The Nymph and the Lamp (24 page)

“Suppose you'd got a cramp?” she demanded.

“One doesn't suppose things like that.”

“Surely enough people have been drowned on Marina without you and Sargent taking silly chances like that. Don't you agree, Matthew?”

“He can't,” Skane said, grinning. “He's done it too often himself. Eh, Matt? Tell your wife about the bet you took, that you'd go for a swim off the north beach last Christmas.”

“I don't believe it!” she cried.

“Well, it's true,” Matthew said sheepishly. “And it cost Skane half a pound of tobacco.”

“But why? And don't say it was just for something to do!”

“How did you guess?” Skane said.

All Marina awaited now the coming of the
Lord Elgin
with the winter stores and mail. “The Boat” was the unfailing topic in every conversation in kitchens, bedrooms, barns, stables, watch rooms and lighthouses, and on the telephone wire that linked their lives. One wife rang up another and they chattered over items in their well-thumbed mail-order catalogues which must be ordered now by wireless if the parcels were to catch the boat. These conversations were public affairs, for like any farm wife on a party line every woman on Marina ran swiftly to take down her receiver, whatever number had been rung. There she listened, throwing in a comment of her own if she felt inclined, or having satisfied her curiosity replacing the receiver on the hook with all the care and skill of a wire tapper in a tale. This diverting custom was not for Isabel, even had she wished, for the wireless station was not connected with the main island line. A bygone “Governor,” wishing to preserve the secrecy of his messages to and from the mainland, had arranged that a private line should connect the radio station with his own home. This exclusive arrangement held. Isabel could chat on the phone with Mrs. McBain and no one else. The main island line, skirting her abode on its drunken and sand-blasted poles, seemed to emphasize the apartness of “those wireless fellers” and that still mysterious creature “Carney's woman.”

She and Matthew went often to Main Station now. Usually McBain sent a youth with the pony-buggy to take them there, and usually he brought them home; but sometimes at Isabel's insistence they walked, always by the familiar shore of the lagoon. The people east of Number Two were too far to join these petty social affairs, but the Kahns came always, and usually the Lermonts, and often a few of the lifeboat crew slipped into the parlor and sat regarding Isabel with sidelong eyes and listening to the music and the talk.

At Matthew's insistence Isabel had begun to ride, wearing a pair of trousers and seated on Lide-Jarge, a resigned and steady going beast. Carney rode beside her, watching the pony's footing. When Matthew had a watch to keep on a fine afternoon she rode forth with Sargent and sometimes even Skane. Frequently there was a small cavalcade of three, jogging easily along the north beach for a visit to Number Two, crossing the island by a labyrinth of ravines and ponds where the ponies' hoofs crushed ripe red cranberries underfoot, and returning along the shore of the lagoon.

Sargent rode with the cheerful awkwardness of a sailor a-horseback, but Skane and Carney sat their mounts like centaurs, leaving her on the beach from time to time for a wild gallop over the dunes. On these frolics she gazed after them with the tolerant amusement of a schoolma'am for whom the two biggest boys in the class are showing off, but she had to admire the reckless grace with which they rode. Matthew afoot had no grace at all. At times he was downright clumsy, especially at evening before the lamps were lit, when he blundered about the apartment like a man in a dream. In the saddle he was another creature, quick, sure, and somehow pitiless like Skane, and she discovered an odd mixture of disapproval and sensual pleasure in watching their strong figures, and the mastery they exerted by the grip of their knees and the firm thrust of their hard loins.

Before long she had a chance to see the whole adult male population of Marina displaying its horsemanship, for with the approaching date of the fall boat McBain arranged a pony hunt. Isabel arose and dressed before dawn to give Matthew and Skane their breakfast, and saw them ride off at first light with McBain and his troop towards the east, trailing grotesque long shadows over the dunes. They would pick up Lermont at Number Two and ride along the north beach to the farther end of the island, there to be joined by Giswell and his boys from Number Three, Reuben Nightingale from Four, and Judah Shelman, the keeper of East Light.

They would extend a living line across Marina and then sweep towards the west, driving the wild herds before them with whoops and shouts. At first it would be easy, for the island was narrow at its ends; but there would be some lively work towards the center where the expanse of dunes and gullies thickened to a mile. There were perhaps three hundred wild ponies on Marina, living in small herds, each dominated by a stallion of superior strength and fighting capacity and grazing over a section of grassy dunes and reedy ponds from which it rarely strayed.

All of these would be driven together in the chase, a brown melee of flying hoofs and glistening bodies and long tossing manes, doubling back cunningly along hidden ravines whenever a chance offered. Many would thus escape the roundup, especially in the wide part of the island where McBain's twenty riders were nearly a hundred yards apart.

Soon after noon, watching from the window of the instrument room, Isabel and Sargent saw about two hundred wild ponies frothing at the mouth and rushing over the dunes towards the concealed pen in the hollow before Main Station, with its wide funnel of extended posts and wire. Then appeared the line of riders, confident now in the narrow neck between the north beach and the lagoon, urging their blown mounts with sticks and whips of knotted rope. They plied these vigorously, dashing back and forth as the driven herds, finding themselves in the shrinking tip of their sandy home, tried again and again to break back towards the east.

Skane galloped past on a frothing, wild-eyed pony, giving them a smile and a toss of his whip. Towards the lagoon Matthew and three or four others rode shouting at a cluster of ponies stealing back along the shore. Sargent grinned enviously. Isabel was astonished. She had seen in the course of her rides a few wild ponies moving amongst the ponds to the eastward of the wireless station but she would not have believed that such a number could exist in that apparently empty wilderness. Indeed all of it was fantastic; the active bronzed men in trousers and sea boots, in jerseys and ragged mackinaws, in a quaint variety of hats and caps, like beggars on horseback; the deep saddles and closed stirrups that she could only associate with Western movies; the yells and whoops which she supposed were an imitation of American cowboys, although none of the men had ever been west of Fundy Bay except by sea; and the spectacle of all this violent life in what until today had been a dead expanse of marram grass and sand.

Most incongruous of all was a slim youth in trousers and mackinaw shirt, with long dark hair flittering about his shoulders, who dashed to head off a pair of ponies breaking back past the wireless station. The ponies turned and fled with the rest towards the trap a mile beyond, and the rider reined up violently at the very edge of the boardwalk, giving Sargent a flashing smile before galloping on.

“Who on earth is that?” Isabel demanded.

“That,” Sargent said with pleasure in his voice, “is Giswell's daughter from Number Three.”

“Not the belle of the island!”

“Yes.”

“Is that the girl you go down to Number Three to see sometimes?”

“Yes.” He smiled and reddened. The riders dwindled in the distance towards Main Station. “She seems rather wild.”

“She rides awfully well,” Sargent said, as if that explained everything.

“Does she always look like that?” Isabel asked, with a quizzical look.

“Pretty much. I mean she usually wears trousers and a man's shirt. But she dresses up very nicely sometimes—even powders her nose. Not for me, of course.”

“Oh?” It was fun to tease Sargent, he blushed so readily. “I suppose one of the lifeboatmen?”

“No.”

“But they go down to Number Three to see her too, don't they? That's what Matthew told me. It must be very exciting, being the belle for so many men at seventeen.”

“I guess so. She's nice to all of us in her way—as if we were just a lot of chums.”

“Then who does she powder her nose for?”

“You'd never guess.” Sargent had the phones on his head, and he left the window now to make his fifteen-minute entry on the log sheet.

“You're making me curious, Sargent. Who?”

“Skane.”

“No!”

“It's the truth, Mrs. Carney. Quaint, isn't it?”

“You don't mean Skane makes love to that—that child??”

“Oh no, not a bit of it. He likes the Giswells and goes down there quite often for a meal and a yarn with them. Swears Number Two's a wonderful place because it's tucked away among the big dunes at the east end of the lagoon where you can't see the wireless station, not even the mast. Sara's the oldest of the Giswell kids. Skane's friendly to her but mostly he plays with the younger ones. He's an odd sort, I suppose you know that.”

“Matthew told me Skane disliked women. That's true, isn't it?”

“I wouldn't know. He never mentions 'em, not to me anyway.”

“He's not good-looking. What does Sara see in him?”

Sargent grinned. “That's what we'd all like to know. He scarcely gives her a word and yet he's the only man on Marina as far as she's concerned. If you'll forgive me, women are funny.”

“That's quite true. Don't you think I'm rather funny myself?”

He blushed again. “Not at all.”

He was so young and naive that she could not resist pressing the point.

“Didn't it occur to you and Skane that it was rather odd, Matthew getting himself a wife so suddenly?”

“No,” he said, unconvincingly.

“Tell me, Sargent—Jim, may I call you Jim?—what did Skane say?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“Tell me!”

“Well, he thought it was a nuisance, that's all. I mean, we'd been living in a free and easy fashion, going about the shack practically naked all summer, in and out of the lagoon like seals. Shaving once a month, or something like that. Letting our hair grow to a mop and then amusing ourselves by cutting it in fancy ways, or clipping it all off, jail fashion. You see what I mean. Skane hated to give that up. It suited him. I suppose it suited all of us for that matter. Well, your coming put an end to all that. And then we wondered what sort of person you'd be.”

“And what sort did you find me?”

“Very nice.”

“And Skane?”

“He doesn't say. He seems to have got over that jumpy feeling he had after Carney radioed to say he was bringing out a wife. He was rather jealous, I think.”

“Heavens! Of me?”

“Well, he and Carney had been very chummy. They were always together, riding, swimming, gunning, sailing. Seemed to have everything in common. Of course they were so much older than MacGillivray and I that I suppose we seemed like infants. When Carney's message came, the message about you, Skane was very upset. He drove us like a madman, scrubbing, painting, burning rubbish. I fancy you've heard about that. He couldn't seem to eat or sleep.”

“If Skane didn't like it, why didn't he ask for a transfer?” Isabel demanded. “He could have got one easily enough. He's served here two or three years.”

Sargent gave her a quick side glance. “I wondered that myself. But of course if Skane had insisted on leaving, MacGillivray would have had to stay—and Mac was crazy to get off the island after his year. It was that, probably, and a feeling on Skane's part that he'd be letting Carney down if he quit. He's awfully loyal to your husband.”

“In spite of Matthew's wife?”

“Skane's got used to you now, I think. He's accepted you as part of Carney, and that makes you all right.” Sargent smiled engagingly. “You know, it wasn't much of a life here before. Vedder was an awful slop, now that I stop to think of it. You changed all that. The food—everything's better. You seemed a bit strange at first—sort of cold and standoffish. You're different now. So is Carney somehow. I think we're all different. It's really a good thing you came.”

“That,” exclaimed Isabel, “is the nicest thing I've heard since I landed on Marina! Now let me tell you something, Jim. When I came here with Matthew I didn't know what the place was like, and when I saw the station, how lonely it was, and so noisy and so bare, I didn't see how I could stick it till the next boat came. Then one day everything looked different. Nothing had changed but my own mind of course but suddenly I was happy. I'm still happy. I have a strange feeling of excitement. I suppose it's because this kind of life is so utterly foreign to everything I'd known before. I feel as if I'd stepped through some sort of looking glass.”

Sargent grinned again. “Oh, it's not so bad. I'll be glad to leave, mind you, because I want to get back to sea. I joined this service to see the world, and you can't see much from here. But it could be worse, at that. It could be some frozen hole in the far North where there's nothing but ice and snow for nine or ten months a year. And when I think of those jobs on the Labrador I congratulate myself. Here on Marina at least we get mail and fresh grub several times a year. And here you can move about as much as you like.”