“I should think he’d stray off with some of the wild ponies along the way.”
“Not Sam—not any pony that’s been broken in. Once they’ve had a taste of oats and chopped hay, and good warm shelter in the winter nights, they never want to go back to the dunes. After all they don’t have much work to do. It’s a soft life for a pony. I’d feel the same, wouldn’t you?”
“I wonder,” Isabel said. She returned to her kitchen to prepare the belated dinner. Poor Sargent! She felt not the slightest qualm over the way she had pumped that artless youth, and she had enjoyed his talk and especially that bashful vote of confidence. I must talk to him more, she decided. I’ve not been curious enough about their comings and goings. That business of Skane and the girl from Number Three for example. It was like Matthew not to have mentioned it. But how strange—and how interesting!
CHAPTER 17
The people who most loudly profess a love of the sea are seldom the ones who live at grips with it. Even romantic young men who go to sea, the Sargents of this world, become in a few years the Skanes who have discovered that all the romance lies ashore, and that every voyage is a travail to be endured between one port and the next. The people of the North Atlantic coasts and islands, where the winds are strong and the waters cold, have no illusions about the sea. It is their enemy. Their lives are fixed in its grasp, they must battle for an existence, each day’s survival is a little victory; but like all wars their struggle is in great part a monotony, an eternal waiting for tides to rise, for storm to subside.
So it was with the inhabitants of Marina, entrenched in their barren ravines like a beleaguered garrison, and climbing the ramparts daily now to watch for a sign of relief. At last it came, for even the North Atlantic must grow weary now and then, and pause to catch its breath for the next assault. Matthew sent the message himself, and smiled at a vision of O’Dell grumbling over the familiar SEA GOING DOWN BAROMETER THIRTY WIND LIGHT NW EXPECT GOOD LANDING CONDITIONS MORNING. Anything could happen at this time of year—even the barometer could lie, or change its mind in a moment.
But the weather held. When Isabel walked with Matthew and Sargent to the landing place in the first streaks of sunrise there was barely enough surf to make a splash on the beach. “You could land in a canoe,” Carney said. The Lord Elgin appeared far out, rounding the tip of the west bar, coming in at half speed and anchoring as usual at a safe mile from the beach. A bleak air out of the northwest searched the beach like a draft in some icy tunnel, and Isabel shivered in spite of her trousers and jerseys and the hooded lammy coat that Carney had found in an empty ship’s boat washed up on the south bar during the war.
She admired the fortitude of the island women, dressed in their quaint Edwardian fashions, determinedly feminine and decorous, even to those preposterous hats. She moved among them, shaking hands, murmuring greetings, while Sargent and Matthew hustled with the other men about the boats. Mrs. Kahn was there, shouting right and left in her penetrating voice, and Lermont’s wife and the others, less familiar and more constrained in their talk with “Carney’s woman.” Only Mrs. Giswell was missing; she was sick with a cold and had not been able to face the long drive on the open beach.
Captain O’Dell came ashore in the second boat, muffled in a bridge coat, wearing a black fur cap and mittens, and looking more than ever like an animated corpse. He greeted the men and whacked Carney on the back, and stood for a long time in sober conversation with McBain. Then he passed up the beach to the women, shaking hands with each one and calling them by name very gravely and courteously. Suddenly Isabel knew why they dressed up for these occasions. To them the Department of Marine and Fisheries was a thing all-powerful and remote, to be worshiped afar, the God from whom all blessings flowed; while Captain O’Dell was the Department’s prophet, who came three or four times a year to deliver them from want, to hear their supplications and complaints, and to receive their respect, which to Isabel seemed curiously like worship.
In the home port, when the Lord Elgin lay dwarfed by the great liners and idle among the busy tramps, O’Dell was as insignificant as his ship. Her errands about the coast were barely noticed by the newspapers except when there was something dramatic to report. Even the folk whose windows looked upon her jetty merely observed that from time to time she disappeared and then, mysteriously, was back again. To the Department, a complex machine that performed its functions all the way from Cape Sable to the Arctic (and had on its payroll no prophet of whatever sort) O’Dell was just another captain in the lighthouse-supply service who got things done very quietly and efficiently; but here and at the other posts along his beat he was the whole Department and he played the role with dignity. He lent a grave attention to the problems of the island men; he chatted with the youngsters, wearing the smile of a patriarch, patting their heads and pulling bars of chocolate from his bridge coat pockets; he addressed himself pleasantly to the women, giving each the impression that her life and interests were of his deepest concern. It was in this manner that he came to Isabel; but there was a glint of curiosity in his sunken blue eyes.
“Well, Mrs. Carney, how does it go?”
“Very well, Captain,” she returned calmly.
“D’you know, when I saw you go over the side last summer I felt sorry for you?”
“I felt sorry for myself—then.”
“Um! And here you are, looking happy and extremely well, if I may say so. Marina’s done you good, by Jove! You’re another woman.”
“A bit of tan makes a lot of difference,” she laughed; but she felt uneasy under that old shrewd gaze. What was he thinking?
She would have been mortified had she known. To O’Dell, long past the passions of youth and able to regard them now with a quizzical eye, Carney’s bride had seemed a rather frigid creature in those brief glimpses on the voyage to Marina. In truth he had felt much more sorry for Carney than for her. It couldn’t last, he had told himself; and all the way from Halifax on the present trip he had expected a radio message from Marina saying that Mrs. Carney would be a passenger on the return. It seemed the logical end to that midsummer madness, a setting-in of marital cold weather after the brief August heat.
Now he beheld the young woman still cool and self-possessed but changed in some vital way. She looked—he searched his mind for the word. Awakened? Ripened? Experienced? Something like ripened. Three months of marriage had transfigured the pale spinster as three months of sunshine would transfigure a fruit long in the shade. It was in her eyes that he saw the greatest difference. Something had gone, something doubtful and fearful—the virginity, no doubt—and in its place was the look of a woman who has found rapture in the arms of a man and calmly expects the marvel to go on, for ever and ever.
O’Dell did not think of it in quite those words. He said to himself: she’s taken to marriage like a duck to water; fine well-set-up gel, probably first-rate in bed; thinks she’s married some kind of god and that makes Marina some kind of heaven. She’s wrong, of course, but how lucky for Carney! His glance strayed down the beach to Carney’s big figure, active as any of the younger men unloading sacks of coal from the boat. By Jove, she might be right at that! Carney is some kind of god. And when he thought of the Carney he had known so long, the hard clean man, innocent of women, the bearded eking of Marina with the body of a warrior and the soul of a boy, it came suddenly to O’Dell that this slim gray-eyed young person before him had been given an experience that a lot of other women would have envied or at any rate admired. In the light of this discovery he gave her another shrewd glance, a nod of congratulation and approval, and then passed on for a word with young Mrs. Lermont. Isabel, with her face unaccountably warm, resumed her watch on Matthew and the boats.
With so calm a sea there was none of the excitement she remembered in her own landing on Marina. The boats came and went without incident, the men moved up and down the strand with sacks and boxes, the stores at the beachhead grew in their separate heaps. The business of watching all thi
s was dull and cold. O’Dell, having made his round, pronounced his last benison and withdrew to the warmth of the ship, leaving his purser, a sharp young man with a dissolute face, shivering in a lammy coat, to check the stores.
The sky was naked except for a scarf of gray cloud drawn along the southern horizon, and the cold November sunshine struck from the sea a sparkling blue—not the soft tint of summer but the hard deep Prussian blue that comes with autumn and can change so quickly to gray, almost to black, under the canopy of winter storms. Conversation amongst the women at the beachhead languished for lack of anything new to say. There was in them a quality of stolid endurance now. The sight of the friendly ship, the arrival of fresh stores, the ritual with Captain O’Dell, the novelty of being together after months of isolation in the various stations, all these phenomena had been observed. Patiently now they waited the climax, the distribution of the mail.
Isabel tramped stiffly over the dunes to the sheltered hollow of Main Station and the warmth of Mrs. McBain’s blue-painted kitchen.
“Hello,” said that busy woman. “Everything ashore?”
“All but the mail.” Isabel opened the lammy coat and spread her numb hands to the glow of the stove.
“And you didn’t wait for it? My, that’s the best part of boat day, getting your letters and papers and parcels.”
“It was awfully cold,” Isabel said straitly.
“What you want is a nice hot cup o’ tea. Pull up a chair to the stove and put your feet in the oven—all my baking’s done.”
Isabel obeyed. She had not told Mrs. McBain the whole truth. The final chill that drove her from the beach had been a sudden realization that she had nothing more to wait for. She felt a sharp and unexpected envy of the stoic island women, those amazing frumps who had friends over the horizon to write them letters. But when Matthew and Sargent came at last with the wireless station mail she had a surprise, a letter for herself, and from Miss Benson of all people.
“Just a line to say Hello,” it ran, “and hope you’re getting on all right. You gave us a fine shock. Hurd was furious. I thought it rather a lark. You always were a quiet one but frankly I’d never have guessed that you were up to anything like capturing the famous Carney. Like capturing a polar bear. Some day when you come off for a holiday (or to have a baby, or should I mention that?) you must drop in and tell me all about it. I’m dying to know the story as who wouldn’t. Young MacGillivray looked in for a minute, said you looked a bit sick when he saw you on the beach but he guessed you were all right. I suppose you know I’ve got your job. Frankly I don’t think it’s worth the few extra dollars a week. Hurd’s got over his rage now of course and is always telling me how much better Miss Jardine did this or that. Phew! And what a lot of work. The way he dictates! I don’t get so much chance to talk to the ops but there’s a cute chap on the Princess Patricia who’s giving me a wonderful rush so I don’t have time to mope. Cheerio.”
Isabel smiled as she tucked it back into the envelope. She had never liked Miss Benson and had made no secret of it. It was nice of her to write. And the flattery in “capturing the famous Carney,” a tribute from an expert, had a fillip of its own. No doubt Miss Benson had her agile tongue in her cheek when she wrote that, but it was warming, it implied a comradeship and conferred a decoration in a single phrase, and it strengthened in Isabel the confidence in her physical attraction that Carney’s adoration had aroused in her, and which a year ago would have been so utterly impossible.
The rest of the mail was easily carried. There were two or three official envelopes for Carney, several letters for Skane, and a thick batch of letters and a parcel for Sargent. On the way back to the wireless station they paused to watch the wild ponies being taken off the ship. This job, Matthew explained, had been left to the end because it was important to get the stores ashore before any change in the weather. Also O’Dell did not like carrying these fractious beasts and he was always glad of an excuse to leave them on the beach.
The herd in the wire enclosure looked the worse for a week’s confinement. “They mill about and kick and bite each other,” Matthew said. “Especially the stallions, who don’t like to find their mares mixed up with the other chaps’. And of course they’ve had nothing to eat since they were caught.”
“Isn’t there hay in the barn at Main Station?”
“That’s for the stable ponies this winter. Anyhow these wild ones are easier to handle when they’ve been starved a bit.”
She sniffed. They watched the operation from the crest of a dune overlooking the enclosure and the beach. A post was driven deep in the sand outside the gate, and to this was fastened a rope with a running noose at the farther end. Giswell, the pony expert, ducked under the fence and threw the noose over the head of a pony near the gate. At once the astonished beast backed away, drawing the rope tight about its neck as if determined on suicide rather than submit to the indignities awaiting it on the beach. The men watched carefully. The pony had reached the uttermost inch of the rope and stood motionless, with its whole weight thrown back, eyes bulging, mouth gaping for air that would not come. In a minute the beast began to sway on its feet. A young lifeboatman slipped inside nimbly and fastened a trip rope to one of the forefeet.
Now the gate was opened and a pair of men led the pony, staggering, drawn by the merciless halter, through a sandy gully to the beach. There it was thrown by a quick jerk on the trip rope. Swiftly Nightingale and a sailor from the Lord Elgin pounced upon it, lashing all four feet together with stout line. Now the frightened beast was permitted to breathe. Gasping, helpless, trembling, inert, it was rolled over upon a large wooden handbarrow, picked up bodily by a group of island men, carried down to the water, and slid into the bottom of a surfboat. Three of these bound captives made a load for the boat. The seamen rowed it out to the edge of the shoals, where the motorboat threw them a line and gave them a tow to the ship. The rest was simple. The Lord Elgin’s derrick lowered a cargo hook and one by one the ponies were swung aboard by the lashings on their feet.
Isabel, watching, hearing Matthew’s calm description of these matters, had to clench her teeth to keep from crying out. At last she could stand it no longer.
“How utterly brutal!” Carney and Sargent looked at each other.
“Ah, how can you be so callous!” she cried. “And why must they be sent away? They’re perfectly happy here, aren’t they?”
“Yes,” Carney said ironically, “but you can’t convince the kind souls on the main. It’s done because from time to time someone ashore gets a notion that the Marina ponies would be better off on the mainland. And as the ponies can be sold for cash that makes the theory perfect. So the orders come, and away the ponies go, forty or fifty at a time—‘rescued,’ that’s the word, ‘rescued from their starvation and exposure on Marina.’ It’s all very humanitarian and wonderful. Well, you’ve seen the way we have to catch ’em, keep ’em, starve ’em, choke ’em, so they can be handled in surfboats on an open beach. They’ll kick and bite, with what strength they’ve got left, all the way to Halifax, and if O’Dell runs into heavy weather they’ll be shaken up like dice in a cup. At Halifax they’ll be sold at auction. You can guess what they’ll fetch. Nice people sometimes buy one to pull a pony cart for the children. Most of ’em drift into the hands of streets hawkers, small farmers, darkies from Preston—people like that. You must have seen ’em about the marketplace in Halifax on Saturdays, hitched to ramshackle carts, their hides a mass of sores and the ribs all but sticking through. They’re tame by that time. All the fight and half the life’s been beaten out of ’em. On one of those days before I met you I wandered up to the market and found a number of Marina ponies looking just like that. By Jingo, it made me sick. Not just sick at the stomach but sick all over. It was one of the things that made me sure the mainland was no place for me.”
“And yet,” Isabel said sharply, “you helped to chase them, you and Skane. Skane gloried in it, I saw his face. And Matthew, I saw yours.”
Carney flushed and turned away, muttering something about “Had to be done…McBain had his orders…more hands less work…”
“Besides,” Sargent said, “it’s nice to have something to do.” Isabel shot him a furious glance but his face was innocent. She rolled her eyes to the sky and stalked away from that hateful scene with the two men silent at her heels.
As they came over the last dune before the wireless station they saw a saddled pony hitched to the porch. In a moment a slim figure in trousers and mackinaw shirt came out quickly and rode away towards the east. Carney and Sargent went in by the porch door, Sargent to relieve Skane at the phones, Carney to deliver Skane’s letters. Isabel turned along the boardwalk towards the apartment. As she passed the watch room she glanced in and met the gaze of Skane himself. He was standing at the window, hands in pockets, phones on his head, and he was smiling, whether in reminiscence or at herself she could not tell. She seemed to see a certain mockery on his lips. She jerked her head away and went on quickly to her kitchen, where the fire was dead and all was cold. She kindled a new fire and stood with the lammy-coat still about her, awaiting a touch of warmth from the chilled iron of the stove, when Matthew came.
The Nymph and the Lamp Page 19