The Nymph and the Lamp

  “Well?” she snapped.

  Miss Jardine leaned against the wall, astonished, and suddenly afraid. That old nightmare scene in the upper hall flooded into her mind. Her tumbled hair framed a face naturally pale and now the face of a ghost. One hand clutched the thin faded stuff of the wrapper about her person, as if anything could shut out that hard black stare which already had discovered and condemned her nakedness.

  “How long,” Mrs. Paradee said, “has this been going on?”

  “You don’t understand,” Miss Jardine gasped.

  “I’m afraid I do. Klaus, get out!”

  The man arose from the bed as if stung, and lurched towards the door. Mrs. Paradee moved aside to let him pass. They heard him go down the hall, fumbling at all the doors.

  “He came into my room,” Miss Jardine began in a low voice.

  “Oh, come, Miss Jardine, that’s so old a tale!”

  “But it’s true! I’d just had a bath, and I was brushing my hair.”

  Mrs. Paradee tossed her head and uttered a theatrical “Ha!” She had in her fashion a sense of humor. She had found more evil than good in her passage through a flinty world but it had given her a certain amount of cynical amusement along the way. The keeping of a lodginghouse in a seaport city had taught her all she cared to know about men and women, and what she had learned had filled her with contempt. She looked upon her lodgers as a species of animal, not to be loved or hated but simply to be preyed upon in the legitimate way of her trade. Her scorn for mankind was eased by the knowledge that they made tractable lodgers; but for women, by nature messy and deceitful creatures born to trouble, her contempt was supreme.

  She had long known that the wharfinger drank, that he was in fact one of those dull beefy animals to whom alcohol is meat and drink and mistress all in one, quite harmless where women were concerned. And while she suspected Miss Jardine of being “deep”—a term that covered most of the sins in her Decalogue— she knew at heart that this cool and remote creature was not the kind to disport with a man like Klaus. Nevertheless the sight of the trembling young woman excited her. The silken wisp drawn so tightly about Miss Jardine betrayed a figure slender but well filled at the breast and hips, and it revealed to the landlady’s gaze a pair of comely legs. She had not suspected the typist of such properties, indeed she had always thought of her as a plain and somewhat meager person who wore her clothes unfashionably long to hide the fact.

  The sight of this shapely stranger not only excited Mrs. Paradee but aroused in her another emotion. The disdain in her gaze made way for something purely malicious. Like most of her lodgers she had seen in Miss Jardine a superior air that irritated her as much as it amused the others; but chiefly her malice sprang from an incident some months before that Miss Jardine herself had noticed only casually and had long forgotten.

  On the occasion of one of those semiweekly evening visitations which so intrigued the lodgers, the man in the bowler, emerging from the Paradee apartment with his customary rush, had all but knocked down the typist on her way upstairs. Miss Jardine had paused and given the man a surprised glance, and over his shoulder she had caught a glimpse of the landlady about to close the door. Their eyes had met, and Miss Jardine had smiled and passed on. It was no more than that. Whether Mrs. Paradee’s hair was up or down, how she was clad or if indeed was clad at all, and what sort of look she had on her face in that unguarded moment as she sped her parting guest, the young woman on the landing could not see or at any rate had failed to notice. But in her glance and smile the landlady had fancied every sort of surmise and condemnation. She was infuriated. For weeks she watched the girl’s face, seeking a sign of what she knew or suspected or merely imagined. For months she had turned her ear to the fleeting gossip of the stairs and landings, hearing indeed nothing complimentary but nothing to confirm or dispel her doubts.

  And now, magically, this superior person cringed before her, caught in a scene of utter disgrace! Mrs. Paradee was inclined to laugh by the sheer justice of the thing; and she was elated to find herself in the familiar roles of witness, prosecutor, judge and executioner, and in a position to return what she had come to regard as a monstrous slight on her own virtue. That the slight was no more tangible than the virtue did not matter a bit. With the wide eyes of a frightened child Miss Jardine beheld a rising menace in the thin line of the mouth, the tense nostrils and the glittering black gaze that confronted her from the doorway.

  “Surely you don’t think…” she gasped.

  “What am I supposed to think? Look at this room! Look at your things, all thrown about. Look at my carpet—ruined! I must say I’m surprised. I hadn’t expected such behavior in a respectable-looking person like you.”

  “Oh, I’ll pay for the carpet,” Miss Jardine said desperately, “and I’ll tidy everything, Mrs. Paradee—only you must believe what I say.”

  “Young lady, I’ve been too long in this business not to believe my own eyes. Look at yourself, practically nude. And with a man like Klaus—disgusting!” Mrs. Paradee uttered the word nude with a peculiar drawn-out emphasis that implied the worst.

  “But how can you say such a thing! What have I ever done that you should think…why, it’s outrageous!”

  “Don’t take that tone with me. I don’t want to be harsh.”

  “Oh, please!”

  “That’s better.”’

  “Then you do believe me?”

  “Not at all. I keep a respectable house and you know my rules. You may keep your room for tonight. In the morning you must get out at once.”

  “But I’m paid to the end of the week!” the girl cried, catching at straws. The landlady uttered a snort. “What about my carpet? If you’re going to make a difficulty like that, you can leave at once.” And she added virtuously, “I’m sure I’m only trying to be kind.”

  Miss Jardine nodded dumbly, turning a slow bewildered look about the bedroom as if to assure herself that all this was really happening. She shuddered. The struggle with Klaus was suddenly remote, it had happened too long ago to matter. She felt defiled, not by the wharfinger’s fuddled grasp but by something evil in the hard black eyes that searched her flesh as if the scrap of silk did not exist. She made a picture of despair, and for a moment the woman in the doorway was almost mollified. The moment passed. Mrs. Paradee put a hand to the knob, closed the door quietly and firmly, and passed along the hall and down the stairs.

  CHAPTER 8

  With the departure of that ominous presence Miss Jardine’s first move was to lock the door in frantic haste, as if to shut out every memory of the twenty minutes past. She sat on the bed, still rumpled by the impact of her unwelcome visitor, and put her face in her hands. A mixture of emotions ravaged her. Humiliation, mirth, fright, indignation, all passed over her in waves like the chills and flushes of a fever patient. Eventually she lay full length and wept. Dimly she heard the returning steps of the lodgers, the opening of doors and windows, the familiar evening chatter of voices in the rooms and across the court.

  At last she sat up. The tears had dissolved the violence of her feelings and left a dull resentment, not of Klaus, not even of Mrs. Paradee so much as the chance that had made her victim of such an idiotic prank. It was all so preposterous, so like those uneasy dreams in which she found herself assailed by hordes of mice or walking down Hollis Street in nothing but her stockings, that she rose from the pillow trying to convince herself that none of it had taken place.

  A glance about the disordered room killed that. She drew her wits together. The urgent thing was to find another place to go. She ran over a mental list of lodgings. At worst she could get a room somewhere in the north end, as she had before. It cost more, and it was a bother, catching trams; but a good many city workers put up with that. It was really much nicer to live where there were trees and bits of lawn. In a few weeks she could forget that she had ever taken the third floor back at Mrs. Paradee’s.

  It occurred to her that the light in the room was dim, that in
fact it was almost night. Suddenly she thought of Carney, waiting for her at the teashop. She sprang up and looked at her watch in the gray reflection of the window. Eight o’clock! How awful! And she thought dismally, I couldn’t go out with him tonight. The mere notion of dressing was intolerable. So was the thought of food. She felt exhausted and she wanted nothing but to lie on the bed and if possible to sleep. She stood irresolute at the window, seeing the lights spring up across the court.

  Her indifferent gaze flicked from one to another and came to rest on the window where last night the sailors had been playing cards. Two of them were in the room now, under the dangling electric bulb, busy stuffing clothing into cheap suitcases. They were laughing. They paused to punch each other, to engage in a lively wrestle on the bed, a pair of strong figures locked in a furious embrace. Miss Jardine felt a pang of envy. They were clearing off to a ship. Tomorrow whatever memories they had of this place would be lost in the wind outside the harbor heads, and they would be thinking only of the adventures awaiting them somewhere else. She had long ceased to wonder why men went to sea. The marvel was that any stayed ashore. Everybody’s in prison, she thought rebelliously, only these men have the key.

  Slowly she drew the blind and switched on the light; and still absorbed in her thoughts she began to pluck fresh stockings and underthings from the battered chest of drawers. In another twenty minutes she was walking quickly along the street. The storm had left a delightful freshness in the air. The looming bulk of the upper city and Citadel Hill shut off the last trace of the twilight in the western sky, the street lamps and shop windows glowed, and overhead already the stars were bright. When she turned in to the teashop she fully expected Carney to be gone, but she saw him at once, sitting at a table in a corner and slowly blowing out tobacco smoke. The ash tray on the table held a small mound of cigarette stubs but now his big fist clutched the pipe. There lay the story of his long waiting. She was stung with remorse, but he looked up and sprang to his feet with such a glad smile spreading over his face and crinkling the corners of his eyes that she felt a wave of self-assurance pass over the wreckage of her mind.

  “Mr. Carney, I’m always late, aren’t I? But this is awful! I really didn’t expect to find you here.”

  “I’d nearly given you up,” he confessed. He helped her out of her coat, and she sat down, looking about the shop. There was a scatter of late diners, young couples mostly, lingering over their dessert. She was glad she had put on her best frock, a light flowered thing, and a rather jaunty hat. The hat was old but of a quality that women would recognize as “good.” Not many of her things were “good.”

  “What kept you so long?” he said. “Or is a man supposed to ask?”

  “He’s not supposed to ask. Anyhow, I couldn’t tell you—it’s too absurd. It upset me for a time but I feel better now. I could even eat.”

  “Ah!” He beckoned the waitress who had been watching him so dubiously for the past hour. Miss Jardine did not feel hungry but she felt obliged to order something to accompany the meal of an obviously hungry man. When the food came she pecked at it in a determined way and found, somewhat to her surprise, that she could eat almost with appetite. She led the talk, chattering feverishly about the things they knew, the gossip of the trade, the movements of operators from one station to another, the latest apparatus. (“Did you know the Americans are broadcasting music and things like that? It’s quite a fad. People here in the city are fixing up receiving sets with audions and honeycomb coils and condensers and phones.”)

  The time and the food passed pleasantly. When the coffee came, Carney looked at his pipe and she said at once, “Light up, if you like. And please give me a cigarette if you’ve any left.” He lit a match for her and she drew on the cigarette and exhaled the smoke expertly through her nostrils. It was the first time Miss Jardine had ever smoked in public. She kept a packet of cigarettes in her room and lit one now and then, especially on wet evenings when there was little else to do. She had grown up in a world that regarded the cigarette in female lips as a sure mark of the prostitute. Although the war had changed that with a good many other things she felt it a daring thing to do here in the teashop, where as it chanced not a woman was smoking. But she did not care, indeed she felt a need to dare something for the sake of her ego, and whether it shocked Carney or not.

  If he was shocked, or even surprised, he gave no sign. She felt a little piqued. She wondered if it would shock him to tell the tale of that encounter in the bedroom, omitting nothing. There was something impishly funny in the notion of herself sitting here so carefully attired from hat to shoes, talking brightly but decorously to the grave man across the table, when not an hour ago she had been playing an all but naked bacchante to the drunken Klaus. Behind this whimsy however pressed the shadow of her solitude and defenselessness. She wondered, glancing about the room, how many of these young women smiling into the faces of men had the same shadow behind them somewhere, not fully recognized perhaps, not something talked about or even hinted at, but always there. And she smiled and chattered, not so much for Carney as to convince the others that she at least was happy and assured.

  Carney was entranced. His acquaintance with women was very limited and of course he had never met one like Isabel Jardine. In the office she was prim and businesslike, in the park she had been moody and mysterious; here she was feverishly alive, she sparkled even when she talked about the new aerial inductance coils or the latest thing in vacuum tubes—as if they were new hats. A sensualist would have said that she talked as if she were beautiful, which of course she was not; and almost any woman could have told him that she talked as if she were frantic, as of course she was.

  It did not matter really what she said. He sat immersed in the flow of her voice, seeing in the amber glow of the table lamp the brushed gleam of her hair under the little hat, the flush that came and went in the clear skin, the expressive movements of her lips, the eyes that sedulously avoided his and yet played over his face, his big shoulders and hands as if he, Matthew Carney, were the most interesting creature in the room. He was sorry when at last she looked at her watch and exclaimed that they were too late for the movies, unless he wanted to see half a show.

  “What do you suggest?” he asked, helping her into her coat.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Let’s just walk about. It’s a lovely night. Wait a minute. There’s a band concert in the Public Gardens. We might catch the last bits if we took a tram.”

  “Let’s do that.”

  In the Gardens a throng of people sat on the lawns or strolled the winding paths in a darkness broken by bright green patches where electric lights shone amongst the trees. The benches about the central bandstand were full and so was the surrounding grass. A hand of the Royal Marines was playing tunes from Tales of Hoffman, and their instruments flashed and their red jackets and white helmets made a fine show in the glare of the canopy lights.

  Well away from the crowd Miss Jardine and Carney came upon a secluded patch of lawn in the shadow of a giant syringa.

  “Let’s sit here,” she said.

  “Won’t the ground be damp from the rain?”

  “It seems to have dried. The other people don’t seem to mind.”

  “I was thinking of you,” Carney said. He had a notion, heard in his youth, that it was dangerous for women to sit on damp grass even for a moment.

  She sank down gracefully, tucking her coat skirt beneath her, and Carney sprawled comfortably at her side.

  “We don’t get so many band concerts now,” she murmured. “During the war, when the troops were passing through, and all the navy ships were here, there were bands galore and we had concerts all through the summer, here and at Point Pleasant and on the shore of the Arm. It was quite wonderful. There’s something about band music, especially at night, and outdoors under the trees…” She paused.

  Instinctively Carney knew that she was thinking of her young officer, the fellow who had treated her so shabbily.

  �
�You still think of him, that army chap, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” she admitted. “Yes, of course. It was the only time I’ve ever been in love. A woman can’t forget that very easily.”

  The air was soft and warm. It was the sort of night that comes rarely in Nova Scotia after mid-August, when the cool sea winds begin. A dreamy music swayed through the leaves of the shrubbery.

  “I don’t know much about music, I’m afraid,” Carney said. “What sort of tune is that?” He took off his hat and tossed it on the grass.

  “It’s a barcarolle. Gondoliers—in Venice, you know—are supposed to sing that kind of thing, keeping time with their oars.”

  “Ah! That’s why I like it, I suppose. You could row a dory to that, played a bit slower. On the lagoon at Marina, say, where the water’s smooth.”

  “Lagoon—that sounds very romantic.”

  Carney laughed. “It’s not a bit. No palm trees, not even a bush. Nothing on the shore but sand and salt-grass and wild pony tracks. It’s not even a lagoon any more, in the usual sense of the word. Years ago, long before my time, a big storm filled the entrance and turned it into a salt lake eight or nine miles long. In summer the middle part dries up, and then there are two Jakes end-to-end like a pair of sausages. They’re only separated from the ocean by a long strip of sand that we call the south bar, running all the way from West Point to Number Three lifesaving station, and the sea beats over that whenever we get a hard blow from the south’ard. Keeps the lagoon from getting stagnant. We have a dory there, a handy little thing we got from a wrecked fishing schooner, and we sail it on the lagoon, and spear flatfish and eels.”

  “That must be rather fun.”

  “I think it is, anyhow. And it’s something to do.”

  Miss Jardine looked about her, thinking how great a contrast it must seem to him, this indecently lush place of grass and flowers and massed leaves, half dark, half garish in the reflected glitter of the bandstand, like a theatrical forest.