The Nymph and the Lamp

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  “Mrs. McBain rang up on the phone last night and said that today would be an occasion—the end of your second month on Marina—and she’d like me to bring you down. She wants to meet you—you didn’t see her the day we landed, she was at Main Station busy cooking meals for all those people at the beach. She’s gone to quite a bit of trouble, baking a lot of fancy stuff, and Jim Kahn’s bringing his wife in from West Light, and the Lermonts are riding up from Number Two. Oh yes, and some of the lifeboat crew will be dropping in probably, and Skane’s coming down in the evening to give us a bit of music. Do say yes.”

  He looked so anxious that she had not the heart to refuse. After putting out a supper for Skane and Sargent she bathed and changed, choosing one of the more conservative dresses in her new wardrobe, a plain brown frock with half sleeves and a hem that came to within ten inches of the floor. Matthew put on his gray suit and the smart Halifax hat.

  “I’ll phone Main Station and get them to send up the ponies and buggy.”

  “I’d rather walk,” Isabel said. “It’s only a mile, after all, and I’d like the exercise. I’ll put on a pair of walking shoes and carry my slippers in a paper bag.”

  It was a bright October afternoon with a warm breeze from the southwest. The sea had the dark blue tint of autumn and in the offing a long streak of cloud moved slowly towards the east. They walked along the shore of the lagoon at Matthew’s suggestion. The sand there was hard and smooth, with occasional small tangles of dried wrack that crackled underfoot. The bank at their right was low and covered with marram grass and the dunes beyond rose with increasing undulations to form at last a crest that hid the north beach from view. The winds had been light for two days and the surf on the shore had a muffled note. On their left lay the glittering surface of the lagoon, and on the farther side Matthew pointed out a few seals sunning themselves on the bar.

  The West Light pointed skyward far ahead. Nearer at hand, on top of the north dune, they could see the red watchtower of Main Station. The small beach birds had departed southward for the winter but the herring gulls remained, and the great black-backed gulls which the islanders called “preachers”; and here and there a few belated terns, known on Marina as “steerns,” hovered and dived into the lagoon or flitted overhead uttering the thin harsh cry which seemed to Isabel the very voice of this desolation. Nothing else met the eye but the expanses of sea and sky.

  “Where are the wild ponies?” Isabel asked.

  “They seldom wander west of the wireless station, the island’s too narrow at this end. They’re a wary lot. East of us where the island’s much wider you’ll see ’em in small groups, usually about the fresh-water ponds where the grass grows well and they can drink.”

  He turned off the lagoon shore along a shallow depression in the dunes and in a few more minutes they came upon a wide circular hollow in which half a dozen wooden buildings lay sheltered like a toy village hidden in a bowl.

  “Here we are,” Matthew said. “That white house with the wind gauge on the roof is McBain’s. He’s Superintendent of the island establishment—commonly known as the Governor. Over there’s the stable. They keep about a dozen ponies to haul the wagons and for beach patrols and so on. Nearest building to our right is the rocket house. Then there’s the boathouse. Next is what they call the Sailors’ Home—for shipwrecked crews. Hasn’t been used for years. Sheltered a good many in its day. Finally there’s the crew house, where the lifeboatmen live, all single chaps, or at any rate chaps without wives on Marina, and of course a cook. The sheds behind are just for stores of various kinds, most of ’em empty. In the old days when they depended on sailing ships they used to keep a year’s supplies of all kinds tucked away. The steamer changed that, with everything else.”

  The house of the Governor was a trim place newly painted in white, with the doors and window frames a dark chocolate brown. Mrs. McBain threw open the door as they came up the steps, and Isabel could see heads peering from the stables and the crew house.

  “Come right in!” Mrs. McBain cried. She was a small woman in the sixties, with thin snowy hair done in a tight little bun. Behind her spectacles a pair of small blue eyes regarded Isabel with a mixture of pleasure and curiosity. Her smile was broad and it revealed a pair of ill-fitting false teeth, the upper of which had a disconcerting trick of slipping down whenever she opened her mouth.

  Isabel found herself in a small parlor furnished like every village parlor on the mainland from Cape Sable to Cape Breton. It was astonishing to find one transplanted so completely to this remote nook in the sea. The softwood floor was painted brown and dotted with hooked rugs in simple flowered patterns made by the lady herself. There was a black horsehair sofa, a pair of high-backed rocking chairs with antimacassars, and two sedate horsehair armchairs, one of which—evidently the Governor’s—had a large brass spittoon beside it.

  In a corner stood a varnished pine whatnot of three shelves, laden with chinaware dogs, pigs, shepherds and shepherdesses; two or three full-rigged ships in miniature enclosed in small medicine bottles; a rusty flintlock pistol found somewhere among the dunes, sea shells, a pony’s hoof polished and mounted on a small block of varnished wood, a walrus tooth, a lobster claw as big as Matthew’s right hand, and some relics of McBain’s early seafaring days—an ostrich egg, a sextant, bits of white and scarlet coral, and some pieces of Madras brassware.

  Upon the walls hung group photographs showing lifeboat crews of other years, mostly in the 1880’s and ’90’s, strapping men with formidable beards, the heroes who had made Marina famous in the days of sailing ships, when wrecks were many, and when the pick of the manhood on the Nova Scotia coast could be had for thirty-five dollars and found. All of these photographs were held in quaint sand-and-shell-decorated frames like the one that she had noticed on Matthew’s wall. Making them seemed to be one of the island hobbies. The room was warmed by a tall black stove whose ornate nickel trim was polished like silverware. The stovepipe ran into the wall above what had been a fireplace, long since covered with lath and plaster and now papered in the twining-roses pattern of the rest of the room.

  The mantelpiece was still in place, and above it in large gilt frames hung tinted photographs of Mr. and Mrs. McBain, taken in younger days, enlarged to life size, and wearing that vacant and lifeless expression which only the family photographer of the Victorian age could achieve. In the exact center of the room, standing upon a beautiful circular hooked rug, was the inevitable small round table bearing in lonely significance a huge Bible fastened with brass clasps. One note was strange. In place of the customary small harmonium in a corner with a hymnbook open on its music rack there was a piano, an exquisite thing of rosewood, small and well made, with polished brass candle brackets at each side of the music rack; and the rack itself held a worn collection of Chopin’s Études.

  Mrs. McBain saw Isabel’s interest. “My daughter’s,” she explained. “She took lessons as a girl, when we lived in Halifax and Mr. McBain had a brigantine in the West Indies trade. She got to play quite well. But she marrit a Hudson Bay factor and went off to live in the Ar’tic where you can’t take anything much bigger than a fiddle. When my husband got the post here as Governor we thought of selling the piano, but it’s a lovely little thing and I couldn’t bring myself to part with it. So here ’tis. It was an awful job getting the piano into a boat. The captain of the steamer was quite vexed. But we got it ashore safe and sound, and the lifeboat crew carrit it over the dunes from the beach. I wanted it put on a wagon but I guess they had to show the new Governor’s wife how strong they were.”

  “Were you impressed?” Isabel smiled.

  “I was too worrit for fear they’d hurt ’emselves, not to mention my piano. Do you play, Mrs. Carney?”

  “No, I wish I could. I love music. So did your daughter, I should say.” She pointed to the Chopin on the rack.

  “Oh, that! That’s Greg Skane’s. It’s queer stuff. He plays well an
d it sounds quite nice in a way, but we like it better when he plays the kind of thing our Lizzie used to play—’Over the Waves,’ and ‘Tenting Tonight,’ and ‘Juanita’ and all that. We’ll have a rare old singsong by and by.”

  McBain came in, a thickset man, very bald, with a round face brown and wrinkled like a potato withered a little in dry storage. A gold tooth gleamed in the forefront of his smile and the rest of his teeth were stained a deep yellow by the tobacco he continually chewed. He was dressed in a boiled shirt and his best blue serge, an evident concession to Mrs. McBain; but nothing had persuaded him to put on a collar or a tie. On introduction he put out the hand of a seaman reared in the days of sail, with short thick fingers bent as if ready at any moment to clap on to a rope. He announced, “Pleased to meet you, Ma’am” in a powerful voice, and grinned and struck Carney a blow with his fist.

  “She’ll do,” he declared.

  “You take Matt and his wife out and show ’em round,” his wife commanded, “whilst I lay the table and get on with my cooking.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Isabel went forth with the two men submissively but without interest. At the stables they walked into a warm gloom where two cows and eight or ten ponies stood in a range of stalls. Above each pony’s stall was a painted board bearing its name. The names seemed to be chiefly those of personages famous during the late war.

  “We catch a bunch of ponies every fall,” McBain explained. “You’ll see—we’ll be at it in a fortnight or so, every man on the island, even wireless operators, eh Matt?—it’s fun alive, I tell you. We always pick out one or two likely ones to break in for ourselves and the rest we ship off to Hal’fax on the fall boat.” He jerked a thumb at a row of saddles hanging from pegs. “You must learn to ride, Ma’am. T’aint hard, and you won’t get around much till you do. You’ll enjoy it. You take Beatty now, or Marshal Fotch, or Lide-Jarge, all good steady chaps, kind as kittens, and used to women on their backs. Miz McBain, she used to ride that Beatty pony clean to East Light with me some times, afore she got rheumatic a few years back; and I often send Lide-Jarge to the West Light for Miz Kahn to come and have a cup of tea.”

  “You see?” Matthew turned to her and smiled.

  “I’ll think about it,” she answered, but with so much doubt in her tone that McBain gave his head a shake and passed on to the rocket house.

  “Not much to see here,” he declared, throwing open the door and pointing out and explaining boxes of rockets, coils of rope, breeches-buoys and Lyle gun. Isabel lent him a polite ear until, her eyes getting used to the dim light of the single window, she saw a row of objects on a shelf at her right shoulder. They were skulls, each the color of old ivory and polished like ivory by the sands in which they had long lain. The shadowed eye sockets regarded her with a concentrated stare and the teeth had that chilling suggestion of a grin which is the final mockery of human existence. She sprang back, startled, and uttering a cry that stopped McBain’s drone like a pistol shot.

  “They can’t bite,” he said.

  “What are those horrible things doing here?”

  McBain turned and spat a brown stream through the doorway, “Oh, the boys see one, now and again, riding their patrols, and bring it in for the collection. Bones, too. There’s a big dune east of you people that’s always been called Frenchmen’s Hill. Few years ago some of the boys took shovels and dug on the top of it. Found a man’s shank-bone and foot complete, with a wooden shoe on it. Brought it in—it’s here somewhere.” He peered into a barrel. “Ah!”

  Isabel shrank away. The air of the gloomy little shed had a sudden chill.

  “I’d rather not see it, Mr. McBain. Really! Shall we go on and look at the other buildings?”

  Outside, she drew in a deep breath of the sunny air. She could not help saying in a shocked voice, “Why couldn’t they have left those poor things where they were?” McBain answered indifferently, “Oh, just something to do. I suppose it seemed an idea at the time.” She frowned and walked on. But she was no longer bored.

  The boathouse proved the most interesting part of Main Station. The interest was not in the pair of surfboats nor the big lifeboat perched on its carriage, ready to be dragged by ponies to any part of the beach, but in an array on the walls. McBain explained that the “boys” had always tried to salvage a “nameboard” from each wreck; and here they were. It was a strange collection. Some were whole bow or stern planks bearing the ship’s name in crumbled gilt; some had elaborate scrolls at each end, some were plain; some were merely stenciled letters on part of a boat strake. For variation there were several ships’ lifebuoys bearing their name and port.

  “I guess,” McBain said, “you’ve seen that map in the wireless station with all the names of the wrecks. Of course there’s a lot we don’t know about. Marina had a bad name in the old times. Some queer yarns—pirates, wreckers, all that. The lagoon had an entrance, those days, and small vessels could shelter inside. People used to come here from the main, fishermen, sealers, chaps after walrus, and find bodies laying about the beach stripped of everything—women with their fingers cut off to get the rings—all that. ’Course a Marina yarn don’t shrink with the telling. You don’t know how much to believe. Ghosts, I mean to say. I’m not superstitious myself. Nor’s Matt, eh? Your husband walks about the beach at night—you know that, I daresay. Something very few of my boatmen would do, I tell you. Alone, I mean to say, and afoot.”

  “How do the women feel about it?”

  “Well now you take Miz McBain, Janie, she laughs at the tales. But I notice she don’t hanker much to go outdoors after dark. I guess they’re all about the same way. When you tease ’em about it they bristle up and say they ain’t a bit scared. But they are. This here’s the house for shipwrecked fellers—what we call the Sailors’ Home. Nothing much to see. Cots, blankets, tables, chairs, all that. We keep it clean and ready but it ain’t been used for years. We won’t go in. But I want you to look in our own crew house and meet the boys. You’ll find ’em a bit shy but you must give ’em a chance to say how-do.”

  It was a large two-story building newly shingled and not yet repainted. The raw shingles made a sharp contrast with the weather-worn rest of it, especially the old-fashioned windows, whose small square panes were misted as if by a faint breath. Matthew explained that the panes had been roughened and robbed of their glaze by the sandblast of God knew how many winters—the house was the oldest on Marina. McBain threw open the door and they passed along a passage and entered a long room furnished with a trestle table and a number of plain wooden benches and chairs.

  A dozen men sprang up and regarded her with the unabashed curiosity of the islanders mingled with that air of faint resentment which is best seen on the faces of troops disturbed in their quarters by an officer making rounds. Isabel achieved a nervous smile, feeling absurdly like visiting royalty. McBain called out their names and each man murmured and ducked his head in her direction. She supposed they had been warned of her visit, for each was clean-shaven and had his hair soaked and combed, and each wore his best trousers and a white shirt open at the throat.

  Their ages ran from seventeen to perhaps forty and they were lean and sunburned to the tint of old mahogany. At first glance they were much alike, but as her sensitive gaze ran over the faces she seemed to see the mixed qualities that Matthew had remarked. The island-born, at once bold and shy; the college boy taking out a year to earn expenses; the sailor out of a berth and drawn to Marina by curiosity; the coastal village ne’er-do-wells, the loafer from the Halifax waterfront; and one or two whose faces and fortunes were not to be read, who might have been anything from a preacher dismissed for tippling to an unhappy husband fleeing from a shrew. The wild island life had set its stamp upon them all however; they had behind their boredom an air of coiled energy that could be released in a moment by a call to man the lifeboat, a quarrel, a pony chase, or any sort of mischief to be found between the West Light and the East. It was the note of lurking mischief that i
mpressed her. They were like schoolboys bored with the long summer holidays who sit lethargic in the sunshine and hope for something, anything, to happen.

  There was something else about them, something that made her skin feel strange as if she stood unclothed in a hot wind off the sands. As she turned to leave it came to her that the crew house was a little monastery, and she had come into their seclusion, a strange young woman, presumably desirable, and had brought them an awareness of the great lack in their lives. The next thought amused her. She had a vision of Miss Benson. It was a situation that Miss Benson would have loved. But her final reflection was a sober one. All these men, even Matthew and Skane and that shy boy Sargent, were castaways really, condemned to a womanless existence in terms of the most deadly monotony; and this sexual and mental starvation gave them their callous attitude towards all other life (and death) about them, and created the eternal need for “something to do.” She seemed to hear the echo of Matthew’s voice in that phrase she so detested on the lips of McBain. And again she had that uncomfortable notion of herself as the Eve who had robbed Carney of his innocence, the innocence that alone had made this solitude endurable.

  These reveries, which held her silent as they walked back across the grassy hollow to McBain’s house, were swept away by the sight of Kahn and his wife riding over the rim of the hollow from the west and pulling up with all the flourish of movie cowboys in the loose sand before the “Governor’s” door. The West Light keeper was a brown man of middle size with quick sure movements and a mild clean-shaven face. His wife was more remarkable, a rather lean woman, taller than her husband. Her face, long and yellow, the face of a woman who has lived too much in a kitchen but who sometimes goes out in a hot sun, was lit by a pair of fierce green eyes that gave Isabel the impression of a farm cat gone wild and peering at her from the top rail of a pasture fence.