The Nymph and the Lamp (21 page)

“I should think they'd be bored to death.”

“I daresay they are. The single men sit about the crew house most of the time, yarning and playing cards. In the fall there's gunning, of course. They brew a drink called barley beer—wicked stuff. They've had some famous brawls. What a lot of questions!”

“I've got to have something to do,” Isabel said tartly. “What do the others do, the married men at Number Two, Three and Four? There's only one lifeboat, you say.”

“Their job's to ride the beaches in thick weather. The idea's to make sure that every yard of the shore, on both sides of the island, is looked over once a day—especially in winter. A long time ago, before the beach patrols were set up, a barque was wrecked on the south side of the island, miles from Main Station and the lighthouses. It was snowing and bitter cold, and about a dozen of the crew got ashore. They headed for West Light—they must have seen it through the snow—but they were soaked and played out and they didn't make it. The island people knew nothing of the wreck till daylight, and then they found the bodies scattered here and there along the south bar. One poor devil had actually reached the lifeboat station. They found him frozen stiff almost at the doorstep. Well, after that the other stations were set up; a man and his wife and family every few miles, to provide a thorough patrol and also a refuge for shipwrecked chaps who might land nearby.”

“I should have thought,” Isabel said gravely, “there'd be a school of some sort for the children.”

“I believe they had one, years ago, down at the east end. But it was difficult getting teachers to come to Marina at the pay they offered, and eventually the whole thing fell through. You can't expect things like that on Marina, we're too far from anywhere. School, doctor, church—all that kind of thing we have to get along without.”

“What happens when somebody's ill? When a woman has a baby, say?”

He stirred uneasily. “Usually she goes off to the mainland on the first boat before her time is due. Some don't, of course. Mrs. Giswell, at Number Three, has five children, all born right there.”

“Who looked after her?”

“Mrs. Nightingale rode down from Number Four, except for the last one.”

“And who then?”

“Giswell himself. He turned up at Main Station next day on pony-back, after some medicine. Cheerful as a cricket and proud as Punch.”

“Humph!”

Isabel picked up her knitting and withdrew. In the bedroom she lay down and lit a cigarette. She was irritated by Matthew's unconcern. The more she learned of life on Marina the more it seemed a tale of another time, of a people only lately out of the caves. The presence of the wireless station and the occasional smoke of a liner passing hull-down on the transatlantic run made the situation all the more grotesque.

When, therefore, a day or two later Matthew suggested a visit to Main Station, she refused with the indifference of one who already has seen more than she wishes to remember. He looked embarrassed. “I wish you'd go,” he urged. “I wasn't supposed to tell you but it's a sort of party in your honor.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Mrs. McBain rang up on the phone last night and said that today would be an occasion—the end of your second month on Marina—and she'd like me to bring you down. She wants to meet you—you didn't see her the day we landed, she was at Main Station busy cooking meals for all those people at the beach. She's gone to quite a bit of trouble, baking a lot of fancy stuff, and Jim Kahn's bringing his wife in from West Light, and the Lermonts are riding up from Number Two. Oh yes, and some of the lifeboat crew will be dropping in probably, and Skane's coming down in the evening to give us a bit of music. Do say yes.”

He looked so anxious that she had not the heart to refuse. After putting out a supper for Skane and Sargent she bathed and changed, choosing one of the more conservative dresses in her new wardrobe, a plain brown frock with half sleeves and a hem that came to within ten inches of the floor. Matthew put on his gray suit and the smart Halifax hat.

“I'll phone Main Station and get them to send up the ponies and buggy.”

“I'd rather walk,” Isabel said. “It's only a mile, after all, and I'd like the exercise. I'll put on a pair of walking shoes and carry my slippers in a paper bag.”

It was a bright October afternoon with a warm breeze from the southwest. The sea had the dark blue tint of autumn and in the offing a long streak of cloud moved slowly towards the east. They walked along the shore of the lagoon at Matthew's suggestion. The sand there was hard and smooth, with occasional small tangles of dried wrack that crackled underfoot. The bank at their right was low and covered with marram grass and the dunes beyond rose with increasing undulations to form at last a crest that hid the north beach from view. The winds had been light for two days and the surf on the shore had a muffled note. On their left lay the glittering surface of the lagoon, and on the farther side Matthew pointed out a few seals sunning themselves on the bar.

The West Light pointed skyward far ahead. Nearer at hand, on top of the north dune, they could see the red watchtower of Main Station. The small beach birds had departed southward for the winter but the herring gulls remained, and the great black-backed gulls which the islanders called “preachers”; and here and there a few belated terns, known on Marina as “steerns,” hovered and dived into the lagoon or flitted overhead uttering the thin harsh cry which seemed to Isabel the very voice of this desolation. Nothing else met the eye but the expanses of sea and sky.

“Where are the wild ponies?” Isabel asked.

“They seldom wander west of the wireless station, the island's too narrow at this end. They're a wary lot. East of us where the island's much wider you'll see 'em in small groups, usually about the fresh-water ponds where the grass grows well and they can drink.”

He turned off the lagoon shore along a shallow depression in the dunes and in a few more minutes they came upon a wide circular hollow in which half a dozen wooden buildings lay sheltered like a toy village hidden in a bowl.

“Here we are,” Matthew said. “That white house with the wind gauge on the roof is McBain's. He's Superintendent of the island establishment—commonly known as the Governor. Over there's the stable. They keep about a dozen ponies to haul the wagons and for beach patrols and so on. Nearest building to our right is the rocket house. Then there's the boathouse. Next is what they call the Sailors' Home—for shipwrecked crews. Hasn't been used for years. Sheltered a good many in its day. Finally there's the crew house, where the lifeboatmen live, all single chaps, or at any rate chaps without wives on Marina, and of course a cook. The sheds behind are just for stores of various kinds, most of 'em empty. In the old days when they depended on sailing ships they used to keep a year's supplies of all kinds tucked away. The steamer changed that, with everything else.”

The house of the Governor was a trim place newly painted in white, with the doors and window frames a dark chocolate brown. Mrs. McBain threw open the door as they came up the steps, and Isabel could see heads peering from the stables and the crew house.

“Come right in!” Mrs. McBain cried. She was a small woman in the sixties, with thin snowy hair done in a tight little bun. Behind her spectacles a pair of small blue eyes regarded Isabel with a mixture of pleasure and curiosity. Her smile was broad and it revealed a pair of ill-fitting false teeth, the upper of which had a disconcerting trick of slipping down whenever she opened her mouth.

Isabel found herself in a small parlor furnished like every village parlor on the mainland from Cape Sable to Cape Breton. It was astonishing to find one transplanted so completely to this remote nook in the sea. The softwood floor was painted brown and dotted with hooked rugs in simple flowered patterns made by the lady herself. There was a black horsehair sofa, a pair of high-backed rocking chairs with antimacassars, and two sedate horsehair armchairs, one of which—evidently the Governor's—had a large brass spittoon beside it.

In a corner stood a varnished pine whatnot of three shelves, laden with chinaware dogs, pigs, shepherds and shepherdesses; two or three full-rigged ships in miniature enclosed in small medicine bottles; a rusty flintlock pistol found somewhere among the dunes, sea shells, a pony's hoof polished and mounted on a small block of varnished wood, a walrus tooth, a lobster claw as big as Matthew's right hand, and some relics of McBain's early seafaring days—an ostrich egg, a sextant, bits of white and scarlet coral, and some pieces of Madras brassware.

Upon the walls hung group photographs showing lifeboat crews of other years, mostly in the 1880's and '90's, strapping men with formidable beards, the heroes who had made Marina famous in the days of sailing ships, when wrecks were many, and when the pick of the manhood on the Nova Scotia coast could be had for thirty-five dollars and found. All of these photographs were held in quaint sand-and-shell-decorated frames like the one that she had noticed on Matthew's wall. Making them seemed to be one of the island hobbies. The room was warmed by a tall black stove whose ornate nickel trim was polished like silverware. The stovepipe ran into the wall above what had been a fireplace, long since covered with lath and plaster and now papered in the twining-roses pattern of the rest of the room.

The mantelpiece was still in place, and above it in large gilt frames hung tinted photographs of Mr. and Mrs. McBain, taken in younger days, enlarged to life size, and wearing that vacant and lifeless expression which only the family photographer of the Victorian age could achieve. In the exact center of the room, standing upon a beautiful circular hooked rug, was the inevitable small round table bearing in lonely significance a huge Bible fastened with brass clasps. One note was strange. In place of the customary small harmonium in a corner with a hymnbook open on its music rack there was a piano, an exquisite thing of rosewood, small and well made, with polished brass candle brackets at each side of the music rack; and the rack itself held a worn collection of Chopin's
Études
.

Mrs. McBain saw Isabel's interest. “My daughter's,” she explained. “She took lessons as a girl, when we lived in Halifax and Mr. McBain had a brigantine in the West Indies trade. She got to play quite well. But she marrit a Hudson Bay factor and went off to live in the Ar'tic where you can't take anything much bigger than a fiddle. When my husband got the post here as Governor we thought of selling the piano, but it's a lovely little thing and I couldn't bring myself to part with it. So here 'tis. It was an awful job getting the piano into a boat. The captain of the steamer was quite vexed. But we got it ashore safe and sound, and the lifeboat crew carrit it over the dunes from the beach. I wanted it put on a wagon but I guess they had to show the new Governor's wife how strong they were.”

“Were you impressed?” Isabel smiled.

“I was too worrit for fear they'd hurt 'emselves, not to mention my piano. Do you play, Mrs. Carney?”

“No, I wish I could. I love music. So did your daughter, I should say.” She pointed to the Chopin on the rack.

“Oh, that! That's Greg Skane's. It's queer stuff. He plays well and it sounds quite nice in a way, but we like it better when he plays the kind of thing our Lizzie used to play—'Over the Waves,' and ‘Tenting Tonight,' and ‘Juanita' and all that. We'll have a rare old singsong by and by.”

McBain came in, a thickset man, very bald, with a round face brown and wrinkled like a potato withered a little in dry storage. A gold tooth gleamed in the forefront of his smile and the rest of his teeth were stained a deep yellow by the tobacco he continually chewed. He was dressed in a boiled shirt and his best blue serge, an evident concession to Mrs. McBain; but nothing had persuaded him to put on a collar or a tie. On introduction he put out the hand of a seaman reared in the days of sail, with short thick fingers bent as if ready at any moment to clap on to a rope. He announced, “Pleased to meet you, Ma'am” in a powerful voice, and grinned and struck Carney a blow with his fist.

“She'll do,” he declared.

“You take Matt and his wife out and show 'em round,” his wife commanded, “whilst I lay the table and get on with my cooking.”

CHAPTER 15

Isabel went forth with the two men submissively but without interest. At the stables they walked into a warm gloom where two cows and eight or ten ponies stood in a range of stalls. Above each pony's stall was a painted board bearing its name. The names seemed to be chiefly those of personages famous during the late war.

“We catch a bunch of ponies every fall,” McBain explained. “You'll see—we'll be at it in a fortnight or so, every man on the island, even wireless operators, eh Matt?—it's fun alive, I tell you. We always pick out one or two likely ones to break in for ourselves and the rest we ship off to Hal'fax on the fall boat.” He jerked a thumb at a row of saddles hanging from pegs. “You must learn to ride, Ma'am. T'aint hard, and you won't get around much till you do. You'll enjoy it. You take Beatty now, or Marshal Fotch, or Lide-Jarge, all good steady chaps, kind as kittens, and used to women on their backs. Miz McBain, she used to ride that Beatty pony clean to East Light with me some times, afore she got rheumatic a few years back; and I often send Lide-Jarge to the West Light for Miz Kahn to come and have a cup of tea.”