The Nymph and the Lamp (39 page)

“Well, my dear Mrs. Carney—it seems funny not to call you Miss Jardine—this isn't the way I expected to see you again. Shot, Mr. Hurd tells me, what an awful thing. But accidents will happen I always say and there's one thing you'll get a good long rest out of it. A bit of change never did anybody any harm either. That lonely place I mean and having to do all the cooking I mean and all that. By the way I've brought the check for your cooking wages—in my bag somewhere—ah! Here you are, four hundred dollars. It wasn't quite eight months—a day or so—but Hurd told me to make it out for the full amount. It's funny. I can't imagine you cooking for three men. But then I can't imagine you there at all, or being Carney's wife, or anything like that.”

Isabel smiled. “Twelve months ago I couldn't have imagined anything like that myself. And now I wonder if any of it's really happened. Marina and Halifax just aren't in the same world. How are you getting along?”

“Oh, very well. It bothered me at first, especially not having you to show me the ropes, but I learned after a bit. I can't chin with the ops quite so much in the secretary's job and you know what a fuss Hurd makes about that anyway. But I get along. Fortunately he's out quite a bit now, making speeches to luncheon clubs and I don't know who all—‘The Immeasurable Future of Radio'—and so on. Everybody's going crazy about this new broadcasting fad and they drink up everything Hurd or anybody else has to say about it. Must be deadly dull if he makes speeches the way he dictates letters. ‘Dear Sir …ahhh …referring…ahhh…to your…ahhh…letter of…ahhh…the twenty-eighth ult…ahh.'”

It was a good imitation of Hurd in the throes of composition and Isabel laughed heartily. Miss Benson went on, “But the whole radio business is a bore if you ask me—barring the ops of course. All those fiddly things with crackjaw names to be sent to ships and shore stations as spare parts, or for repairs, or what-have-you. You can't find half of them in the dictionary, even. As for this new fad, these broadcast receiving sets, you sit hunched over a lot of tubes and coils and batteries and things with a pair of phones jammed over your hair, listening to somebody talking down in a barrel in Schenectady, New York, and saying ‘Double-you Gee Why' in a slow solemn voice as if it was God pronouncing judgment on a wicked world. You just can't see a future in anything like that.”

She rattled on for half an hour and then picked up her gloves and handbag.

“Well, so long, dear. I'll run out and see you when I can, but you mustn't expect me too often. You know how it is.”

“Yes, I know how it is.”

Miss Benson patted her marcelled blond coiffure and arranged her hat. She walked towards the door and turned. “You know you look changed.”

“So would you if you'd got in front of a gun at the wrong moment.”

“Oh no, I don't mean that. Perhaps it's because you haven't got your glasses on. Don't you wear them any more?”

“Never. I don't think I ever needed them much. Anyhow, once I got away from staring at letters and columns of figures all day long my eyes improved.” Miss Benson gave her a shrewd glance. “You look better, anyway. It isn't just the glasses. There's something about you—I don't know how to put it. I used to think you looked a prude. Now you don't.”

“You forget I've been married since I saw you last.”

“Well, it isn't just that, either. If I was a man I'd say you looked interesting. That's not exactly the word I want but you know what I mean. Most of the married women I know just look married.”

And away she went, a hat and a pair of legs, looking very unmarried indeed.

One day the house surgeon brought in a man with a bristle of iron-gray hair and the face of a benevolent bulldog.

“Mrs. Carney, this is Doctor McGrath, who did your operation, remember?”

“Oh, yes.”

The bulldog smiled, and his eyes were lively. “How are you getting along?”

“Very well, I'm told. Doctor McGrath, you wouldn't tell me that morning how much I'd been damaged. Will you tell me now?”

“Of course. You're a very lucky young woman. A bit more to the center, or a bit higher, say, and you'd have come off that island in a box. As it was the bullet knocked some nasty splinters off your lower rib and then tore its way out without hitting anything important. Missed the liver very neatly, and I still can't see why it didn't tear the kidney to pieces. That was a dumdum bullet of some sort. You seem to play rough games out there. Fortunately it only mushroomed a little before it emerged. As it is, you'll have an interesting dimple in the top of your hip, something very few women can boast.”

She laughed. “When shall I be able to leave?”

“Ah!” the house surgeon said. “There! We treat 'em nicely, we give 'em all the comforts of home, we even provide 'em with dimples, and what's the first question they ask? When can we go home! That's gratitude. That's women for you.”

“Not long,” Doctor McGrath said. “You picked a good time for your adventure. We know a lot more about gunshot wounds now than we did before the war. Say three more weeks if you behave yourself nicely. After that you'll have to go easy for a bit—no housework that involves much stooping, and so on. You've got a good healthy system and in two months' time you'll be as good as new. What's life like on Marina? Lots of excitement, all those shipwrecks, eh? But a bit tough, I should say.”

“It's not as comfortable as this,” she said. He nodded, peered around the screen at poor Mrs. Tappett, glanced at the carboy, chuckled—it was one of the stock jokes of the hospital—and went out.

The days in bed were interminable. It was an immense relief when she was allowed to get up and on fine days to spend several hours in an armchair on the ground-floor veranda. The May sunshine fell warmly on the stretch of lawn, where a troop of fat robins hopped after worms every morning and again late in the afternoon. The forsythia clumps about the hospital grounds were a yellow blaze but none of the other shrubs were in blossom, some were not even in full leaf, and the elm and ash trees along the driveway were still winter-bare. Along the street at the foot of the grounds, where the signs said HOSPITAL ZONE QUIET, an endless swarm of motorcars scuttled up and down. They observed the signs but at each end of the zone they broke into raucous sound, a medley of toots, whistles, squawks and bugle notes that reminded Isabel oddly of Marina. For a time she wondered why, and then she smiled. It was like the phones on a busy night.

May weather is a capricious thing in Nova Scotia, and these warm lazy morning and afternoon hours on the veranda were invaded frequently by fog, rolling up from the harbor in dank folds and driving everyone indoors; and there were days when the wind came out of the east and shot volleys of rain against the windows, when the bare trees along the driveway shone stark and black, and the traffic hissed along the roadway like an angry snake. Then most of the convalescents preferred to doze in bed and only the most restless went down to the reading room and lounge. Isabel was one of the restless. The idiosyncrasies of Mrs. Tappett had begun to get on her nerves. The water joke had become a bore; and when the house surgeon came in with his invariable “Well, and how's our pet gunshot wound today?” she felt that she could yell. She felt perfectly well, two of Doctor McGrath's weeks had passed and she could not see why she must drag out the hours of another.

She was reading by the fire in the lounge on a rainy afternoon when one of the nurses put her head in the doorway and said cheerfully, “Mrs. Carney? There's such a nice-looking young man to see you. A sailor. Shall I send him in?”

Isabel started violently. For a moment she could not speak. She got out of the chair and stood facing the door with her fingertips biting into the palms.

“No…Yes, send him in.”

The nurse stepped back and beckoned to someone along the hall; and as he turned into the doorway Isabel breathed out a long sigh. It was Sargent. “Jim!” she said shakily, and relaxed in the chair. “What on earth are you doing here?”

He was wearing the sea uniform he had kept so carefully on Marina, with its bright merchant-navy buttons and the entwined gold sleeve braid. A wet blue raincoat was slung over his arm and he carried his cap in his hand. When she put out her hand he shook it in a gingerly way as if he were afraid she might fall to pieces at a single hearty touch.

“Well,” he explained with a pleased look, “I got off Marina a fortnight ago. O'Dell was in quite a wax because he'd had to drop everything to take you off, and then turn round inside a month to make the regular trip out to Marina with supplies and mail. None too soon, I may say. The cupboards were getting pretty bare. Anyhow as you know my year was up and Hurd sent out a new chap, Battleford, to take my place. Three or four of the island people came off at the same time I did. One of 'em—you'd never guess—was Sara Giswell.”

“Oh?”

“Ma Giswell's been trying to persuade her to go ashore and get some schooling for the past four years, but you know how potty Sara was about Skane. Well, apparently she's got over it at last. Going to live with Ma Giswell's people at Port Bickerton. So away we came, but not direct to Halifax. O'Dell wanted to go right on with his buoy work and he set us ashore at Canso and washed his hands of us. I had orders to join a tanker at North Sydney—Hurd had promised to get me a ship, you know—and I was in a bit of a stew because Carney and Skane had given me letters for you, with strict instructions to put them in your own hands. However I found the tanker was going to call at Halifax on her way south, so I carried 'em on to North Sydney. Hence the delay.”

He fished in an inner pocket of his blue jacket and handed over the letters. Isabel put them in her lap without a glance but her hand shook.

“How are they—Matthew and Skane?”

“Oh, all right. We were all pretty blue after O'Dell took you off, and you can imagine the relief when we got Hurd's message saying you'd just come away from the operating room and everything was okay. It was pretty dull after that. The winter was nothing to it. Of course Carney and Skane are both the silent sort, and I was just counting the days. When I got aboard the
Elgin
I dropped on my knees and kissed the deck. Phew! What a relief! Give me life at sea.”

“And now you're off to sea?”

“Yes, we dropped in here for stores and tomorrow we pullout for Talara.”

“What a lovely name! Where's that?”

“It's not a very lovely place, I guess. It's in Peru. Oil, you know. It's a regular run. Panama Canal each way. The fellows aboard find it monotonous but it sounds like a pleasure cruise to me. And of course the grub and everything else aboard tankers are A-1 compared with the tramps and colliers I was in before. It's a bit quaint to be piping away with a half-kilowatt set again, after that roaring thing at Marina. The whole transmitter's stowed in a cabinet no bigger than your kitchen cupboard, and the spark's shut away behind thick doors—like a cat meowing in an icebox. But what a luxury to be able to throw a switch and let some bloke down in the engine room worry about the juice! The only gas engines I ever want to hear again are the kind they put in taxicabs.”

His laugh was infectious and Isabel laughed with him. He chatted for another ten minutes and then went off with quick strides, with his cap cocked over one ear, with his gold braid gleaming in the corridor, like a new kind of Pizarro and as if Peru were just around the corner of Tower Road.

She opened Matthew's letter at once. The envelope was addressed in his huge scrawl. “Mrs. Isabel Carney. Personal. Care J. Sargent Esq.” The letter read:

MY DEAR GIRL,

Sargent leaves tomorrow and I'm writing this in the night watch as it seems a good chance to get a letter off to you direct. We're getting along very well, as Sargent will tell you. Nightingale has sent down his oldest boy, eighteen, to do the cooking for us, and the new operator will be coming ashore in the first boat. It's always pleasant when a new man comes. You get the latest shop talk and of course a fresh lot of yarns.

I can't tell you how relieved we all were when we learned that you'd come through all right. Hurd says it's only a matter of time and rest and you are getting the best of care. Thank God for all that.

Now, my dear, I want to tell you what I couldn't find words for the day you went away. I knew from the first that you could never be happy with me on Marina, for several reasons, some of which you know. In a fit of selfishness at Halifax I forgot them all, even the one that was sharpest in my mind. I suppose we were both a bit delirious in those days but I think we both realized our mistake soon after we came to the island. You tried to make the best of it and I shall always be grateful for the joy you gave me then. But by the time winter came I knew much more than you what a frightful mistake it was. There didn't seem to be any way out of it. I felt like a man walking over a cliff and dragging someone else with me.

Then came your accident, a most unexpected and terrible turn in the affair. You can guess how I felt, thinking that I'd brought you here to die in such a way. And you must know how I felt when you rallied and I knew you had a chance to live. For a time I didn't realize the full meaning of it, but the moment you asked me to close the door on Mrs. McBain I knew. And I knew it was the only thing to do, for your sake and my own.