The Nymph and the Lamp

  “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.

  “You’ve heard all this before, I know. You’ve probably read it in a dozen novels about the war. But it happens. It happened to me. When he crossed the Channel to France his letters were fewer still. That made them all the more precious. He still loved me very much. But his ideals weren’t quite the same. The army wasn’t the wonderful crusade it seemed at first. After a year in the trenches he began to wonder what the war was for. Then he was wounded at Vimy Ridge. Not very badly, but I was in agony from the time I saw his name in the casualty list until the first letter came. It was written with his left hand, not very much, a few huge pencil scrabbles on a sheet of hospital notepaper, but I found it beautiful. Because it said that my love was the one thing he had found worth living for.

  “There were more letters, and each time the scrawl improved. Then it got worse—his arm was healing and he’d begun to use his right hand again, to exercise the cords. And all that time I wrote and wrote. My hours in the office were one long purgatory until I could hurry back to my lodging and see if a letter had come. When I got one my fingers used to tremble. The mere sight of my name in his hand used to send me into ecstasies, as if he’d caressed me in the flesh. No doubt all this sounds schoolgirlish to you. Or is it only dull?”

  “No,” Carney said. “You’re not dull.”

  “It’s just the story of half the women in the world, it seems to me. You love a man and he loves you. You’re separated by war or money or something else that’s cruel and makes no sense. You eat out your hearts for each other, and in the meantime you pour out your love in envelopes. I won’t bore you with any more of that. His wound entitled him, he felt, to a cushy job in a staff office in England. Anyhow, he got one. And he confessed his ideals had taken a battering with the rest of him. The army had taught him a lot about life. His letters went on like that. He didn’t put so much into that final paragraph which meant so much to me. And the words weren’t quite the same. But I refused to notice any difference. I went on reading his letters and seeing things that weren’t there anymore. Then his letters stopped. I never heard from him again.

  “You’ve guessed the rest, of course. He’d met a girl in London, very pretty and daring and amusing, just the sort he needed, just the sort I wasn’t. So he married her. I heard about it afterwards from one of his fellow officers on the Pay Corps staff in London. It wasn’t unusual in the war. I don’t blame him, you understand. You can’t live on ideals for long, not when you’re young. After a time you’ve got to have something you can feel in your arms.”

  She took a handkerchief out of her bag and made swift little dabs at her eye corners, and blew her nose.

  “Don’t be alarmed, I’m not crying. I got over all that long ago. It’s just the wind, and not wearing my glasses. I shouldn’t have told you all this. But I haven’t talked to anyone in a long time, except on business. You just happened to be the victim.”

  “I didn’t mind,” Carney protested. “I like listening to you. I never heard a woman talk like you.”

  “Nonsense! All women talk—like me!”

  Miss Jardine put away the handkerchief. Her fingers went up to her hair, tucking the loose strands away under the pins with swift darting movements fascinating to watch. She put on her hat and slipped the book and glasses into her bag; and she stood up briskly, smoothing her dress.

  “I mean the way you talk,” Carney said mildly. “Your voice, and the way you say the words. Everybody ought to speak like that.”

  “Pooh! That’s the school ma’am in me. Now I must go. I can catch a tram at the top of the park if I walk quickly. Good-by, Mr. Carney.”

  “Good-by,” he repeated; and then, when her light form was moving swiftly through the trees towards the road, “Miss Jardine!” She stopped and turned, with a surprised look, one hand thrown up to hold the big hat against the wind. Carney walked down to her. The sunlight glinted on his beard and the unkempt yellow hair.

  “Look here,” he said jerkily. “I’m not one of those brash young ship operators you meet in the office. I’m just a chap from Marina, old enough to know my place, and I’m going back there in a few more days. Would you mind very much if I asked you to have a meal with me, or go to a theater—anything you like? Just for company, you understand. I don’t know anybody here.”

  She was doubtful, he could see. There was a flush in her cheeks that might have been annoyance. She regarded him carefully, with the dress fluttering about her legs.

  “I’m not much of a squire,” he admitted lamely. “These clothes…”

  “They’re all right,” she broke in, with a faint smile. “Are you sure you aren’t just feeling sorry for me? Because I’m quite happy. You mustn’t think…”

  “I’m simply feeling sorry for myself.”

  “Well, in that case…all right. Tomorrow afternoon, after work. You may take me to tea and a theater. Nothing expensive. And please don’t come to the office for me. Miss Benson wouldn’t understand—nor would Mr. Hurd. He has a peculiar sense of humor. I’ll meet you by the post office, across from the Boer War monument, at a quarter to six.”

  Away she went to catch her tram, and Carney watched her out of sight.

  CHAPTER 4

  Miss Jardine’s abode was a lodginghouse in one of the lower streets. It was not to be judged by the outside, and certainly not by the grubby restaurant that occupied the ground floor; for above stairs there was good evidence of soap and scrubbing brush, of frequent moppings and dustings, of morning airings with upflung windows when the lodgers had gone to work.

  Like many such establishments in the lower town it occupied two upper fl
oors, a warren of small chambers furnished each with a brass-knobbed iron bedstead, a birchwood chest of drawers, a mirror, a cane-bottomed chair, a strip of carpet and a curtained closet for the hanging of clothes, all worn by the impact of untold lodgers who had come and stayed their days or years and then gone their way in the city’s labyrinth.

  The wallpaper, once the hectic yellow of a stormy sunrise and clustered with exotic flowers, had faded to a brown desert in which the blossoms had withered and perished and now awaited only a stiff breeze to blow them away. And the once gaudy pattern of the carpets had receded into the battered fabric, where it leered like the face of a trollop worn out by the passage of men and time.

  Each floor had a single bathroom, a narrow shrine lit day and night by the glare of a dangling bulb for lack of a window, and the scene of morning and evening devotions by men in undershirts and women in wrappers, each clutching a towel and toiletcase. Its fixtures had a defeated look. Often they surrendered their functions altogether and forced their patrons to invade the hostile territory of the next floor. In each of these cells the scents of toothpaste, shaving soap, bath salts, cosmetics and disinfectants battled with the ammoniac reek of the water closet; and over all a faint but pervading aroma of flesh, male and female, mingled in vulgar intimacy from morn to night.

  Nevertheless the air of the house was respectable, an adjective much employed by the landlady, who lived with two teen-age daughters on the second floor. She was, she at times explained, the widow of a sea captain, whose untimely death in a collision off Cape Breton had obliged her to go into the lodginghouse business in the rooms over Feder’s Grill. The captain’s enlarged and tinted photograph hung in a gilded rococo frame above the parlor mantel, and there were further mementoes of his existence in the shape of conch shells, bits of coral and other curios on the mantelpiece and in the shelves of a whatnot in a corner.