The Nymph and the Lamp (30 page)

“I put in for shore duty, and somebody mentioned a post on Marina. I'd heard of the place, and of Carney—who hadn't? It seemed the kind of place I was looking for. And when I came here and studied Carney for a bit it seemed to me that his was the kind of life I wanted.”

Skane arose, picked up the mittens and walked to the door.

Isabel came to her feet swiftly.

“And then I came, and spoiled everything—isn't that what you want to say?”

He turned and gave her that straight look which seemed to pierce the last recess of her mind.

“No,” he said evenly. “Let's say you changed everything.” And then in a lighter tone, “We've been very serious, haven't we? And after all it's Christmas and we should be merry. Let me tell you something to make you smile. Our shy boy Sargent confessed to me last night, when he was packing up his gift, that he was half in love with you.”

He was laughing as he said this, and she felt again that creeping flush.

“Only half?” she said, with a small toss of her head, and turned to clear the table, feeling absurdly hot and indignant. In the clatter of dishes she heard the door slam and Skane's retreating footsteps on the walk.

CHAPTER 20

Giswell's nose for the weather proved very accurate. For a night and a day the blizzard screamed through the wires and scoured roof, walls and windows with blasts of snow. The telephone wires blew down again and McBain's men did not get it repaired until New Year's Day. On that afternoon the box on the wall uttered a cheerful tinkle and Isabel took down the receiver.

“It's for you,” she said. Matthew rose from the desk, slipping one of the radio phones aside. Isabel sauntered into the hall. Skane and Sargent had gone for a walk on the lagoon ice. She had never seen their rooms and it seemed a good moment to indulge her curiosity. Sargent's door was open. She stood for a few moments looking in. It was like the cell of a monk. The furniture consisted of a narrow iron bed, a plain wooden chair and a small birchwood chest of drawers. The walls and ceiling were nailed sheets of pressed wood-pulp, painted that awful drab she had found in Carney's bedroom when she came. The softwood floor had been painted brown at some remote time, but the constant scuffing of boots gritty with sand had worn it bare except in the corners. In one corner lay Sargent's sea chest, a stout wooden thing with rope beckets for handles, and his name in large white letters on the top.

A row of hooks held a raincoat, a ragged pair of trousers and the complete uniform of a radio officer in the merchant marine. The uniform was in good condition. She could see that Sargent kept it brushed and its brass buttons polished. A faint smile played over her lips. Here was full proof of his longing to get back to sea. A photograph stood on the chest of drawers; a man and woman in middle age smiled at the camera; Sargent's father and mother beyond doubt. Pinned to the wall above them were several cuttings from magazines, all pictures of young women flaunting their legs in very short skirts or posed with one bent knee in bathing suits.

She went along to Skane's room. The door stood half open and she pushed it wide, feeling like Bluebeard's wife. The room was like Sargent's even to the sea chest in the corner; but here the clippings were of sailing ships and there was no photograph at all. She wondered at the ships, recalling his hatred of the sea; but perhaps these pictures satisfied some memory of a time when he was filled with the romantic illusions that now possessed Sargent. There was something sad about that. A sealskin with the hair worn down to the hide in a great bald patch in the middle lay beside the harsh iron bed. The clothes on the hooks were odds and ends, trousers, jackets, sweaters, a suit of oilskins, all very shabby and worn. Despite these the room had the same look of rigid neatness that she had found in Sargent's, and which she supposed was a result of their training at sea.

She wondered at the absence of a photograph. Surely he kept something to remind him of his people, his friends, if not his women? Guiltily she pulled open the top drawer of the chest of drawers. Nothing there but a dressing-case, a few handkerchiefs clean but wrinkled, just as they had dried after washing, a collar box, two or three black neckties of the sort that sea officers wore with their uniforms, a seaman's sheath knife, and a scatter of the small and exquisite sea shells to be found along the beach which the islanders used in decorating their picture frames.

A lower drawer lay partly open and she could see neatly folded woolen underwear and gray flannel shirts of the sort to be found in the seamen's-supply shops on Water Street. She turned to the sea chest and lifted the lid. There seemed to be nothing but books. She looked at them, one by one. A history of Canada in two volumes;
Tristram Shandy; Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan;
Flecker's poems;
Handbook of Wireless Telegraphy; Care and Maintenance
of Radio Telegraph Apparatus; The lngoldsby Legends;
an English-Spanish dictionary. As she plucked at the next she saw exposed a corner of a snapshot album and drew it forth. It was old, apparently a relic of an early enthusiasm for the camera. It must have been laid aside with other souvenirs—probably boxed in the storeroom of the wireless office at Halifax—and reclaimed when he returned from that final tussle with the sea.

The pictures had been taken with a small camera and developed and printed in a slapdash fashion, probably in tin pans borrowed from the galley of a ship. They had faded badly. There were pictures of various ships, all tramp steamers, tied up at dreary-looking docks or at anchor in harbors whose shores were out of focus and not to be recognized. Pictures of men in shabby uniforms, in ill-fitting mufti, leaning against a ship's rail, against a lifeboat on its chocks, on a sun-blazing white road with a background of palms. Views of houses, of gardens, of Spanish looking churches and other buildings in a tropical setting. A few of Skane himself, alone or with one or two others evidently from the same ship, with arms linked or thrown about each other's shoulders. There was one of him in tropical whites, with his cap at a jaunty angle and a lock of black hair drooping across his forehead. He looked very young. He was facing the camera and laughing with the adventurous air that she had noticed so often in the seamen across the court at Mrs. Paradee's. She thought of him now and felt a pang. Was this what happened to them all—did they all become disillusioned and defeated, hiding themselves away from the world, like Skane?

The album was only half full, and among the snapshots there were gaps with traces of paste and wrenched fragments of paper. And there was not a picture of a woman. From first to last, not one. He had torn them out. She uttered a little cluck of disappointment and replaced the album carefully beneath the books. It would have been amusing to see what sort of woman Skane had favored in those days before he lost his illusions. Were they dark, fair, tall or short? Were they “nice” or were they tarts, or women simply unable to resist a handsome young man ashore for a fling? She pictured him in the white uniform, cap on one ear, walking up from the docks in some foreign town with that laughing challenging air.

There was a sound towards the front door. She fled on tiptoe into the hall. Nobody there. The sound again—Matthew moving about the watch room in his slow methodical way. She stepped into the room that had been Vedder's and peered from the window. Skane and Sargent stood on the shore of the lagoon examining the wreck of the dory, which had been lifted into the air like a paper cup by one of the hurricane winds of last autumn. She glanced about the room. It was bare like the others but unswept. A dust of fine sand layover the floor. There was nothing on the bed but the bare mattress. Skane and Sargent had taken the late cook's blankets for extra warmth in this frigid monastery. The only evidence of Vedder was an array of pictures pinned above the bed, and these surprised her. The cook's indignation at her coming, and his flagrant desertion in the face of it, had given her an image of a brooding ascetic. But the clippings he had chosen to adorn his cell were all of women in various stages of undress, and there were two or three postcards marked
“Souvenir de
Rouen”
exhibiting girls with nothing on at all. It amused her to perceive that the cook had come to this far place to dream of women and then fled from the mere approach of reality.

She returned to the watch room and found Matthew adjusting the receiver dials and tapping a finger on the crystal detector. He listened in the phones intently for a moment and scribbled on the pad before him.

“Hello,” he said, looking up. “Where've you been?”

“Exploring,” she said honestly.

“What did you find?”

“Nothing. The operators' rooms are awfully bleak, aren't they?”

“Yes. Of course, they're used to it. I've put in for a general heating system several times but it doesn't do any good.” He added fretfully, “We need a stand-by engine very badly, too. I told Hurd about it when I went to Halifax and he promised to do something but you know what that means. As it is, we have to turn out at all hours, all hands, whenever the engine breaks down, and work like beavers till we get it going again. We've got a stock of spare parts and all that; but it's rather a nightmare knowing the engine may give up the ghost some time when there's urgent stuff on the air—a ship in distress or something like that. It's not right, you know. Hurd doesn't realize.”

“What was the telephone call?”

“Eh? Oh! McBain. He wanted us to come down for a party tonight. New Year, you know. Skane's going down to play the piano. But I said I didn't fancy walking back in the dark, and I wouldn't put him to the trouble of driving us home.”

“Oh, Matthew, I wish you'd said yes. We could walk back on the lagoon ice, dark or no dark. The weather's clear, there'll be starlight. And it's so long since we had talk with anybody but ourselves.”

He stirred uneasily. “We'd get back very late, and I haven't been sleeping well. I'm sorry, Isabel, I really couldn't go. Look here, why don't you go along with Skane?”

“I'd rather go with you.”

“I'm afraid that's impossible.”

She walked over and sat on the edge of the desk. “Matthew, do you know you're getting awfully strange? You seem unhappy. What on earth's the matter? Giswell says you used to go everywhere, even in winter. Have I made a difference? Is it me?”

He gazed stonily out of the window. “No.”

“Then what in Heaven's name is it?”

“Nothing—nothing, my dear. It's just that I don't like to leave the station for long nowadays—the engine, you know. After all I'm the O-in-C, I've got the responsibility.”

“Pooh! It's Sargent's watch this evening. If the engine broke down he could phone McBain's and we'd all be back in half an hour.”

“Sargent's just a young chap. You don't understand.”

She slid from the desk and went to the north window, staring out at the snow on the dunes. Over her shoulder she said in an irritated voice, “No, I don't understand. I don't understand anything. You men are such a secretive lot. For some time now I've had a feeling that you're all keeping something from me. Sometimes I think it's one thing, one guilty secret that you all share. And then sometimes each one of you seems to have his own secret, something that it wouldn't be good for me to know or for the others to suspect. It's all quite mad to me, here in this place where we're all shut up together. Like a lot of petty conspirators in a private lunatic asylum, when we should be making the most of each other, sharing our thoughts, laughing together—crying together if you like. Don't say Pooh or Nonsense, Matthew, as if I were just a silly woman being emotional over nothing. It's here. It's real. I feel it. This mystery! This awful feeling of suspense! As if you'd all done a murder and buried the corpse under the station! Sometimes at night when the wind makes that doleful sound in the wires, when you're on the midnight watch and I'm alone in the apartment and can't sleep—I get frantic. I feel I must get away from it, whatever
it
is; I want to run out into the wind and keep running on and on over the dunes in the dark, away from that sound, away from all of you!”

She swung about, panting, and with her hands behind, bracing herself against the wall. “Even when I make love, it's not the same. You're not the same. You seem reluctant. Why is that? Why won't you look me in the eyes any more?”

Carney sat in the familiar posture at the instruments, with his big forearms resting on the desk in front of him, his hands within quick reach of the receiver dials and the key. The headbands of the phones enclasped his thick blond locks. His bearded face, with its immovable gaze fixed on the dunes outside, betrayed no emotion whatever. In that sphinx like attitude he seemed to contemplate with an immense fortitude some riddle of the sands.

“I suppose you think I'm just being neurotic!” she cried.

He spoke then. “I'm afraid it's something of that sort,” he said carefully, and without shifting his gaze. “I've heard men talk like that. And it always comes in the winter, about now, or in February, when they've been thrown in each other's company for months, shut in by storms for days on end, and there's absolutely nothing to look forward to but the next boat, which may not come till April or May. They begin to suspect each other of slights, insults, petty injustices, all sorts of things. It works a bit worse in a man. Some chaps get high-strung at this work. It's a certain strain on the nerves of course, all this listening, the everlasting effort to catch a thin sound in the distance, or to fix your attention on one particular ship amongst a dozen all clattering away at once; or to pick out a message in cipher, say, when there's a storm in the offing and the static's crashing in your ears. Add all that to the monotony of life on the station and, well, some chaps can't take it. They get on each other's nerves and finally they fly off the handle—usually at each other's throats. I've seen men trying to kill each other with their fists, here in this room. I saw Skane, the first winter he was here, standing where you are now and slugging it out with a wild red-haired chap from up the Gulf.”