The Nymph and the Lamp (31 page)

“Skane?” she said, with a curious tone. “Of course you stopped them.”

“Not at all. I knew it had to come, sooner or later. They'd reached the point of not speaking to each other, even at meals. There had to be something to clear the air, and there it was. I was afraid for a moment that they'd upset the stove and set the place afire—that happened here once, years ago. But a chance blow of Skane's knocked the other chap through that window behind you and they finished it outside. They were pretty evenly matched. They beat each other's faces to a pulp—played themselves out.”

“And you—the O-in-C didn't do a thing about it?”

“Oh yes. Somebody had to keep watch. I picked the phones off the floor where Skane had flung them and went on with it.”

Isabel uttered a small harsh laugh. “That sounds like everything else I've heard about Marina. Savages! Savages! But I'm afraid I can't work off my jitters with a boxing match.”

Carney did not answer. The silence was broken by Skane and Sargent, bursting in red-faced and cheerful from their walk along the ice.

“Hello!” Skane said. “You look very serious, you two. Is the secret out?”

Isabel gave him a startled glance. Carney swung sharply in the chair.

“Secret, Skane?”

“Then you don't know?” Skane waved a hand. “Behold my star pupil. Yesterday, my dear O-in-C, your wife did a perfect twenty words a minute, for ten minutes by the clock. You've got another op on your staff!”

Carney turned to her slowly with an astonished smile. “Not really?”

“Really!” she said, with indifference. Sargent picked up the scuttle and rattled coals into the stove. He was oblivious of the odd atmosphere into which he and Skane had so suddenly plunged. But Skane had seen the strained look on Isabel's face. He looked away, reflectively. Then, turning swiftly to Carney with a theatrical gesture, “And now, my dear sir, we must teach her one or two technical details about Signor Marconi's marvelous invention, so she can go up for a ticket. Let me introduce Signor Sargenti, a technical expert. Signor Sargenti, kindly give the lady your celebrated lecture on the standard receiving tuner, 1914 model.”

“Oh nuts!”

“Go ahead,” Carney said.

“Oh, well,” Sargent grinned at Isabel. “There was a W.T. instructor at the Halifax Dockyard during the war. He was Royal Navy, a nice bloke who knew his stuff but rather la-de-da. Believe it or not, he wore a monocle.” Sargent fished in a drawer for a large iron washer, stuck it in his right eye, and caught up a ramrod from a corner of the room.

“Now yah,” he said loudly, arching his back and stabbing the rod towards the tuner panel, “yah weh have the tunah. When weh speak of the tunah weh do not refah to a fish, nor de weh refah to the chappie who goes about tinkering pianos. Weh refah to this verreh impawtant black-paneled aff-yah with all the little knobs and dials and things. Now the tunah …” Sargent went on with it, posturing, grimacing, rattling off inanities about the crystal detector, the potentiometer, the aerial tuning coils, the condensers, the theory of magnetic waves and the analogy of the stone cast into the pool. It was his favorite performance and he was delighted to see that Mrs. Carney found it droll.

She smiled in a mechanical way at first; but as he went on her smile became a giggle and before long she was leaning against the wall and shaking hilariously. Her voice rose in pitch and volume. Tears ran down her face. At last she was uttering shrieks that rang through the station, and staring with wide wet eyes, not at Sargent, but towards the farther wall at a point near the ceiling.

The comedian paused. “Look here,” he said anxiously, “it's not as funny as all that is it?” There was no answer, Carney was rising from the chair and moving towards his wife. Her laughter went on, peal after peal, each spaced by a long sobbing intake of breath.

“It wasn't my idea,” Sargent stammered. A hard boot bruised his shin.

“Shall we retire?” murmured Skane's voice icily.

CHAPTER 21

On an afternoon late in February, Isabel sat in the watch room wearing the phones. She was alone. It was a triumph. After all the months of practice, all her hours at the instruments in company with the operator of the watch, and after a whole morning's persuasion, Matthew had consented to let her take a watch. The difficult part had been to convince him that she must take it absolutely alone.

“What!” he had protested. “None of us?”

“None!” Skane had put in swiftly. “Sargent and I are taking a walk to West Light, and you're coming with us. We'll give McBain a hail on the way past Main Station, and we'll be back here for tea.”

“But the engine…”

“Damn the engine. It's running sweetly anyhow.”

“But sometimes it stops out of sheer cussedness, you know that, Skane. With us it's just a matter of running into the engine room, shoving the flywheel back on compression, and giving the thing a whirl with the crank. But Isabel couldn't do that, she hasn't the strength.”

“The engine's going to run,” Skane insisted. “If it doesn't she'll simply write ‘Bi engine repairs' in the log and wait for us to turn up. After all the station's off the air from time to time for that very good reason—and one more log entry of that sort might be all we need to get that stand-by engine.”

“I don't like it,” Carney muttered. “Couldn't we just walk down to the beach a bit and come back?”

“No!” Isabel put in firmly.

“Very well,” he said reluctantly. And he had gone off between Skane and Sargent, wearing his old khaki duck coat and with his long locks fluttering in the wind, and saying, “I don't like it!” in a futile voice as they climbed the first dune.

It was a sunny day and the breeze was quite mild for February, a foretaste of spring. The men would enjoy their walk despite Matthew's forebodings. In the succession of storms and bitter calms there had been a few days of mild weather, but these had been wet and had given them more anxiety than the cold. During one January night a freezing rain had fallen—the thing they dreaded more than hurricanes or frost. It was what Nova Scotians called a “silver thaw,” a condition that covers the world outdoors with a glaze of ice, making a glassy fairyland of woods and parks, coating every branch and twig and glittering in the next day's sunshine like an enormous crystal chandelier.

On Marina there was neither tree nor shrub to make such a show. But there was the enormous man-made tree of the radio mast with its cone of stays and aerials. The stays were stout enough to hold their unusual load; but the slender phosphor bronze wires of the aerial itself acquired in the course of a few hours the thickness of a man's wrist, and they broke from the masthead, falling on the glassy crust of Marina with a clatter that startled the operator on watch and brought the others out of their beds. Nothing could be done until morning, and altogether the station was off the air for twelve hours.

The repair was a matter of difficulty. Ordinarily the aerials were held at the top of the mast by their spreader, a stout wooden spar that could be lowered to the ground by means of a halyard passing through a block lashed at the peak. Now, however, the spreader, bereft of its metallic load, remained at the masthead, frozen and immovable. That meant hoisting a man up to free it, a ticklish business. The halyard of a bosun's chair passed through another block at the masthead. This was free, but there was no means of knowing how good or bad was the lashing of that block after the autumn and winter storms. But the greatest danger was the great pine mast itself, which had suffered a queer white elephantiasis in the night. The rain had drifted in from the east, and the whole easterly cheek of the mast from top to bottom—one hundred and sixty-five feet—was bloated by a growth of ice several inches thick.

They hailed Mings, one of the lifesavers from Main Station, riding patrol up the beach, to give them a hand with the work.

“You see what it means,” Carney said, as they took the halyard from its cleat and rigged the bosun's chair. “The sun's out now and that ice is apt to let go in chunks when I knock against it, going up. Means you chaps will have to mind your heads below. And mind you don't let go the rope!”

“We're not hoisting you up there,” Skane said bluntly. “You're too big.”

“Let me go,” Sargent suggested. His grin was nervous as he said it. The masthead looked an enormous distance in the sky. Skane slipped into the chair.

Isabel, glancing from her kitchen window, was astonished to see him sitting in what appeared to be a child's swing and going slowly up the mast, fending himself off gingerly as he went. She had supposed that the repaired aerials would be hitched onto something at the mast foot and hoisted from there, as the three men were now hoisting Skane. She ran out towards them, concerned by the anxious look on Matthew's upturned face; and as she approached, each footstep plunging through the white crust with the sound of broken glass, he cried, without shifting his attention from the dangling man in the chair, “Isabel? Go back to the walk!”

“But surely I can help you?” she appealed.

“Get away, I say!” There was a harsh note in his voice that she had never heard before. She obeyed dumbly, a little angrily. But as she stood on the boardwalk and watched what followed, her blood went cold. Skane's lean form rose towards the sky in slow jerks, swinging, fending off with hands and feet. Each time he swayed against the mast a piece of the encrusted ice came down. Some of these were small. But from time to time five, ten or more feet of that strange lopsided elephantiasis lost its hold on the round wood, and with no more warning than Skane's quick shout fell like a javelin towards the straining men below.

They could not jump clear. Carney had to snub the halyard on the cleat before they dared move at all, and then they could only shrink away towards the lee side of the mast, still holding hard on that line which seemed so tenuous to Isabel—holding Skane's life by a thread. Each of those falling ice-shapes, so exquisitely molded to the form of the mast, could kill a man. It seemed to Isabel, watching dry-mouthed and trembling from the safety of the walk, that a frightful accident was about to happen and it must involve them all. It was an eternity before they got Skane to the top, and another passed before his voice came floating down like a cry from another world.

“Okay! Lower away on the bridle!”

Down it came with the spreader, that dull wooden thing, so much more important than men's necks or skulls, while Skane remained like a small black spider at the masthead, hung by a bit of gossamer. When they lowered the bosun's chair at last the strain showed in all their faces; but Carney's and Sargent's and Ming's were dripping sweat, while Skane's, nipped by the keen upper air, was almost blue. They laughed and thumped each other with their fists, as men do when they wish to conceal an emotion that has shaken them; and they were astonished when Isabel ran up to them crying incoherent things, flinging her arms about each one in turn and kissing him on the mouth. They chaffed her about it afterwards in their irritating male way, as if there had been nothing really to the job and as if no one but she had given it a moment's concern.

She could smile about that now. In six months she had come to regard them with something of the air of a maiden aunt who is, or at any rate considers herself, responsible for three schoolboy nephews, of various ages, manners and appearance. She had soon acquired this feeling towards Sargent; and it was odd now to think that she had once been afraid of Skane. That savage confession of Skane's had reminded her irresistibly of a dark moody schoolboy who has gone off to a corner to sulk after a whipping. As for Matthew, she had been attracted by the naive small boy in him from the first, from the moment she saw him in Hurd's office. Even as a lover he had been swayed and governed always by her own impulses; and if now, in the strange aloofness that had come upon him with the onset of winter, he seemed less of a lover and more of a recluse, she knew that sexually at least she had become as withdrawn as he. After that ecstasy in the autumn their passion had drifted into a sort of hibernation, as if it were subject to the weather like everything else on Marina.

This feeling of faintly amused indulgence towards the three men was shadowed by the mystery in which they seemed to wrap some part of their thoughts, and which her intuition could not pierce. At first she decided that she was making a puzzle out of nothing more than the instinctive reserve of the human male, even among his fellows. For all their outward camaraderie men were secretive bodies after all. They never fully revealed themselves, even to each other. Matthew had once confessed that in years of intimate contact with all kinds of men he had felt familiar with the minds of only two or three.

But there came days and nights when a black fog fell upon her thoughts and senses, and then it seemed that behind their professional jargon, their casual jokes, their tales of guns and ducks and ponies, there lay something concealed, something that concerned her as much as themselves but that she must find out alone. What was it? They were all living under some kind of spell, presumably evil. She wondered if there were not some truth in that wild quip of hers about a corpse beneath the station. The whole island was a sepulcher. Those skulls and bones in the rocket house! Those creepy tales of the islanders, handed down from one generation to another, and implicitly believed like a faith brought down from the patriarchs! Wasn't that it? Wasn't this queer tension in the wireless station part of an all-pervading supernatural force arising from all those dead people, those sea-slain men and women in the dunes? A mystic pressure from the nameless dead of Marina! Fantastic! And yet the islanders believed in some such force. Some, like the McBains, would not admit it, that was all.