The Nymph and the Lamp (42 page)

“Take vegetables and fruit. Nobody around here thought of canning 'em till I put up a factory here last year. Seen it? On the road west of the town, private railway siding, all that. Doing very well. Building a new piece on it right now. Next year I'm going into jam—strawberry, plum and so on. Wish I'd done it in time for the war—all that plum-and-apple jam they used to feed the troops. Um! Well, I suppose you're wondering what all this has got to do with you. Point is, I've been doing all my own letter-writing or getting one of the girls in the store to whack it out with two fingers on a typewriter. Won't do any more. Too slow. Letters don't look good. Point is, I need a secretary. No, that's too highfalutin. What I want's a good sensible girl that can look after my letters and answer the phone, and sell hardware—'specially on Saturdays, when the store's rushed. Girl that knows what's what. Girl that's dependable and won't go flying over the moon the first time some young fool waggles a finger at her. See what I mean?”

“I think so.” But she looked her astonishment.

“What did they pay you down to Hal'fax?”

“Seventy dollars a month. I'd been promised a raise to eighty, this year.”

Mr. Markham grimaced as if in pain. “That's a lot of money. Board's a lot cheaper here. Clothes—you won't need fancy clothes in Kingsbridge. Never paid a girl more than nine dollars a week in my life. Before the war it was eight. Tell you what I'll do. I'll give you fifty dollars a month and a half-day holiday once a week. Provided you prove out satisfactory, of course. All right?”

“Yes. Yes, I think so, Mr. Markham. I don't know if I can do all you want, but I can try.” She was trying to keep down her elation and she did it very well. The old shrewd eyes observed her cool demeanor and approved.

“Um. Where you staying?”

“At the hotel.”

His brows shot up again. “That's expensive.”

“Oh yes, but I intend to get a boarding place somewhere in the town.”

“Um. You do that tomorrow morning. Report to me at the store after dinner—half-past one, prompt. After that your working hours'll be half-past eight to noon, and one o'clock to half-past five. May have to work an evening now and again. I guess that's all. Good night.”

He closed his eyes again and sat there rigid against the back of the chair, with his hands clasping the forward curve of the chair arms, impassive as a gray stone god in the growing dusk of the veranda. Isabel murmured “Good night,” and passed down the gravel walk towards the street. She was still amazed when she got to her room. She looked at herself in the dressing table mirror.

“Those Jardines!” she said aloud, seeing for the first time a Jardine in luck.

Getting board and lodging outside the hotel proved a more difficult matter than she had expected. She remembered the Kingsbridge boardinghouse of prewar days, a big ramshackle unpainted house on a lane near The Corner, kept by a happy-go-lucky widow named Tess O'Donnell. But this, like so much else in the town, had changed hands and ways in the new flood of prosperity. The Widow O'Donnell had sold out and gone to live with a married daughter in Massachusetts, and the new owner had repaired and painted the house, installed another bathroom, and hung a “Tourists” sign over the door. Where the O'Donnell hens had stalked and scratched on the clay patch at the side of the house there was now a motor service station with two bright red gasoline pumps. And the house itself was full. There was not even room for a tourist.

In former days the big house had always been half empty and visitors of the more frugal sort used it as a second-rate hotel, staying a day or a week as they pleased; but now, with the increased staff of clerks at the bank, the additional teachers required by the enlarged Kingsbridge school, and sundry shopgirls and bookkeepers from the various stores, the place was full; and so were the three or four homes near The Corner that took in what used to be called “paying guests.”

At last Isabel found a middle-aged couple willing to rent their spare room. The Halletts lived in a small white-shingled house on the edge of the town towards the east. It was almost a mile from The Corner, a long walk in rainy weather; but it was comfortable, simple and quiet, it had a nostalgic flavor of her old home at Scotch Springs, and Hallett's apple trees ran down to the river. From her bedroom there was a view of the orchard and the river and of a broad green stretch of meadows on the farther side. There were tall elms along the bank and the fields were broken here and there with copses of young ash and maple. In the distance arose the dark wooded shoulder of the hills known to all the valley folk as South Mountain.

Between the rows of Hallett's apple trees ran the furrows of his spring plowing, neat and exact as if they had been ruled and drawn with an ocher crayon, starting behind the barn where he kept his three cows and a horse, and extending to the clay bank of the stream. In front of the house Mrs. Hallett had her flower garden, and there were shrubs of japonica and lilac to screen it from the valley winds. Isabel's bedroom was a prim little chamber, redolent of paint, containing a small wooden bed, a chair, a chest of drawers and a washstand, all done in white. There was a cheerful flowered wallpaper. Two small oval rugs, made with hooked rags by Mrs. Hallett herself, lay on the painted softwood floor.

Altogether it was a pleasant place, a charming place, and Isabel was thankful that she had not been able to get a lodging among the huddled business houses of The Corner. The Halletts were much alike, a pair of tall gaunt people who had lost their only son in the war. They were descended from the Yankee pioneers who came to Nova Scotia after the old colonial wars and settled along the valley, and in manner, speech and appearance they might have stepped out of the hills of Vermont. Mrs. Hallett had been a schoolteacher when she married. She wore pince-nez and had about her the indefinable air of a school-ma'am in middle life, although for twenty-five years she had taught nothing more than a Sunday-school class at the Baptist church. She was a calm even-tempered person and she managed her house and Hallett with a calm and even hand.

Hallett was more volatile. He whistled about his chores and carried on lively monologues with his horse and the cows. He was full of dry little jokes and as Isabel departed after dinner to keep her appointment at the store he came part way down the gravel path towards the highway.

“We're a mite out of the way,” he pointed out, “but you'll get used to that. When people twit me—and they're a great lot of twitters up to The Corner—when they twit me about living so far out, I just tell 'em, Ah but I'm well on the road to Paradise, friends, which is more'n you can say. That's the name of a village east o'here, see? But of course you've lived hereabout and you know. Well, that's what I say, I'm well on the road to Paradise. Anybody twits you about boarding so far out you tell 'em that. That'll set 'em back. That'll give 'em something to think about. 'Cause there's other towns besides Paradise on that road. Kentville, f'rinstance. Used to be called the Devil's Half Acre back in olden times. Can't help thinking of it when I see the tourists tearing off through Paradise in a cloud of dust so's to make the hotel in Kentville afore night. That's life for you, ain't it? Ain't that life?”

Isabel had to admit that it was.

CHAPTER 30

The
Courier
always referred to Mr. Markham as a pioneer, and so he was. He had been the first man in Kingsbridge to own an automobile and the first to install a gasoline electric plant for lighting his house. His bathroom had been the first in town, and so was the furnace that poured a gush of hot air through a grating in the floor and did away with a clutter of stoves. He had always been the most progressive businessman as well; and now, at an age when most men are thinking of the grave, he had launched forth with every dollar and every ounce of energy he had to take advantage of the postwar boom. Rumor said he was worth as much as three hundred thousand dollars, a fabulous sum in the valley, and there were people who predicted that he would be a millionaire before he died.

The hardware store from which his little empire had sprung was one of the best in the valley. He carried a stock of everything from shingle nails to the newfangled gasoline tractors. There was a busy plumbing and tinsmiths' workshop at the back. The office was a small coop with scant room for Mr. Markham's own desk, an immense old roll-top thing, and a small modern typewriter desk at which Isabel was soon installed. The staff consisted of three shopgirls and herself, a handy man and an errand boy. The girls looked upon her with suspicion at first, especially the girl who was about to marry; but when Isabel took over the typewriter and began to initiate Mr. Markham into the strange art of letter dictation their instinctive hostility vanished. It was a relief to see someone else struggling with the old man's correspondence.

In the next Saturday's rush, when she was able to help at the counters, they began to welcome her presence in the store. When the word passed around Kingsbridge that old Markham had brought in a typist from the city, the shopgirls were quick to point out that she was a home girl after all, a Jardine from Scotch Springs, and that she was “nice.” This was confirmed by the Halletts, who were delighted with their quiet and sensible boarder; and when Isabel appeared in the Baptist tabernacle with them on Sunday morning her acceptance was complete. She was asked to join the choir but this she declined, saying that she hadn't a singing voice, which was not quite the truth. She wondered what her rigid Presbyterian father would have thought to see her there joining in the services of “those dunkers,” and she salved her conscience with the fact that there was no church of her own faith nearer than Scotch Springs.

She liked Mr. Markham. He was really much more of a businessman than Hurd, who was so rigidly efficient in routine matters but whose mind too often drifted into the abstract realms of electrical science. Markham's only concern was business. He could see to the core of a problem at once and he dealt with each promptly as it arose and passed his attention to the next. He was one of those remarkable men who never hurry, who are never rattled or confused, who go through life without a wasted thought or movement getting things done. He had a profound reverence for the dollar but he did not let it interfere with his other religion. He was a devout Baptist, generous to the church, although he had that peculiarity of the pious well-to-do who give large sums each year to missions and will not bestow ten cents upon a wistful urchin outside a candy shop.

His scorn for “loafers” of whatever sort amounted to hatred.

He regarded the poolroom behind the barber's shop and the clubrooms of the Great War Veterans Association as dens of iniquity. He did not use tobacco and he had the quaint Victorian view that a man who chewed plug or smoked a pipe was merely a Christian with an amiable weakness, but that anyone who smoked a cigarette was bound for hell. Isabel found this a little wearing. There were times when she longed for a cigarette. Even in the privacy of her room at the Halletts' she could not indulge without risk of offending those good people, whose views were much the same. The shadow of the Puritan conscience, brought to the valley in colonial times, still lingered under many a roof in Kingsbridge, where in the more pious circles a pack of cards was still known as “the Devil's prayer book” and dancing (even of the old-fashioned “squares,” heavily chaperoned in the Odd Fellows' Hall) was under the suspicion of the church and deacons.

As for the drinking of “rum,” their general term for all alcoholic beverages, the Nova Scotia Temperance Act was for them a manifest act of God. But Isabel noted that even here the seeds of change had been cast by the winds of war. The young soldiers had brought back with them a scorn for Prohibition and a taste for “rum” that was not to be satisfied by the hard cider that even the most pious farmers made secretly and hid from their strait-laced women in the barns. And their free and easy manner with girls, especially their evening frolics with certain females in the long grass by the river, were things undreamed of in the Kingsbridge of '13. Their reluctance to go back to the old dull round was not due to laziness and foreign corruption, as Mr. Markham declared, so much as a deep dissatisfaction with things as they were and a longing for some zest in the lives that had been spared to them in the blood-baths of France and Belgium.

It was of no use for the Reverend Wilbert Palliser to belabor his Bible every Sabbath and set the tabernacle ringing with denunciation and warnings of hell-fire. The young men had seen hell-fire on the slopes of Vimy Ridge and in the bloody swamps of Ypres, where the devout had perished just as miserably as the damned, and they looked upon the preacher and Mr. Markham and the other tut-tutting elders as pious frauds or at best a flock of dignified ostriches with their heads plunged deep in the red valley soil. What was to come of all this no one could truly say; but Isabel perceived that the young men were the new generation, or what the war had left of it, and eventually theirs would be the only voices to be heard.

She was old-fashioned enough to feel some of Mr. Markham's concern; but she too had seen hell-fire, she had been in Halifax when the great disaster of '17 threw half the city in ruins and killed or maimed five thousand people at a stroke; and she had observed that it was not the rich or the worldly who bled and burned, but the poor folk of the north end of the city, the sort of people who according to the Scriptures were supposed to inherit the earth. There seemed to be something wrong, if not with the texts at any rate with the preachers' interpretation of them.