The Nymph and the Lamp (8 page)

“Yes.”

“I see. Was that why you got your leave?”

“Mostly, yes.”

“I'm awfully sorry.”

“It wasn't quite what you think,” Carney said deliberately. “But it came to the same thing in the end. When you've been roving half your life, like me, you invent one place and someone there, to think about, to convince yourself that you've got roots like everybody else. If I'd stayed on Marina and gone on believing that it would have been all right. But I had to go and see—and she was dead.”

“After all that time!” Miss Jardine exclaimed. “How sad!”

Carney looked up and was confounded to see tears in her eyes. He condemned himself for a fool. She had been so melancholy in the park that he had planned an evening's entertainment, full of lively talk. And now, this!

“I'm afraid I've given you a wrong impression,” he said carefully. “What happened to me was just a notion that came to nothing. It gave me a knock but it's over now. Life on Marina was all right for me because I'd absolutely nothing here ashore. I didn't know it then. Now I do. Let's talk about something else. Here's the waitress. What will you have to eat?”

Miss Jardine picked up the menu. “A salad, please. The salmon salad will be very nice. And some rolls, and tea.” A cool young person in a green frock took this down and turned her impersonal glance to Carney. He ordered steak and potatoes and coffee.

“Make the potatoes French fried,” Miss Jardine put in. The waitress nodded and swayed away towards the kitchen on a pair of legs straight out of a silk-hosiery advertisement.

“What made you think of that?” Carney asked.

“Because you've got a man cook on your island and you eat your potatoes boiled or not at all. And all that stuff out of tins! I've heard the operators. When they get ashore from Marina they eat nothing for days but greens and steak and French fried potatoes. Why don't you get another cook?”

“He's all right. Beside, they're hard to get.”

She dismissed Carney's cook with a gesture. “Well, have you picked a theater? There's a stock company playing at the Academy of Music. And there's a girl-and-music show at Acker's if you want something lively. I haven't seen it but I can testify that the girls are lively enough. Some of them used to stay where I do and they made a frightful racket.”

“They probably make a frightful racket on the stage. I'd rather see a movie.”

“Ah! That makes it simple. What kind do you like?”

“Anything except those Western things with a lot of chaps galloping about, shooting off pistols and never hitting anything. Like Marina in a nightmare.”

Miss Jardine raised her brows. “Oh? I couldn't imagine anything less like your island than a Western movie.”

“You'd be surprised. When you step off the beach at Marina on a summer's day you might be in the heart of Arizona, or wherever they film those things. The biggest dunes are by the shore and they shut off the view of the sea in a good many places. You can hear the surf but for all you know it might be a thousand miles away. And there you are, riding a half-wild pony amongst the dunes, with nothing in sight but grass and sand, just like those movie chaps. We even use Western saddles and stirrups, brought all the way from the prairie. You can stick on the ponies better in the kind of going you find out there. In fact, all we lack is the fancy clothes and the pistols—and a villain after the girl, of course.”

“And a girl?” Miss Jardine suggested.

“Oh no. We've got a girl. She's only seventeen, the daughter of a man in charge of a small lifesaving station eight miles or so from us. She's the belle of Marina. All the young chaps in the lifeboat crew are crazy about her.”

“And surely the wireless operators?”

“Oh, MacGillivray rides down there quite a bit. He likes girls. I don't know about Sargent, the new chap. But Skane—no. Skane dislikes women. If the Queen of Sheba landed on our island one fine afternoon in all her glory, Skane wouldn't turn his head to give her a glance.”

“And would you?” Her eyes were merry. She was trying to picture Carney with the Queen of Sheba, and the strange thing was that she could. He seemed to belong in some splendid and barbaric scene, where everything was a little bigger than life size, not like this restaurant, not even like Marina.

“I've always thought it was a bit rude, staring at a lady,” Carney parried.

“Don't tell me that you've never turned to look at a pretty woman. A sailor!”

He smiled broadly, revealing his square white teeth. “Oh, I've always liked women, you understand. When I was in my twenties and going to sea it was a pleasure to come in from a voyage and walk about admiring the girls, the way they moved, and the sound of their voices. They were marvelous. You wondered how men in cities could be so casual about them. But I never got any further than that. And I must say I've got along very well.”

Miss Jardine laughed. “You stuck out your jaw when you said that! You know, you're not a bit like the creature I expected. The operators always called you a ‘character'—meaning something queer, I supposed. But you're not. You're absolutely normal. The rest of us are characters, scrambling after hats and dollars—and seats at the movies. We'll have to hurry to catch the show at the Orpheus. That's the nearest.”

Inside the theater, seated together in a warm gloom where the tinkling notes of a piano failed to drown the chatter of the machine, they fell into a mutual silence. The picture was a banal thing with an authentic hero, a patent villain, and a gesticulating young woman with a beautiful chalk-white face who ran about the screen and made a tiresome business of misunderstanding both of them. Miss Jardine was bored, but she was interested and amused to find that Carney was not. She watched him with sidelong glances for the better part of two hours, fanning her face gently with a handkerchief in the exhausted air.

Carney sat forward with a rapt face lit by the glare in which those fantastic creatures moved, clenching his fists when the villain became outrageous, shaking his head when the heroine failed to see how outrageous the fellow was. Miss Jardine smiled. She felt like a maiden aunt who has taken a small boy to the matinee. Once, when the simpering she-ghost got into a predicament that she thoroughly deserved, Carney put out a hand and seized Miss Jardine's wrist with such force that she barely suppressed a cry. But she did not move. Her wrist lay passive in his grasp until, in the same unconscious way, he let it go.

When they emerged into the clean air of the August evening Carney drew in a great breath and blew it out through his bearded lips.

“That's better,” he announced with satisfaction.

“But I thought you liked the show?”

“Oh, I did. I didn't like that dark chap, though. By Jingo, I could have knocked his head off. I don't understand why the other chap didn't, there in the first reel. He could see what the fellow was.”

“So could the girl, if she had any sense.”

“I thought she was rather nice.”

“I thought she was an idiot.”

He turned and looked at Miss Jardine in surprise.

“But you couldn't expect a girl like that to know anything about a fellow of his sort!”

“I could and I did. Even nice girls are supposed to have some common sense. And he was so obvious. He fairly dripped nastiness. Of course, life's not like that anyhow. The man who looks like a hero usually turns out to be the villain sooner or later; and the really nice man might be anybody, like…” She was going to say “you” but she checked the word on her tongue. She did not mean quite that. Carney was nice, of course, but not in the romantic sense. You looked upon him as you might have regarded a good-natured uncle when you were small and the world seemed full of huge man-creatures, stern, indifferent, and all as old as the hills.

“Like what?” Carney demanded.

“I can't think of the right word. Anyhow, nice men seldom have a cameo profile and I hope they have a lot more sense than our hero. It isn't any good striking attitudes when the lady's making a fool of herself. Frankly I don't think she was worth bothering about, but a good shake right at the start might have helped. What she really wanted was an old-fashioned smacking, country-style.”

Carney chaffed, “You're still pretty much the school ma'am, aren't you?”

“Of course I am! I'm pretty much a cat, too. All women are—or didn't you know? Sometimes I'd like to get out on the tiles and howl. It must be fun. You see? I'm the character, not you. Here's where we turn; and you may see me to my lodgings if you like. It isn't far. I live downtown to save tram fares.”

They had come to one of those steeply descending Halifax streets that break the long procession of shops with a sudden glimpse of the shipping. There was no moon but the harbor water had a faint shine in the starlight, and a liner with rows of yellow portholes lay framed for a moment between the buildings on her way to sea. Miss Jardine slipped an impulsive hand under Carney's arm.

“How lovely! Don't you ever want to go back to ships? I would, if I were a man.” They swung down the street in long strides, due partly to the slope but with a touch of exhilaration, as if the sight of the water in the starlight had set them forth on an adventure. So it seemed to Carney at least. Miss Jardine's light clasp charged his arm with electricity. When they abandoned the slope and turned along the street on which she lived, she attempted to withdraw her hand, but Carney pressed it firmly against his side.

She halted at last at a doorway beside a small cafe. It was a dingy place. Through the glass Carney could see a few late customers sitting at the tables and a bored slattern moving about with plates. The air was hung with cigarette smoke, eddying slowly in the faint draft of a fan somewhere at the back of the room.

“So this is where you eat!” he exclaimed.

“It's better than it looks,” Miss Jardine said defensively. “During the day the customers are mostly clerks and typists like me. At this time of night the place is patronized mostly by men wanting a cheap snack and a place to sit and smoke. I live upstairs. The landlady's rather a fearsome creature but the rooms are very clean, and I haven't far to go to the office. When I first came to the city I boarded with a family in the north end. It was very nice, but it cost more than this, and it was a nuisance getting back and forth. I seemed to spend half my time waiting for trams.”

She turned towards the side door and put a foot on the step, “I'm sorry I can't invite you in. There's no parlor for the lodgers, and we're not allowed to entertain anyone in our rooms.”

Carney had released that captive hand at last, and he stood awkwardly, wondering what he should say next. Miss Jardine solved his problem quickly.

“Well, it's been very nice, all of it, Mr. Carney. It was so kind of you to ask me.” She put out a hand and he took it with a boyish eagerness.

“I…” he stammered. “Look here, I suppose it's too much to ask, but couldn't we do this again tomorrow?”

For a moment her fingers lay quiet in his grasp. Then he felt them stiffen and he let the hand go.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Carney. I couldn't, really. I've got things to do.”

“What about the next day?”

A silence. Then, in a subdued voice, “I'm sorry.”

“I see.”

“Good night, Mr. Carney.”

“Good night.”

She ran up the steps. The door closed with a firm click and left him staring at the withered paint.

CHAPTER 6

Carney killed the time partly with tram rides about the city, getting off as fancy moved; but chiefly he wandered along the docks, where he was at ease talking to sailors and longshoremen, or boarding a ship and striking up an acquaintance with the wireless operator or one of the mates. The city baked and sweated in the August heat, even the harbor seemed to burn with the shimmering blue flame of alcohol. Amid the clatter of cargo winches the stevedores moved listlessly about the slings. Urchins dived and splashed all day from the ends of the wharves. The fetor of Water Street hung in the unmoving air above the docks. From the hills behind Bedford Basin a bush fire sent up a haze of thin brown smoke, and towards sundown there was sometimes a whiff of burning leaves, borne along the water by a stir of the evening air.

On the morning before the
Lord Elgin
was due to sail he took the ferry across the harbor to see about his berth. The familiar ship lay at a wharf on the Dartmouth side, loading stores, mail, and odds and ends of equipment for another round of the outposts. She had a black hull and a slender buff funnel, a pair of very tall masts of the sort deemed necessary for wireless telegraphy in its earlier days, and a heavy iron sheave hanging over the bow for cable repair work. The foredeck was cluttered with red and black buoys, and in a temporary stall on the afterdeck, placidly chewing her cud, stood a Guernsey cow consigned to some post towards the east.

The ship went about the coast like a traveling tinker, tackling every sort of job that had to do with what the
East Coast Pilot
called “all necessary aids to navigation,” and doing them very well. Every fisherman knew her slim silhouette and unmistakable masts, and greeted her in passing with a respectful wave of hand, as city dwellers greet the policeman on the beat; and on the lonely lighthouses and wireless stations men and women watched for her as children watch for Santa Claus.