The Nymph and the Lamp

  All this seems a maundering sort of way to tell you what is on my mind. You were always a direct sort of person and I know you’re too sensible not to agree with what I have to say. It’s simply this. As you know we were never married in the legal sense and you are free to live your own life as you choose. Live it then, my dear, and try to forget this sorry episode. You are young still and the world can be a very charming place. For my part the world is here. I shall never leave the island again. I have written a letter to my bankers, the Bank of Nova Scotia in Hollis Street, making over to Isabel Jardine the sum now lying to my credit there. It’s something between eight and nine thousand dollars and will give you a good anchor to windward if you should ever be in need.

  Do take it, my dear girl, for I won’t need money anymore. Even if I did there’s my pay, and I’m good for a long run yet. Try to think kindly of me. If I took advantage of your moment of weakness in Halifax it was because I was weak myself, catching at a kind of happiness that was new and wonderful to me. That I shall never forget. And now there seems nothing more to write but what I said to you on the beach as you left. Good-by my dear and God bless you and keep you always.

  Yours sincerely,

  MATTHEW CARNEY

  The nurse came in. “Why, Mrs. Carney, you’re crying! Was it that young man? And he looked so nice!”

  “I’m quite all right.”

  A searching stare. “You don’t look all right. You’re as white as a ghost. I shouldn’t have let him in. It isn’t a regular visiting day but the convalescents are allowed visitors in the lounge in the afternoon and I didn’t think…Hadn’t you better go to bed? You can get up again tomorrow.”

  “Oh no, I’m quite well,” Isabel protested.

  But Nurse Thompson, obsessed with that fear of authority, that awe of the doctors, that abject worship of the rules which is the most tiresome characteristic of hospital attendants, would hear no argument. To bed Isabel went, clutching her letters and her self-command in the same forlorn fists. When Doctor Pelly came in with his fatuous cry she pretended to be asleep.

  It was three days before she permitted herself to open the letter from Skane. It was written on the blue back of a long Press message form, and in the beautiful draftsman’s script that flowed from Skane’s hand as naturally as his dots and dashes and his music.

  MY DARLING,

  Sargent’s off tomorrow and he’s to put this in your hands himself. I don’t know what they do with patients’ mail in hospital but I have a vision of some snuffy female creature in a starched cap slitting the envelopes and reading everything aloud to you and anybody else who may be passing. What wonderful news that you weren’t dangerously hurt. We were all smiles for days. Mrs. McBain has kept the telephone ringing every day since you went away and says everyone’s been anxious about you from the Kahns right down east to Jude Shelman and his wife. Altogether it’s been the greatest excitement on Marina since a schooner loaded with rum struck on the east bar and all the islanders went down with D.T.’s for a month.

  Seriously, though, we were all terribly worried and for me it was hell. I’d tried in those afternoons by the pond to tell you what you meant to me but it wasn’t till we were making that ghastly journey back to the station that I really knew, myself. I won’t inflict it on you here. When spoken, love is so very fresh and original; you feel that nobody ever said these things before. But when written (judging from the books one reads) it’s all so dismally trite and a lot of it looks damned silly. Yet actually those are the things one says and finds so marvelous. The moral is that you should speak of love but never write about it. Anyhow, I refuse to make love to you on paper, and this is chiefly to inform you that I’ve written to Hurd reminding him that I’ve been here nearly three years and that he must send a man to relieve me when O’Dell comes again in August. Then for a good long leave! You’ll have left the hospital long before that, of course, so please keep Hurd informed of your whereabouts. When I get to Halifax I’ll stop in the office long enough to pick up your address, and then my very dear I shall come to you with a D prefix demanding absolute priority.

  All my love,

  GREG

  P.S. It’s impossible to make plans until I see you. Hurd would give me a transfer to almost any station I wish. There are some snug ones up the Gulf and on the Great Lakes, in or near towns where we could live a civilized life and be completely happy. Or do you want to get away from the whole thing? I could quit pounding brass and go in for something else, anywhere you like. What about the West Coast— Vancouver, say?

  Isabel read it through several times. And she walked over to the lounge fireplace, tore the sheet to small blue scraps and dropped them into the flames.

  CHAPTER 28

  Kingsbridge had sprung up about a crossroads and a river ferry in the time of William the Fourth; and in the course of several generations it had gathered a population of about five hundred, two churches, a large brick school, a hotel, a movie theater and a dozen shops. It called itself a town but in reality it was simply an overgrown village, with its shops and public buildings clustered about “The Corner” and its homes set well apart along the roads for a mile in each direction. It was the center of a farming district and a good many of the townsfolk were truck gardeners themselves. Apples were the chief crop. On all sides as far as the eye could reach the orchards marched in neat companies and battalions over the floor of the valley and into the lower slope of the hills.

  Along the green floor the Annapolis River wound sluggishly between steep red clay banks as if a vast puncheon of sherry were leaking somewhere in the hills. The main valley highway, which was also the town’s Main Street, dipped a little to the south past the Baptist church and leaped over this wine-stream on a black iron bridge. With the passage of time and fat crops a number of well-to-do farmers had moved into the town and built substantial white clapboard houses with deep verandas and red or green doors and window frames and shutters. There were trim lawns and gardens and shady maples and chestnuts. Main Street itself was lined with huge old elms that overhung the sidewalks and the road, and there was a constant battle between the residents and the telephone company about the mutilation of these trees in the name of progress.

  In winter Kingsbridge went into hibernation like the bears on the mountainside. The townsfolk stayed close to their comfortable homes, stoking fires and stoves and furnaces with chunks of hardwood cut on the wooded sides of the valley. Those who owned motorcars stored them away in a shed when the fall rains turned the valley roads to red mud, and there they remained, jacked up on blocks to save strain on the tires, until the following April, when the frost had come out of the roads and the spring mud had begun to dry.

  In summer there was a lot of travel through the town, and the dining room of the Trilby Hotel rang with the voices of American motorists on their way to the shrine of Evangeline at Grand Pre. Otherwise Kingsbridge was rather quiet all through the week, even in summer, except on Saturdays. It was a Saturday night town. On Saturdays when the farmers and their wives and families came in to shop and gossip and see the latest Western movie, Kingsbridge became another place altogether. Then the town’s back yards and lanes were crammed with parked buggies and wagons and tethered horses, and Main Street itself was lined with the carefully polished cars of the new era. The shops were thronged, the Empire Theater was packed to the doors, and groups of girls and youths arrayed in their best mail-order finery strolled up and down the sidewalks under the elms. At eleven o’clock the crowd thinned away and vanished, and only the horse-droppings in the lanes and the scatter of gum wrappers and peanut shells outside the Empire remained to inform the Sunday morning churchgoers that another week’s frivolity had come and gone.

  Apart from the summer invasion of American tourists, whose cars stirred up clouds of red dust all along the valley from June to September, the chief traffic in and out of Kingsbridge was horse-drawn. Even the town’s own motorists seldom drove farther than the next town to the east or west. If
you wanted to go beyond that you went down to the small gray wooden railway station where Jim Farris, the agent, looked after your ticket and baggage; and you stood on the worn plank platform regarding the shining rails that led the eye and the mind towards the distant wonders of the world.

  When Isabel got off the “up” train in the bright May sunshine everything looked exactly as it had eight years before, when she had cast off the career of a country school ma’am at the age of twenty-two and set out for the city a hundred miles away. Here was the station with its small freight shed, the red water tank and the big wooden warehouse of the fruit company, all set apart in the field outside the town; here were the rails, the cinders the very knots in the platform looked the same; and a few hundred yards away the familiar roofs and spires of Kingsbridge rose out of the surrounding orchards and the massive elms like half-tide rocks in an ocean of living green.

  She had never lived in Kingsbridge but she knew it very well. It was the magic place of her childhood, to which her father and mother had taken her in the small riding-wagon every Saturday afternoon. She had grown up with a clear impression that the town was a center of civilization holding everything the heart could desire, and if she could have got a post in the Kingsbridge school she might have been there still. Unfortunately Kingsbridge folk had a profound faith in outside talent for the teaching of their offspring—except of course when the daughter of a leading merchant wanted a post at home—and anyone like the Jardine girl, herself a product of the small school at Scotch Springs, and with no more than a year’s training at Normal School, had no chance at all.

  Scotch Springs was one of the poorer hamlets of the countryside. It lay at the edge of the valley where the rich red soil gave place to coarse sands and gravels washed down from the rugged slopes of North Mountain. Its fields were stony, its orchards had a scrawny look. The farmhouses were kept in repair but seldom painted. A little group of Scots had settled there long after the good land in the valley had been taken up, and they had clung stubbornly to that grudging soil on the edge of the hills until the third generation. Then the young men began to drift away to the States and the Canadian West. There was a saying in Kingsbridge that the only worthwhile stuff they raised for home consumption in Scotch Springs was a fine tall crop of girls, and there was a good deal of truth in it.

  Eight years is not a long time in the life of a country town in Nova Scotia but Isabel’s absence included four years of war and nearly three of a postwar boom that had changed everything. In a town like Kingsbridge where the Victorian age had crept on undisturbed well into the twentieth century the impact of all this was immense. The scene that looked so familiar as she stepped off the train was an illusion. The first symptom of change was right at the station, where in place of the old Democrat wagon belonging to the Trilby Hotel which used to meet all the trains she found three shining cars, and three alert young men wearing war veterans’ badges crying “Taxi, lady?” The second was at the rambling pine clapboard hotel, where she registered under her own name. It was in new hands, some of the rooms had private baths, the name had been changed to Boston House, and for the further attraction of American tourists a large Stars and Stripes waved slowly from a staff over the entrance.

  The tourist season was not yet in full swing and she was given a very good room and bath facing upon an apple orchard at the side of the house. The trees were in full leaf and the buds were fat; in another week or two the whole valley would burst into blossom. The sun fell warm on the town and the air was quiet, indeed it was almost uncanny after the bustle of postwar Halifax and the eternal crash of surf on Marina.

  As she unpacked she took stock of her resources. The trousseau she had bought so hastily on the way to Marina was almost intact. Mrs. McBain had put in everything with care. In Halifax she had cashed the four-hundred-dollar check for her “cooking wages.” The hospital had refused to accept any money from her, saying that Mr. Hurd’s office was taking care of all that, and she had not argued the point. She had not gone near Carney’s bankers in Hollis Street. She had not even gone to see Hurd. All that was out of her life.

  She found a small windfall in the second of her suitcases. Tucked away among the carefully folded underwear was a check for seventy dollars—the month’s salary that Hurd had sent her by Carney on that hectic day of their departure for the island. With it was the wedding license. In the long months gone by she had forgotten both. There was something else. In the very bottom of the suitcase lay that Christmas gift of Skane’s, the photograph of himself and Carney with the figurehead. She took it up and examined it curiously, seeing herself in Clélie’s place between the two men, with Skane’s face turned to hers in a whimsical smile and Matthew squinting against the sun. Skane had given it to her long before that revealing adventure of Old Two but she wondered now, seeing how perfectly the photograph set forth the living tableau from which she had fled, if Skane had known what must come of the silent little drama in the wireless station. She studied it profoundly for a time and then thrust the small lifebuoy frame away under the clothes in the suitcase. No more! It had never happened! A dream, everything, including the desk in Hurd’s office and the room at Mrs. Paradee’s. She told herself that she had never left the valley, and that now she had merely ventured into Kingsbridge looking for a job.

  In prewar days the ideal of almost every girl in Scotch Springs was to teach school, but failing that the great thing was a job behind the counter of one of the Kingsbridge shops. There you saw life, you got money, a stuff seldom seen on the farm, and because of the money you were able to dress exactly like those languid creatures in the mail-order catalogues. This circumstance attracted beaux and in Kingsbridge you had a choice from all the countryside. The marriage rate among the shopgirls of Kingsbridge was very high, and for that reason there were frequent “vacancies.” If you were young and strong and came of honest parents (and if you were willing to work for eight dollars a week) you got a chance to fill a vacancy, and in the next issue of the Kingsbridge Courier your parents could read with pride that Miss Maisie McCutcheon of Scotch Springs had “accepted a position” at Carson & Goble’s Emporium. In Kingsbridge you could get board and lodging for five dollars a week (which you considered outrageous) and that left you more than a hundred and fifty dollars a year for clothes and amusement. And if you looked well in your clothes there were always young men eager to see that your amusement cost you nothing. It was marvelous.

  Isabel walked along the street to the bank and deposited three hundred dollars and the seventy-dollar check. It was a very small anchor to windward but at least it was her own, and in Kingsbridge it would enable her to weather quite a storm. She made some discreet inquiries at the bank regarding “vacancies” and she walked up one side of Main Street and down the other, looking in the shops. There was not a single “Girl Wanted” sign. At the hotel she picked up a three-day-old copy of the Courier and found in the classified column a small advertisement for female help, with the blunt command “Apply Bon Ton.” This was something new, a hat shop she supposed, but on application she found it to be a small restaurant off Main Street near the bridge, catering to farmers and other transient visitors who did not want to go to the hotel. It was not the sort of job she wanted but she went inside and inquired. A fresh-faced girl, obviously from an outlying farm and obviously delighted to be here, informed her at once that the position was filled. “I’ve got it,” she said, and smiled.

  “Do you happen to know if there are any other jobs likely to be open soon—girls getting married or anything like that?”

  “Well,” the girl said, “there are two girls getting married, one at old Markham’s, the hardware merchant’s, and the other in Olney’s Dry Goods; but they’re planning to keep their jobs. They’re marrying town boys who’ve been out of work ever since they got back from the war.”

  “I see,” Isabel walked out. Evidently the times and manners had changed a good deal since she went away to the city. In 1913 young men did not marry u
nless they had a farm or a good job. As for the girls, any girl who continued to work in a shop after marriage was regarded as an unfortunate. The phrase “She’s keeping on with her job,” went about the town and countryside and everybody condemned her for the poor little fool who had tied herself to that no-account fellow So-and-so.

  But now that she had taken a careful look at the town Isabel realized that the Kingsbridge she had known had vanished. The war and the huge demand for foodstuffs of every sort had driven farm values into the sky and produced a flood of money beyond anybody’s dreams in the frugal days of ’13. The demand and the prices were still high. For almost seven years the valley had basked in this golden sunshine and there seemed no end to it. Shops were changing hands, farms were changing hands, everybody seemed to be on the move and prosperous except the young men home from the war, who hung about the Great War Veterans’ rooms over Kerrigan’s barbershop, talking of battles and beer.

  Most of the veterans appeared to be farm boys and when Isabel asked the hotel manager why so many appeared to be out of work he simply shrugged and whistled the air of “How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm Now That They’ve Seen Paree?” It seemed very strange. She wondered at all this outward prosperity when there were so many young men with nothing to do. Her acquaintances in Kingsbridge in ’13 were young men and girls from Scotch Springs who had gone to work in the town. She inquired in the post office for them and found that everyone had disappeared. The girls had married and gone away. Some of the youths had been killed in the war; and the rest, unwilling to return to the prewar monotony of Scotch Springs, had taken their discharge money and passed on to Ontario or the West, or had crossed over the border towards the humming cities of the States.

  Isabel had accepted the changes in city life without concern. In wartime Halifax was a city of strangers and a constant shift of faces was the normal thing. Even when it was shattered by the great disaster of ’17 she had looked upon it as a natural result of a great war in which the port was of immense strategic importance. But it had not occurred to her that the war could so profoundly affect the life of the countryside. What was going on in her valley was happening all over the United States and Canada. It was as if some mighty hand had seized the land and given it a shake, so that all the human contents changed places, trades, amusements and ambitions. Kingsbridge looked the same but all the faces were strange and most of the old ways were as dead as William the Fourth. She thought of Matthew Carney. He had felt like “Rip Van What’s-his-name” because he had come from ten lonely years on Marina and found every city a madhouse. She could understand that. But it was a shock to come back to the valley after eight years and find nothing familiar in what she had considered a scene and a way of life as fixed and eternal as the stars.