any poetry?”

“Quite a bit. Why?”

“Do you know ‘The Lady of Shalott'?”

“Who doesn't? That's Tennyson.”

“Well, I'm sick of shadows, just like her. Shut up and seeing life go by in a glass—you get awfully tired of it. And the worst part is knowing that it's bound to go on like that, and nothing you can do about it.”

“She did something, didn't she—the Lady of Shalott?”

“Ah, but what happened to her? Probably it wasn't Sir Lancelot at all. Probably it was just some ordinary lout on a horse and her imagination did the rest. You couldn't expect her eyesight to be very good after all that weaving by night and day. You see, I know. I broke my spell once. Only I didn't find myself drifting down to Camelot. I just found myself before the mirror again, watching the same old shadows and weaving the same old pattern.”

“I'm afraid that's out of my depth,” Carney murmured.

Miss Jardine opened her eyes and plucked the hair away from her mouth.

“It's quite simple, really. One of the most hackneyed stories in the world. I suppose every girl hopes to meet Lancelot. But I wasn't good-looking and the kind of knights who came my way weren't up to the Round Table standard. They pawed. Then one day during the war along came Lancelot—bugle, armor, plume and all. At least, he was a young officer in a regiment going overseas. I met him at a YWCA dance. We were both twenty-four. He was quite good-looking and full of ideals, and he liked me because I was serious. We went about a lot together. At the end of two weeks I was in love with him. Utterly, you understand. When he kissed me he could have had anything. But he was honest. He really had ideals. He asked me to promise I'd wait for him, and I promised—of course I promised! I was so happy that I wept as I said it. When his transport sailed I stood at the end of a pier for hours, in a cold wind down the harbor, in squalls of snow, trying to find his face in all that khaki along the ship's rails.

“As soon as he reached England he wrote, and I wrote back. I wrote letters every night, rapturous things, and posted them in the morning on my way to work. He couldn't write so often; the training was hard and sometimes there were weeks on end when he couldn't manage anything more than a scrawl on a bit of paper torn out of his field notebook. But sometimes there were long letters, very enthusiastic, full of army talk, and always a paragraph at the end about his ideals—and me. I read them over and over. When I went to bed I'd take the latest and put it under my pillow. That seemed to bring him near to me, and intimate a little fulfillment of the promise.