The Nymph and the Lamp

  Skane lit his own cigarette and sat back in his chair, regarding her with that unchanged gaze. She wanted to break this uneasy spell, which had come from nowhere, without reason, and was so ridiculous; but she could not find a thing to say. She thought a little wildly: Why doesn’t he say something? Anything! His hand reached out to flick a tip of ash into a saucer, and the hand that was so quick and sure at the key in the watch room seemed a little unsteady, as if it had fallen under the same mysterious spell. The ash fell on the tablecloth.

  At last she found something to say. It came to her with a vicious brilliance. “Sara Giswell called to see you yesterday, and you were out.”

  “So Sargent told me.”

  “You’re not very kind to her, are you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Isabel felt more confident now. She turned, drawing in a strong whiff of smoke and blowing it out through her nostrils, with her head tipped back, regarding Skane beneath the lowered eyelids.

  “You know very well what I mean, Greg. The girl’s in love with you.”

  “Who told you that, Sargent?”

  “Never mind. Anyhow I’ve got eyes. And Giswell was complaining yesterday that you never go down there any more.”

  “You know what the weather’s been like.”

  “The weather was just as bad in the other winters, wasn’t it?”

  “I suppose so. But the shack was a place to get away from as much as possible in Vedder’s day. You’ve made life here more comfortable. Anyhow, Number Three had become a habit, and a man’s habits change like anything else.”

  “That’s unfortunate for Sara. She can’t change hers, apparently.”

  “My dear Mrs. Carney, surely you know Sara’s the belle of Marina? She could have any of McBain’s crew, or Sargent, say, just by whistling them up.”

  “But not you!”

  “I’m not susceptible—put it that way.”

  “So I’ve heard. But I believe you used to be very susceptible once upon a time. May I ask out of sheer curiosity, what made the change?”

  Skane drew hard on his cigarette and opened his mouth, letting the fumes drift forth. “That’s too long a story to be interesting.”

  Isabel felt at ease. She had put him on the defensive. It was absurd that she should have become so flustered over nothing more than a glance and a silence like a schoolgirl tête-à-tête for the first time in her life.

  “I wish you’d tell me. You’ve never said anything about your life. You had a rough time in the war, didn’t you?”

  “No worse than a good many others.”

  “Go on, please.”

  Skane drew on the cigarette again, and again let the smoke curl out of his mouth. It took some time. “Well, I’ll tell you,” he said at last, deliberately. “I used to take life pretty lightly when I went to sea. I served mostly in tramps, wandering from one port to another all over the show—and it was a show then, for a man in his twenties, before the war spoiled everything. The time at sea was rather dull but there was all the life you wanted ashore. There were so many new things to see and taste and feel—everything from Cuban dances to a Japanese tattoo needle. And of course there were girls here and there. That’s what you wanted to know, wasn’t it?

  “Well, I liked women and they seemed to like me. I don’t know why; I was no pretty-boy and it couldn’t have been my money. A seagoing Sparks in those days was lucky to get fifty or sixty dollars a month. But I’d like to make this clear: the women were only part of it. The fun was in the world. I got as much pleasure out of swinging my fists in a dockside free-for-all as I ever had from a woman. And I’ve seen a square-rigger under full sail in the evening light that struck me as more beautiful than any woman that ever walked. Oh, it was all very wonderful, I tell you, till I grew up.”

  “When was that?” she asked.

  “When I was getting on towards thirty. Time, wasn’t it? I should have known in ‘16, when my ship was torpedoed ten days out of Mobile with a load of cotton. But there wasn’t much to that. We didn’t see the sub. The cotton swelled and stopped the hole to some extent, and we kept the old hooker limping on towards England for another day. Then the cotton swelled enough to burst the hatches off and we took to the boats. The sea wasn’t bad. We were picked up inside twenty hours anyhow. When we got to Cardiff we had a wonderful spree to celebrate our luck.

  “Then I got posted to another tramp and had another year of it, chugging about the North Atlantic, sometimes in convoy, sometimes not. Things were getting pretty grim at sea by the fall of ’17. There was still some fun in the world but you didn’t get the same kick out of it. Then, two days out of Wabana, Newfoundland, with a cargo of iron ore, we got it. A submarine slammed two torpedoes into the ship and down she went. With an iron ore cargo you haven’t a chance. I picked myself up off the wireless cabin floor and started to send out ‘Allo’—the ‘I am attacked’ signal, expecting the mate or somebody else from the bridge to pop in with the ship’s position. I was using the emergency set—the ship’s dynamo had gone with the rest of the engine room—and it was one of those old ten-inch coil outfits with an open spark, that hadn’t the range of a good clear shout.

  “The ship gave a lurch and the cabin door swung open and banged against the bulkhead. I looked out and saw the mate and eight or nine chaps in a boat, floating abreast of the deck. She was down to that in four minutes. The mate yelled to me and I walked out, just as I was, in trousers, shirt and jacket, and stepped over the rail into the boat. We just had time to pull clear when down she went. The skipper and the others went with her—nobody’d seen them after the torpedoes exploded.

  “We weren’t in convoy. We’d been making a lone run of it, keeping radio silence. Those few squawks on the battery set hadn’t got anywhere, and even if they had, there was no position. So you get the picture—adrift in the North Atlantic, in November, which is a cold time in these latitudes, and nobody looking for us. There was no hope of making shore. The nearest was Newfoundland, nearly five hundred miles to windward. For two days and nights the wind blew a gale out of the west and it was all we could do to keep before it, with a bit of canvas hoisted forward. There was a big sea running and it pitched the boat up and down. With the shock of the explosions, and then the wild motion of the boat, several of the chaps got sick. The mate had his bridge coat on, and two of the sailors had lammy coats. The rest were like me, in their jackets. The wind went right through to the skin. We were all covered with red ore dust and so was every inch of the boat. We were a weird-looking lot.

  “The mate was an old fellow and we made him keep the bridge coat. The lammies we passed about, so that every man could have a bit of time protected from the wind. If you didn’t get seasick you could stick it, but if you retched you were done for. The cold went right through you then. Three men died like that, the first night. We shared out their clothes and put the bodies over the side. We took turns at the oars, not that we’d any hope of getting anywhere but just to keep our blood stirring. The sky was open-and-shut, mostly cloud but a flash of sunshine now and then. There was no heat in the sun but you got some cheer out of seeing it. When darkness came you lost that, and then the cold seemed to reach in and grab hold of your heart. On the second night two more men died, and we took off their clothes and rolled them over the gunwale.

  “That was the way it went. There was a small tin of water and some emergency food—ship’s biscuit and some sort of cocoa stuff pressed into a hard cake. It didn’t do us much good. When you’re being flung about in a small boat like that you can’t sleep, you can’t even relax, and you get so weary that you lose all desire to eat. At the end of a week there were three of us left. We had clothing to spare by that time, each of us wearing everything he could cram on, and the rest of it piled on the boat bottom to make a bit of soft lying. The water tin was empty of course. We hadn’t strength enough to row. We left all to the sail, steering with an oar and keeping the boat before the wind, whichever way it blew. The
re was nothing else to do. It rained quite a bit but sometimes there were squalls of snow.

  “I told you this was a long yarn, didn’t I? I’ll skip a lot. On the twelfth day we were sighted and picked up by a Nova Scotia schooner running east for Lisbon with a cargo of salt fish. The messroom boy and I were alive. The other chap had been dead for days, and we were all three huddled together on that ragman’s stock of clothing in the bottom of the boat.”

  Skane paused and lit another cigarette. His hand shook as it held the match. Isabel sat watching him, dumb with pity. The horror was not so much in what he said or in what she was left to guess; it was in the defiant tone of his voice. He told his tale with a sneer, with a look of utter disdain, as if he despised her for calling up this old nightmare out of his past.

  “There’s not much left to tell, except the point of all this. I was a long time in a Lisbon hospital, and after that in a convalescent home for merchant marine officers in England. By the time I got back to Halifax the war was in its last few months—and I’d had enough of it. I’d had enough of everything, including the sea.”

  “And women?” Isabel asked.

  “And women. Women! You think a lot about women when the sea catches up with you at last, and gives you the full treatment. It doesn’t strike you till then what a lot of soft, empty, self seeking creatures they are, and what a fool you’ve been to have any part of them. You lump women with the smug ship owners, the busy ships handlers, the Victory Loan orators and all the other comfortable shore people who send you off to sea with a smile—and look around for someone else. Oh, it’s wonderful how clear you can see after a few days in an open boat.”

  “So you came to Marina,” she said, unperturbed.

  “I put in for shore duty, and somebody mentioned a post on Marina. I’d heard of the place, and of Carney—who hadn’t? It seemed the kind of place I was looking for. And when I came here and studied Carney for a bit it seemed to me that his was the kind of life I wanted.”

  Skane arose, picked up the mittens and walked to the door.

  Isabel came to her feet swiftly.

  “And then I came, and spoiled everything—isn’t that what you want to say?”

  He turned and gave her that straight look which seemed to pierce the last recess of her mind.

  “No,” he said evenly. “Let’s say you changed everything.” And then in a lighter tone, “We’ve been very serious, haven’t we? And after all it’s Christmas and we should be merry. Let me tell you something to make you smile. Our shy boy Sargent confessed to me last night, when he was packing up his gift, that he was half in love with you.”

  He was laughing as he said this, and she felt again that creeping flush.

  “Only half?” she said, with a small toss of her head, and turned to clear the table, feeling absurdly hot and indignant. In the clatter of dishes she heard the door slam and Skane’s retreating footsteps on the walk.

  CHAPTER 20

  Giswell’s nose for the weather proved very accurate. For a night and a day the blizzard screamed through the wires and scoured roof, walls and windows with blasts of snow. The telephone wires blew down again and McBain’s men did not get it repaired until New Year’s Day. On that afternoon the box on the wall uttered a cheerful tinkle and Isabel took down the receiver.

  “It’s for you,” she said. Matthew rose from the desk, slipping one of the radio phones aside. Isabel sauntered into the hall. Skane and Sargent had gone for a walk on the lagoon ice. She had never seen their rooms and it seemed a good moment to indulge her curiosity. Sargent’s door was open. She stood for a few moments looking in. It was like the cell of a monk. The furniture consisted of a narrow iron bed, a plain wooden chair and a small birchwood chest of drawers. The walls and ceiling were nailed sheets of pressed wood-pulp, painted that awful drab she had found in Carney’s bedroom when she came. The softwood floor had been painted brown at some remote time, but the constant scuffing of boots gritty with sand had worn it bare except in the corners. In one corner lay Sargent’s sea chest, a stout wooden thing with rope beckets for handles, and his name in large white letters on the top.

  A row of hooks held a raincoat, a ragged pair of trousers and the complete uniform of a radio officer in the merchant marine. The uniform was in good condition. She could see that Sargent kept it brushed and its brass buttons polished. A faint smile played over her lips. Here was full proof of his longing to get back to sea. A photograph stood on the chest of drawers; a man and woman in middle age smiled at the camera; Sargent’s father and mother beyond doubt. Pinned to the wall above them were several cuttings from magazines, all pictures of young women flaunting their legs in very short skirts or posed with one bent knee in bathing suits.

  She went along to Skane’s room. The door stood half open and she pushed it wide, feeling like Bluebeard’s wife. The room was like Sargent’s even to the sea chest in the corner; but here the clippings were of sailing ships and there was no photograph at all. She wondered at the ships, recalling his hatred of the sea; but perhaps these pictures satisfied some memory of a time when he was filled with the romantic illusions that now possessed Sargent. There was something sad about that. A sealskin with the hair worn down to the hide in a great bald patch in the middle lay beside the harsh iron bed. The clothes on the hooks were odds and ends, trousers, jackets, sweaters, a suit of oilskins, all very shabby and worn. Despite these the room had the same look of rigid neatness that she had found in Sargent’s, and which she supposed was a result of their training at sea.

  She wondered at the absence of a photograph. Surely he kept something to remind him of his people, his friends, if not his women? Guiltily she pulled open the top drawer of the chest of drawers. Nothing there but a dressing-case, a few handkerchiefs clean but wrinkled, just as they had dried after washing, a collar box, two or three black neckties of the sort that sea officers wore with their uniforms, a seaman’s sheath knife, and a scatter of the small and exquisite sea shells to be found along the beach which the islanders used in decorating their picture frames.

  A lower drawer lay partly open and she could see neatly folded woolen underwear and gray flannel shirts of the sort to be found in the seamen’s-supply shops on Water Street. She turned to the sea chest and lifted the lid. There seemed to be nothing but books. She looked at them, one by one. A history of Canada in two volumes; Tristram Shandy; Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan; Flecker’s poems; Handbook of Wireless Telegraphy; Care and Maintenance of Radio Telegraph Apparatus; The lngoldsby Legends; an English-Spanish dictionary. As she plucked at the next she saw exposed a corner of a snapshot album and drew it forth. It was old, apparently a relic of an early enthusiasm for the camera. It must have been laid aside with other souvenirs—probably boxed in the storeroom of the wireless office at Halifax—and reclaimed when he returned from that final tussle with the sea.

  The pictures had been taken with a small camera and developed and printed in a slapdash fashion, probably in tin pans borrowed from the galley of a ship. They had faded badly. There were pictures of various ships, all tramp steamers, tied up at dreary-looking docks or at anchor in harbors whose shores were out of focus and not to be recognized. Pictures of men in shabby uniforms, in ill-fitting mufti, leaning against a ship’s rail, against a lifeboat on its chocks, on a sun-blazing white road with a background of palms. Views of houses, of gardens, of Spanish looking churches and other buildings in a tropical setting. A few of Skane himself, alone or with one or two others evidently from the same ship, with arms linked or thrown about each other’s shoulders. There was one of him in tropical whites, with his cap at a jaunty angle and a lock of black hair drooping across his forehead. He looked very young. He was facing the camera and laughing with the adventurous air that she had noticed so often in the seamen across the court at Mrs. Paradee’s. She thought of him now and felt a pang. Was this what happened to them all—did they all become disillusioned and defeated, hiding themselves away from the world, like Skane?

  The
album was only half full, and among the snapshots there were gaps with traces of paste and wrenched fragments of paper. And there was not a picture of a woman. From first to last, not one. He had torn them out. She uttered a little cluck of disappointment and replaced the album carefully beneath the books. It would have been amusing to see what sort of woman Skane had favored in those days before he lost his illusions. Were they dark, fair, tall or short? Were they “nice” or were they tarts, or women simply unable to resist a handsome young man ashore for a fling? She pictured him in the white uniform, cap on one ear, walking up from the docks in some foreign town with that laughing challenging air.

  There was a sound towards the front door. She fled on tiptoe into the hall. Nobody there. The sound again—Matthew moving about the watch room in his slow methodical way. She stepped into the room that had been Vedder’s and peered from the window. Skane and Sargent stood on the shore of the lagoon examining the wreck of the dory, which had been lifted into the air like a paper cup by one of the hurricane winds of last autumn. She glanced about the room. It was bare like the others but unswept. A dust of fine sand layover the floor. There was nothing on the bed but the bare mattress. Skane and Sargent had taken the late cook’s blankets for extra warmth in this frigid monastery. The only evidence of Vedder was an array of pictures pinned above the bed, and these surprised her. The cook’s indignation at her coming, and his flagrant desertion in the face of it, had given her an image of a brooding ascetic. But the clippings he had chosen to adorn his cell were all of women in various stages of undress, and there were two or three postcards marked “Souvenir de Rouen” exhibiting girls with nothing on at all. It amused her to perceive that the cook had come to this far place to dream of women and then fled from the mere approach of reality.

  She returned to the watch room and found Matthew adjusting the receiver dials and tapping a finger on the crystal detector. He listened in the phones intently for a moment and scribbled on the pad before him.