The Nymph and the Lamp (26 page)

Isabel tramped stiffly over the dunes to the sheltered hollow of Main Station and the warmth of Mrs. McBain's blue-painted kitchen.

“Hello,” said that busy woman. “Everything ashore?”

“All but the mail.” Isabel opened the lammy coat and spread her numb hands to the glow of the stove.

“And you didn't wait for it? My, that's the best part of boat day, getting your letters and papers and parcels.”

“It was awfully cold,” Isabel said straitly.

“What you want is a nice hot cup o' tea. Pull up a chair to the stove and put your feet in the oven—all my baking's done.”

Isabel obeyed. She had not told Mrs. McBain the whole truth. The final chill that drove her from the beach had been a sudden realization that she had nothing more to wait for. She felt a sharp and unexpected envy of the stoic island women, those amazing frumps who had friends over the horizon to write them letters. But when Matthew and Sargent came at last with the wireless station mail she had a surprise, a letter for herself, and from Miss Benson of all people.

“Just a line to say Hello,” it ran, “and hope you're getting on all right. You gave us a fine shock. Hurd was
furious
. I thought it rather a lark. You always were a quiet one but frankly I'd never have guessed that you were up to anything like capturing the famous Carney. Like capturing a polar bear. Some day when you come off for a holiday (or to have a baby, or should I mention that?) you must drop in and tell me all about it. I'm dying to know the story as who wouldn't. Young MacGillivray looked in for a minute, said you looked a bit sick when he saw you on the beach but he guessed you were all right. I suppose you know I've got your job. Frankly I don't think it's worth the few extra dollars a week. Hurd's got over his rage now of course and is always telling me how much better Miss Jardine did this or that. Phew! And what a lot of work. The way he dictates! I don't get so much chance to talk to the ops but there's a cute chap on the
Princess Patricia
who's giving me a wonderful rush so I don't have time to mope. Cheerio.”

Isabel smiled as she tucked it back into the envelope. She had never liked Miss Benson and had made no secret of it. It was nice of her to write. And the flattery in “capturing the famous Carney,” a tribute from an expert, had a fillip of its own. No doubt Miss Benson had her agile tongue in her cheek when she wrote that, but it was warming, it implied a comradeship and conferred a decoration in a single phrase, and it strengthened in Isabel the confidence in her physical attraction that Carney's adoration had aroused in her, and which a year ago would have been so utterly impossible.

The rest of the mail was easily carried. There were two or three official envelopes for Carney, several letters for Skane, and a thick batch of letters and a parcel for Sargent. On the way back to the wireless station they paused to watch the wild ponies being taken off the ship. This job, Matthew explained, had been left to the end because it was important to get the stores ashore before any change in the weather. Also O'Dell did not like carrying these fractious beasts and he was always glad of an excuse to leave them on the beach.

The herd in the wire enclosure looked the worse for a week's confinement. “They mill about and kick and bite each other,” Matthew said. “Especially the stallions, who don't like to find their mares mixed up with the other chaps'. And of course they've had nothing to eat since they were caught.”

“Isn't there hay in the barn at Main Station?”

“That's for the stable ponies this winter. Anyhow these wild ones are easier to handle when they've been starved a bit.”

She sniffed. They watched the operation from the crest of a dune overlooking the enclosure and the beach. A post was driven deep in the sand outside the gate, and to this was fastened a rope with a running noose at the farther end. Giswell, the pony expert, ducked under the fence and threw the noose over the head of a pony near the gate. At once the astonished beast backed away, drawing the rope tight about its neck as if determined on suicide rather than submit to the indignities awaiting it on the beach. The men watched carefully. The pony had reached the uttermost inch of the rope and stood motionless, with its whole weight thrown back, eyes bulging, mouth gaping for air that would not come. In a minute the beast began to sway on its feet. A young lifeboatman slipped inside nimbly and fastened a trip rope to one of the forefeet.

Now the gate was opened and a pair of men led the pony, staggering, drawn by the merciless halter, through a sandy gully to the beach. There it was thrown by a quick jerk on the trip rope. Swiftly Nightingale and a sailor from the
Lord
Elgin
pounced upon it, lashing all four feet together with stout line. Now the frightened beast was permitted to breathe. Gasping, helpless, trembling, inert, it was rolled over upon a large wooden handbarrow, picked up bodily by a group of island men, carried down to the water, and slid into the bottom of a surfboat. Three of these bound captives made a load for the boat. The seamen rowed it out to the edge of the shoals, where the motorboat threw them a line and gave them a tow to the ship. The rest was simple. The
Lord Elgin's
derrick lowered a cargo hook and one by one the ponies were swung aboard by the lashings on their feet.

Isabel, watching, hearing Matthew's calm description of these matters, had to clench her teeth to keep from crying out. At last she could stand it no longer.

“How utterly brutal!” Carney and Sargent looked at each other.

“Ah, how can you be so callous!” she cried. “And why must they be sent away? They're perfectly happy here, aren't they?”

“Yes,” Carney said ironically, “but you can't convince the kind souls on the main. It's done because from time to time someone ashore gets a notion that the Marina ponies would be better off on the mainland. And as the ponies can be sold for cash that makes the theory perfect. So the orders come, and away the ponies go, forty or fifty at a time—‘rescued,' that's the word, ‘rescued from their starvation and exposure on Marina.' It's all very humanitarian and wonderful. Well, you've seen the way we have to catch 'em, keep 'em, starve 'em, choke 'em, so they can be handled in surfboats on an open beach. They'll kick and bite, with what strength they've got left, all the way to Halifax, and if O'Dell runs into heavy weather they'll be shaken up like dice in a cup. At Halifax they'll be sold at auction. You can guess what they'll fetch. Nice people sometimes buy one to pull a pony cart for the children. Most of 'em drift into the hands of streets hawkers, small farmers, darkies from Preston—people like that. You must have seen 'em about the marketplace in Halifax on Saturdays, hitched to ramshackle carts, their hides a mass of sores and the ribs all but sticking through. They're tame by that time. All the fight and half the life's been beaten out of 'em. On one of those days before I met you I wandered up to the market and found a number of Marina ponies looking just like that. By Jingo, it made me sick. Not just sick at the stomach but sick all over. It was one of the things that made me sure the mainland was no place for me.”

“And yet,” Isabel said sharply, “you helped to chase them, you and Skane. Skane gloried in it, I saw his face. And Matthew, I saw yours.”

Carney flushed and turned away, muttering something about “Had to be done…McBain had his orders…more hands less work…”

“Besides,” Sargent said, “it's nice to have something to do.” Isabel shot him a furious glance but his face was innocent. She rolled her eyes to the sky and stalked away from that hateful scene with the two men silent at her heels.

As they came over the last dune before the wireless station they saw a saddled pony hitched to the porch. In a moment a slim figure in trousers and mackinaw shirt came out quickly and rode away towards the east. Carney and Sargent went in by the porch door, Sargent to relieve Skane at the phones, Carney to deliver Skane's letters. Isabel turned along the boardwalk towards the apartment. As she passed the watch room she glanced in and met the gaze of Skane himself. He was standing at the window, hands in pockets, phones on his head, and he was smiling, whether in reminiscence or at herself she could not tell. She seemed to see a certain mockery on his lips. She jerked her head away and went on quickly to her kitchen, where the fire was dead and all was cold. She kindled a new fire and stood with the lammy-coat still about her, awaiting a touch of warmth from the chilled iron of the stove, when Matthew came.

“That girl,” she announced in a hard voice. “You ought to stop it. I wondered why she wasn't at the landing place—so must everybody else.”

“Oh no!” he protested. “Everybody on Marina, including Pa and Ma Giswell, knows that Sara comes here to see Skane. She's had a case of puppy love ever since she turned fourteen and it hasn't worn off yet, that's all. Nobody takes it seriously, least of all Skane.”

“She's not a puppy now. Skane must know that.”

“But I tell you he …”

“You told me he was quite a Lothario when he went to sea. And now, here in this monotony, do you think for one minute …Matthew, darling, you mustn't judge all men by yourself. As for the girl, she's a half-wild creature with no more moral sense I venture than the ponies on the dunes. Heaven knows I'm broad-minded but after all a thing like that, going on right under my nose…”

Carney took off his old fleece-lined coat and dropped it on a chair. “Look here, my dear, this doesn't sound like you. I can't forbid the girl to come here. How would she feel? And what would her family think?”

“Her family! From all I hear, Matthew, her family live more or less like animals—and so do half these wonderful people of yours! A tribe of savages in Hannel and dungarees! Imagine that grinning man Giswell playing the midwife when their last baby was born! And all that going on in the same small house with the rest of the children, including the precious Sara! What can you expect?”

“You don't understand,” Matthew said doggedly. “They're decent people.”

She saw that he was not to be moved. He was one of them after all Carney of Marina! She made an elaborate shrug. The stove began to glow. She threw off the coat and rearranged her hair, disordered by the hood. As the kitchen warmed, the cold knot in her emotions seemed to thaw. She asked casually, “Did the mail order come—the things from Eaton's?”

“Yes, McBain will send them up in the wagon tomorrow.”

Isabel walked across the room and sat on the arm of his chair. “I'm sorry I spoke so nastily, Matthew—about the Giswell girl, I mean. I was a bit upset and ready to fly up at anything. The cold I suppose, and that revolting business of the ponies. But there was something else. It didn't occur to me until the last moment, when those other women still waited on the beach so patiently, that there'd be no letters for you and me—not real letters, from people who cared for us. Oh, Matthew, how awfully alone we are!”

She said this in a mournful tone that touched him to the heart, putting her head down on his shoulder and staring at the floor.

“We have each other,” he said woodenly.

“Oh yes, of course. Last summer I thought it wonderful, leaving the world behind. Now it frightens me sometimes. The world's so indifferent. It doesn't know we exist, and doesn't care. And suppose something happened to you? What ever should I do?”

“You mustn't frighten yourself with fancies.”

“Don't you ever worry about something happening to me?”

“What shall I say, after giving you that advice?” he answered smiling.

CHAPTER 18

With the disappearance of O'Dell's faint smoke towards the west the garrison of Marina settled down for a winter's siege. For two months the wet autumn gales had flogged the island. Now came the gales of winter. They blew from the northerly quarters of the world. The prevailing wind was northwest, blowing down from Hudson Bay and over the snowbound forests and the frozen Gulf, a blast that pierced any amount of cloth to the skin, rattled the most securely fastened doors and windows, and covered the eight-mile length of the lagoon from Main Station to Number Three with a rugged crust of ice.

When the wind shifted east of north it fetched a dank breath over the long sea reach from Iceland and brought down snow, in small pellets that rattled on roofs and panes like shot, in thick white flakes that blew day and night, filling the air, hiding the dunes, plastering the windward side of the bungalow, the store shed and the mast itself, covering the rough ice of the lagoon with a virgin whiteness that glittered and hurt the eyes when at last the sun broke through. Occasionally there was a mild freak of weather. The wind crept around from north through east until the restless little schooner on the vane above the store-shed pointed her bowsprit almost south. Then came rain, in big drops, in cataracts, flooding down the panes, splashing against the clapboard walls with the sweep and hiss of a head sea along the hull of a ship, gushing from eaves spouts, dissolving the snow crust on the dunes, whisking the white blanket from the dark lagoon ice and leaving in its place another lake, another lagoon laid exactly over the first, with the ice between. Rarely was the air still. Between gales a restless breeze played over the dunes, now from this quarter, now from that, and set up in the telephone poles a hum of invisible bees, and drew from the aerial wires a mournful crooning that seemed to Isabel worse than the banshee screaming of the storms.