The Nymph and the Lamp (29 page)

“Actually,” he informed her, “the picture was taken two years ago. The female creature in the middle used to stick out of the sand down by Main Station. The figurehead of a French barque named
Clélie
that piled up on the east bar forty or fifty years ago. She's rather a good bit of carving, don't you think?”

“She's rather—opulent,” Isabel observed. “And she looks as if she'd just taken a bath in her nightie.”

“Well,” said Skane, busy with his dinner, “wasn't Clélie the Roman girl who swam the Tiber to get away from the Etruscans?”

“I don't know. I'm afraid I never was much good at Roman history.”

He smiled. “Same here. By the way, this chicken is awfully good. The only reason I remember the tale is because in my student days I was rather interested in French translation, and I got hold of one or two seventeenth-century novels by Mademoiselle de Scudéry, including
Clélie
. Mam'selle was very decorous and her heroes and heroines were a stuffy lot. She used to skitter very carefully about the edges of their love affairs. In
Clélie
I remember she described the River of Inclination winding its way down from the hills and watering the villages of Billets Doux, Petits Soins, and a lot of other rot. Very good picture of Matt, isn't it?”

“It's awfully good of you, too. I shall treasure this. Did you make the frame yourself?”

“Yes. The idea's not very original but I thought it would make a souvenir for your wall. The wood's from a piece of wreck timber I picked up on the beach.”

“I'd like to see Clélie. You must show me her some day when we're down that way.”

“I'm afraid she's gone. She toppled over in a storm a few months after that picture was taken, and then we got an unusual succession of nor'east winds and a big dune moved over and buried her. Mam'selle de Scudéry could have written a whole novel about that—the Tempest in the Desert, and the millions of grains of sand hustling in to cover poor Clélie's modesty.”

They laughed together. “I'm afraid you're a cynic,” Isabel said. “Here's your plum pudding—hard sauce by courtesy of Vedder's cook book. I'll have a cup of coffee with you for company. You haven't opened my present.”

Skane unwrapped the mittens and looked up. “Just what I wanted!”

“That's what you're supposed to say, anyway. I made the same for all of you. There's one comfort about knitting mittens, you don't have to worry much about size.”

“They're very nicely made,” he observed handsomely. He stirred his coffee and offered her a cigarette. Isabel took one, and Skane struck a match on his boot and held it for her. As she leaned forward with the cigarette between her lips their eyes met in the curious intimacy of the rite and there was an odd little silence. Something in the quality of Skane's gaze set a pulse beating in her throat. For a moment she forgot the cigarette. That old silly habit of flushing over trifles, over nothing, suddenly possessed her. She was startled and annoyed. The warm blood spread beneath her skin from throat to temples, and there was nothing she could do about it. She fixed her attention on the cigarette. She drew on the thing with several unsteady puffs and turned away murmuring “Thanks,” and staring out of the window with a quite false air of interest as if the sight of her own small washing, a few silken things waving gaily in the cold breeze from the sea, were something she had never seen before.

Skane lit his own cigarette and sat back in his chair, regarding her with that unchanged gaze. She wanted to break this uneasy spell, which had come from nowhere, without reason, and was so ridiculous; but she could not find a thing to say. She thought a little wildly: Why doesn't he say something? Anything! His hand reached out to flick a tip of ash into a saucer, and the hand that was so quick and sure at the key in the watch room seemed a little unsteady, as if it had fallen under the same mysterious spell. The ash fell on the tablecloth.

At last she found something to say. It came to her with a vicious brilliance. “Sara Giswell called to see you yesterday, and you were out.”

“So Sargent told me.”

“You're not very kind to her, are you?”

“I don't know what you mean.”

Isabel felt more confident now. She turned, drawing in a strong whiff of smoke and blowing it out through her nostrils, with her head tipped back, regarding Skane beneath the lowered eyelids.

“You know very well what I mean, Greg. The girl's in love with you.”

“Who told you that, Sargent?”

“Never mind. Anyhow I've got eyes. And Giswell was complaining yesterday that you never go down there any more.”

“You know what the weather's been like.”

“The weather was just as bad in the other winters, wasn't it?”

“I suppose so. But the shack was a place to get away from as much as possible in Vedder's day. You've made life here more comfortable. Anyhow, Number Three had become a habit, and a man's habits change like anything else.”

“That's unfortunate for Sara. She can't change hers, apparently.”

“My dear Mrs. Carney, surely you know Sara's the belle of Marina? She could have any of McBain's crew, or Sargent, say, just by whistling them up.”

“But not you!”

“I'm not susceptible—put it that way.”

“So I've heard. But I believe you used to be very susceptible once upon a time. May I ask out of sheer curiosity, what made the change?”

Skane drew hard on his cigarette and opened his mouth, letting the fumes drift forth. “That's too long a story to be interesting.”

Isabel felt at ease. She had put him on the defensive. It was absurd that she should have become so flustered over nothing more than a glance and a silence like a schoolgirl tête-à-tête for the first time in her life.

“I wish you'd tell me. You've never said anything about your life. You had a rough time in the war, didn't you?”

“No worse than a good many others.”

“Go on, please.”

Skane drew on the cigarette again, and again let the smoke curl out of his mouth. It took some time. “Well, I'll tell you,” he said at last, deliberately. “I used to take life pretty lightly when I went to sea. I served mostly in tramps, wandering from one port to another all over the show—and it was a show then, for a man in his twenties, before the war spoiled everything. The time at sea was rather dull but there was all the life you wanted ashore. There were so many new things to see and taste and feel—everything from Cuban dances to a Japanese tattoo needle. And of course there were girls here and there. That's what you wanted to know, wasn't it?

“Well, I liked women and they seemed to like me. I don't know why; I was no pretty-boy and it couldn't have been my money. A seagoing Sparks in those days was lucky to get fifty or sixty dollars a month. But I'd like to make this clear: the women were only part of it. The fun was in the world. I got as much pleasure out of swinging my fists in a dockside free-for-all as I ever had from a woman. And I've seen a square-rigger under full sail in the evening light that struck me as more beautiful than any woman that ever walked. Oh, it was all very wonderful, I tell you, till I grew up.”

“When was that?” she asked.

“When I was getting on towards thirty. Time, wasn't it? I should have known in ‘16, when my ship was torpedoed ten days out of Mobile with a load of cotton. But there wasn't much to that. We didn't see the sub. The cotton swelled and stopped the hole to some extent, and we kept the old hooker limping on towards England for another day. Then the cotton swelled enough to burst the hatches off and we took to the boats. The sea wasn't bad. We were picked up inside twenty hours anyhow. When we got to Cardiff we had a wonderful spree to celebrate our luck.

“Then I got posted to another tramp and had another year of it, chugging about the North Atlantic, sometimes in convoy, sometimes not. Things were getting pretty grim at sea by the fall of '17. There was still some fun in the world but you didn't get the same kick out of it. Then, two days out of Wabana, Newfoundland, with a cargo of iron ore, we got it. A submarine slammed two torpedoes into the ship and down she went. With an iron ore cargo you haven't a chance. I picked myself up off the wireless cabin floor and started to send out ‘Allo'—the ‘I am attacked' signal, expecting the mate or somebody else from the bridge to pop in with the ship's position. I was using the emergency set—the ship's dynamo had gone with the rest of the engine room—and it was one of those old ten-inch coil outfits with an open spark, that hadn't the range of a good clear shout.

“The ship gave a lurch and the cabin door swung open and banged against the bulkhead. I looked out and saw the mate and eight or nine chaps in a boat, floating abreast of the deck. She was down to that in four minutes. The mate yelled to me and I walked out, just as I was, in trousers, shirt and jacket, and stepped over the rail into the boat. We just had time to pull clear when down she went. The skipper and the others went with her—nobody'd seen them after the torpedoes exploded.

“We weren't in convoy. We'd been making a lone run of it, keeping radio silence. Those few squawks on the battery set hadn't got anywhere, and even if they had, there was no position. So you get the picture—adrift in the North Atlantic, in November, which is a cold time in these latitudes, and nobody looking for us. There was no hope of making shore. The nearest was Newfoundland, nearly five hundred miles to windward. For two days and nights the wind blew a gale out of the west and it was all we could do to keep before it, with a bit of canvas hoisted forward. There was a big sea running and it pitched the boat up and down. With the shock of the explosions, and then the wild motion of the boat, several of the chaps got sick. The mate had his bridge coat on, and two of the sailors had lammy coats. The rest were like me, in their jackets. The wind went right through to the skin. We were all covered with red ore dust and so was every inch of the boat. We were a weird-looking lot.

“The mate was an old fellow and we made him keep the bridge coat. The lammies we passed about, so that every man could have a bit of time protected from the wind. If you didn't get seasick you could stick it, but if you retched you were done for. The cold went right through you then. Three men died like that, the first night. We shared out their clothes and put the bodies over the side. We took turns at the oars, not that we'd any hope of getting anywhere but just to keep our blood stirring. The sky was open-and-shut, mostly cloud but a flash of sunshine now and then. There was no heat in the sun but you got some cheer out of seeing it. When darkness came you lost that, and then the cold seemed to reach in and grab hold of your heart. On the second night two more men died, and we took off their clothes and rolled them over the gunwale.

“That was the way it went. There was a small tin of water and some emergency food—ship's biscuit and some sort of cocoa stuff pressed into a hard cake. It didn't do us much good. When you're being flung about in a small boat like that you can't sleep, you can't even relax, and you get so weary that you lose all desire to eat. At the end of a week there were three of us left. We had clothing to spare by that time, each of us wearing everything he could cram on, and the rest of it piled on the boat bottom to make a bit of soft lying. The water tin was empty of course. We hadn't strength enough to row. We left all to the sail, steering with an oar and keeping the boat before the wind, whichever way it blew. There was nothing else to do. It rained quite a bit but sometimes there were squalls of snow.

“I told you this was a long yarn, didn't I? I'll skip a lot. On the twelfth day we were sighted and picked up by a Nova Scotia schooner running east for Lisbon with a cargo of salt fish. The messroom boy and I were alive. The other chap had been dead for days, and we were all three huddled together on that ragman's stock of clothing in the bottom of the boat.”

Skane paused and lit another cigarette. His hand shook as it held the match. Isabel sat watching him, dumb with pity. The horror was not so much in what he said or in what she was left to guess; it was in the defiant tone of his voice. He told his tale with a sneer, with a look of utter disdain, as if he despised her for calling up this old nightmare out of his past.

“There's not much left to tell, except the point of all this. I was a long time in a Lisbon hospital, and after that in a convalescent home for merchant marine officers in England. By the time I got back to Halifax the war was in its last few months—and I'd had enough of it. I'd had enough of everything, including the sea.”

“And women?” Isabel asked.

“And women. Women! You think a lot about women when the sea catches up with you at last, and gives you the full treatment. It doesn't strike you till then what a lot of soft, empty, self seeking creatures they are, and what a fool you've been to have any part of them. You lump women with the smug ship owners, the busy ships handlers, the Victory Loan orators and all the other comfortable shore people who send you off to sea with a smile—and look around for someone else. Oh, it's wonderful how clear you can see after a few days in an open boat.”

“So you came to Marina,” she said, unperturbed.