The Nymph and the Lamp

  CHAPTER 32

  All the way back to Kingsbridge Isabel’s thought ran furiously upon that scrap of news. “Passengers”! Among others Gregory Skane. No doubt of it. She could see him with that firm jaw and the hard blue challenge in his eyes, striding into Hurd’s office and demanding the address of Mrs. Carney. She could see Miss Benson simpering, and Hurd putting on the quick glad smile and thrusting forth the quick glad hand that he reserved for crack shore-station operators. And she could hear Hurd murmuring that he was sorry, that Mrs. Carney had left the hospital without a forwarding address, that doubtless she was convalescing quietly somewhere, and how were things on Marina?

  All those vague yearnings and speculations by the stream had perished. She was again Miss Jardine of Markham’s office, the determined young woman who had set her future on a business career and would have no more of men. Skane would be angry and amazed, no doubt. But there was nothing he could say or do. She had disappeared and that was that. He would fume about Halifax for a day or two and then go off to see his people and spend his leave. She told herself (and admitted with a curious reluctance) that he would find other women charming and quite willing to meet his wants. It was silly to say that no woman could resist Greg Skane. The truth, she suspected, was that only a rare woman in good health and under forty could escape an impulse to throw herself into his arms, whether he wanted her or not. It was a strange gift, one of the sardonic jokes that life plays on its creatures here and there, for Skane was no Lothario. Lotharios are gay, they flash and whir like hummingbirds exploring every flower along the way, whereas Skane was a mixture of self-pride and self-contempt, he wanted to be whole master of himself and hated the need that could make him slave, even for an hour, to a woman; and there was a kind of fury in the passion that he expended in her flesh when at last he admitted, not her victory, but his own defeat.

  Oh yes, that was Greg Skane. And she would have no more of him. She had never loved him, never!—any more than Skane had really loved her. They had both given way to something that sprang out of the emptiness of winter in the lonely gray station, a hot quick spark that leaped and flamed and trumpeted a message that had no beginning and no end and then was silent, leaving nothing but the tang of ozone and an echo down the dunes.

  And now she was quite safe from that dangerous quality in him and in herself. She went over the points again and again. The hospital? She had told them nothing but that she was leaving the city. Hurd? Miss Benson? She had left without a word to them. There was no way that Skane could seek her out with that confident “D prefix” he had mentioned in his letter. She had never mentioned Kingsbridge or even the valley, not so much from reticence as because he had never been curious enough to ask her anything about her background before she met Carney.

  Nevertheless for several weeks she started whenever a quick new step came through the shop towards the office, whenever the telephone rang and a man’s voice demanded “Miss Jardine?” At evening when Brockhurst came on one of his erratic visits and Mrs. Hallett let him in and called, “Here’s a man to see you, Miss Jardine,” in the arch way she had, there was always a tense moment until Isabel heard his voice. Brockhurst himself remarked that she seemed “jumpy”; and on one of their buggy wanderings he paused in the midst of a scathing denunciation of the capital system and remarked with his wise grin, “You’re not listening. Am I slipping or are you? I can’t get a rise out of you any more.”

  “I’m sorry. I was thinking of something else.”

  “Something important, I hope.”

  “In a way, yes.”

  “May I ask what it was? Or is that impertinent? I’d like to know what could be more important than the rule of Canada by a handful of bloated capitalists in Toronto and Montreal.”

  “You’re forgetting the one in Kingsbridge.”

  “Just ignoring him for the moment. What’s the trouble? Business, I suppose, you poor weak tool of the capitalist class. Old Markham must be worrying about the fall in pulp and paper prices in the States. All his wood goes to pulp mills over the border, and the price of groundwood pulp over there has dropped from something over a hundred dollars a ton to something under forty—or does he know that yet? He never reads anything but his Bible and the Courier.”

  “He knows.”

  “Ah, then he’s begun to taste the pickle his greed has got him into. I happen to know that the mills have stopped buying wood—presto!—like that. They’ve all got big stocks on hand, and they’re carrying ’em on their books at values that don’t exist any more. The mills won’t get their breath back till they’ve ground up the wood on hand and got it off their inventories.

  That means a year at least, from all I can learn. In the meantime there’s old Dollars-and-Deuteronomy left with at least ten thousand cords of spruce and fir, cut and piled in the woods or stacked at sidings all the way from Windsor to Karsdale. In the round! With the bark on! Do you see the pretty picture? Wood left like that will rot within twelve months and then the mills won’t take it as a gift. So there’s our local Midas stuck for ninety thousand dollars at the very least, unless he can sell the stuff for firewood. Even at that it’s almost a dead loss. Why are you turning the horse?”

  Isabel’s mouth was set in an angry line. “We’re going back to Kingsbridge. And there I’m dropping you, Brock, not just for this evening but for keeps. I’ve had enough of you and your everlasting sneering at my boss.”

  She gave the horse a smart flick of the whip and they rattled off towards town. For a time Brockhurst said nothing, watching her frigid profile and the vexed set of her lips.

  “Look here, I didn’t mean to upset you,” he said seriously at last. She did not reply.

  “After all I’m just a student of economics and Markham only interests me as a specimen of his type.”

  “You’ve said that before,” she exclaimed scornfully. “You’ve been repeating yourself all summer. ‘Specimen of his type’! Brock, you’re a specimen of your own type. The man who got hurt in the war and feels he owes the world a grudge. I met your type once before; only he didn’t go about preaching a backwoods version of Marx; he went off to sulk on a desert island. There seem to be a good many others—all this talk about a ‘lost generation’! And you’re all alike, the lot of you. All you’ve lost is your sense of decency. Sooner or later you hurt other people. Not always in the same way, but they suffer just as much.”

  “But,”’ he protested, “you used to take all I said as a lark. Why the sudden change?”

  “I just couldn’t stand any more.”

  Isabel flung out these remarks without looking at him, without relaxing for a moment that fixed stare on the road ahead. The buggy clattered into Main Street at the same brisk pace. When Isabel pulled up at the sidewalk the horse turned its head reproachfully, no doubt wondering like the schoolmaster what had so changed the peaceful evening ramble. Brockhurst limped down and put his hands on thy side of the buggy, looking up at her. There were people strolling under the elms and he waited for a group to pass before he spoke.

  “You don’t mean what you said about dropping me for keeps?”

  Isabel turned her head and met his eyes firmly. “Yes, Brock.”

  “Surely you know that on that night we first met, when you were so annoyed with poor Mrs. Hallett and so much on your guard with me, I deliberately threw out some remarks that would sting—as a kind of challenge—because you seemed to me a mysterious and rather attractive personality that I wanted to know better? And, well, it worked.”

  A youth and a girl passed arm in arm, and Brockhurst waited again. He went on in a low voice, “I’m not trying to imply that I didn’t mean all I said then or since, I meant a good deal of it, the basic things, the principles in which I believe. But I stuck in some fireworks here and there because it seemed to stimulate you, because I enjoyed hearing your retort. Have I misjudged you all this time? Is it possible that you haven’t a sense of humor?”

  “I daresay not,” she said acidly,
and turned to jerk the reins.

  “One moment!” he begged quickly. “You’re determined to have no more to do with me, I can see that in your face. And I’m quite sure it’s not entirely due to things I’ve said. There’s something else. You’ve been queer for the past few days. Won’t you tell me what it is? You see, I’m afraid I’m in love with you and I can’t let you drop me without knowing fully why.”

  Isabel gave him a startled look. For several moments she was speechless. It was the last thing she had expected to hear him say. And far from being mollified she was outraged by this calm confession. She was disturbed by the news of Skane’s return, by all those poignant memories of Marina, and with her thoughts so full of the two men who had loved her this voice of a prospective third seemed utterly indecent. She drew away as if from some lewd proposal.

  “Brock,” she said in a rapid and breathless voice, “you’re mad. What right have you to say such a thing to me?” And with that she drove off. Brockhurst stood on the edge of the sidewalk and watched the buggy flit away into the dusk.

  She went no more to the old mill. She told herself that the sun had lost its value now that September was far gone, that the cool winds had begun to blow, that in any case there was too much work to do. There was some truth in all this, but she would not admit that she was afraid to give herself a chance to think of Skane, and of that future which had seemed so peaceful and so satisfying and was now so empty and so bleak. Even in her few leisure evenings she fixed her mind on the past day’s business and the problems of tomorrow with all the fervor of Markham himself.

  There was much to ponder. The inquisitive Brockhurst had been right. The market for pulpwood had collapsed, and Markham was left with nearly one hundred thousand dollars stacked in neat wooden heaps along the valley slopes. Most of the wood had been cut during the previous winter. The autumn rains would soon begin, and then would come another winter’s frost and snow. When the hot sun of another springtime fell upon the sodden stuff it would ferment and rot. The woodsmen had an old English word for it, handed down from colonial times. Unless Markham got rid of his wood before another winter, they said, the damned stuff would dote.

  Markham knew it as well as they. He was making desperate efforts to sell it, offering bargain prices by wire to every pulp mill on the seaboard and hunting up the owners of small lath and stave mills all along the valley. But now another problem loomed. The apple market was going the same way. Through his speculations in farmland the old man had the crops of twenty-eight orchards on his hands—crops on which he had advanced money for spraying and general nurture through the year. AIready the bank had called him into agitated conference. There were conferences with other growers and shippers; and twice in a month he joined a deputation to the government at Halifax.

  It must have gratified the sardonic Brockhurst to see how far his guess had been correct; but it would have surprised him to see how old Dollars-and-Deuteronomy was taking it. The man who worshiped money only a little less than God met the prospect of ruin with all the cool philosophy of those sinful men who play for big stakes with cards. And with a stubborn courage that Isabel admired he persisted in running the cannery at full production, finding somehow the money to pay his hands for their labor and the farmers for their fruit and vegetables.

  “The bank calls this a ‘dubious experiment,’” he told her with a thin smile. “So it is, I suppose. But it looks to me the only real solution of the market problem in the valley, done on a proper scale. Don’t expect I’ll live long enough to see a cannery or a jam factory in every town and village but at least I’ve made a start. Hate to see it shut before it has a chance to prove itself. Trouble is, I’m living thirty years ahead of my time. They call me old. Good gracious, I’m too young for my boots.”

  “Things look very bad, don’t they?” Isabel said.

  “’Course they do. They’ll look a lot worse by-and-by, the way the world’s going. But it’s natural, mind you. Progress ain’t a thing that goes straight up like a flight of stairs. Got to be dips and hollers and thank-ye-ma’ams along the way. This is one. Well come out of it all right unless every tomfool loses his head. What worries me is that later on, when we’ve pulled out of this one, the valley’ll go on in the same old way, packing apples in barrels when everyone else is using fancy boxes, growing special types for the English market instead of shifting, gradual of course, to kinds that’ll sell here at home with a bit of push; and then some day there’ll come another flop that’ll really knock it flat. Thank God—and I say it in all reverence, Miss Jardine—I won’t be living then. All I hope is that someone then will remember old Jase Markham and say, By gosh, the old boy showed us where the bear crossed the brook.”

  The valley had never yielded such a harvest as it did in that golden autumn of ’21. For a hundred miles the orchards bent under the weight of gleaming fruit. There was never such a crop of corn, of potatoes, of turnips and beets. The pumpkins had never been so fat or such a deep golden hue. The plums were never so juicy nor the pears so firm and sweet. The weather held fine. The west wind trailed white mares’-tails across the lightest of blue skies, blew thistledown across the fields, waved the tassels of the corn stalks, flapped the Union Jack on the post office and the Stars and Stripes over the porch of the Boston House, set up dizzy whirls and capers in the dust of Main Street and blew away the last brown rags of the rambler roses.

  Cattle moved slowly by the river in the rich green aftergrass of the hayfields. In the orchards an army of men and larking boys and giggling girls moved among the branches, picking the fruit into baskets and turning each basketful with care into the waiting barrels. The barrels were new and clean, the pale yellow staves gleamed in the sun, and they stood in orderly ranks along the roadsides and were posted like sentinels among the trees. Frequently along the highways came a hay wagon filled and piled high with barrels fresh from the cooperage and drawn by a pair of immense oxen. The oxen wore a heavy yoke strapped to their horns, and the yoke was painted a bright red or blue, and studded with brass ornaments. The last wandering tourists swung their cars aside to let them pass, and smiled and said how quaint it was to find such things in Canada in the twentieth century, and the ox-bells tinkled and the cameras clicked.

  Along the lanes and beside the paths and ditches through the fields the goldenrod blazed like a fire in grass, and the celandine was butter-yellow and the Michaelmas daisies came to the knee, and the wild white asters were tall. By the pasture walls the red hips of the wild rose gleamed like cherries, and the withe-rod berries hung in their clusters pink and black. On the hardwood ridges a few red maples had put on their autumn dress before the rest and made rich spots of color in the green. Underneath the trees the ferns already had turned the tint of rust and made a dry swish against the legs of the partridge hunters, and the huckleberry leaves were freckled with the bright fall stain that soon would turn them all to blood.

  The noons were hot. A blue haze transformed the more distant ridges of South Mountain to waves of a giant sea that heaved in the warm shimmer off the valley floor. But the evenings, as the farm folk said, were drawing in. By the end of September they found the sun going down as they sat down to the evening meal; and by the time the dishes were washed and put away the twilight was getting dim. The nights were chill and sometimes in the starlight the heavy dewfall looked like frost. For some time now the northern lights had been making experimental flickers in the sky, and by the end of the month they were putting on their autumn show with sheaves of glittering spears, with single beams that crept sometimes to the zenith and then fell back, with sheets of pale fire that shivered, that ran in ripples along the top of North Mountain as if twitched by the frost giants of the Micmac tales.

  The first week in October brought to full tide that change of color in the autumn leaves which is the special miracle of North America and is seen at its best in New England and the Maritime Provinces of Canada. Between the long hills the valley unrolled its length in a quilt of patches
, green and brown, very square and exact when you looked upon them from a height; and the river, the wine-stream, wandered through the pattern in lazy curves as if in contempt of such old-maidery. When you stood in the valley the fields and orchards on either hand ran flat or in mild undulations to the edge of the hills, and there the modest tints of the farmland gave way abruptly to a riot of gaudy forest rising sheer toward the sky and extending its length as far as the eye could reach. If you had an eye for trees you could pick out the bright scarlet, the salmon pink and the delicate yellow of the maple clumps, the purple of the ash, the yellow torches of the poplars flaming in the breeze along the slope, the gold of beech and birch, the wine of the young oaks, the clearings where huckleberry bushes made a solid red like a dress parade of the Royal Mounted, and the somber green of pine and spruce and fir that served for contrast and background to the rest.

  One night in mid-October Isabel lay awake and heard a familiar cry far up in the dark, the honking of wild geese on their way south. It was the old warning of winter on the way. But it was also the old Indian promise that before the real snows there would come a spell of summer, one last glow of warmth before the cold. She smiled in the darkness. It was the best time of year. All the months led up to October, and afterwards there was only a waiting for the miracle to come again. And again she told herself, These are the things that matter. All these lovely things that I’ve missed so long. Nothing else. Nothing!

  CHAPTER 33

  The great public event of autumn in Kingsbridge was the County Exhibition, held in what were known as the Fair Grounds at the western edge of the town. Like all fall fairs in country towns it was a simple affair that brought everyone together, for the space of a week, in a holiday atmosphere in which they could gaze upon the champion cattle, horses, swine and poultry, the prize fruits and grain and vegetables, the finest homemade pickles and jams of their own district. The exhibits were housed in four long barrack-like structures of wood, arranged about an open rectangular space, and the whole surrounded by a fence of tall weatherbeaten boards so that everyone but active and impecunious small boys must buy a ticket at the central gate before passing inside.