The Nymph and the Lamp

  There was good footing on the shore of the lagoon. The hard strand wound like a narrow road between the water and the dunes. The sun was far down towards the sea in the west and now that the sands no longer burned the mirage had dissolved.

  Every object along the shore was very sharp and clear. When the wireless station came in sight Isabel’s head began to loll.

  “Just a bit more, darling,” Skane begged. “Only a little way now.”

  When they turned off the lagoon shore and came up the easy undulating slope towards the station Carney and Sargent were outside, rolling a drum of gasoline to the intake pipe of the engine room. They did not notice the approach of the ponies for some time. Then Sargent exclaimed, Carney began to run first. He came in swift strides over the sand, shouting “My God, what’s happened, Skane?” The sunset gave a coppery glint to his beard and hair. Skane did not reply at once but as they drew together he said in a flat voice, “She’s been shot.” In a profound silence they drew the ponies to the door and carried Isabel to the bedroom.

  Carney turned to Sargent. “Get back to your watch,” he said. “Phone McBain and tell him what’s happened. Then crack off a message to the Department office at Halifax. Say my wife’s been seriously injured and the Elgin must come at once. Mark it ‘D’ for urgent, and sign my name. Then see if you can raise the Elgin. She’s up the coast somewhere.”

  Isabel swam in a dark sea, rising and falling with the waves. There were moments when she was acutely conscious of the careful hands of the two men as they cut her clothes away, and of the concerned murmur of their voices. She did not feel pain so much as exhaustion and a vast dull protest in her flesh that seemed to have no point of origin. Once she heard very plainly the click of the tin cover of the first-aid kit. Once, in reply to Carney, she heard Skane saying, “Some fool with a rifle I suppose, potting at ducks among the ponds.” And again, “No, she didn’t seem to know what had happened for a minute. She didn’t cry out. She looked at me in a startled sort of way and then I saw the blood.”

  These interludes were brief. Most of the time she floated in darkness with the sound of a great surf in her ears. She did not hear the faint crunch of McBain’s buggy wheels and she did not see Mrs. McBain come storming in, with a coat thrown over her apron and a moth-eaten Lily Langtry hat perched coquet tishly on her gray head, crying, “Guns! Guns! Guns! Last year it was Jim Corrie with his arm blown half off, and the year before it was that Shelman child, playing with a loaded twenty-two. When are you going to learn, you dangerous idiots! Where’s this poor girl?”

  She took charge at once, drove Carney and Skane out of the apartment, shook up the fire in the stove, filled the kettle, and moved into the bedroom with her old carpetbag. For years she had been Marina’s oracle in medical matters, a role that she sustained with homely remedies learned in her girlhood in a Nova Scotia fishing village, in the years when she went to sea with McBain and in her years on Marina and with a good deal of plain common sense.

  For many hours Isabel lay unconscious, sometimes tossing in delirium, sometimes as still as if dead. There were fantastic dreams. Processions of hideous faces came and went on a bright red screen of whirling molecules. Weird hags that might have stepped out of Grimms’ fairy tales sidled up to her, speaking softly, slyly, and suddenly struck her in the face. She was on the beach, fastened, unable to move, with the great ice pack thrusting towards her, the floes heaving, thundering, falling upon her. She was in the Lord Elgin’s cabin again, feeling that sickening rise and fall of the ship, or being carried to the bathroom to retch. But chiefly she was back in the buried house at Old Two. The scene was repeated again and again, with the actors changing roles. Sometimes when she cried out in that horrible darkness it was Skane’s voice she heard. Sometimes it was Matthew’s, and when she screamed “Why don’t you strike another match?” he answered, just as Skane had done, “I’m sorry, I haven’t any more.” But sometimes there was another match. She could hear the scrape of it in the dark, and when it flared she saw the face of Skane, dark and smiling in reassurance, or the face of Matthew, very calm and stern. Once or twice the voice that cried was not her own, and she found the match in her fingers and struck it; and then the face was Matthew’s, with a frightened and lost expression in his eyes.

  On the second day she swam back to full consciousness, and Mrs. McBain fetched Matthew. “My dear,” she said, “here’s your husband. You mustn’t try to talk to him. I don’t know how far down the lung goes but the bullet may have touched it, though you seem to breathe all right. You talk to her, Matthew, while I put the dinner on.” Isabel turned her eyes. There was pain now, intense pain, as if a red-hot iron had been thrust into her side and was being twisted without cease or mercy in the wound. She lay drenched in perspiration. She saw Matthew coming slowly to the bedside. He ignored the chair and dropped upon his knees.

  “My dear, my dear, if you only knew how I wish to God it had been me.”

  Her eyes filled but she managed to twist her lips in a smile.

  He turned his gaze to the wall and said with an assumed briskness, “You’re going to be all right. We’re going to take you off to hospital at Halifax. The Department’s sent a message ordering O’Dell here at once. We’re trying to get him now—so is Halifax. He’s pottering about in some of those little harbors towards Canso, setting out buoys that were taken up for the winter, and of course there’s no telegraph ashore and his wireless is blanked inside the hills and islands. We’ll raise him the moment he sticks his masts outside. Thank God the weather’s fair and the glass keeps high.”

  Mrs. McBain looked in the doorway and saw Isabel close her eyes, “That’ll be enough,” she said at once. “Don’t talk any more. You can sit there with her if you like. You’ll have to go out by and by when I change the dressings.”

  Isabel could hear the coughing of the engine exhaust, and presently the transmitter screamed. She knew Skane’s hand at once. He was calling the Lord Elgin and she sensed in the long repeated signals the urgency of her lover. She could see his anxious face. And in the long silence that followed she could see him bent towards the tuner panel with his lean fingers on the dials, straining to hear the hoarse burr that was for all of them the voice of The Boat. There seemed to be no answer and she drifted into sleep. When she awoke again Matthew was gone, and Mrs. McBain was saying, “Ah! Now, lamb, before I touch those bandages do try to eat a little soup.”

  CHAPTER 26

  The hours passed. Much of the time now she lay awake and feverish. The pain remained but she had grown familiar with it, and with the patience of women who are born to endure she lay quiet under the torture. She saw the next day’s sunrise enter the window and brighten a strip of wall above the bed, and she watched it slowly move and fill the room. Mrs. McBain came in and went at once to draw the blind, but Isabel protested.

  “Don’t pull it down, Mrs. McBain, please, I love the sunshine. There hasn’t been much in my life.” Mrs. McBain looked at her curiously.

  “You mustn’t speak if it hurts, lamb. You haven’t been happy on Marina, have you?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Well, it’s not much of a life for a young woman like you that’s been used to towns and such.”

  “It isn’t that. But I don’t want to talk about it. Where does Matthew sleep?”

  Mrs. McBain pointed to the wall, “On the other side, in the cook’s old room, so I could bang on the partition if you took a bad turn. Your voice sounds quite strong. You don’t feel any bubbling inside or anything like that?”

  “No.”

  “You look bad though, lamb. I suppose it’s the shock and of course you lost an awful lot of blood. We’re all praying for a calm sea, so McBain can get you off the beach all right, and then you’ll have a good run to Halifax. Carney’s going off with you, I suppose?”

  “Oh no, he mustn’t do that.”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “After this one there won’t be another boat till August. He c
an’t leave Skane and Sargent here to keep watch-and-watch all that time. Besides, he’s so worried about the station, the engine and all that. The equipment is so old. He must stay. I won’t hear of him leaving.”

  “You mustn’t get excited, lamb. Well, I suppose you’ve got plenty of friends and relatives ashore.”

  “I shall be quite all right.”

  “Um. Well, I must go and get the men’s dinner on. Your husband had the long watch last night and he turned in at eight this morning. He’ll be up now, I expect. That man never sleeps more than four hours a day, it seems to me. After dinner I’ll brush your hair and fix you up nice and he can talk to you. Would you like to see Skane and Sargent for a minute? They’ve been terrible anxious over you.”

  “That would be nice.”

  Mrs. McBain was an exact woman. Skane and Sargent had no more than her minute, standing in the doorway murmuring a few commonplaces and then being shooed off like importunate puppies. Then Matthew came, with a light of relief on his haggard face.

  “My dear, Halifax raised the Elgin five minutes ago and we’ve just heard O’Dell’s reply. He’s heading for Marina at ten knots—should be off Marina tomorrow about the middle of the forenoon. There’s a light westerly breeze and not much surf, and McBain thinks that will hold. He’s fixed up a wagon with a mattress on top of some loose hay. Tomorrow after breakfast he’ll hitch up his steadiest ponies and we’ll take you along the north beach to the landing place. You must tell Mrs. McBain what things to pack up for you. I’ll get my own duds later on.”

  Isabel licked her dry lips. “Matthew, will you close the door, please—gently, I don’t want to offend Mrs. McBain. There’s something I must tell you.”

  Carney arose and shut the door. He turned, drawing in a deep breath and squaring his shoulders. “Yes, my dear?”

  “Please sit down, Matthew. I don’t want you to come away with me.”

  “But I’ve made arrangements…”

  “That doesn’t matter. The station’s what matters. You can’t go off and leave two men to run the thing for so long. Don’t argue—please! You must hear what I have to say. I’ve had a lot of time to think, lying here. My mind’s been so muddled ever since I came to Marina, but now it’s very clear. I’m going to be all right. I don’t think I’m dangerously hurt. It’s not even important, really. The important thing, Matthew, is that it offers me away out of a nightmare. I think you know I’ve not been happy here. There were times when I was, when everything seemed wonderful, and I think you felt the same. But after the winter came everything changed. It did something to us. As if—as if we were both under a curse of some kind. There were times when I’ve felt that it was very close to me, that I could put out my hand and touch it, if only I knew what it was. But I don’t know and it wasn’t to be touched. It was like a darkness that you can sense but you can’t feel. It seemed to shut us off from each other, you and me.”

  “Yes,” he said. He was not looking at her. The massive blond head was bowed, the crisp beard against his chest. He sat hunched forward, contemplating his big clasped hands, and she saw that the knuckles were white.

  “It’s difficult to say this, Matthew. I realize now that I should never have come. It wasn’t your fault. It was mine—all mine. I came to you in a moment of hysteria and threw myself at your head; and then I persuaded you to bring me here. That was the ultimate folly. I know that now. It’s only brought unhappiness to you, to me—to all of us. I suppose we might have gone on like that, for how long it sickens me to think. Then this happened. It seemed a final judgment on my folly. But now I know it’s the best thing that could have happened, for us all. It puts an end to this—this glum little play that we’ve all been acting here. At least it takes me off the scene and leaves you all as you were before, when you had what you considered the finest kind of life. I’ve never forgotten what you told me the day we met, that Marina was the only place that had any meaning for you. That’s still true, isn’t it?”

  He remained bowed and silent. Then in a strained voice, almost a whisper:

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’ll promise to stay—and let me go?” Another silence; and again a hoarse “Yes.” She saw a tear splash on the clenched hands, and her own eyes filled.

  “Please leave me now,” she said in a broken voice. “And tell Mrs. McBain that I want to be alone for a time.”

  She wept when he had gone; and in the morning, just before they came to take her away, she worked the wedding ring off her finger and slipped it under the pillow. It seemed the only way to mark the end of their relationship. Matthew would find it there when he returned from the beach, and he would understand.

  Clothing the patient was a problem, for every movement was an agony; but this was solved by enclosing her carefully, just as she was, in an eiderdown sleeping bag from McBain’s emergency stores. In this, securely buttoned from head to foot, they carried her on a stretcher to the wagon. It was Sargent’s watch and she said good-by to him there, with a pale smile, and saw him turning away to hide his emotion. Mrs. McBain sat in the straw beside her, and McBain took the reins himself. They set off slowly over the dunes towards the north beach, with Carney walking on one side of the wagon and Skane on the other, to ease the sway of it as the ponies clambered over the slopes. For all that, it was a painful journey until they came out on the level footing of the beach.

  There was a light breeze and the air was cool and fresh. The surf hissed on the shore and seemed at times to sweep about the ponies’ feet but it did not sound like a bad sea. She noticed Mrs. McBain and the men glancing at it carefully from time to time. A flock of terns followed the wagon, darting, wheeling, soaring overhead, and filling the air with their outcry. The radio mast stood tall in the April sky, receding, sinking slowly into the dunes. Isabel watched it out of sight.

  At the landing place the lifeboat crew were waiting with the station’s best surfboat and a special stretcher with slings at both ends for hoisting aboard the ship. The Kahns were there, and the Lermonts had ridden down from Number Two.

  “Is that thing safe?” demanded Mrs. McBain, eyeing the stretcher as the men eased the laden sleeping bag into it.

  “I made it myself,” said McBain rather indignantly. “She’ll be strapped in. She can’t fall out, even if one sling lets go.”

  “Well, you look to it sharp before they hoist her up. I won’t have the poor girl slung aboard by the heels like a pony, John McBain. Are you all right, lamb?”

  “Yes.”

  “Here’s your husband to kiss you good-by.”

  Matthew’s face appeared, bending over her. He looked very stern. His eyes were exactly the color of the spring sky, so different from the dark blue sea-tint of Skane’s, and she saw in them now the strange “radio look” that she had so often remarked in all of them, the eyes unseeing and yet regarding things hidden and afar. There were no tears in them, as there were in hers. She felt the crisp hairs of the golden beard against her cheek and then a brief touch of his lips.

  “I’ve written a letter to Hurd,” he said in a measured voice. “He’ll make all the hospital arrangements and see that you have everything you want.”

  He paused, and swallowed, looking off to sea. “Good-by, my dear, and God bless you. It’s strange…that seems all there is to say.” He turned away.

  Mrs. McBain fussed about the buttons of the sleeping bag and kissed her.

  “Good-by, lamb, and come back to us soon. Your suitcase and things are in the boat.” And she added, “Don’t cry, you mustn’t cry,” as if she were not weeping noisily herself.

  Then Skane’s face, gaunt and impersonal, but with an intimate message in his eyes. She blinked the tears away and said in a small cold voice, “It’s good-by, Greg.”

  “We’ll be seeing you,” he said. She did not answer. In another moment McBain was saying, “All right, boys, shove off.” He stood in the boat clasping the loom of the big steering oar in his seasoned hands. The crew, with Kahn, Lermont, Skane,
Carney and the three island women, put their hands on the gunwales and waded out into the surf, thrusting the boat to sea. Isabel, in the boat bottom, could see nothing now but McBain’s alert brown face and the sea birds wheeling in the cloudless sky. It was like that other boat journey when she had felt herself so lonely in the grip of the sea. The boat was water-borne now, dancing in the surf, and the crew jumped in and ran out the oars.

  “Pull!” snapped McBain. “Lively now!” The rowers pulled violently. A sea ran along the gunwale and poured a thin lip over it. There was a sound of water trickling. Then the short quick chop of the inshore waves subsided. The boat moved up and down on slow glossy swells. McBain looked down and gave Isabel a grin.

  “Nothin’ to it, Ma’am. Janie’s got us a good sea for her prayers.”

  Nevertheless there was concern in his eyes as they drew alongside the ship and looked up the swaying iron cliff of her side. O’Dell had his forward derrick boom swung out and the cargo hook came down to the boat like a predatory claw. One of the boatmen took the steering oar so that McBain could fasten the stretcher tackles himself. Then, easing one of the control lines through his hands and keeping a fierce eye on the man who held the other, he called, “H’ist away!”

  Isabel heard O’Dell’s high voice calling “Easy! Easy now!” to his donkeyman. It was done very well, without even a jerk as the stretcher left the boat. She had no fear, indeed despite her pain and weariness she found a twinge of humor in the thing. It was so like Little Eva going up to heaven on a rope from the flies of Acker’s. For a time there was nothing in her view but the sky, the cargo hook and its wire, but as the boom swung slowly inboard the Lord Elgin’s upper works came into sight, and the faces of O’Dell and his mate thrust over the canvas dodger on the bridge. The stretcher was lowered to the forward deck. Without warning Isabel was looking up into the smiling face of a woman.