Apart from Sargent’s hopeful sticks there was no sign of spring on the face of Marina. The snow had vanished; but the lagoon was still sealed under thick ice, the dunes stretched their brown length east and west without a sign of green, and there were no birds except a hardy flock of herring gulls that had stayed through the winter. When other signs appeared they were a paradox—a flare of northern lights more brilliant than any seen since autumn, and a white invasion from the northwest, a vast ice field that crept over the horizon and came down upon the island under the thrust of a three-day gale. For miles the sea was invisible under this white mask; and when the first floes touched the beach, closing the last gap of open water, the eye was dazzled by the broad sweep of reflected sunlight.
Isabel walked with Matthew and Sargent to West Light and watched this glittering spectacle from the plate-glass windows of the lantern. Along the north beach the weight of the pack thrust its foremost floes up to the edge of the dunes, but there all progress stopped. The floes groaned, squealed, cracked with the report of cannon, but could not budge the brown rampart against which all the fury of the winter seas had been so impotent. The west bar was another matter. The long spit ran out for miles barely submerged, and sinking gradually into deep soundings. Here the floes inshore touched and held, while those in deeper water moved on. The wind, shifting towards the east, began to press the whole field over the bar and around the west end of the island, a whirling movement that sent the big cakes slithering one over another in the shallows, mounting until sometimes a whole floe rose on edge into the air, swayed, buckled and collapsed.
This struggle, made the more violent by the strong set of current around West Point at half-ebb, filled the small world of Marina with a confused and mighty uproar. To Isabel, even in the safety of the lighthouse, clutching Matthew’s arm, the spectacle and the sound were frightening. With amazed eyes she watched the ice field piling up in masses like a spilled pack of cards, grinding its own ruins underfoot and pressing on. And again she wondered, as she had wondered through the winter gales, how Marina, made utterly of sand, without a rock, without even a pebble in its composition, could withstand such assaults for even half an hour.
Walking back to the wireless station she exclaimed, “And this is a sign of spring, you say!”
“Well, you see,” Matthew said in his slow reasonable way, “the pack ice gathers in the Gulf all winter and then spews out to sea. We get some of it every spring. In three weeks or so the first steamer will pass up the Gulf and dock at Montreal, and the port bigwigs will be down on the dock to present the skipper with a gold-headed cane—they really do, you know.”
“And what about the northern lights? They’re so much brighter now. Isn’t that a sign of colder weather?”
“A sign of change. They always seem brighter at the equinox, in this latitude anyway. Remember them in September?”
She thought of those unhappy nights when, with a coat over her nightdress, she had slipped down to the shore of the lagoon. That seemed ancient now. She wondered at the passage of experience no less than the passage of time. She had not roamed in the dark since the evening party at McBain’s, the first time she heard Skane play, and the spell of his music sent her weeping and passionate into Matthew’s arms. She had passed some sort of equinox herself that night. The winter had brought an uneasy pause, a brooding sense of coming storm. And now spring lay ahead. According to the almanacs the vernal equinox must bring great gales and rains before one could enjoy the sunshine and the flowers.
She remembered a mild night in September when, awake and restless, she had crept past Matthew’s sleeping form on the couch in the kitchen and stepped out into the dark. It was nearly three o’clock in the morning and the night operator had left his phones and gone to the engine room to pump the water tank. Isabel could hear the dreary suck and clank of the pump, and in a whim of curiosity she had turned along the south wall of the station and peered at one of the engine room windows. What she saw was arresting.
The engine room was an uncomfortable place, for it was always very hot, and usually the windows were kept shut lest sand blow in upon the machinery. In one corner stood a tall cylindrical tank, kept full of water, from which the engine’s cooling system circulated. The top of the tank was open, and in the short space between it and the ceiling appeared the overflow pipe of the domestic water tank, which stood in the attic above. Thus when the domestic tank had been filled the overflow began to run into the engine room tank. It marked the end of the operator’s nightly labor at the pump, for a few strokes more were enough to replace the water evaporated from the cooling-tank during the day.
On this almost windless night, with no sand blowing, Skane had opened the west window to catch the faint stir along the dunes. But the air in the room was stifling for all that, compounded of a hot reek of grease, of lubricating oil, of gasoline, a smell of warm varnish from the dynamo armature and the queer sharp tang of ozone given off by the spark in the course of the day’s work. In this stokehold atmosphere Skane stood naked at the pump. Sunburned by those free and easy summer months when they had “all lived like savages,” and wet with sweat, his figure shone like polished bronze. The pump handle rose to the height of his breast and he stood with one foot advanced, and with one arm thrusting the handle back and forth.
Isabel’s impulse was to retreat in haste, like a modest woman, but she was held by the expression on Skane’s face. He faced the cooling-tank, looking up towards the ceiling where, any moment now, the overflow pipe would begin to gush. One lock of drenched black hair lay over his forehead, and the light of the single lamp on the wall fell on his upturned face and revealed the intent, anxious, eager look with which he awaited the end of his slavery. All the tense rhythm of his lean body, unconsciously poised in the attitude of an athlete at some crucial moment, seemed to flow into that ardent face.
In a few moments the water appeared overhead and began to splash into the steaming top of the cooling-tank, a thin stream, bright in the lamplight and pulsing with the movements of the pump. Skane uttered an “Ah!” of satisfaction and thrust the handle away from him in one final stroke, made with a savage force that conveyed all his hatred of the thing. He turned towards the door, and in that moment Isabel fled.
Now, walking silently between Sargent and Matthew, and wondering what the end of winter would bring forth here, where nothing ever really changed except the sky and the clouds that passed across it, she thought of Skane at the pump. There was a symbol in the picture that remained so clearly photographed on her mind. We’ve all been at some sort of pump, she thought, ever since winter came, and that’s the way we’d all look if the masks were off. We’re all waiting for something to happen. We’re all watching for something to break the spell that binds us. For the thousandth time she asked herself, What is it? And again there was no reply. But now a new question formed itself and remained, insistent, in the undercurrent of her thoughts. When?
CHAPTER 23
Sargent’s absurd pegs crept towards the mast. There were mighty winds and sandstorms, there were drenching rains. But in the sunny intervals a benign warmth came upon Marina. On bright afternoons the sand hills shimmered and brought back a phenomenon not seen since the last days of Indian summer. Now in the distance the dunes writhed like the folds of a slowly shaken blanket, and wild ponies wandering over the slopes appeared misshapen and immense, like buffalo. Lifesavers riding their patrols from Main Station or making a visit “down East” became giants mounted upon impossible beasts as they drew away, and then in a moment, in a blink of the harsh light, changed to mere dots or disappeared. Bits of old wreckage along the beach were endowed with a weird life at half a mile, rising, twisting, swelling, shrinking, now resembling houses, now trees, now ships. With the return of spring Marina exchanged its last hold on reality for the fantasy of the mirage.
The ice on lagoon and ponds turned dark and rotten. Long fingers of sand blown over the surface from the nearby dunes now caught the sun and bu
rned into the ice and opened channels of blue water; and one wild night at the last of March a westerly gale wrenched at the veined and rotten sheets, tore them to rags and flung the gray tatters along the shores. The last stranded floes of the sea ice, like the dead of a polar invasion beaten off the beaches, changed in the sun to a queer fibrous mass that collapsed in a heap of crystals at a touch, and then melted clean away. Wild duck appeared in twos and threes, and then in hundreds, drifting like dark rafts on the surface of the lagoon.
And now on sunny afternoons Isabel began to ride again with Matthew or Skane or Sargent, whoever was free to get the ponies from Main Station and amble about the dunes and beaches in her company. One April afternoon she and Skane rode east to Number Two and called on the Lermonts. Their station looked very small and lonely, a house and a shed tucked away in a cup of dunes so neatly and so thoroughly that only the telephone line betrayed its presence. Lermont came out of the shed and took the ponies as they rode into the hollow, and plump Mary Lermont threw open her kitchen door and welcomed them.
“Thought at first it was Sara back again!” she cried. “She was here only a minute ago, didn’t you see her?”
“No,” they said.
“She must have rode out of sight awful quick. Been down this way every day since the ducks came, with Pa’s old seal-rifle, huntin’ amongst the ponds. Says you can’t git near ’em with a shotgun, they’re that wild. Come on in.”
They passed into a severe little parlor furnished after the fashion of McBain’s, and chatted over cookies and tea. Lermont’s face was still the weathered brown of last autumn. Isabel thought of the winter patrols, and the lone man and his pony facing the blast along the beach. In contrast Mary Lermont looked sallow and it seemed to Isabel a little worn, as if the vacuum of months shut in this lonely hole had drained her soul and her complexion in a single process. She had one topic of conversation, the topic of all the island women now—The Boat.
“You heard anythin’ about the Elgin over the wireless? No? Pretty near time we heard somethin’, ain’t it? I got my mail order list made up days ago. You got yours made up? There’ll be some changes in the hands at Main, three of the lifeboat crew got enough of it this winter—goin’ off to Hal’fax. And the lightkeeper’s assistant out at East, he’s poorly, thinks he’ll take a spell ashore. Ma wants Sara to go off, too, to git a bit o’ schoolin’ for a year or two. Stay at Ma’s sister’s place at Port Bickerton. Sara won’t have it, o’ course. Great girl she’s gettin’. And wild as a pony, roamin’ up and down.”
Mary’s large blue eyes rolled as she said this, and flicked from Skane to Isabel, and back again. “Ridin’ out quite a bit now, ain’t you, Miz Carney? Sara says she sees you quite a lot. She’s always up West. Don’t know why, I’m sure.” You do, though, Isabel thought. Skane was putting aside his empty cup and rising.
“I think we’d better be getting along, hadn’t we?”
She nodded and rose, brushing crumbs from her jodhpurs and buttoning the bright red coat. There were polite murmurs, and then they were climbing out of the hollow with the Lermonts watching them from the doorway. As they passed over the crest the house and shed vanished with the suddenness of a conjuring trick. They were alone in the wilderness of dunes. To the north, hidden but close at hand, the surf clamored on the beach, and far away on the other hand came the subdued murmur of the south bar. Behind them only the tip of the radio mast could be seen. Before them the telephone poles and wire ran on and vanished in the mirage towards Number Three. They rode for a time without speaking. The saddles creaked, the feet of the ponies whispered in the sand.
“Why doesn’t the sand fill up hollows like that?” Isabel asked, to break the silence.
“Like Number Two? Well, if you’d noticed, those dunes around it are well anchored by tufts of marram and creeping stuff like beach pea. The bare dunes, like those over there”—he pointed with his whip—“are the roving kind. A wind from one quarter blowing steadily for days will shift ’em bodily. That’s why from time to time the patrolmen find bones and bits of old wreckage that must have been buried for years, centuries perhaps. Look here, let’s ride over to Old Two. It’s only a couple of miles.”
“All right. What’s Old Two?”
“The original Number Two. You’ll see what happens when a big dune shifts. The house was built in a hollow, secure from the weather, and for years it was all right. Then somehow the wind began to eat under the grass tufts to the east of it. Probably some of the wild ponies had kicked a hole there and given the wind a start. Anyhow the sand began to shift. Not much at a time, you understand. A few tons, perhaps, whenever a gale blew from the east. The chap at Two battled with it for a year building a fence of driftwood to hold it back, and so on. Might as well have tried to fence off the sea at low tide. Then the Governor got alarmed—it was fifty or sixty years ago, before McBain’s time, but everyone knows the tale, it’s an island classic. The whole island crew had a go at stopping that dune—even tried shoveling it back. Finally they had to give up. The government built another station farther west—that’s New Two, where we’ve just been. They cleared everything out of Old Two and let it go.”
Skane led the way past a succession of small ponds edged with reeds and a thin turf covered with cranberry vines. They passed under the telephone line, ducking their heads, and rode up the shoulder of a bare sand hill. Skane reined up, and Isabel, drawing abreast, saw, in a shallow ravine below, the gable end of a roof. There was a glimpse of beach at the mouth of the ravine and a white flash of surf. She regarded the protruding bit of house and laughed. “It looks a bit silly, doesn’t it? Like something you’d see in a child’s sandbox.”
They rode down to it and dismounted. The dune had buried the house all but that end of the roof and the gable, where an empty window frame stared like a square black eye.
“That’s the attic window,” Skane remarked. “Sargent and I climbed in there one day and went down inside the house—like going down a mine. All the other windows are intact—they’d nailed boards over ’em as the sand rose about the place, hoping I suppose that some day the dune would hump itself east again. Sargent thought it a fine lark. He was like a kid exploring a cave.”
“I’d love to see it, Greg,” she said impulsively. “Do take me in.”
He fastened the ponies to a stout balk of wreck timber and crawled inside the window. Isabel followed, and as she scrambled to her feet Skane lit a match. In its yellow flare she could see a drift of sand along the attic floor, blown through the open window. They passed down a narrow flight of steps and explored four small bedrooms. The walls were covered with a simple flowered paper, stained with damp and peeling away in rotten strips.
“They took out all the furniture when the house was abandoned, of course,” Skane said. In the musty atmosphere of the empty rooms, where every floor had a layer of fine sand and all the timbers of the frame were held in the dead grip of the dune itself, Skane’s voice had the dull hollow echo of a grotto. The fuzzy radiance of the match threw their shadows across the farther wall, a pair of giant grotesques.
As they passed on down the main stairs to what had been the ground floor Isabel exclaimed, “Now I know what a diver feels like inside a sunken ship! These stairs—they’re built like a ship’s companionway—so steep and narrow.”
She laughed nervously. “I find it a bit eerie. It’s so cold and the air has such a wet feel. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an octopus or something else slimy and horrible coming out of a corner.” She slipped a hand in his arm and kept close to him as he moved about the rooms, plucking matches from his jacket pocket with his free hand and striking them. In the lowermost cavern, dank and chill as a tomb, Skane rattled the knob of the kitchen door. “You know it’s quite right what you said about it being like a sunken ship. That’s the way it impressed me before. You feel as if you could walk out of this door straight into Davy Jones’s locker.”
“Don’t!”
“Oh, it’s quite all r
ight. Sargent and I opened the door out of curiosity, half expecting to see the corpse of a sailor with his hand on the other knob; but there’s a heavy storm door beyond, nailed shut from the outside.”
“Ugh! Let’s go back, please.”
“Let’s give it a good look while we’re here. See that shelf in the corner. That’s where they used to stand their water buckets—you can still see the round mark on the paint. They didn’t have kitchen pumps in those days—had to get all their water from a small pond, back there towards the south. Sargent and I found an old puncheon sunk flush with the sand at the edge of the pond, where they used to dip their pails.”
He wandered about the lower rooms, striking matches, examining walls and ceilings with an interest that Isabel could not feel. She was aware of a chill horror creeping through her flesh. She moved step for step with him. On the wall their shadows were one.
“Those old chaps didn’t leave a thing when they cleared out, did they? Not even a picture on the wall. Natural, of course. When you’ve lived for years with anything, even a simple object like a stool that you could replace in twenty minutes with an ax and a sharp knife, you wouldn’t leave it in a place like this to be buried alive.”
The Nymph and the Lamp Page 25