The Nymph and the Lamp

  The cabin built for the Deputy Minister of Marine and Fisheries (and never used by that worthy) delighted Isabel. With a schoolgirl’s eagerness she exclaimed over the red carpet, the green plush couch, the maple panels, the gilt mirror, the great mahogany berth with its brass-handled drawers below, the water carafe and tumblers secure in their rack, the opulent green curtain sliding on brass rings across the doorway when the door itself stood open for air, the adjoining bathroom, the open ports through which the harbor water cast a dappled sunshine on the bulkhead. She turned to Carney and kissed him with all the enthusiasm of a bride whose husband has secured the bridal suite of, say, the Mauretania.

  He smiled and left her to unpack, walking out upon the deck with his solid tread to watch the last-minute stores and mail bags coming aboard. When the bell rang for the evening meal he found her freshly arrayed in one of her purchases, a smart yellow frock, and with her mouth full of hairpins, putting the final touches to her coiffure.

  “How do you like my dress?” she demanded through the pins.

  “Lovely!”

  “It’s awfully short, do you mind? I feel all legs.”

  “You look very nice, legs and all.”

  “It’s the fashion,” she said, a little self-consciously.

  They entered the saloon together and found the officers standing politely at their places about the table. The purser and the young third mate were absent at their duties. The chief officer, a handsome man with curly gray hair and a ruddy, somewhat choleric face, was at the table’s foot. The second mate, a pockmarked man of thirty-five, and the other passenger, a fat and cheerful assistant lightkeeper bound for the lonely rock of Saint Paul, were on the settee side. Captain O’Dell asked Isabel to sit at the head of the table on his left, opposite the chief engineer, and placed Carney at the chief officer’s right.

  The formality of these arrangements, a tribute of which she was quite unconscious, seemed to fit the pattern of that wonderful private cabin and she accepted it as the normal habit of the ship. Carney, familiar with the easygoing air that usually obtained with passengers going to posts about the coast, gave O’Dell a humorous glance. But the captain was devoting himself to Isabel, and in sidelong glances so was every man about the board. The sudden reappearance of the famous Carney with a wife was a phenomenon as startling in its way as the appearance of a bright new satellite beside the Polar Star, and they regarded her with almost the same professional interest.

  She was quick to sense it. Their curiosity was a challenge and she accepted it with spirit, chatting vivaciously with O’Dell and the walrus across the table, and from time to time casting a smiling glance to meet Carney’s own adoring gaze. He was proud of her in the presence of these men he had known for years and he showed it in his eyes, in his smile, in his absent conversation with the florid man beside him.

  The happiest moment came with the dessert, when at a signal from Captain O’Dell the steward passed around with a bottle of champagne smuggled from Saint Pierre, and they all rose and drank, in the captain’s words, “To the new queen of Marina, and long may she reign!” There followed a burst of handclapping and demands for a speech. She refused, smiling, and aware that she was blushing hotly as all brides are supposed to do but as well-trained queens are not. Then came demands on Carney, who refused as well, protesting with truth that he was too poor a hand at speechmaking to do the subject justice. There it ended, a pleasant little episode. There were sounds of winches turning on the deck outside, and the voices of longshoremen, and in a few moments O’Dell and his mates gulped the last of their coffee and withdrew to take the ship to sea.

  The sun had withdrawn behind the harbor hills. A few clouds high in the west caught the last of the light with a sudden blaze as if afire. In the shadow of Citadel Hill the lower city already was putting on the artificial glitter of its night. In the still air the smoke of its chimneys rose and mingled over steep tiers of rooftops rising from the water, so that all were veiled and mysterious, and in this haze the lights winked like fireflies. Halifax was beautiful then, and Isabel, standing beside Carney on the bridge, felt a momentary pang. Then the memory of that shabby little court behind Mrs. Paradee’s establishment rose out of the dusk like an apparition. Again she thought of the sailors packing for sea. And now I—I too, she whispered to herself triumphantly. She turned her face toward the bow, and far ahead saw the Mauger’s Beach lighthouse flashing in the twilight, a signpost on the way to adventure.

  A procession of familiar things seen from an unfamiliar viewpoint crept past like objects in a dream; the sprawl of oil tanks on the Dartmouth slope, the small hump of George’s Island, the long stone breakwater, and then Point Pleasant and its pine woods and the old battery squatting at the tip. She caught Carney’s arm.

  “See! There’s where it all began, Matthew—on the little bench where I was so unhappy, and you came. How wonderful it seems—so much, in such a little time!”

  “Some day we’ll come back there and sit, for old time’s sake.”

  “That’s nice and sentimental, darling. Will you make love to me, too?”

  “I’ll always make love to you.”

  A squeeze of his arm. “I’ve never been beyond this point. What’s that out there?”

  “Chebucto Head. Where the sea really begins. It’ll be a bit rough, I’m afraid. O’Dell’s been in touch with Marina by wireless and there’s quite a swell breaking on the landing beach.”

  “What will that mean?”

  “He’ll take the ship up the coast to Bold Head—the nearest point to our island. From there it’s a run of about ninety miles straight out to sea. There’s good anchorage inside Bold Head and he’ll hold up there until Marina reports decent landing conditions. There’s a lot of stuff to put ashore.”

  “I like the way you say that. Our island!”

  “Well, I’ve always thought of it as mine, somehow. Because I’ve been there longer than anyone else, I suppose. And now it’s ours, of course.”

  “Of course!”

  The ship had begun to dip and sway on a long swell running in past the harbor heads. There remained a smear of light in the western sky but towards the sea all was darkness, and Isabel realized for the first time how thoroughly she was plunging her life into the unknown. She turned for reassurance to the shadowy figures on the bridge; the young helmsman statuesque behind the wheel, with his face gaunt and serious in the faint glow of the compass bowl; the dim shapes of O’Dell, the chief officer and Carney chatting in low tones by the forward screen. But chiefly she sought the comfort of Carney’s voice, with its deep and vibrant ring. She gazed at the big figure that had seemed so out of place in the Halifax streets and now was in its proper setting. And she felt now that faint resentment which comes to all women who give themselves utterly and find that a man has other interests in which they cannot join.

  Words, phrases, snatches of sea talk came to her in the darkness like murmurs in a foreign tongue. Occasionally someone laughed, and when the voice was Carney’s she recognized in it the deep happy tone which she felt belonged to her alone. I’m jealous—how silly! She moved towards him in the heaving darkness, and instinctively he turned away from his companions and came to her, putting an arm about her waist.

  “Are you cold? Shall I get you a coat?”

  “Oh no, the air’s quite warm. And I’m so proud of my sea legs. The water’s really quite rough, isn’t it? It seems strange, with hardly any wind.”

  “There’s been a southeaster out there,” he gestured into the night, “and we’re getting the swell it’s kicked up.” He added casually, “She’ll roll worse by and by, when O’Dell hauls up towards Bold Head. She’s a tipsy tub when she takes it on the beam.”

  “That sounds very nautical and ominous.”

  “Not as bad as it sounds. You really don’t mind the motion?”

  “I’m enjoying it.”

  But later, when the Lord Elgin began to fulfill Carney’s prophecy, her skin felt strangely chill
ed, as if a cold wind blew. “I think I’ll go below—that’s the word, isn’t it?” And turning to him with a low and intimate voice she added, “Come to me soon.”’

  “How soon?” he murmured.

  “I’ll give you half an hour—that will be quite enough sea talk for one night.” He laughed gently, and she caught his hand and pressed it in the darkness.

  The cabin looked very snug in the pink glow of the shaded lamp above the couch and she glanced about it with a new approval. Throughout the long day the memory of last night’s embraces in the squalid little hotel had oppressed her with a sense of something tainted, and she was anxious to erase it from her own and Matthew’s mind. Here in the scrubbed and polished stateroom with its touches of nautical luxury she saw a proper setting for their nuptials, and with the sentimental and theatrical instinct of a healthy young woman at such a moment she prepared to play her part.

  The lurching of the ship seemed more violent within doors. The sea legs of which she had been so proud could not prevent her staggering as she undressed. Twice she almost fell. In the bathroom a problem awaited her. Matthew had explained in his offhand way the operation of the short steam hose that heated water in the bath, but she could not remember what he had said. She turned the valve experimentally and was alarmed by a jerk and a loud howl from the hose. A pillar of steam arose like a jinni from the bath and she shut the thing off hastily. Eventually she bathed in cold water, clasping a sponge in one hand and steadying herself against the ship’s roll with the other. It was a difficult process. In the white tub the water rushed to and fro like an insane tide, and when she stepped forth at last she was aware of a disagreeable sensation in the pit of her stomach.

  From one of the new suitcases she drew forth the most extravagant of her purchases, a black nightgown of a stuff so sheer that it was little more than an illusion. She had felt indecent, buying it under the gaze of so many shoppers, but she had determined on it together with a set of delicate French underwear that a good breath would have blown away. So many of her purchases had been “sensible,” and after all she was a newly married woman with a bridegroom to charm out of his wits. That at least had seemed the purpose of the things displayed at the bridal counter in the shop.

  She slipped into the illusion and studied it in the glass, moving back to get the full effect. Her first impulse was to take it off at once and cover herself with something more in keeping with her modesty. What would Matthew think? But was a bridegroom supposed to think, or even to be quite conscious? The shop girl had called the gown “bewitching,” and surely Matthew was entitled to be bewitched? How pitiful it was, that long barren gap in his life without romance, and how grateful and how naive he had been last night! He worshiped her, there was no doubt of that. But all that had been in the dark. Was it wise here in the lamplight, this bold display of all his idol’s charms? Hadn’t she given too much already, and too soon?

  She debated the matter seriously, with the intuition of women who know that the honeymoon was designed for the creation of charming impressions that will last a husband’s lifetime, and bracing herself with increasing desperation against the antics of the ship. And suddenly the ship decided all her doubts and speculations. The queasiness she had felt as she emerged from the bath now spread a clammy malaise through her flesh and sent her stumbling to the couch, where she lay coldly perspiring and gasping for breath in an atmosphere suddenly devoid of oxygen and filled with the stuffy odor of ship’s paint.

  When the bridegroom came he found a wretched creature ill apparently to the point of death, and clad in a bit of black gossamer whose purpose had been lost. He lifted her into the berth and covered that damply clinging mockery with a blanket. There she lay through the night and most of the next day, staring glassily at the peeling white paint on the deck above, and with clenched teeth fighting back waves of nausea that always won in the end. Gradually her natural pallor assumed the greenish hue that seasickness stamps upon its victims, and at intervals, alarmed at her appearance, Carney with gentle insistence forced a spoonful of brandy between her lips.

  Her one shred of hope in this engulfing misery was the anchorage of which Carney had spoken, somewhere ahead. She pictured a harbor where for a few hours at least there would be a respite. Alas for these delusions! The very contrivances of Signor Marconi, with which she and Carney were so familiar, conspired to rob her of a moment’s grace. Far out on Marina a watchful patrol on the beach had observed a slackening of the swell, and a bored unshaven man in the wireless station flicked a message across the darkness to the small steamer wallowing slowly up the coast towards Bold Head. O’Dell, aroused from a nap on the chartroom couch, studied the message for a few moments and sent a quartermaster for Carney.

  “You know those people,” he grumbled, as Carney read a scrawled yellow form in the bright cone under the chartroom lamp. “Always a bit too anxious to get their mail and stuff. ‘Sea going down, surf slackening’—ha!—‘expect good landing conditions afternoon’—ha!—just the sort of thing that’s fetched me out there on many a wild-goose chase afore.”

  “McBain signed it,” Carney observed. “He usually knows what he’s talking about.”

  “Ha! The swell’s still running strong here, you can see for yourself.”

  “From the southeast, yes—Marina way. They’d get the change first.”

  “You’re as bad as the others, Carney. Can’t wait to get your feet on that damned heap of sand again, can you?”

  “I want to get my wife ashore. She’s terribly sick.”

  “Oh? Oh! Well, all right. But I bet a dollar I’ll butt my way out there through a head sea and find I can’t land an ounce of stores—have to chuck the mailbags into their surfboat and hump off back to Bold Head where I should have dropped my hook in the first place. Your wife won’t thank me for that.”

  He threw open the door and bellowed an order into the murk of the bridge; and as the Lord Elgin swung away towards Marina the unceasing wallow changed to a new discomfort for the unhappy girl in the berth below.

  Through all these hours Matthew attended her faithfully, wiping the sweat from her poor face, stroking her cold brow, carrying her limp and unprotesting form to that giddy bathroom as if she were a child, watching even when she lay apparently asleep. All her blissful fancies had fled. All her cherished mysteries had been revealed to his gaze under the worst possible circumstances. She felt herself the victim of a hideous joke no less degrading than that affair at Mrs. Paradee’s; and while one part of her mind was grateful for Carney’s tenderness, the rest regarded with a sullen resentment his very presence in this utter ruin of her pride.

  More than this, with the bitter inconsistency of the sick she considered the whole course of affairs his fault, from the moment when he had spoken to her in the restaurant above the docks. She regretted that she had ever met him and wished fervently that by some stroke of magic all could be undone. Even in those comatose intervals when she appeared to sleep her restless brain went on with the torture, fetching forth the mocking voice of Miss Benson, the malicious smile of Mrs. Paradee, the cynical gaze of Mr. Hurd.

  The water in the carafe, the door curtain, the coats on the hooks, the porthole drapes swept back and forth in a tireless dance. The mahogany drawers beneath the berth slid inward a fraction of an inch at each starboard roll, and then back again with a little chorus of dull clicks against the brass securing buttons. Indeed the ship was full of sound—groans, creaks, scrapes, mysterious clangs and knocks, the hiss of water flung over the bow, an occasional running footfall on the deck overhead. As the engines throbbed, hour on hour, carrying her ever farther into a purgatory from which there was no redemption or escape, her Calvinist conscience chanted dismally, You’ve been wicked and foolish, and this is the result. The remorseless engines pounded the refrain, is the result…is the result…is the result…on and on through the night, through the chill sea dawn, and far into the next afternoon.

  CHAPTER 11

  “Well, th
ere it is,” O’Dell said, squinting against the glare, “and you can see the surf from here.” He passed his binoculars with an indignant thrust, Carney put them up and stared for a long time towards the shore.

  “I see,” he said deliberately. “Well, I wouldn’t say it was bad, Captain. The swell’s definitely going down. Send off the light stores first, and by the time you get to the coal and oil and the rest of the heavy stuff there shouldn’t be enough surf to matter.”

  “So you say!” And in a sudden shout forward, “All ready the anchors, Mister?”

  “All ready, sir.”

  “Stand by to let go. Bosun!”

  “Aye, sir!”

  “Make ready the motorboat.”

  These distant voices, the reduced clamor of the engines, the changed motion of the ship itself, all came to Isabel with a realization that the longed-for end of this nightmare had come at last. Matthew found her sitting up in the berth and peering at the porthole.

  “We’re there,” he announced cheerfully.

  “I can’t see anything.”

  “The island’s on the other side—we’ve just turned the west bar. How do you feel?”

  “Horrible.”

  “Shall I help you dress?”

  “No.” Her voice was sullen.

  “I’ll wait for you on deck, then. Don’t hurry, my dear. The ship will be here for several hours, and the landing will be better later on.”