The Nymph and the Lamp

  She walked back to the hotel thoughtfully. She was paying three dollars a day for her room and meals. This was the pre-tourist-season rate. In another three weeks the rate would jump to five. She could not afford anything like that. She had dinner and spent the evening reading in her room. When she put out the light and ran up the blind she saw the leaves of the apple trees gleaming faintly in the starlight. The night was warm and through the open window came a familiar smell of plowland, of fresh grass and the massed foliage of the orchard. The town’s lights were out. In the darkness nothing moved. There was one word for it—peace. Whatever else had changed, this remained, the massive calm of the land itself, gravid, expectant, waiting to put forth blossom and fruit as it had waited every May since the first hopeful settler cleared a patch in the forest and planted seed. This is it, surely, she told herself. This is what I’ve wanted all this time. I was a fool to have left it, ever.

  CHAPTER 29

  Old Mr. Markham, the proprietor of Markham’s Hardware Store, was chairman of the Kingsbridge school board. He was sitting in a cane chair on his veranda when Isabel came up the walk. It was a fine evening in midweek, and in the twilight stillness she could hear through the open door a faint rattle of dishes being put away. He made no attempt to arise when she came up the veranda steps, nor when she stood before him stating her errand. He was seventy-six, a tall man with neatly brushed gray hair, an aquiline nose and the eyes of a tired but watchful hawk. He motioned her to a chair.

  “Jardine—You wouldn’t be one of the Jardines from Scotch Springs?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thought they were all dead or gone.”

  “I daresay they are, Mr. Markham. At least, my own parents are dead, and I’ve been away for the past eight years, working in Halifax.”

  “Schoolteaching?”

  “No, I was a secretary in a city office.”

  He lifted his bushy gray brows. “Oh? What in thunder did you come back for?”

  She ventured a nervous smile. “I wanted to live in Kingsbridge. I’d hoped to find a job in one of the shops or perhaps the bank or the post office, but there don’t seem to be any vacancies. So I thought of my teaching experience, and somebody told me to see you.”

  “No vacancies there either.” He pursed his thin lips. “Staff’s fully engaged for next term. Might be something in one of the outside sections, come September. What’s your experience?”

  “I taught my home school at Scotch Springs two years, and I taught one term at Appleton.” Both were poor sections. The most she had been paid was three hundred and sixty dollars for the term at Appleton. She could see what Mr. Markham was thinking.

  “The money’s not important so long as I’ve enough to live on,” she said.

  His eyes flicked over the smart city clothes. “The pay’s a bit better in the back sections than it used to be, but I don’t think you could live on what you’d get there, even now. Seems strange, giving up a good job in the city for something like that. Most girls head the other way.”

  “Yes, I know. I did myself. But I got tired of it.”

  “Married, by any chance?” He was trying to see the third finger on her left hand. She turned the hand casually.

  “No.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty.”

  “Um. Good sensible age. Healthy?”

  “Very.” She did not know whether to be amused or annoyed. Mr. Markham was the shrewdest as well as the oldest merchant in Kingsbridge and he had made money in everything from hardware to real estate. He was inspecting her now as if she were a horse for sale.

  “Supposing now,” he announced, shutting one eye and staring at her keenly with the other, “supposing now I got you something—a school in one of the back districts say—how do I know you won’t get tired of that and go off to the city and leave the trustees in the lurch? Girls have done that before.”

  “I told you I’d come back to stay,” she said with spirit. “I meant it, Mr. Markham.”

  “Um. Suppose you can’t get a job?”

  “I’ve got some money in the bank here, enough to keep me several months. I intend to stay as long as it lasts. Surely something will turn up.”

  “Determined young woman, ain’t you? Got a letter from your city employer?”

  “No, but I can get one. Or I can give you his address and you can inquire yourself, if you’d like.”

  Again the squinted eye. “Would you prefer me to do that?”

  “No,” she said frankly. “Besides, I don’t see what that’s got to do with a job teaching school in the valley.”

  “Ah! Quite right. What sort of things did your city firm deal in?”

  “Wireless telegraph apparatus,” she said in a diffident voice.

  “Electrical stuff, eh?”

  “Yes, and parts for gasoline engines, and rope and wire rigging, lubricating oils, paints, provisions, all sorts of tools—a long list of things, everything from pumps to stationery.”

  “Ha! Well! And you were raised on a farm. Know a Baldwin apple from a Gravenstein?”

  “Of course.”

  “Horses? Cattle? Fertilizers?”

  “I know something about them, yes. But I don’t see…”

  “And of course you’ve done a lot of typing and shorthand and all that. Who looked after the office accounts?”

  “I did. But you understand there wasn’t much to that. The accounting was mostly done at the head office. Ours was just a port branch.”

  “Um.”

  Mr. Markham leaned back in the tall wicker chair. His eyes were closed. His fingers played a little jig on the chair arms. For two minutes he said nothing. Once or twice his eyes opened, shot her a quick glance and closed again. Isabel sat erect, with her hands in her lap. She was puzzled by this odd catechism and she had a suspicion that the old hawk in the chair had been indulging his curiosity at her expense. She wished now that she had got up and left when he uttered that blunt “No vacancies there either.”

  “Those Jardines,” he said abruptly, without opening his eyes. “Good stock. Scotch. Proud lot. Hardworking. Honest. Moody, though. Minds up in the clouds half the time. Give the shirt off their backs for a whim. All of ’em gone now. Sad.”

  The wrinkled eyelids lifted. His slate-gray eyes had a look of decision.

  “Tell you what. Got a girl in my store that’s marrying one of these young fellers back from the war. Says she wants to keep her job.”

  Isabel spoke quickly. “I heard about that. But I won’t put another girl out of a job, if that’s what you mean.”

  He snorted. “You’re a Jardine, no mistake. Jumping to conclusions. Proud as Lucifer. Come down off that high horse, girl. Didn’t say I was letting her go, did I? She can have the job as long as she wants it but I know that kind of arrangement ain’t going to last. Feller’s got any gumption he’ll get out of Kingsbridge. Find a job somewhere. If not, she’ll find mighty quick that she can’t keep herself and him on nine dollars a week. Fact is, I expect the pair of ’em to pull up stakes inside a month. Means I’ve got to get someone in there learning the business. Tricky business, hardware. Big stock, a thousand things, a thousand prices. Think you could do it?”

  “I could try, Mr. Markham. But suppose…”

  “Suppose nothing. I’ll do that. Point is, I want more than a hardware clerk. I’m into all sorts of things nowadays. Take real estate. Daresay I buy and sell more farms in a year than any other man ’tween Annapolis and Kentville. Take pulpwood. For the past five years I’ve been buying up those worthless farms in Scotch Springs and other places along the edge of the mountain, getting ’em for a song. People said I was crazy. Laughing on the other side of their faces now. Every one of those farms had a back lot of timber running up the mountain. Small stuff mostly but just the right size for pulpwood. Easy to log, easy to get out, railway handy, good price for all the pulpwood I can ship.

  “Take vegetables and fruit. Nobody around here thought of canning ’em t
ill I put up a factory here last year. Seen it? On the road west of the town, private railway siding, all that. Doing very well. Building a new piece on it right now. Next year I’m going into jam—strawberry, plum and so on. Wish I’d done it in time for the war—all that plum-and-apple jam they used to feed the troops. Um! Well, I suppose you’re wondering what all this has got to do with you. Point is, I’ve been doing all my own letter-writing or getting one of the girls in the store to whack it out with two fingers on a typewriter. Won’t do any more. Too slow. Letters don’t look good. Point is, I need a secretary. No, that’s too highfalutin. What I want’s a good sensible girl that can look after my letters and answer the phone, and sell hardware—’specially on Saturdays, when the store’s rushed. Girl that knows what’s what. Girl that’s dependable and won’t go flying over the moon the first time some young fool waggles a finger at her. See what I mean?”

  “I think so.” But she looked her astonishment.

  “What did they pay you down to Hal’fax?”

  “Seventy dollars a month. I’d been promised a raise to eighty, this year.”

  Mr. Markham grimaced as if in pain. “That’s a lot of money. Board’s a lot cheaper here. Clothes—you won’t need fancy clothes in Kingsbridge. Never paid a girl more than nine dollars a week in my life. Before the war it was eight. Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you fifty dollars a month and a half-day holiday once a week. Provided you prove out satisfactory, of course. All right?”

  “Yes. Yes, I think so, Mr. Markham. I don’t know if I can do all you want, but I can try.” She was trying to keep down her elation and she did it very well. The old shrewd eyes observed her cool demeanor and approved.

  “Um. Where you staying?”

  “At the hotel.”

  His brows shot up again. “That’s expensive.”

  “Oh yes, but I intend to get a boarding place somewhere in the town.”

  “Um. You do that tomorrow morning. Report to me at the store after dinner—half-past one, prompt. After that your working hours’ll be half-past eight to noon, and one o’clock to half-past five. May have to work an evening now and again. I guess that’s all. Good night.”

  He closed his eyes again and sat there rigid against the back of the chair, with his hands clasping the forward curve of the chair arms, impassive as a gray stone god in the growing dusk of the veranda. Isabel murmured “Good night,” and passed down the gravel walk towards the street. She was still amazed when she got to her room. She looked at herself in the dressing table mirror.

  “Those Jardines!” she said aloud, seeing for the first time a Jardine in luck.

  Getting board and lodging outside the hotel proved a more difficult matter than she had expected. She remembered the Kingsbridge boardinghouse of prewar days, a big ramshackle unpainted house on a lane near The Corner, kept by a happy-go-lucky widow named Tess O’Donnell. But this, like so much else in the town, had changed hands and ways in the new flood of prosperity. The Widow O’Donnell had sold out and gone to live with a married daughter in Massachusetts, and the new owner had repaired and painted the house, installed another bathroom, and hung a “Tourists” sign over the door. Where the O’Donnell hens had stalked and scratched on the clay patch at the side of the house there was now a motor service station with two bright red gasoline pumps. And the house itself was full. There was not even room for a tourist.

  In former days the big house had always been half empty and visitors of the more frugal sort used it as a second-rate hotel, staying a day or a week as they pleased; but now, with the increased staff of clerks at the bank, the additional teachers required by the enlarged Kingsbridge school, and sundry shopgirls and bookkeepers from the various stores, the place was full; and so were the three or four homes near The Corner that took in what used to be called “paying guests.”

  At last Isabel found a middle-aged couple willing to rent their spare room. The Halletts lived in a small white-shingled house on the edge of the town towards the east. It was almost a mile from The Corner, a long walk in rainy weather; but it was comfortable, simple and quiet, it had a nostalgic flavor of her old home at Scotch Springs, and Hallett’s apple trees ran down to the river. From her bedroom there was a view of the orchard and the river and of a broad green stretch of meadows on the farther side. There were tall elms along the bank and the fields were broken here and there with copses of young ash and maple. In the distance arose the dark wooded shoulder of the hills known to all the valley folk as South Mountain.

  Between the rows of Hallett’s apple trees ran the furrows of his spring plowing, neat and exact as if they had been ruled and drawn with an ocher crayon, starting behind the barn where he kept his three cows and a horse, and extending to the clay bank of the stream. In front of the house Mrs. Hallett had her flower garden, and there were shrubs of japonica and lilac to screen it from the valley winds. Isabel’s bedroom was a prim little chamber, redolent of paint, containing a small wooden bed, a chair, a chest of drawers and a washstand, all done in white. There was a cheerful flowered wallpaper. Two small oval rugs, made with hooked rags by Mrs. Hallett herself, lay on the painted softwood floor.

  Altogether it was a pleasant place, a charming place, and Isabel was thankful that she had not been able to get a lodging among the huddled business houses of The Corner. The Halletts were much alike, a pair of tall gaunt people who had lost their only son in the war. They were descended from the Yankee pioneers who came to Nova Scotia after the old colonial wars and settled along the valley, and in manner, speech and appearance they might have stepped out of the hills of Vermont. Mrs. Hallett had been a schoolteacher when she married. She wore pince-nez and had about her the indefinable air of a school-ma’am in middle life, although for twenty-five years she had taught nothing more than a Sunday-school class at the Baptist church. She was a calm even-tempered person and she managed her house and Hallett with a calm and even hand.

  Hallett was more volatile. He whistled about his chores and carried on lively monologues with his horse and the cows. He was full of dry little jokes and as Isabel departed after dinner to keep her appointment at the store he came part way down the gravel path towards the highway.

  “We’re a mite out of the way,” he pointed out, “but you’ll get used to that. When people twit me—and they’re a great lot of twitters up to The Corner—when they twit me about living so far out, I just tell ’em, Ah but I’m well on the road to Paradise, friends, which is more’n you can say. That’s the name of a village east o’here, see? But of course you’ve lived hereabout and you know. Well, that’s what I say, I’m well on the road to Paradise. Anybody twits you about boarding so far out you tell ’em that. That’ll set ’em back. That’ll give ’em something to think about. ’Cause there’s other towns besides Paradise on that road. Kentville, f’rinstance. Used to be called the Devil’s Half Acre back in olden times. Can’t help thinking of it when I see the tourists tearing off through Paradise in a cloud of dust so’s to make the hotel in Kentville afore night. That’s life for you, ain’t it? Ain’t that life?”

  Isabel had to admit that it was.

  CHAPTER 30

  The Courier always referred to Mr. Markham as a pioneer, and so he was. He had been the first man in Kingsbridge to own an automobile and the first to install a gasoline electric plant for lighting his house. His bathroom had been the first in town, and so was the furnace that poured a gush of hot air through a grating in the floor and did away with a clutter of stoves. He had always been the most progressive businessman as well; and now, at an age when most men are thinking of the grave, he had launched forth with every dollar and every ounce of energy he had to take advantage of the postwar boom. Rumor said he was worth as much as three hundred thousand dollars, a fabulous sum in the valley, and there were people who predicted that he would be a millionaire before he died.

  The hardware store from which his little empire had sprung was one of the best in the valley. He carried a stock of everything from shi
ngle nails to the newfangled gasoline tractors. There was a busy plumbing and tinsmiths’ workshop at the back. The office was a small coop with scant room for Mr. Markham’s own desk, an immense old roll-top thing, and a small modern typewriter desk at which Isabel was soon installed. The staff consisted of three shopgirls and herself, a handy man and an errand boy. The girls looked upon her with suspicion at first, especially the girl who was about to marry; but when Isabel took over the typewriter and began to initiate Mr. Markham into the strange art of letter dictation their instinctive hostility vanished. It was a relief to see someone else struggling with the old man’s correspondence.

  In the next Saturday’s rush, when she was able to help at the counters, they began to welcome her presence in the store. When the word passed around Kingsbridge that old Markham had brought in a typist from the city, the shopgirls were quick to point out that she was a home girl after all, a Jardine from Scotch Springs, and that she was “nice.” This was confirmed by the Halletts, who were delighted with their quiet and sensible boarder; and when Isabel appeared in the Baptist tabernacle with them on Sunday morning her acceptance was complete. She was asked to join the choir but this she declined, saying that she hadn’t a singing voice, which was not quite the truth. She wondered what her rigid Presbyterian father would have thought to see her there joining in the services of “those dunkers,” and she salved her conscience with the fact that there was no church of her own faith nearer than Scotch Springs.