The Nymph and the Lamp (23 page)

This mood was still more apparent when Mrs. McBain demanded a singsong. He went at once to the beautiful little piano and struck up “Old Macdonald Had a Farm.” It was now getting dark and McBain lit the kerosene hanging lamp and the candles in the brass brackets of the piano. The company clustered about the pianist and sang with gusto. Skane had a rather good tenor, McBain and Kahn and Lermont sang loudly if somewhat off key, Mrs. Kahn screamed happily, young Mrs. Lermont disclosed a strong sweet voice. Isabel ventured her own light clear tone a little timidly at first; and then encouraged by the general uproar she sang with an assurance that she had not known since her school-teaching days, when she led the morning hymn. And now she heard that sound made famous by the operators' tales all over the coast, Carney's rich baritone ringing above the others and through the room. It was the first time he had sung in her presence.

Skane went on to “Juanita,” with young Mrs. Lermont singing the verses and everyone coming in on the chorus, and then to “Old Black Joe,” and “In the Evening by the Moonlight.” For variation he played a few chanties, and Isabel was amused at the vigor of McBain and Matthew, making appropriate motions with their hands and roaring out the words as if the parlor floor had become a deck and there really were sails to haul.

After an hour they were all hoarse and there was a movement back to the chairs. Skane remained at the piano, smoking a cigarette and turning the worn leaves of Chopin. He put out the cigarette carefully and began to play one of the
études
. Mrs. McBain leaned across to Isabel, whispering, “This is what he really comes for. The rest was just to please us.”

“I think it's nice, don't you?”

“Well, yes, in a way; it's lively after a fashion but underneath it's sad-like and makes you want to cry. That's my notion anyhow.” Isabel smiled and nodded. It was not a bad description of Chopin.

The Kahns and Lermonts regarded the man at the piano with the faintly bored faces of those for whom the best part of the evening had gone by, and soon the men were looking at their watches. Kahn muttered something about “seeing to the light,” as if the faithful Joe were not there to climb the stairs and turn the crank; as if indeed the light were not already sweeping the darkness over the west bar and Joe sitting in the old chair by the kitchen window, smoking stolidly and glancing upward every five minutes or so to see that all was well.

At ten o'clock the Kahns and Lermonts left, shaking hands solemnly all round and calling loud good nights from the doorstep. A gust of cold air blew into the house. Matthew looked at Isabel with the uplifted brows of a husband who expects the wifely signal to go home; but she was sitting relaxed in one of the armchairs and her eyes were closed. Skane was not an accomplished pianist but he played well, as Mrs. McBain had observed. His lean sinewy fingers sprang over the keys and his gaunt jaw in the twin lights of the piano candles was serious and taut. Throughout the uproar of the others' departure he had played on, and he played now in the new silence as if he were the only person in the room.

He had none of the mannerisms of the pianist and there was something oddly familiar in his attitude on the stool, the strong figure tense, the head and shoulders drawn forward, the eyes at once dreamy and alert. It occurred to Isabel that it was the characteristic attitude of all radio men, their hands busy before them, their eyes on something miles beyond the panel of the instrument; and again she had that whimsy that they were not as other men but a separate creation, cursed or gifted with a power of throwing their souls into space.

A sudden crash of keys in discord startled them all, and Skane sprang up from the stool. “Good God, what time is it?”

McBain drew a huge silver watch from his waistcoat. “Half past eleven.”

“And I've got the graveyard trick!” Skane turned, pulling on his battered sea-officer's cap, and gave Isabel a gesture that was not so much a bow as a quick jerk of his head and shoulders. Then with a “So long!” to Carney and the McBains he was off, slamming the door and running down the steps.

“Does he always go like that?” Isabel asked, amused.

“Pretty much,” Mrs. McBain replied. “Wakes up, like, then he's off.”

“He seemed almost human tonight. He's usually glum.”

Mrs. McBain pushed up her spectacles and rubbed her eyes. She yawned.

“He's a queer sort. Never seems happy but when he's here, in this room with the piano. Comes down quite often, afternoons or evenings when he's off watch, and plays by the hour. I daresay it's something to do.”

Isabel twisted her lips. “Well, we must be getting along ourselves.”

“I'll bring round the buggy,” McBain said rising.

“No, I'd rather walk, wouldn't you, Matthew?”

Matthew hesitated.

“In the dark?” cried Mrs. McBain.

“Oh, but I love the dark, Mrs. McBain, and so does Matthew. It won't take half an hour, the walking's very good by the lagoon—so hard and smooth, like a pavement. Come on, Matthew!”

Outside she took his arm and they walked slowly. The stars were out, with frosty glitter, and a wind blew keen along the shore, ruffling the dark expanse of the lagoon in small whitecaps. To their left the dunes in the cold light had the look of dead mountains on the moon. Matthew seemed absorbed in her presence and the intimacy of her hand on his arm. He looked straight ahead and stumbled frequently over bits of raffle on the sand. After a long silence Isabel asked idly, “Why didn't Skane wait for us? He must have known we'd be leaving right away?”

“He thought we'd be going back with McBain in the buggy. And he had to catch his watch—I venture he's run the whole way. Skane's as hard as nails.”

She laughed. “You're all as hard as nails. None of you know what comfort is.”

The wireless station lights appeared. They could hear the engine and in another few moments a harsh fanfare of the spark.

When they reached the door the wind was blowing a full gale, whipping sand in their faces and harping in the wires overhead. It was a relief to step into the warmth of the apartment, where the kitchen fire still glowed. Matthew struck a match and lit the kitchen lamp, and Isabel noted with gratitude that the operators had washed and put away the dishes after their meal. She went straight to the bedroom, lit the lamp and drew the blind. She undressed quickly. In the bathroom she ran the tub deep and let herself into the hot water with the satisfaction of one who has accomplished a far journey; and she returned to her room taking with her beneath the clinging silk of her dressing gown that pleasant aura of clean flesh, of moist warmth, of scent, which always had been to her the very atmosphere of well-being.

She sat before the mirror brushing her hair when Matthew came, in shirt and trousers, and found her door wide open. He gave an apologetic knock on the jamb.

“Isabel, you forgot to put out my bedding. Just let me have it and I'll make up my berth.”

She put the brush aside and rose, turning slowly to face him. Her skin was flushed and to Carney in the mild glow of the lamp she was a vision of beauty. “I didn't forget, Matthew. I've been an idiot but that's over now.”

“I'm afraid I don't understand.”

Isabel put up a hand to the lamp and turned it low. Her bare feet on the sealskins carried her like a wraith across the room, and without warning she was before him with her hands upon his shoulders.

“You'll never understand, my poor darling, and I can't explain. I'm not sure I know myself—not really, not anything that makes sense, except that I've been what any man but you would call a damned she-fool—and I'm sorry. Do you love me still?”

He made no answer. He stood trembling and she felt in him a yearning that brought tears to her eyes. She put her mouth to his, and at the quick passionate pressure of his arms she wept, drooping in his embrace as if her bones had fled. In an April storm of tears and kisses he carried her to the bed. Outside, the gale blew on. The building shook; it seemed to blench before the stronger gusts, and the keening in the aerials rose to a witches' chorus as if all the ghosts of Marina had found voice about the mast. It was a fit night for passion. Within the walls, in the warm dusk of the bedroom, their own storm rose and fell, renewed itself in sleep, and wakened to new gusts and further calms. In a tranquil moment she murmured, “Are you happy now, Matthew?”

“Yes.”

“Am I nice?”

“You're wonderful.”

“Better than the first night?”

“Yes.”

“Ah! ‘Wives improve with much caressing.' Who said that?”

“I don't know.”

“Not your precious Byron, anyway. Recite me some Byron—the bit you like best.”

Matthew rolled on his back, smiling at the small ring of light on the ceiling.

“It's shopworn, I suppose, but I've always liked ‘Solitude' better than anything. I'm a simple chap and the poetry I like says something I can understand. I know the meaning of:

‘There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society where none intrudes

By the deep sea, and music in its roar;

I love not man the less, but Nature more.' ”

Isabel's face was pressed against his breast, where his deep tones echoed like an inner voice. “That's like you, darling. I'm afraid I don't know Byron very well. ‘There was a sound of revelry by night' and one or two things like that. I'm not sure I like your ‘man less' and ‘Nature more.' What about woman? What about me?”

“Ah, then you don't know how ‘Solitude' begins?”

“Oh yes, I do! And how it ends.”

“Well, then…”

“I was joking. Go on.”

“All right. Smile if you like. Omar Khayyám said it a bit better for me but Byron's good enough:

‘Oh that the desert were my dwelling place,

With one fair spirit for my minister.'”

“Lovely! Are you sure you didn't invent that just for me?”

“I wish I had.”

“My Byron with a beard!”

Later, wakeful while Matthew slept with one unconscious arm clasped beneath her breasts as if to insure her captivity, she heard the dreary clanking of the water pump. Skane was at the task they all hated, stripped and sweating in the hot reek of the engine room. She thought of her bath guiltily. The main tank was over the operators' quarters and it was one of the petty embarrassments of her life that they could hear the rush of water whenever she tubbed. But the twinge passed. She drifted into sleep with a faint smile on her lips. There was something entertaining in the notion of Skane, the moody anchorite, sweating an extra half hour at the pump for the pleasure of a woman.

CHAPTER 16

November brought the first snow, a few specks wandering down from a sullen sky and then a brisk fall that covered the dunes and the south bar. Below the dark ceiling the sea moved in sluggish gray folds, and when the sun put down a thin ray through a momentary rift in the clouds the wet foreshore had a hard gray shine like steel. The white skin on the dunes gave Marina the illusion of an Arctic landscape, a range of snow hills sunk to their shoulders in the sea, and by contrast made the lagoon a pool of ink; between the black sheet of the lagoon and the heaving gray mass of the ocean itself the south bar made a thin white stroke like a path of virtue through besetting sins. None of this lasted longer than the first hard blow, for then the familiar sand-devils rose and danced above the dune peaks and swept in clouds along the island, burying all that purity within an hour.

Now there was hard frost in the nights, the ponds in the heart of the island had a skim of ice about their margins and often a complete skin that shrank and vanished under the next day's sun. But now the sun itself was in full retreat towards the south. The mast, the telephone poles, the dead brown tufts of marram on the dunes, all threw long and longer shadows, even at high noon. The hollows where the wild ponies sheltered from storm, where in summer the sun fell like a sword, now lay in a perpetual twilight, and a descent from the sunny crest into their deep shade was like a plunge into a tomb.

The southerly slope of the island in the region of the wireless station gave it the full benefit of the meager sunshine. At sunset the last rays shone at sea level and lay flat against the southern edges of the dunes for a few moments like a fiery fan, and gave them a gilded beauty not to be seen in summer. Then the day was gone; the station building, the store shed, the cluster of oil drums lay in shadow; the last of that golden light crept up the mast and vanished with the finesse of a Hindu rope trick, and the night came on like a wave, vast and black, flooding over the dunes from the east.

Most of the wild fowl had moved on, in their great migration towards the south, and the flocks that had settled like living clouds over the ponds and the quiet reaches of the lagoon were seen and heard no more. The gunners from Main Station ceased their visits. Skane and Sargent themselves gave up after one chilly dawn when they returned with a pair of draggled ducks and a tale of tossing a coin to see who should strip and swim out to retrieve them. Skane had lost the toss, it appeared, and the wind had carried the dead birds far out into the lagoon and given him a long swim in that bleak water. Isabel shuddered.