The Nymph and the Lamp

  “The lagoon,” Matthew said, with a flick of the whip. He pulled up the ponies outside a small porch at the end of the white building and helped Isabel down.

  “My dear,” he cried, “we’re home!”

  CHAPTER 12

  Isabel had a fear that he was about to sweep her up in his arms and carry her over the threshold, as he had carried her up the beach under the eyes of those staring women and that cynical man Skane; and she forestalled him by stepping quickly through the open doorway. She found herself in a narrow hall from which a series of doors opened right and left. A powder of fine sand lay along the floor. Matthew threw open the first door on the left and revealed a young man sitting in a chair facing the east window, with a pair of phones clasped on his head. Before him a long table ran across the east side of the room, and upon it stood the receiving apparatus, two varnished wooden boxes faced with ebonite and studded with knobs and dials. At his right hand lay the transmitting key with its thick brass shank and round black knob.

  There was a black switchboard on the wall at his left with an imposing array of switches and voltmeters and ammeters. A small iron stove and three worn wooden chairs completed the furniture. The wooden floor was bare, and badly worn by heavy boots grinding the all-pervading sand underfoot, so that the knots in the boards stood out like wens. Along the painted wainscot a row of hooks dangled clips of message forms. The upper part of the walls was painted an unimaginative drab. There were two windows, one looking out towards the mast and the other facing north towards the invisible beach and the dunes over which the buggy had just come. It was a room devoid of beauty and of comfort, and to Isabel it reflected faithfully the sterile life of Matthew and the others in this place for all the years. She could scarcely repress a shudder.

  The man at the phones sat in a rigid attitude, gazing through the window with alert far-staring eyes as if he could see across the void to the lurching, creaking radio cabin of the ship to which he was listening. But he had seen the buggy draw up at the door, and suddenly, as if satisfied for the moment with that mysterious whisper in the phones, he turned and sprang out of his chair, slipping off one of the earpieces and looking towards the newcomers. Isabel saw that he was very young and shy. He could not have been more than eighteen. He had an oval, rather girlish face, and under the tan a quick flush spread as he met Isabel’s eyes. His hair, like Skane’s, was badly in need of the scissors. It hung in a brown mop on his neck and across his forehead; but he was freshly shaved. He wore an old navy jersey of heavy wool and a pair of shapeless trousers that once had been part of a naval uniform, and there was a pair of battered leather slippers on his feet.

  “Sargent,” Matthew said briskly, “I want you to meet my wife.” Sargent moved politely towards her, still listening with the other ear to the far-off voice in the air; and Isabel, noting the short length of the phone cord, stepped forward quickly and put out her hand. He shook it bashfully and their hands withdrew.

  “Sargent, I’m the happiest man in the world,” Carney cried, “and you can see why. And it’s going to be a lot better for us all, I tell you, with a woman about the place. Don’t let us interrupt your work. I’m just showing Mrs. Carney her new home.” He took Isabel’s arm and they moved out into the hall. He pointed down the hall. “It ends at a partition, as you see. My—our apartment’s on the other side, with a separate entrance. That door on the left, beyond the watch room, is Sargent’s bedroom, and the farther one is Skane’s. The room on the right, opposite Skane’s, is Vedder’s—the cook, you know. Next is the operators’ bathroom. This one here”—he threw open the door—“is the engine room, as you see.”

  She peered inside obediently. The place reeked of hot oil. It had a concrete floor and in the midst of it a large single-cylinder gasoline engine whirled a pair of flywheels. From one of these a long slatting belt led her eye to the generator, spinning and whining at the farther end of the room. Along the wall stood a work bench equipped with vises and a scatter of tools, and above the generator there was an array of apparatus that she recognized as radio condensers and tuning coils. She had seen these things by the dozen in the storeroom at Halifax, items that she typed on long forms or mentioned in Hurd’s business letters; and from time to time she had seen them sent off to ships or to distant parts of the coast. It was strange to see them in use, especially here in this small sea-desert where Carney of Marina had grown lonely and famous through the years. Outside she heard the steady thudding of the engine exhaust, and through a window she perceived several gasoline drums lying on the sandy slope at a safe distance from the building in case of fire.

  Young Sargent, in that barren cell across the hall, began to talk in dots and dashes to the ship that had so engrossed his attention when the Carneys arrived. Isabel, standing on the greasy floor, was startled by a terrific sound as sharp, as deafening as rifle shots, and the little engine room was lit by a rapid succession of bright violet flashes that sprang, like the sound, from the revolving brass spark-studs at the end of the generator shaft. Involuntarily she shrank against Matthew’s stalwart form and she was thankful for the arm clasping her in reassurance.

  It was no wonder to her now that Matthew had been able to read the messages far down the beach. The sound was frightful, like an enormous and explosive brass trumpet. Electricity in large quantities had always seemed to her an uncomfortable if useful commodity; she had read in the newspapers of people killed by high-voltage wires about the streets; and she wondered how it was possible to stand in this hot little chamber, in the midst of these shattering manifestations, and remain alive. It was clear that Matthew and the others, grown careless with familiarity, were taking desperate chances every day of their lives. Casting dignity aside with Matthew’s arm she fled into the hall and covered her ears with her hands. Matthew merely grinned.

  “You’ll get used to it,” he declared calmly. “There’s a muffling drum that fits over the spark disc but we leave it off—we have to file the studs clean and adjust the gap every day, sometimes two or three times a day.”

  “Do you mean to say,” she demanded in a voice that sounded thin and strange in her singing ears, “that it goes on like that, day and night?”

  “Only when the chap on watch is transmitting.”

  “But the transmitting goes on day and night—at intervals, I mean?”

  “Oh yes. As I say, you’ll get used to it.”

  She did not reply. How could anyone sleep, even exist, with this erratic uproar shattering the silence of the station and of all the dunes within half a mile? And when she thought of days, weeks, months of it, she wondered how any of them kept from going mad. She was glad when Matthew led her outside and they passed along the plank walk to his own apartment at the east side.

  As he opened the door she stepped inside with an air of skepticism, expecting the worst. After all, what could you expect of men living this barren life so far from civilization? The long ghastly hours of the voyage had given her an impression of enormous distance, as if she had come to the end of the world. With a quick feminine inquisitiveness she inspected the kitchen, the realm of the still unseen Vedder, a slovenly creature no doubt. What she saw was somewhat reassuring. The place was clean. The floor had been swept of sand and scrubbed. The boards gleamed bone-white in the sunshine through the uncurtained windows. The wainscoting was newly painted a dark shining brown, and the upper walls with white. A kitchen range stood against the partition wall. It had been freshly blackened and the kettles and pots on the neighboring shelves had been scrubbed to a dull sheen.

  “Not many stations are laid out like this, with a separate apartment for the chief operator,” Matthew said with pride. “In most of ’em he has a room like the others and the kitchen is simply a living room for all hands. Of course, not being married, it didn’t matter much to me—we’ve all hung about in here, when we were off watch. Vedder grumbles about having to step outdoors to get from the kitchen to his room.”

  Isabel drew open a cupboard door
and saw crockery of a plain indestructible sort ranged in neat rows along the shelves. Another cupboard held tinned food of various kinds and there were bins for flour and potatoes.

  “Getting low,” he observed. “Always the case, by the time the boat arrives. But tomorrow the wagon will bring up our stores. I wonder where Vedder is?”

  There was a coal fire in the stove and a kettle murmured and faintly steamed. On the table stood a teapot, two cups and saucers and a tin of milk with holes punched ready for pouring. Isabel peered into the pot and saw that the invisible cook had put tea in it ready for the hot water.

  A worn sofa stood against the farther wall and there were four common wooden chairs of the sort to be found in every fisherman’s kitchen. There was a tier of stout shelves, evidently made from ships’ planking, holding a great number of worn books whose titles ranged from Complete Works of Byron to Practical Wireless Telegraphy. She noticed Guerber’s Myths of the Norsemen and an English translation of the Heimskringla; and there were tins of tobacco, boxes of cartridges, playing cards, a pair of binoculars, a bottle of gun oil and other masculine bric-a-brac. A calendar on the back of the door advertised the wares of a marine cordage firm in Dartmouth. Above the kitchen table hung a snapshot of Carney mounted on one of the small island ponies. The frame was curiously contrived of wood cut out in the shape of a starfish, and covered with a glued surface of sand and small shells from the beach. A rusty single barreled shotgun, whose stock had been split and bound with copper wire, stood in one corner, and a double-barreled gun of more modern type gleamed with oil in another. The long bony bill of a swordfish, fitted whimsically with a carved wooden hilt and guard, hung over the stove like a monstrous cutlass.

  Above the couch hung a map in a wooden frame. She walked over and looked at it. There lay the island like a slim bean pod in the sea, surrounded by the names of ships neatly printed with a pen, and dates going all the way back to 1804.

  “Those are all the known wrecks,” Matthew said diffidently. “The lifesaving station was established in 1804. Before that the island had been the hangout of all sorts of queer characters, including a gang of wreckers. You’ll hear some pretty gruesome legends of those days. The first lifesaving crew included a squad of troops. The equipment was pretty poor in those days and there wasn’t much they could do except salvage what they could from the wrecks and gather up the corpses on the beach.”

  “Where were the dead sailors buried?”

  “Usually in the dunes above the spot where they washed ashore. They’re everywhere. There are something like three hundred known wrecks and God knows how many others. If you like guessing you can go all the way back to Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s Delight. You see bones sticking out of the sand quite often.”

  Isabel glanced out of the kitchen window, at the dunes, at the blue lagoon, at the white flick of surf along the farther side of the bar. She shivered in the warmth of the kitchen. Matthew said quickly, “Of course we don’t get many wrecks nowadays. A fishing schooner from time to time, and once in three or four years a steamer off its course in thick weather. Fact is, the day of sail is past. Those ships you see on the map were windjammers mostly, caught on a lee shore and unable to claw off. Steamers can get out of trouble when they see the breakers; and anyhow nowadays when a skipper’s in doubt he can get his bearings by radio from the new D.F. stations on the main. What with that, and the improved depth-sounding gear, and of course the island lighthouses and wireless station, Marina’s lost its old meaning altogether.”

  She changed the subject. “This is the living room as well as the kitchen?”

  “Yes, and the dining room as well. The chaps will come in here to get their meals.”

  “It seems rather bare.”

  “It’s all we’re supplied. But I’ll order some more furniture to come down on the next trip, if you like. And anything else you want. You’ve only to say the word. Come and see the rest of it.”

  The bathroom was freshly painted white, and she was relieved to see modern sanitary fixtures, a bath with hot and cold taps, and pipes running off to the kitchen hot-water tank.

  “We got these put in during the war when the navy was running the show. Before that things were pretty crude. Here’s the bedroom.”

  Matthew stood aside, and she walked in with an odd flutter in her knees. The nausea had gone, nevertheless she still felt miserable, and the sight of the plain iron bed gave her a longing to shut the door upon Matthew and lie down. A pair of skins on the floor, the soft white coats of young seals killed on the sea ice in the spring, lent the only touch of luxury to the room. There was a plain oak dresser whose mirror had gone dull with damp and time, and in which she could see herself like a ghost and the figure of Matthew looming dimly in the doorway. The window had a blind but no curtains. There was a single chair. And here again were the varnished fir wainscot and the drab paint on the upper walls. The revelation of a bathroom had raised her spirits a little but now her heart sank. It was all so bleak, and the smell of new paint somehow made it worse, like the antiseptic in a sickroom that abolishes germs but at the same time removes all trace of humanity.

  “Well?” he asked eagerly.

  She did not answer for several awkward moments. Then, in a cold voice, “I wish I’d known, and had a bit more time to shop. I bought some sheets, an eiderdown, one or two other things; but I could have got curtains, a few pictures for the walls, some chintz to cover the furniture—that kind of thing.”

  “Of course you can order anything you want by the next boat.”

  “Yes.”

  The Lord Elgin would not return for three months, an eternity. She could not keep the flat note from her voice and did not try. She turned away from him abruptly.

  “Matthew, I don’t quite know how to say this. I feel awfully unwell but it isn’t entirely that. I might as well be frank with you. I was in a hysterical state that night I met you so late—the night of the band concert. I was almost out of my mind. Since then, in that awful berth aboard the ship, I’ve gone through another nightmare and I’m horribly mixed up. You must give me time to get used to all this—and to you. I’ve known you so very little, after all.”

  She paused. Matthew said, “Yes?” quietly.

  “Matthew, I want to sleep by myself. Not just tonight but until I feel more settled about everything. Do you mind?”

  She continued to gaze out of the window, unwilling to meet his eyes, and she was relieved to hear his deep tone murmuring, “Of course not, my dear. I was going to suggest it,” He hesitated, and went on, “Do you remember what I said to you that night when we sat on the grass listening to the band? I said I’d ask nothing that you didn’t want to give. I still mean that. And you’ve given me so much.”

  For a moment she was ravaged with remorse. The view of the lagoon dissolved in tears. She had to fight down a wild impulse to turn and fling herself into his arms and weep, as she had wept that embarrassing morning in the grubby little railway hotel.

  “I wish you’d lie down a bit,” Matthew said. “I’ll hunt up Vedder and get you some tea and toast. You’ll feel better for something to eat.”

  “Perhaps.”

  She heard his retreating footsteps and the closing of the outer door. The bed invited her. There was no counterpane and the blankets were coarse gray things, but she was gratified to find sheets underneath. They had been lately washed and aired and the pillows had fresh slips. She took off her hat and shoes, her skirt and jacket, and lay down, covering herself with a blanket. She closed her eyes and longed for sleep, but it would not come. The engine exhaust popped steadily and vagrant gusts of the sea breeze eddying along the lee side of the station brought through the open window a mingled smell of burnt gasoline and the sea. At intervals the transmitter spark rang through the thin partitions like a trumpet and she could hear the continual whirr of the machinery. Amid these sounds her mind was filled with dismal reflections and with speculations on the future, in which there was one melancholy comfort: the
past few days had been so fantastic that anything to come must seem commonplace.

  The outer door opened and she heard Matthew’s step in the kitchen. He was alone. There was a faint rattle of chinaware. After a time she sniffed a faint smell of toast. It occurred to her suddenly that she was hungry. When the bedroom door opened she at first saw nothing but the tray in Matthew’s hand, the little mound of buttered toast and the steam rising from the cup of tea. When she glanced at his face she sat up at once.

  “Something’s wrong. What is it?”

  His blue eyes were alight with something she had never seen there. It was anger. He was furious. “Vedder’s gone,” he said. He came to the bed and placed the tray on her lap. She ignored it.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s skipped—bunked—the self-important ass! He waited till Skane went down to the landing place and then packed his bag and sneaked off to Main Station by the shore of the lagoon. I suppose he waited there till he knew the coast was clear and then slipped into one of the boats and went off to the ship.”

  “But he can’t do that, can he?”

  “He’s done it. Cooks are a law to themselves.”

  “Didn’t he say anything, or even leave a note?”

  “He told young Sargent a good deal. That’s partly why Sargent was so tongue-tied when we came in. He didn’t know how to tell us. Seems that as soon as Skane got my message he put the whole crew to work—himself, MacGillivray, Sargent and the cook—sweeping, scrubbing, painting, polishing—raising hell, as Vedder put it. You understand, we’ve always kept things clean in a routine sort of way. But in a place like this you’re apt to pig it a bit. The sand blows in through every crack. You get fed up, sweeping. You wear as few clothes as possible because the less you wear the less you have to wash. You have to do your own washing and you hate it, so you slop through it as quickly as you can. Once the warm weather comes you practically live in an old pair of trousers or bathing drawers, like a lot of savages. It’s a fine free life in a way but of course it wouldn’t do with a woman about. That was the point, I gather.