The Nymph and the Lamp (41 page)

In prewar days the ideal of almost every girl in Scotch Springs was to teach school, but failing that the great thing was a job behind the counter of one of the Kingsbridge shops. There you saw life, you got money, a stuff seldom seen on the farm, and because of the money you were able to dress exactly like those languid creatures in the mail-order catalogues. This circumstance attracted beaux and in Kingsbridge you had a choice from all the countryside. The marriage rate among the shopgirls of Kingsbridge was very high, and for that reason there were frequent “vacancies.” If you were young and strong and came of honest parents (and if you were willing to work for eight dollars a week) you got a chance to fill a vacancy, and in the next issue of the
Kingsbridge
Courier
your parents could read with pride that Miss Maisie McCutcheon of Scotch Springs had “accepted a position” at Carson & Goble's Emporium. In Kingsbridge you could get board and lodging for five dollars a week (which you considered outrageous) and that left you more than a hundred and fifty dollars a year for clothes and amusement. And if you looked well in your clothes there were always young men eager to see that your amusement cost you nothing. It was marvelous.

Isabel walked along the street to the bank and deposited three hundred dollars and the seventy-dollar check. It was a very small anchor to windward but at least it was her own, and in Kingsbridge it would enable her to weather quite a storm. She made some discreet inquiries at the bank regarding “vacancies” and she walked up one side of Main Street and down the other, looking in the shops. There was not a single “Girl Wanted” sign. At the hotel she picked up a three-day-old copy of the
Courier
and found in the classified column a small advertisement for female help, with the blunt command “Apply Bon Ton.” This was something new, a hat shop she supposed, but on application she found it to be a small restaurant off Main Street near the bridge, catering to farmers and other transient visitors who did not want to go to the hotel. It was not the sort of job she wanted but she went inside and inquired. A fresh-faced girl, obviously from an outlying farm and obviously delighted to be here, informed her at once that the position was filled. “I've got it,” she said, and smiled.

“Do you happen to know if there are any other jobs likely to be open soon—girls getting married or anything like that?”

“Well,” the girl said, “there are two girls getting married, one at old Markham's, the hardware merchant's, and the other in Olney's Dry Goods; but they're planning to keep their jobs. They're marrying town boys who've been out of work ever since they got back from the war.”

“I see,” Isabel walked out. Evidently the times and manners had changed a good deal since she went away to the city. In 1913 young men did not marry unless they had a farm or a good job. As for the girls, any girl who continued to work in a shop after marriage was regarded as an unfortunate. The phrase “She's keeping on with her job,” went about the town and countryside and everybody condemned her for the poor little fool who had tied herself to that no-account fellow So-and-so.

But now that she had taken a careful look at the town Isabel realized that the Kingsbridge she had known had vanished. The war and the huge demand for foodstuffs of every sort had driven farm values into the sky and produced a flood of money beyond anybody's dreams in the frugal days of '13. The demand and the prices were still high. For almost seven years the valley had basked in this golden sunshine and there seemed no end to it. Shops were changing hands, farms were changing hands, everybody seemed to be on the move and prosperous except the young men home from the war, who hung about the Great War Veterans' rooms over Kerrigan's barbershop, talking of battles and beer.

Most of the veterans appeared to be farm boys and when Isabel asked the hotel manager why so many appeared to be out of work he simply shrugged and whistled the air of “How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm Now That They've Seen Paree?” It seemed very strange. She wondered at all this outward prosperity when there were so many young men with nothing to do. Her acquaintances in Kingsbridge in '13 were young men and girls from Scotch Springs who had gone to work in the town. She inquired in the post office for them and found that everyone had disappeared. The girls had married and gone away. Some of the youths had been killed in the war; and the rest, unwilling to return to the prewar monotony of Scotch Springs, had taken their discharge money and passed on to Ontario or the West, or had crossed over the border towards the humming cities of the States.

Isabel had accepted the changes in city life without concern. In wartime Halifax was a city of strangers and a constant shift of faces was the normal thing. Even when it was shattered by the great disaster of '17 she had looked upon it as a natural result of a great war in which the port was of immense strategic importance. But it had not occurred to her that the war could so profoundly affect the life of the countryside. What was going on in her valley was happening all over the United States and Canada. It was as if some mighty hand had seized the land and given it a shake, so that all the human contents changed places, trades, amusements and ambitions. Kingsbridge looked the same but all the faces were strange and most of the old ways were as dead as William the Fourth. She thought of Matthew Carney. He had felt like “Rip Van What's-his-name” because he had come from ten lonely years on Marina and found every city a madhouse. She could understand that. But it was a shock to come back to the valley after eight years and find nothing familiar in what she had considered a scene and a way of life as fixed and eternal as the stars.

She walked back to the hotel thoughtfully. She was paying three dollars a day for her room and meals. This was the pre-tourist-season rate. In another three weeks the rate would jump to five. She could not afford anything like that. She had dinner and spent the evening reading in her room. When she put out the light and ran up the blind she saw the leaves of the apple trees gleaming faintly in the starlight. The night was warm and through the open window came a familiar smell of plowland, of fresh grass and the massed foliage of the orchard. The town's lights were out. In the darkness nothing moved. There was one word for it—peace. Whatever else had changed, this remained, the massive calm of the land itself, gravid, expectant, waiting to put forth blossom and fruit as it had waited every May since the first hopeful settler cleared a patch in the forest and planted seed. This is it, surely, she told herself. This is what I've wanted all this time. I was a fool to have left it, ever.

CHAPTER 29

Old Mr. Markham, the proprietor of Markham's Hardware Store, was chairman of the Kingsbridge school board. He was sitting in a cane chair on his veranda when Isabel came up the walk. It was a fine evening in midweek, and in the twilight stillness she could hear through the open door a faint rattle of dishes being put away. He made no attempt to arise when she came up the veranda steps, nor when she stood before him stating her errand. He was seventy-six, a tall man with neatly brushed gray hair, an aquiline nose and the eyes of a tired but watchful hawk. He motioned her to a chair.

“Jardine—You wouldn't be one of the Jardines from Scotch Springs?”

“Yes.”

“Thought they were all dead or gone.”

“I daresay they are, Mr. Markham. At least, my own parents are dead, and I've been away for the past eight years, working in Halifax.”

“Schoolteaching?”

“No, I was a secretary in a city office.”

He lifted his bushy gray brows. “Oh? What in thunder did you come back for?”

She ventured a nervous smile. “I wanted to live in Kingsbridge. I'd hoped to find a job in one of the shops or perhaps the bank or the post office, but there don't seem to be any vacancies. So I thought of my teaching experience, and somebody told me to see you.”

“No vacancies there either.” He pursed his thin lips. “Staff's fully engaged for next term. Might be something in one of the outside sections, come September. What's your experience?”

“I taught my home school at Scotch Springs two years, and I taught one term at Appleton.” Both were poor sections. The most she had been paid was three hundred and sixty dollars for the term at Appleton. She could see what Mr. Markham was thinking.

“The money's not important so long as I've enough to live on,” she said.

His eyes flicked over the smart city clothes. “The pay's a bit better in the back sections than it used to be, but I don't think you could live on what you'd get there, even now. Seems strange, giving up a good job in the city for something like that. Most girls head the other way.”

“Yes, I know. I did myself. But I got tired of it.”

“Married, by any chance?” He was trying to see the third finger on her left hand. She turned the hand casually.

“No.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty.”

“Um. Good sensible age. Healthy?”

“Very.” She did not know whether to be amused or annoyed. Mr. Markham was the shrewdest as well as the oldest merchant in Kingsbridge and he had made money in everything from hardware to real estate. He was inspecting her now as if she were a horse for sale.

“Supposing now,” he announced, shutting one eye and staring at her keenly with the other, “supposing now I got you something—a school in one of the back districts say—how do I know you won't get tired of that and go off to the city and leave the trustees in the lurch? Girls have done that before.”

“I told you I'd come back to stay,” she said with spirit. “I meant it, Mr. Markham.”

“Um. Suppose you can't get a job?”

“I've got some money in the bank here, enough to keep me several months. I intend to stay as long as it lasts. Surely something will turn up.”

“Determined young woman, ain't you? Got a letter from your city employer?”

“No, but I can get one. Or I can give you his address and you can inquire yourself, if you'd like.”

Again the squinted eye. “Would you prefer me to do that?”

“No,” she said frankly. “Besides, I don't see what that's got to do with a job teaching school in the valley.”

“Ah! Quite right. What sort of things did your city firm deal in?”

“Wireless telegraph apparatus,” she said in a diffident voice.

“Electrical stuff, eh?”

“Yes, and parts for gasoline engines, and rope and wire rigging, lubricating oils, paints, provisions, all sorts of tools—a long list of things, everything from pumps to stationery.”

“Ha! Well! And you were raised on a farm. Know a Baldwin apple from a Gravenstein?”

“Of course.”

“Horses? Cattle? Fertilizers?”

“I know something about them, yes. But I don't see…”

“And of course you've done a lot of typing and shorthand and all that. Who looked after the office accounts?”

“I did. But you understand there wasn't much to that. The accounting was mostly done at the head office. Ours was just a port branch.”

“Um.”

Mr. Markham leaned back in the tall wicker chair. His eyes were closed. His fingers played a little jig on the chair arms. For two minutes he said nothing. Once or twice his eyes opened, shot her a quick glance and closed again. Isabel sat erect, with her hands in her lap. She was puzzled by this odd catechism and she had a suspicion that the old hawk in the chair had been indulging his curiosity at her expense. She wished now that she had got up and left when he uttered that blunt “No vacancies there either.”

“Those Jardines,” he said abruptly, without opening his eyes. “Good stock. Scotch. Proud lot. Hardworking. Honest. Moody, though. Minds up in the clouds half the time. Give the shirt off their backs for a whim. All of 'em gone now. Sad.”

The wrinkled eyelids lifted. His slate-gray eyes had a look of decision.

“Tell you what. Got a girl in my store that's marrying one of these young fellers back from the war. Says she wants to keep her job.”

Isabel spoke quickly. “I heard about that. But I won't put another girl out of a job, if that's what you mean.”

He snorted. “You're a Jardine, no mistake. Jumping to conclusions. Proud as Lucifer. Come down off that high horse, girl. Didn't say I was letting her go, did I? She can have the job as long as she wants it but I know that kind of arrangement ain't going to last. Feller's got any gumption he'll get out of Kingsbridge. Find a job somewhere. If not, she'll find mighty quick that she can't keep herself and him on nine dollars a week. Fact is, I expect the pair of 'em to pull up stakes inside a month. Means I've got to get someone in there learning the business. Tricky business, hardware. Big stock, a thousand things, a thousand prices. Think you could do it?”

“I could try, Mr. Markham. But suppose…”

“Suppose nothing. I'll do that. Point is, I want more than a hardware clerk. I'm into all sorts of things nowadays. Take real estate. Daresay I buy and sell more farms in a year than any other man 'tween Annapolis and Kentville. Take pulpwood. For the past five years I've been buying up those worthless farms in Scotch Springs and other places along the edge of the mountain, getting 'em for a song. People said I was crazy. Laughing on the other side of their faces now. Every one of those farms had a back lot of timber running up the mountain. Small stuff mostly but just the right size for pulpwood. Easy to log, easy to get out, railway handy, good price for all the pulpwood I can ship.