The Nymph and the Lamp

  The North Atlantic was in one of its tranquil moods. Under the weeping veils of rain its mild swell rose and sank with a majestic regularity, the breast of a stormy woman gone to sleep and gathering fresh strength for the passions of tomorrow. All that was evil and cruel about her, all that was bright and beautiful, lay concealed now beneath that enormous breathing skin. There was no sky and no horizon. The ship, weary and old like O’Dell himself, pushed forward in a gray murk dragging a white train that spread and was lost in the murk astern. She had good lines, she was shapely in her fashion, and she had a fine sheer forward and an old-fashioned clipper bow that always gave dockside loafers an impression of great speed. But at best she did ten knots, usually it was much less, and here in the thick weather she seemed to crawl, uttering a tremulous moo from time to time.

  Yet she moved, and as she moved the dim bulk of the land slipped away behind the rain like a shadow, an illusion after all. With it went all those other illusions: the scrabble for cash that could not buy security, the frantic pleasures that could not give content, the pulpit-thumpings that could not summon virtue, the Temperance Acts that killed temperance, the syncopated noise that was not music, the imbecile daubs that were not art, the lavatory scrawls that were not literature, the flickering Californications that were not drama, the fortunes that grew upon ticker tapes, the statesmanship that was only politics, the peace that led only towards more bloody war, the whole brave new world of ’21 that was only old evil with a mad new face. Like an aging empress quitting with dignity a palace given over to the Jacquerie the old ship departed from the continent and trailed her long white gown across the green fields of the sea.

  Towards the end of the afternoon the rain ceased. There was a stir of air, warm and delightful, from the starboard hand; and in another half hour the overcast broke in the west and revealed the sun poised on the edge of the sea, a fat red ball that cast a ruddy shimmer widespread on that gently heaving skin. In a few moments it rolled over the edge of the world and was gone, but the whole of the west was drenched with the scarlet splash of that plunge and there were streaks of bloody gold along the horizons to north and south. For a long time afterwards in the new high western sky that display remained when all the rest was dusk, except that towards the east, towards Marina, where the night already was far up the sky, there hung in reflection a wonderful purple stain slowly fading into the dark.

  Isabel left this splendid show reluctantly to bath and change her dress before dinner (a meal known in the Lord Elgin with simple honesty as supper) and when the steward rang his bell along the deck it was night. In the saloon once more she was the only woman at the board. O’Dell was there in his best uniform and with the eager preoccupied look that always came upon him at the prospect of food, and in their places stood the chief officer, handsome and severe; the gloomy McIntyre; the purser and his dissipated gray features, strange in so young a man; and the bluntly healthy second mate. The other passenger, the inspector of lighthouses, a Mr. Forbes, came in at Isabel’s heels, and there were introductions as they all sat down and the steward began to pass the soup.

  As before the wife of the fabulous Carney was the center of interest, but with an added glamor of her own; she had overheard a seaman saying as she came on board, “Here’s the Marina woman, the dame that came off in a sling.” She bore the concentrated attention of the table with sang-froid and there was a respectful admiration in their glances, as if the ability to get shot and carry it off well were a mark of the greatest distinction. For a time the talk was slow and awkward but before long Isabel discovered that Mr. Forbes, like so many others whose profession dragged them up and down the coast, dreamed of a day when he could retire to a snug little farm inland. He was a tall and heavily built man nearing sixty, with thick gray hair and a pair of hazel eyes that sparkled behind his steel-rimmed glasses when Isabel, at his urging, gave an account of harvest time in the valley.

  He was enraptured. He paid no attention to his food. He had the air of a man listening to celestial music. At length he said to her with a curious lift of his brows, “I don’t see how you can tear yourself away from all that to face a winter on Marina. What a contrast!”

  “You forget my husband’s there.”

  “Why don’t you make him take you ashore and buy a good house in the country?” Isabel knew what he thought; it was a common illusion on the coast that wireless operators, especially O-in-C’s like Carney, got fantastic salaries and that after a few years in some isolated spot they could retire in comfort for the rest of their lives.

  “Some day perhaps,” she answered deliberately. “In the meantime I shall be entirely happy on Marina. Once you know what a place is like, you know what to do about it. Life anywhere’s what you make it—and life on Marina can be wonderful.” Forbes glanced up expecting to see the patient look that belonged to such words about such a place, and saw the radiance that had so astonished Skane, and that made her plain face beautiful.

  Afterwards, when the officers had gone and the steward had cleared the table, she sat with Forbes and O’Dell on the red plush cushions of the settee. Forbes produced cigars, and Isabel lit a cigarette. The steward turned on the phonograph. It was a very good machine securely fastened to a special shelf beside the sideboard. The tune of the latest fox trot crashed in the silence of the saloon. The warm wind from the southwest, still blowing in the dark, had changed the direction of the swell, and as the Lord Elgin swayed with a long easy motion the needle arm occasionally jumped out of the groove and slid across the record, producing discords even wilder than the African strains of the band. At last the steward moved beside it, steadying the needle arm with his hand.

  O’Dell turned to Isabel. “D’you like this modern stuff? I can’t call it music.”

  “No.”

  He gestured to the steward. “Belay that thing.” The jazz notes perished.

  “Do you want me for anything else, sir?”

  “No, you may go.”

  The trio on the settee talked in a desultory fashion for a time and then Forbes arose, stifling a yawn and murmuring something about a long day tomorrow and all those confounded steps to climb. He bade the others good night and walked away with his solid tread to bed. The porthole curtains swayed gently and the glasses on the sideboard clicked together in their fiddleholes.

  “Still feel all right?” Captain O’Dell asked.

  “Perfectly all right. On that first trip I was rather upset from the start—we’d come away in such a rush; and of course the weather wasn’t anything as mild as this.”

  O’Dell nodded absently. “There’ll be a bit of a slop on the beach in the morning, though. You’d better stay aboard till we’ve got some of the heavy stores ashore. A surfboat with a light load rides up on the beach better.”

  He studied the gray wisp arising from the cigar in his delicate fingers.

  “There’s something I want to speak to you about, now that we’re alone, and I don’t quite know how to say it. About Carney. I’ve known him a long time. I think a lot of him. It’s always seemed to me that Carney measured closer to God’s standard of a man than anyone else I knew. Lately, ever since he came off the island in the spring of ’20 in fact, there’s been something about him I couldn’t fathom. Men who didn’t know him very well used to say that Carney lived in a shell, but I could never see it. Till now. The shell’s there all right. And he’s right down inside.”

  “Yes?” Isabel kept her gaze on the sideboard and its polished brass rail.

  “I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve brought this up. Partly it’s because I’ve a notion that something went adrift between Carney and you. That’s none of my business, I know, but I might as well say what I think. However there’s something else. When I went to the island last spring and again in August he didn’t come off to the ship. That was strange. He always steered one of the surfboats when they were unloading stores. The rougher the sea the better he liked it. With some of the wilder young lifesavers he’d take a
boat off the beach in a surf that would scare McBain—and Mac’s a good little man. Now all of a sudden Carney’s lost his delight in that kind of thing.

  “When I went on the beach in August he was there backing stuff up the shore from the boats. Didn’t seem to want to talk. Wouldn’t look me in the eye—just kept lugging things back and forth. I stayed to the last, talking to the other people, and when we were about to shove off he spoke to me, gazing over my shoulder somewhere. He said in a dull sort of way, ‘There was no other passenger?’ I said ‘No.’ Then he asked, ‘Was there any personal mail for me?’ And again the answer was no. He turned away. He looked mighty tired—he’d been working like a slave all day, of course—and I noticed then a small gold ring slung by a cord about his neck. I’d often seen him stripped to the waist like that when the work was hot, but I’d never noticed the ring before. I didn’t think much about it, but that night, lying in my berth, one or two things occurred to me and set me wondering.

  “The third mate had gone ashore with me that morning. We stepped out of the boat on opposite sides and walked up the beach towards Carney. I suppose we were ten or twelve feet apart. We were both in uniform and about the same height; otherwise we’re not a bit alike. Carney was at the beachhead checking stores with one of his operators and I sang out Hello. He straightened up and gazed down the beach, turning his head slowly from me to the Third. And he addressed himself to the Third, calling out something about empty gas drums to be shipped off, and that they were coming up by wagon from the wireless station and mustn’t be left behind, and so on. I thought it kind of funny that he should be saying all this to the Third and ignoring me. He was still talking when we got within ten feet of him, and then he stopped, with an odd look on his face, and turned his eyes to me. For a moment he was silent. Then he went on with what he had to say—you know, as if he’d been addressing me all the time.

  “After that, as I’ve said, he didn’t seem to have anything more to say, not a personal word, none of the old chummy gam we used to have together on the beach. After a time another boat came in, and out jumped one of the lifesavers who’d gone to Halifax with us in the spring. Chap named Blackburn. He sang out ‘Carney boy!—you know, the way they all do when they see him—and walked up the beach towards him just as we’d done. Carney merely answered hello in a noncommittal sort of way, but when the fellow got about ten feet away—I was watching the distance this time to make sure—Carney suddenly grinned and exclaimed ‘Blackie!’ You know, as if the name had just slipped his mind until that moment. Afterwards, in my berth aboard the ship, these things rang a little bell in my mind. Do they ring anything in yours?”

  Isabel turned and met his sunken eyes, the small blue eyes that were so keen and alive in that weary cynical face.

  “Yes. You mean Matthew’s losing his sight. The doctors say he will be blind in another year at most.”

  “So you knew! I wondered.”

  “I know now. I didn’t when you took me off last spring. He concealed it from me. For some months he wouldn’t believe what the oculists said. He thought it was just a sudden case of shortsightedness. It wasn’t until last winter that he knew they were right. When I last rode along the island with him, last spring, in the bright sunlight, he could still distinguish people at quite a distance. But that was nearly seven months ago.”

  “Ah!” O’Dell nodded slowly. “That explains a good deal.” He ground out his cigar in the ash tray before him. “Do you know, when you failed to turn up in August I thought you’d had enough of it—that you’d left the island for good. I used to phone the hospital from time to time when we were in port, to see how you were getting along; and so I knew that you could have come back on the August trip if you’d wished. And Carney knew it. I could see it in his manner there on the beach, when he asked about the passengers and mail. He looked very lonely. And later on, when I realized he was losing his sight—and how fast it was going—I got a double shock. For I remembered something he’d told me long before.

  “You know what a reader he was—always quoting Byron and so on. Always after me for any old books or magazines that might be lying about the ship. Some time in ’17 or ’18, when all sorts of navy people were going about the coast with us, someone left behind a book about the old Norse kings. In English of course. I’d picked it up from time to time and read a bit of it. Well, I gave it to Carney, and you can imagine how he ate it up. When I came, next trip, he was full of it, and he sent off for a book on Norse mythology. You know, he looks like a Viking himself. I don’t mean just that he’s big and blond but his manner, the way he carries himself, something noble and fearless about him, like one of those old sea kings. I used to kid him about it. I told him once he was living proof that the Norsemen came to Newfoundland. He didn’t like that, I remember, and went on to talk about something else.

  “Well, one day on the beach he got talking about the old Norse beliefs. This must have been in the spring of ’20—the time he went off to see the eye doctors. Told me about Ran, the sea goddess. She had caves at the bottom of the ocean, a sort of Fiddler’s Green, where drowned sailors were entertained with food and drink and each found a nymph waiting for him shaped in the image of the woman he’d most desired on earth. It sounded pretty swell. But there was a bit of a catch. It seems that the Lady Ran’s a rather mercenary creature. No sailor could get in unless he had a bit of gold to pay for the accommodation. A bit of the real yellow stuff—nothing else would do. That’s why those old Norse rovers used to wear a gold bracelet or a ring or an amulet or something of that sort whenever they shoved off to sea. Just in case. A kind of life-hereafter insurance. Carney told me all this and we both laughed. But then he said, quite seriously, ‘It’s all bosh, of course, but the idea’s sort of splendid. When the ship went down or the fight was lost, when there was no hope left, a man could let himself sink and feel that all would be well.’ And he threw out that big right arm of his towards the breakers on the outer shoals, where he often used to swim.”

  Isabel was rising from her seat and staring with eyes that seemed to him enormous. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m just trying to explain,” O’Dell said quietly, “why I couldn’t find words to say when you came up the gangway this morning. My dear, you were the finest sight in the world.”

  CHAPTER 39

  She was awake long before daylight. When the Lord Elgin rounded the west bar she had washed and dressed and was busy packing her things and checking over the multitude of parcels which seemed to fill half the cabin. As she tucked away her nightdress her fingers encountered a piece of paper. She drew forth the old wedding license and stood for a moment in profound thought. It had no value here. She had kept it out of sentiment and a notion that it made her relations with Carney quite respectable. Absurd! Her union with him was ordained and complete in itself. Life had thrown them together on a desolate shore where none of the old rules applied. A marriage of castaways. As for this patch of print and scrawled ink, the license had lost its meaning along with the world of which it was part, the mad world they had put behind. Slowly and firmly she tore the thing to shreds and let them flutter from her fingers out of the porthole.

  She appeared at breakfast with a tranquil face; and afterwards, watching the hatches taken off, the boats arriving alongside, the cargo booms sweeping back and forth, the flicker of white surf on the distant shore, she seemed to the glances of the crew no more than a composed wife returning from a holiday on the main. The heavy stores went first, the drums of gasoline and kerosene and lubricating oil, the coal sewn up in hundred-pound bags for ready handling in the boats, the deceptive little cylinders containing mercury that looked so insignificant and weighed so mightily, the bales of pressed hay, the barrels of salt beef and pork, of flour and sugar and molasses, the bags of salt, the machinery parts.

  It was well on towards noon when she said good-by to the officers and went down the Jacob’s ladder to the boat. Forbes came with her, and O’Dell. The captain, awaiting th
is moment, had delayed his customary state visit to the shore. He was burning with curiosity. All the way to the beach he watched with sidelong glances the calm face of the young woman in the stern. There was, as he had prophesied, a bit of a slop on the beach. Nothing to be alarmed about, but he regarded Isabel’s smart costume and silken legs with some concern. He leaned over to her.

  “When we run in, you’d better let one of the boatmen carry you out of the surf.”

  “I shall be all right.”

  “You should have worn boots and trousers,” he said severely.

  The steersman watched his chance. He chose the crest of a long green swell and cried to his oarsmen fiercely. The boat rode in. It was very neatly done. Almost as well, O’Dell thought, as Carney himself could have done it when his eyes were at their best. Not a drop came over the gunwales until the boat’s keel touched the sand and the wave broke. There was a rush of island figures about the boat, clutching the gunwales or snatching up the most perishable packages. O’Dell turned swiftly to the steersman, commanding him to lift Mrs. Carney to dry footing. But his breath was wasted with the thought.

  Before the words were out of his mouth Isabel stepped upon the thwart and poised a foot on the gunwale. In another moment she was in the water to her knees and wading swiftly to the shore. The captain sprang out and followed her, but at the edge of the dry and trampled sand he stopped. The air on the beach, where the sun was falling now with the full stroke of noon, made a grateful contrast to the cold nip of the water. The spell of Indian summer, which comes to the north country after the first hard frosts, had awakened an almost tropical heat in the sands of Marina. The dunes wavered as if it were July. In the mirage towards the east the tip of the wireless mast sagged in a drunken bow, the surf breaking on the long curved sands past Number Two seemed to spring straight in the air like the spouts of great whales; and the west lighthouse was going up and down like an insane phallic monument.