The Nymph and the Lamp (51 page)

“I felt like that once. It's a wonderful feeling while it lasts. Then one day you find yourself hating the sight of blue water and it's all over. It never comes back. All you want after that is to be ashore. You steam along a coast at night and you lean on the rail and look at the lights of towns, and you think of all the pleasures of life that shore people enjoy and you don't—like a caged tiger in a circus parade passing all the butcher's shops. Some sailors marry and they're worse off than ever. They only get to see their wives and kids a few times a year. In every port they moon about the ship, watching the young chaps go ashore for fun. All they can afford themselves is a pint of beer at the pub outside the dock gates or a bottle of some foul South American wine. Poor devils, I used to laugh at them, and why not? They were fools. Only young men and fools go to sea—or to places like Marina—and the smart ones quit before it's too late. I've been talking an awful lot, haven't I? Wandering all over the map! But surely you see my point now?”

Isabel arose and sauntered to the edge of the mill pool, stretching a foot to the slowly turning carpet of bright leaves.

“What's going to happen next year, when the staff is cut?”

“Carney will find himself alone on the station. He'll bluff it out as long as he can. There won't be any traffic to handle except a message to or from the island and sending out weather reports and ice warnings and that kind of thing for the benefit of passing ships. Chiefly it'll be a case of keeping watch at certain hours during the day and the evening, listening for distress calls and so on. It'll be quite simple. The end will come when he can't see to put the messages on paper any more—not even to write up his fifteen-minute log entries. Then the authorities will catch on, and he'll have to quit.”

“And what then?”

Skane shrugged. “The little shack in the dunes, I suppose, or more likely a room at McBain's. Carney's got quite a bit of money in the bank ashore, I daresay you know that. Anyhow the island people will look after him all right. It's his own wish, after all. Marina's his home. He's got no people anywhere and he'd perish very quickly in an institution for the blind.”

“And that's the whole story, Greg?”

“Every word.”

He was lighting another cigarette, with his hands cupped against the cool draft blowing down the little glen. It had gone against his principles to play that forbidden trump. He had thrown it out without thinking. But he did not regret it now. She had taken it quietly, even casually. She had to know the truth sooner or later and it might as well be now, before she wasted any more of her life in silly regrets and recriminations. After all she wasn't the first woman who'd lost her head over a man and then found herself cheated. He blew out the match with a whiff of smoke and looked up. He was startled to see Isabel standing close to him with her slender brown fists gripped at her sides. She was looking down upon him, a bitter anger in her eyes, and her face was contorted to the point of ugliness. She was in a passion of rage.

“So that was it!” she exclaimed in a harsh whispering voice. “That was the mystery! That was the secret you all knew! That was what I felt about me all that frightful winter! Something I could reach out and touch. Of course! What a fool I was not to have seen! I even noticed the strangeness of his eyes, but I thought it was just the faraway look you all had at times, the look you got from sheer habit at the phones. He was going blind. Blind! Oh, you cowards—you and Sargent—you utter cowards! Why didn't you tell me?”

She turned away again, shaking. Skane sprang to his feet. He put out his hands in a futile gesture. “My dear girl, don't take it so hard. Probably I shouldn't have mentioned it. But there was nothing Sargent or I could have said or done. He swore us to silence. After that we could only wonder how long Carney could conceal it from you. He should have told you himself but he wouldn't face it.

Why should we?”

Isabel swung about, and the cigarette fell from Skane's fingers. He had expected to see her weeping, and she was; but he was stunned by the look which had replaced the anger in her face. It was one of happiness, an almost delirious happiness that shocked him. For a moment he thought she had lost her mind. And in that strange tone, like the swift rush of feet in dry grass, she cried, “You're wrong! He did face it! He concealed his blindness because he didn't want to hurt me. Don't you understand? He loved me—he loved me all the time! And he forced himself to conceal that, too. He forced himself to draw away from me, to let me think he'd grown sick of me in those dreary winter months. For my sake he was willing to part with the only joy he'd ever had in his life—for my sake, just for that! Which of you others would have done it? Which of you had half his courage or his love for me?”

“Oh come!” Skane protested. “It's not fair to make a comparison like that. I love you as much as Carney ever did—more! I'm absolutely mad about you and you know it.”

“Blind!” she exclaimed in that crushed voice, as if she had not heard, as if Skane were not there at all. “I was the blind one—I! Not to have seen! Not to have known! And all those things so plain to anyone but me!”

Skane regarded her carefully. Her lit face puzzled him. A bit of sentimental hysteria at the full knowledge of Carney's misfortune was feminine and natural, he supposed, but he could not understand the look of wild delight that now transfigured her.

“After all,” he said reasonably, “there's nothing you can do about it. You've got your own life to live. And what about me?”

“I'm going back to Marina.”

He started violently, as if she had announced that she were going to cut her throat. “My God, Isabel, pull yourself together. You can't go back there.”

“Oh yes, I can, Greg. And I'm going. The
Elgin
leaves in two days, didn't you say? Don't you see how wonderful it all is—as if everything had been ordained in some way? It was so strange, the way Matthew and I came together in the first place. And then the whim that led me to Marina. And the urge for something to do—‘something to do'—that set me learning the code and practicing at the instruments. Do you remember the day we persuaded him to let me take a watch? Don't you see the meaning of it all?”

Skane stared at her. “Look here, you don't mean you'd chuck everything that's good in life to go back to that barren heap and be a—a lamp for Carney?”

She threw back her head and smiled. “Yes—yes, that's it. A lamp for Carney! I've always dreamed of being loved by some man utterly—completely—absolutely—as Matthew has loved me. But love by itself wasn't enough. All my life I've wanted—I've craved to have someone need me absolutely and completely. To feel that I was doing something that mattered, that nobody else could do. To feel that my life had a purpose. And not to feel lonely any more. Those are the things I've really wanted. They've been vague and separate things. I never saw them clearly and together until now. And now they're waiting for me on Marina, in spite of all my folly and stupidity!”

Skane took his amazed eyes from the radiant face. He kicked a twig into the stream, watched it drift aimlessly on the skirt of the eddy and then dash over the sill of the old dam towards the valley and the sea. From the moment that Isabel had brought him here he had debated the exact point at which he should take her in his arms and put an end to her doubts and questions with his kisses. He was confident that his own keen longing must pass to her with actual contact like so much electricity. But the moment had never come, and now her face confounded him. He regarded her with sidelong glances, incredulous and appalled, as a savage who has come upon a lunatic in the woods might regard a creature touched by the gods.

“Come!” she said imperiously, and she began to run down the rough trail towards the car.

When she stopped to let him out at the hotel Skane closed the car door carefully and paused with his hands upon it. The exalted look had gone out of her face and to the glances of passers-by she was once more the composed young woman who worked for old Dollars-and-Deuteronomy. But in the clear gray eyes Skane perceived a deep and shining happiness that he had never seen before. It nettled him. It was as if he had never existed.

“Tell me,” he said. “If I'd managed to hold my tongue, if I hadn't solved the riddle of Carney for you, would it have made a difference?”

She gave him her hand and a brilliant smile. “Good-by, Greg. I shall always be grateful.”

“Would it?” he repeated, with her hand in his grasp. She drew it free with a firm little tug and turned with a brisk air to the steering wheel. Her lips twitched. A mysterious expression played over them.

In that moment she seemed to Skane the image of Eve incarnate, at once weak and resolute, wise and foolish, prim and bold, a creature of impulse with a strangely rational mind, the natural prey of man's deceptions and desires and yet his master in these and all things, world without end, amen. His kisses, his embraces, all those hot intimacies by the island pool, had passed over her like a summer storm on the dunes. They had not left a trace.

“That, Greg,” she said, slipping the clutch into gear, “is a riddle that you'll have to solve for yourself.”

The car fled away towards the Hallett house and left him standing in the puddled clay before the hotel, among the fallen leaves.

CHAPTER 37

The train clicked along the valley, passing towns exactly like Kingsbridge, and the small red chalets of way stations, and farmhouses with white shingles or clapboards glinting in the sun, and mile on mile of orchards marching through the fields. Most of the trees stood bare, and they and the shrubs along the roadsides had a scrubbed look after the storm. The autumn sunshine gave an amber tint to everything but the air was very clear and the long hills looked close enough to hit with a pebble.

At Windsor the train rumbled over a deep chasm of red mud and poured smoke along the main street of the town. Here the orchard country ended. The engine uttered a mournful howl and dived into somber woods of spruce and fir. There were sudden gaps where small streams flashed beneath the bare branches of maples, and sometimes a stony clearing and a ramshackle cottage shot into view and disappeared. Sometimes the rails emerged from the woods and ran beside the motor highway, and then there were fields and wayside farmhouses, and an occasional crossroads hamlet with a store, a red gasoline pump and a church, or a small sawmill with its yellow heap and its tall stack belching the smoke of burning slabs.

When the conductor came through the cars announcing “Bedford next! Bedford!” Isabel sat up with a flutter in her breast. The first sight of salt water after months in the country was always exciting, and now—now it meant everything. The train rushed beside a small river, past the rifle ranges of the garrison troops, and suddenly there it was, the placid water of Bedford Basin pink in the sunset, and far across its polished surface the outskirts and the smoky pall of Halifax. She remembered the time when this great anchorage was alive with ships awaiting convoy, and from the transports came the music of military bands playing Lancelot towards the wars. It was empty now except for a few pleasure craft, and enclosed as it was by the bowl of hills it seemed no part of the harbor or the sea.

The engine trailed its smoke around the curving shore. Then it howled again and rushed between steep rock faces that shut out the evening light and left the passengers with nothing to see but each other, gathering coats and hats and hand-baggage in a sudden dusk. Wreaths of mingled smoke and steam sailed past the windows. Daylight again, the last light of an autumn evening, and the red and green lights of switch points going past, and the train slowing down in a multitude of tracks that ran off like the delta of a steel Mississippi spreading and flowing to the sea. Isabel could see the masts of ships. Then the final plunge into the vast sooty cavern of the Halifax station, with electric lights glowing in the smoky vapor overhead like rows of small moons, the clatter of baggage trucks, newsboys shouting, people running, exclaiming, clutching and kissing, the iron ring of garrison boots, and best of all the familiar sight of seamen laden with duffel bags, laughing and whistling along the platforms.

When the taxi driver said, “Where to, Miss?” she hesitated. She had always stayed in boardinghouses or private lodgings and it appalled her to realize that her only acquaintance with hotels was the Boston House at Kingsbridge and that one night in the dingy Travelers' Arms. On this last fateful journey she determined to have nothing but the best. The Queen Hotel was where most of the government members stayed when the legislature was in session, and she had heard that there was a telephone in every room. It seemed to her the height of respectability and luxury. “The Queen,” she said.

Half an hour later she was dining in her best frock in the heart of Nova Scotia politics. When she returned to her room she went to the telephone, and paused. Hurd's office was closed, of course. She considered calling him at his home, but she remembered how he hated being disturbed after office hours and after a mental wrestle she gave it up. Nevertheless she burned with impatience. She had a morbid fear that Skane was mistaken about the date of O'Dell's sailing for Marina. Suppose the
Lord Elgin
had gone? She would have to wait until next spring for another chance. Frightful! A dozen times she went to the phone determined to call Hurd out of his evening diversions, out of his bed if necessary, and each time she came away.