The Nymph and the Lamp (53 page)

She laughed. “I wouldn't want it for anything. The memories are too powerful. I was awfully sick in there—do you remember? I hope to behave better this time.”

“You keep your chin up and you'll be all right. The sea's been down for days—one of these oily fall calms. And we'll be out of the rain in a few hours. I got the weather probs just before we pulled out. A spell of Indian summer moving up from the sou'west. In Boston they're sweltering. There'll be some hot work at Marina, getting all this stuff ashore and up the beach, especially the coal.”

“When shall we be there?” Isabel said eagerly.

“We'll be rounding the west bar at first light tomorrow if all goes well. That'll give McBain a full ten hours of daylight for the job. Are you happy to be going back?”

“Very.”

“You keep clear of guns after this. That was a nasty accident you had. I hear Carney's given up duck-hunting.” The cold blue eyes bored into hers. “He getting squeamish about his feathered friends?”

“He's getting civilized,” Isabel said calmly. “It's the result of having a squeamish wife. I'm starting a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Ponies, too.”

“Good! Can't you do something about the Prevention of Going to Sea for poor old chaps like McIntyre and me?”

An incoming steamer loomed in the rain ahead, and O'Dell moved away towards the helmsman, speaking in his high voice.

A yacht club appeared to starboard with all its craft hauled up and snugged under tarpaulins for the winter. Then the long stone breakwater and the dark pines of Point Pleasant. Isabel watched eagerly for the place where so often she had brooded alone, and where she had kept that first involuntary tryst with Carney; but it was shrouded in rain and only the sea wall of the old battery showed against the gloomy mass of the pines. The entrance to Northwest Arm gaped beyond, a wet doorway leading nowhere and screened by gray portieres that thinned and gathered mysteriously with the uncertain easterly breeze. Then the tall mass of York Hill, with the steep road, and the white church halfway up, and the low gun-casements of the fort on top. A foghorn blared from the port side, where the squat round tower of the lighthouse showed very close and clear with the long wooded bulk of McNab's Island running on beyond.

The ship began to lift and settle gracefully on the easy swell running in past Chebucto Head. Soon to starboard Isabel could make out the low hill of Camperdown, with the old army signal tower on its crest and the gray wooden bungalow of the wireless station on the shoulder below. Within a few moments she heard the hoarse spark of the
Lord Elgin's
wireless sounding through the bulkhead. At once in the inner mechanism of her brain the sound became a spoken and familiar tongue, without effort, without even conscious thought. O'Dell's operator was calling VCS, that gray box on the hillside, and asking QRU?—“Have you anything for me?”

Apparently VCS had nothing, for in a moment or two the ship's spark uttered a couple of dots, the operators' casual way of saying All Right or 'Nough Said, and she heard the dying whine of a switched-off motor. She was reassured to find that this scrap of code talk came so pat to her mind, that she had forgotten nothing of those patient lessons nor those long hours at the Marina phones. And she summoned up Carney's deep voice repeating, “Once you've stood a busy watch or two the code is yours for keeps. After that it's simply a language that you know, that you can't forget if you tried. By Jingo, you'l1 think in dots and dashes for the rest of your life.” And she heard Skane adding, with his dark grin, “Horrible, isn't it?”

The rich essence of the valley, the after-harvest smell of the fields and the wet pungency of the mountain woods, had faded in the stuffy varnish and coal fumes of the train; and that had given way to the city smell, that compost of soot and sweat and gasoline, of cloth and scent and paper, of hot food and warm flesh and stale human breath which hung in the streets and poured from the doorways of shops and offices. And now all that was gone, too. Now there was only the breath of the sea, the sharp clean reek of salt and kelp, rich in its own way, distilled from thousands of square miles of untainted ocean for the ventilation of the world.

The North Atlantic was in one of its tranquil moods. Under the weeping veils of rain its mild swell rose and sank with a majestic regularity, the breast of a stormy woman gone to sleep and gathering fresh strength for the passions of tomorrow. All that was evil and cruel about her, all that was bright and beautiful, lay concealed now beneath that enormous breathing skin. There was no sky and no horizon. The ship, weary and old like O'Dell himself, pushed forward in a gray murk dragging a white train that spread and was lost in the murk astern. She had good lines, she was shapely in her fashion, and she had a fine sheer forward and an old-fashioned clipper bow that always gave dockside loafers an impression of great speed. But at best she did ten knots, usually it was much less, and here in the thick weather she seemed to crawl, uttering a tremulous
moo
from time to time.

Yet she moved, and as she moved the dim bulk of the land slipped away behind the rain like a shadow, an illusion after all. With it went all those other illusions: the scrabble for cash that could not buy security, the frantic pleasures that could not give content, the pulpit-thumpings that could not summon virtue, the Temperance Acts that killed temperance, the syncopated noise that was not music, the imbecile daubs that were not art, the lavatory scrawls that were not literature, the flickering Californications that were not drama, the fortunes that grew upon ticker tapes, the statesmanship that was only politics, the peace that led only towards more bloody war, the whole brave new world of '21 that was only old evil with a mad new face. Like an aging empress quitting with dignity a palace given over to the
Jacquerie
the old ship departed from the continent and trailed her long white gown across the green fields of the sea.

Towards the end of the afternoon the rain ceased. There was a stir of air, warm and delightful, from the starboard hand; and in another half hour the overcast broke in the west and revealed the sun poised on the edge of the sea, a fat red ball that cast a ruddy shimmer widespread on that gently heaving skin. In a few moments it rolled over the edge of the world and was gone, but the whole of the west was drenched with the scarlet splash of that plunge and there were streaks of bloody gold along the horizons to north and south. For a long time afterwards in the new high western sky that display remained when all the rest was dusk, except that towards the east, towards Marina, where the night already was far up the sky, there hung in reflection a wonderful purple stain slowly fading into the dark.

Isabel left this splendid show reluctantly to bath and change her dress before dinner (a meal known in the
Lord Elgin
with simple honesty as supper) and when the steward rang his bell along the deck it was night. In the saloon once more she was the only woman at the board. O'Dell was there in his best uniform and with the eager preoccupied look that always came upon him at the prospect of food, and in their places stood the chief officer, handsome and severe; the gloomy McIntyre; the purser and his dissipated gray features, strange in so young a man; and the bluntly healthy second mate. The other passenger, the inspector of lighthouses, a Mr. Forbes, came in at Isabel's heels, and there were introductions as they all sat down and the steward began to pass the soup.

As before the wife of the fabulous Carney was the center of interest, but with an added glamor of her own; she had overheard a seaman saying as she came on board, “Here's the Marina woman, the dame that came off in a sling.” She bore the concentrated attention of the table with
sang-froid
and there was a respectful admiration in their glances, as if the ability to get shot and carry it off well were a mark of the greatest distinction. For a time the talk was slow and awkward but before long Isabel discovered that Mr. Forbes, like so many others whose profession dragged them up and down the coast, dreamed of a day when he could retire to a snug little farm inland. He was a tall and heavily built man nearing sixty, with thick gray hair and a pair of hazel eyes that sparkled behind his steel-rimmed glasses when Isabel, at his urging, gave an account of harvest time in the valley.

He was enraptured. He paid no attention to his food. He had the air of a man listening to celestial music. At length he said to her with a curious lift of his brows, “I don't see how you can tear yourself away from all that to face a winter on Marina. What a contrast!”

“You forget my husband's there.”

“Why don't you make him take you ashore and buy a good house in the country?” Isabel knew what he thought; it was a common illusion on the coast that wireless operators, especially O-in-C's like Carney, got fantastic salaries and that after a few years in some isolated spot they could retire in comfort for the rest of their lives.

“Some day perhaps,” she answered deliberately. “In the meantime I shall be entirely happy on Marina. Once you know what a place is like, you know what to do about it. Life anywhere's what you make it—and life on Marina can be wonderful.” Forbes glanced up expecting to see the patient look that belonged to such words about such a place, and saw the radiance that had so astonished Skane, and that made her plain face beautiful.

Afterwards, when the officers had gone and the steward had cleared the table, she sat with Forbes and O'Dell on the red plush cushions of the settee. Forbes produced cigars, and Isabel lit a cigarette. The steward turned on the phonograph. It was a very good machine securely fastened to a special shelf beside the sideboard. The tune of the latest fox trot crashed in the silence of the saloon. The warm wind from the southwest, still blowing in the dark, had changed the direction of the swell, and as the
Lord Elgin
swayed with a long easy motion the needle arm occasionally jumped out of the groove and slid across the record, producing discords even wilder than the African strains of the band. At last the steward moved beside it, steadying the needle arm with his hand.

O'Dell turned to Isabel. “D'you like this modern stuff? I can't call it music.”

“No.”

He gestured to the steward. “Belay that thing.” The jazz notes perished.

“Do you want me for anything else, sir?”

“No, you may go.”

The trio on the settee talked in a desultory fashion for a time and then Forbes arose, stifling a yawn and murmuring something about a long day tomorrow and all those confounded steps to climb. He bade the others good night and walked away with his solid tread to bed. The porthole curtains swayed gently and the glasses on the sideboard clicked together in their fiddleholes.

“Still feel all right?” Captain O'Dell asked.

“Perfectly all right. On that first trip I was rather upset from the start—we'd come away in such a rush; and of course the weather wasn't anything as mild as this.”

O'Dell nodded absently. “There'll be a bit of a slop on the beach in the morning, though. You'd better stay aboard till we've got some of the heavy stores ashore. A surfboat with a light load rides up on the beach better.”

He studied the gray wisp arising from the cigar in his delicate fingers.

“There's something I want to speak to you about, now that we're alone, and I don't quite know how to say it. About Carney. I've known him a long time. I think a lot of him. It's always seemed to me that Carney measured closer to God's standard of a man than anyone else I knew. Lately, ever since he came off the island in the spring of '20 in fact, there's been something about him I couldn't fathom. Men who didn't know him very well used to say that Carney lived in a shell, but I could never see it. Till now. The shell's there all right. And he's right down inside.”

“Yes?” Isabel kept her gaze on the sideboard and its polished brass rail.

“I suppose you're wondering why I've brought this up. Partly it's because I've a notion that something went adrift between Carney and you. That's none of my business, I know, but I might as well say what I think. However there's something else. When I went to the island last spring and again in August he didn't come off to the ship. That was strange. He always steered one of the surfboats when they were unloading stores. The rougher the sea the better he liked it. With some of the wilder young lifesavers he'd take a boat off the beach in a surf that would scare McBain—and Mac's a good little man. Now all of a sudden Carney's lost his delight in that kind of thing.

“When I went on the beach in August he was there backing stuff up the shore from the boats. Didn't seem to want to talk. Wouldn't look me in the eye—just kept lugging things back and forth. I stayed to the last, talking to the other people, and when we were about to shove off he spoke to me, gazing over my shoulder somewhere. He said in a dull sort of way, ‘There was no other passenger?' I said ‘No.' Then he asked, ‘Was there any personal mail for me?' And again the answer was no. He turned away. He looked mighty tired—he'd been working like a slave all day, of course—and I noticed then a small gold ring slung by a cord about his neck. I'd often seen him stripped to the waist like that when the work was hot, but I'd never noticed the ring before. I didn't think much about it, but that night, lying in my berth, one or two things occurred to me and set me wondering.