The Nymph and the Lamp

  At these words Isabel quailed. She tried to force calmness into her voice.

  “Do let’s go, Greg—now! I’m frightened. It’s silly but I actually am.”’

  “Eh? Oh, nonsense! There’s something I want to show you. Sargent and I found a bit of old newspaper somewhere down here. Where did we chuck it? Quaint thing—a Boston paper with a column headed ‘Latest News from the War,’ and a long account of the battle of Bull Run, July, 1861.”

  He stepped away from her to look in a corner, holding the match low, and in that moment it went out. The darkness was intense. It was something wet and solid. Isabel stepped forward and groped uncertainly for the comfort of his touch. It was not there. She stretched out her arms. He had vanished. She listened. There was not a sound. She screamed “Greg!”

  “Yes?” he said, quite near at hand, but slightly behind her, not where he had been before. “It’s so dark—it’s horrible! Why don’t you strike another match?”

  “I’m sorry, I haven’t got any more.”

  She heard him step towards her and she turned and caught hold of his jacket. She clung to him, shuddering and sobbing, “Take me out! Take me out!”

  Skane put an arm about her and they groped their way to the main stairs. She could scarcely breathe. It seemed to her that the walls were closing in. Under the mass of sand, in the sinister darkness of the house, she seemed to feel the cold clutch of Marina itself, the evil sea-monster with its belly full of wrecks and dead men’s bones and still unsatisfied. She was almost fainting when at last they emerged in the fresher air of the attic and saw the shaft of sunlight through the empty window frame. In a few more moments they were outside, regarding the patient ponies and the blue V of sea between the dunes.

  Isabel leaned against the curled and rotten shingles of the gable as if she dared not trust her legs. Skane’s arm was still about her. The draft from the sea blew cold on her damp forehead. It vexed her to think that in a spasm of claustrophobia she had behaved like a nervous child. The fear had gone, but now there was another sensation running swiftly through her nerves. She turned to Skane instinctively, not moved by fear any more but as if those frantic moments in the darkness had released some other emotion that required his presence close to her. She did not try to think what it was. The face she turned to him was the wondering face of a dreamer absorbed in a vision still obscure but of an immeasurable importance, and whose end she must know.

  Skane did not speak. His arms clasped her swiftly and his lips found her mouth. Isabel stood in an attitude of utter submission, with eyes closed and hands at her sides. Skane’s lips were hard and fierce. All the repressed hunger of his long monkhood on Marina seemed to find expression in the kisses he wrenched from her trembling mouth. At last he paused. She opened her eyes and met his dark blue gaze. There was no hostility in it now, no smiling cynicism, no cool appraisal, none of the things she had seen and hated in the past; only a need that tortured him, and a demand that was not to be denied. Even had she wished to deny, there was nothing in her experience to enable her to cope with it easily and expertly as Miss Benson might have done; and all her cool integrity of other days, the inheritance of a Presbyterian conscience, the very knowledge of good and evil, were submerged and lost in a quick surge of emotion. Her one conscious thought was that the long frustration of the winter months had led in some mysterious way to this encounter and this moment, and now that it had come to crisis she might find relief.

  She was aware of a new and urgent caress, and she closed her eyes.

  “Not here,” she said faintly. “Not in this awful place.”

  Skane slipped an arm beneath her knees and carried her slowly up the ravine. The murmur of the sea receded. She felt herself carried up a slope and down another that seemed to fall quite steeply under Skane’s feet. She opened her eyes for a moment and saw a small pond in a sandy bowl. It was one of the innumerable and nameless ponds from which the wild ponies drank and where they took shelter from storm. The dunes sloped down to it in an almost perfect funnel like the crater of a small volcano, covered with spire-grass and beach pea. The water was shallow and clear and fringed with reeds, and the margin was pitted by the sharp hoofs of wandering ponies. For a distance of perhaps four yards about the rim of it a thin peat had formed in the course of ages, now covered with short grass and cranberry vines and already showing a hint of green. In one place a gleaming disc in the grass revealed the sunken puncheon of which Skane had spoken. It was the former well of Old Two.

  The turf by the pond was soft underfoot and Skane set her down carefully upon it. She did not move. She lay relaxed and quiet in the grass, with her face averted and eyes closed, the attitude of one wearied of struggle and submitting herself to the Fates. There was no further word. Everything had been said in the look that passed between them at the gable of Old Two. The afternoon sun fell hot on the grass where they lay. The sea breeze merely stirred the spire-grass on the crater rim. A diminutive sandpiper, one of the spring arrivals, flitted among the reeds and watched them curiously. Isabel was not conscious of her clothing, or of being unclothed. There came a moment when she felt the sun’s warmth on her thighs and then she was caught up in Skane’s passion and her own wild longing for oblivion.

  An hour passed, or it may have been two. Like a man long parched in a desert Skane drank deeply of the spring he had found, relaxed for a time, and drank again. In the toss and quiver of these ecstasies there was nothing to mark the passage of time. Once in a supreme moment with her head flung back, Isabel opened her eyes and saw framed in the blue circle of sky a lone gull, very white and noble in the sunshine, wheeling slowly and then dipping towards the west. Her eyes closed, and after a time Skane saw tears running down her cheeks.

  CHAPTER 24

  The long-awaited word came. A prosaic flicker of dots and dashes informed Marina that the Lord Elgin would sail for the island in about three weeks’ time. Along the island telephone wire the bells rang a carillon from morn to night. McBain drove up to the wireless station in his buggy with a list of stores required for the lifesaving stations and the two lighthouses. Carney and Skane went over the needs of the wireless station, and Isabel was called into their conference regarding food supplies. She was cool and competent, and she relieved them of much two-fingered labor by running off a complete list on the station typewriter. Sargent, on the graveyard watch, had a busy night of it; for in addition to a long recital of provisions from barrels of flour to pounds of tea, and every sort of material from drums of gasoline (for the radio engine) to flasks of mercury (for the lighthouse mirror bearings), there were personal shopping lists from all the island wives addressed to friends on the mainland. All of this had to be transmitted on the three-hundred meter wave, and in the small hours of the night, when there was little other traffic.

  The blare of the great electric trumpet going on and on kept Isabel awake; and Matthew, who usually slept profoundly, seemed infected with her restlessness. Once he spoke, but she affected not to hear. Into her sleepless ears, accustomed now to the language of dot and dash, the spark dinned an endless chant of nuts and bolts, of beef and bacon, of kerosene for East Light and wool stockings for Mrs. Nightingale at Number Four; a hardware merchant’s nightmare, a provision store’s whole inventory and a haberdasher’s “Spring Staples” list, all rolled into one unending catalogue.

  With unwilling vigilance her mind caught every inflection of Sargent’s hand, the falter as he turned a page, the occasional blurred dots as, bored by the whole thing, he made a blunder at the key; the slowly growing hoarseness of the spark, as if it were getting tired as well, although she knew that came from the charring of the brass studs of the whirling, flaming disc. She wondered if Skane were awake. She pictured him turning on that hard cot in his room.

  She had tried not to think of Skane in Matthew’s presence, not from a sense of guilt so much as a fastidious instinct that demanded it. At meal times and when she chatted with the others in the watch room her manner towards Sk
ane was what it had been ever since the autumn, when she lost her fear of him and talked to him as she talked to Sargent, with the air of a friendly young maiden aunt. And Skane with his quick understanding played his part. They seldom addressed each other directly and when they did their eyes were cool and impersonal. Without conscious plan, without any sort of connivance, they reserved all intimacy for the hours by the hidden pond.

  Each fine afternoon Isabel rode forth with one and sometimes two of her companions. Matthew had lost his keenness for riding. He seemed to have put aside all the pleasures that once had been his whole life. He was like a hermit whose habits, simple and innocent, have been shattered with his vow of chastity, and who now seeks penance in a revulsion against joy of any sort. Skane was free every third afternoon in the rotation of watches, but the April weather set a limit on their trysts. When, after rainy delays, they made their way to the hollow at Old Two, Skane was avid and impatient, and she gave herself up to him with the quiet, almost devout air of an odalisque who believes that this, for reasons not of her seeking, has been ordained as a mission in life.

  Nevertheless she was not prepared to give him what he so greedily wanted without a firm profession of his love for her. After that first silent yielding she was not so easily compliant. Each time they tied the ponies to the log beside Old Two and walked with arms about each other to the pond, she demanded, not so much with words as with her attitude, another assurance for the sake of her pride. It was the instinct of all women since Eve who refuse to be taken for granted, and Skane, swiftly perceiving, wooed her with every art he knew. It was no pretense. He was genuinely mad about her and it was apparent in his every word and gesture. He lived for these moments when, miles from the station, they could throw their masks aside and slip with words and caresses into Elysium.

  For her part Isabel sought in his abject and passionate avowals a fleeting comfort against the pangs of doubt. For the shadows were still there. The feeling of impending crisis that had come upon her with the winter dark was not changed by the discovery that Skane was violently in love with her. At first she had thought it was the answer to everything, and she had yielded body and soul with all the fervor of a woman who sees an answer to the ponderous riddle of existence. But the fears were only subdued, the mystery was still there, brooding over all four of them, and the new light of Skane’s passion made the old shadow more somber still. Bewildered, she threw herself into his embraces as if the fault were in herself, and as if it might be purged by some new ardor of her flesh; and afterwards, riding back to the station side by side in the silence of spent lovers or of old companions between whom everything has been said, she avoided his glances and fixed her gaze on the distance where the mast made its thin pencil stroke against the sky. The shallow mirror of the pond, in which she had peered to rearrange her hair, had reflected also the tall form of Skane beside her plucking a reed to put between his teeth, and she had a whimsy that they were phantoms both. The radio mast was reality; and as it drew near, climbing steadily towards the zenith, the raptures by the pool receded and were buried like Old Two itself. The sun was always well down the sky when she dismounted outside the apartment door and Skane rode on to return the ponies.

  Once Matthew said to her mildly, “You shouldn’t ride so far, my dear.”

  “Do you mind?” she said quickly with a sidelong glance.

  “Oh no, but you seem a bit tuckered sometimes. I’ll drop a hint to Skane.”

  She paused in the bathroom doorway and looked back, regarding him more carefully. Carney sat in the big chair with his pipe. He had been amusing himself with patience and the worn cards were scattered over the table. Did he suspect? There was nothing of suspicion in his calm face, wreathed in smoke and contemplating her with a faint smile on the lips. There was only a friendly solicitude and the touch of profound melancholy that had crept into his features during the past four or five months.

  “Please don’t,” she said. “I’m quite all right, and it’s wonderful to be out in the sunshine after so many months indoors.” She smiled. “You can feel sorry for the pony if you like.” She closed the door and a moment later, over the gush of taps, she inspected her features in the glass. The former pallor of her skin had acquired an amber tint on these sunny rides—“a nice genteel tan” as Skane had told her. It was a healthy tint, and if her mouth was a little drawn her eyes were clear, were even bright. There was only the small fold beneath her eyes to betray the ardors of the afternoon, but of course Matthew could not have noticed that. She was reassured. Nevertheless, she thought, a woman would have guessed. As her fingers closed on the knob of the medicine cabinet she was thankful that the nearest woman, shrewd Mrs. McBain, was well out of range towards the west.

  Marina now had come alive. The common seals which lived about the island all through the year had moved into the lagoon with the departure of the ice, and on sunny afternoons they could be seen in herds, lazing on the warm sands of the south bar. A number of big hooded seals had drifted to Marina with the great ice pack, and these hung about the island fishing in the surf. These too came ashore to sleep in the sun, and when disturbed by a passing rider they scrambled with swift ungainly movements into the water, digging their fore flippers into the sand and drawing their sleek hinder parts under them for each forward flop.

  But the great change was the return of the birds. Immense flocks of terns communed together on the shores of the lagoon and along the south bar. They filled the air with the white flash of their wings and their incessant harsh tee-arr tee-arr tee-arr. It fascinated Isabel to watch them from the south window of her kitchen, hurling themselves into the water like stones, with a bright splash and a plunge, and emerging with small fish. They were jealous of their property rights. A rider venturing near their roosting places was assailed and followed by a living cloud of birds, fluttering, crying, darting to within an inch of his head and soaring up again. In another month, Matthew told her, they would be laying their eggs and only a bold man with a long stick would venture into their rookeries. Yet they were careless creatures, they made no nest, simply scooping a shallow basin in the sand and letting the sun do their hatching for them.

  Fox sparrows came in a single flight, paused for a day or two to rest and to sound their music through the grass, and then went on towards the north. So it was with the wild ducks, although some of these remained to nest beside the ponds. Flocks of small beach birds skittered along the sands feeding at the lip of the surf, weaving their course as the water shot up the beach. Sandpipers ran among the marram tufts above the shore. Plover rose and settled in small groups like puffs of smoke in rainy weather. There were other species, small shy things with curious cries and songs. Carney knew them all. They filled him with delight.

  “Hark!” he would say with sudden enthusiasm. “Do you hear that wee chap in the grass behind the shed? That’s a variety of the Savannah Sparrow. And do you know, Marina’s the only nesting place of that variety known to man. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Makes you realize how old this heap of sand must be, how long ago it must have been kicked up out of the sea, when a distinct subspecies has evolved. That’s what makes me laugh when McBain and the others talk about the island washing away—disappearing in another century or so. They see a big storm in the winter tear a bit of the shore away and they measure everything by that. All that happens is that the sea bites a chunk out of it in one place and chucks it up again somewhere else. McBain and his ‘washing away’! Nightingale and that yarn he tells everybody about Marina having been a hundred miles long and forty wide in his great-grandfather’s time! I’ve seen a very good chart of Marina made more than a hundred and twenty years ago, with soundings taken and even the biggest dunes marked and named. By Jingo, it shows the island exactly as it is today, except that in those days you could sail a sloop into the lagoon and today you can’t. And what about that sparrow?”

  His pleasure in the return of the birds and of the broad strong sunshine seemed to lift some of the melanchol
y from his spirits. One warm April day he even consented to ride with Isabel and Sargent along the shore of the lagoon towards Number Three. They rode close enough to see Giswell’s house looming and shrinking in the mirage and then turned back. For variety they rode part way along the dunes. As they reached the crest of a long ridge with the ponies knee-deep in spire-grass they came upon a little comedy in a group of wild ponies grazing in the shallow green valley beyond. Carney reined up to point them out.

  “See the stallion—that’s the big dark chap with the very long mane. I can’t see him clearly from here—the dazzle on the sand—but I’ll venture his flanks are well scarred where he’s been fighting for his mares. You see some wonderful scraps when a rival comes along.”

  “What happens to the stallion colts?” asked Sargent, peering under the shade of his hand.

  “He kicks ’em out when they come of age, and they wander off along the island looking for a mate. Like that one—see that lone pony in the ravine just below us? There’s a rogue stallion from some other herd unless I’m greatly mistaken.”

  “Is he going to fight?” Sargent demanded, with interest.

  “Not by the way he’s working. Probably tried it and got a hearty kicking for his enterprise. Watch him now. See how that little mare has wandered away from the rest—down there. That one. In a few more nibbles she’ll be out of the old boy’s sight. See? Now watch the young stallion—see him working along the ravine. Now! Now he’s slipping up to her—see! See how he’s nudging her, nipping her with his teeth—shoving her the way he wants her to go. There! Now they’re off together along the ravine. By the time the old chap misses her they’ll be a mile away and out of sight.”

  “She seemed to be quite willing,” Isabel observed.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Rather like people, aren’t they?” Sargent said, and laughed. Isabel flushed.