The Nymph and the Lamp (43 page)

Moreover there was her own intimate case. In terms of what Mr. Markham constantly referred to as “the good old-time religion” she was doubly an adulteress, a creature to be scorned and rejected in this world and burned in the next. And she rebelled. Even when she sat under the rostrum with the kindly Halletts, conscious of these black and secret sins in the full tide of the Reverend Palliser's eloquence, she told herself that what he preached was not only wrong but a deliberate and monstrous injustice. She had been brought up with a deep sense of religion and until the age of twenty-nine she had walked the path of virtue with a sure and quiet step. Then, for no reason that she could see, she had been plunged into a fantasy of humiliation, frustration and pain that had no meaning or reward. Where was the justice in that? Where was the sense in it?

It was all very well for these people to talk. They could afford to be smug in the comfortable niches they had carved out for themselves in the little valley town. She tried to imagine Mr. Markham on Marina, where, whatever riches might be stored in Heaven, there was no hard money to be made or lost. She tried to picture the Reverend Palliser there with his bald white dome and his trombone voice, preaching his fiery gospel to a people who fully believed in hell and damnation but who believed no less devoutly in a ghostly Frenchman who roamed the dunes by night riding a great white horse and singing unintelligible songs, and in the spooks of drowned men and women wandering up and down the beaches—just as they believed with the utmost faith that a belt of tarred sennit worn next to the skin would cure the most stubborn case of lumbago, and that a salt herring split and wrapped about the throat under a bandage was God's own remedy for quinsy. It was easier to picture Matthew Carney counting dollars at Mr. Markham's roll-top desk; or Captain O'Dell, say, in the preacher's place in church.

Nevertheless she continued to attend church with the Halletts for the sake of good relations, and the congregation never suspected that they had an unrepentant and somewhat indignant Magdalen in their midst. During the rest of the week she plunged her mind into her work. She had a good memory and a knack for figures, and within a month she had grasped the workings of the hardware business in a way that astonished the other young women and drew even the cautious Markham's praise. But the real job lay in Markham's other enterprises and her duties as his secretary—that highfalutin word. It did not take the astute old man long to see that he had found a quick and precise tool for the dispatch of business. Before long Isabel was working two and sometimes three evenings a week in the effort to keep up with it. She had persuaded him to get some proper business stationery, and upon these crisp white sheets with their imposing letterhead, and with his grammar corrected and his country-merchant phrases rendered into city business jargon, he was able to admire the product of his own dictation and to wonder how he had ever got along without this cool and admirable creature.

She seemed actually to crave work, a quality that he had rarely encountered in the succession of young women who had passed through his employ in the course of the years; and he thrust work upon her with the eagerness of an Aladdin who has called forth a genie out of a lamp and is not sure at what moment it may vanish in thin air. The store accounting system consisted of a cashbook, a journal and a ledger which were in charge of the oldest counter girl. There was a bookkeeper at the canning factory. Another, in a shack on the mountain slope, looked after the logging accounts. Markham's real estate deals were jotted in a notebook, carried in his pocket. The bank passbooks and checkbooks he kept in the roll-top desk. All of these matters were assembled and reconciled more or less in his head, so that when he tackled the newfangled income tax (the worst disaster of the war) it was largely by a process of mental arithmetic.

With the present swift and complicated growth of his business activities this peculiar accounting would no longer serve. Apart from anything else there was now the prospect of inspection by some snooping income-tax official who undoubtedly would demand to see everything on paper and in order. He took his problem to the bank manager, and that useful man, anxious to please his busiest customer and largest depositor, came and held a long conference with Markham and Miss Jardine. The result was a new set of books for the office, with a master ledger containing what the man called “control accounts” for all the Markham activities. These and the bank accounts and checkbooks were placed in Isabel's charge. The new burden obliged her to hold daily telephone conferences with the cannery foreman and the logging boss, and frequently Markham drove her in his car to one place or the other so that she could straighten out some matter by a quick personal inspection.

From this he saw the advantage of taking her along with him when important real estate deals were in the making, so that she could jot down agreements in shorthand and turn them into indisputable type for signature before the matter had a chance to grow cold. Eventually he got one of the mechanics at Hemple's Garage to teach her how to drive the Markham car, so that she could run her own errands in connection with the business, leaving him free to tackle something else. In this way she soon came to know most of the people with whom Markham conducted his affairs, and they in turn came to recognize in her a competent person to whom they could refer a good many matters without troubling Markham himself. When the office phone rang it was usually for Miss Jardine. In the store, in the bank, on the street, even outside the church on Sunday morning, she was approached by persons anxious for her opinion or her intercession in everything from a mortgage on the farm to a job in the cannery.

This transition in her importance took about five months, and at the end of that time Mr. Markham recognized it by raising her salary to sixty-five dollars. In the meantime the summer had come and gone. Summer began officially at the end of May, when the orchards bloomed and for almost a hundred miles the valley lay in a pink and white snow to the very eaves of the farmhouses. This famous spectacle drew hordes of tourists, rolling along the red roads in dusty cars or peering from the windows of the trains. The Boston House and the Bon Ton Restaurant did a hustling business and so did the souvenir counter in the hardware shop. Even the inhabitants paused in their tasks to admire the annual miracle; at night Isabel, gazing from her window to the river, drank in the heavy scent of Hallett's trees.

The almost feverish devotion with which she had thrown herself into Markham's affairs did not prevent her from taking the promised half holiday once a week. She chose an afternoon when the weather was fine, borrowed Hallett's horse and buggy and set forth after dinner with a packet of sandwiches and a Thermos flask full of cold milk in a basket under the seat. Her route lay towards Scotch Springs, where she visited the little churchyard and placed flowers on the graves of her father and mother. The old home was in the hands of strangers and was sadly changed. They had let the veranda go to rot and then torn it away. The barn was tottering. A group of ragged children played about the clay patch which had been her mother's flower garden. She did not go in.

Farther along the road she turned up an old familiar log road into the woods and drove a few hundred yards up the steep slope to a brook. Here she hitched the horse. She spread her blanket on the grass beside the water, undressed, and lay in the sunshine, reading, smoking, or merely dozing until five o'clock. She then ate a leisurely picnic meal and dressed, and towards dusk she appeared once more at the Hallett house, putting up the horse herself and trundling the buggy into the shed.

Her mysterious appearance from the city, the almost immediate job with Markham, the zeal with which she attended to his affairs, the fact that she got no mail, her general air of aloofness of which these weekly disappearances were part, all marked her down in Kingsbridge as “queer.” Even good Mrs. Hallett, who knew her best, became worried about her lack of social life; and one evening with the somewhat breathless patter of an amateur conjurer she introduced into her parlor and Isabel's leisure a man. He was Brockhurst, the principal of the Kingsbridge school, an eligible male of about Isabel's own age. He was a dark stocky man whose tall brow and glasses gave him a proper schoolmasterly appearance, although he had fought in France with a regiment of Canadian infantry and still limped from a bad wound in the leg.

Like Isabel he saw through Mrs. Hallett's simple device at once, and they exchanged amused glances as they shook hands. Isabel was less amused when her hostess gathered up the garrulous Hallett on some paltry excuse and left her alone with the visitor. Her old trick of flushing made itself felt. She said in an exasperated tone, “I'm afraid Mrs. Hallett's trying her hand at matchmaking.”

Brockhurst smiled. “I should have guessed that when she asked me here. She had that arch look of the female conspirator, and of course I'd seen and heard about you.”

“What did you hear?” Isabel asked.

“Oh, that you came from these parts originally, and turned up again after a long time and become old Markham's right hand overnight. Frankly I'm glad to meet you. You sound like an interesting person—unusual, anyhow. That's refreshing in Kingsbridge.”

“Don't you like it here?”

“Oh yes. I've always lived in towns, apart from a hitch in the army, and I find I like life in the country. What I meant by my remark was that social life here in many ways still follows a pretty definite pattern, laid down by the older women, and it's a change to see a young woman keeping herself out of the rut.”

“You're quite wrong,” Isabel said, leaning back in her chair and toying with a china dog on the side table. “I've merely got a rut of my own, and I happen to like it.”

He gave her a whimsical grin. “That sounds rather hostile. Let me disarm any suspicion you may have by saying that I'm a bachelor who happens to like it. That doesn't mean I dislike women, especially intelligent ones like yourself. I'm not a bit romantic and I suspect you're not, either. That ought to give us a sound basis for an evening's conversation, don't you think?”

She regarded him, sprawling on the sofa where Mrs. Hallett had insisted on seating him, as if she hoped that Isabel would join him there once they were alone. His stiff leg was thrust out before him and he was engaged in filling his pipe.

“Tell me about the war. What did you do?” she said, with the too-obvious air of a woman determined to keep herself out of the conversation.

“Nothing much.” He struck a match and puffed at the pipe. “I'd rather talk about things here and now. Apart from being principal of the school I'm president of the local branch of the G.W.V.A., which gives me a lot more trouble. The steadier veterans have gone back to work on the farms they came from, or cleared off to the States. The active membership consists of Kingsbridge lads and the more restless types from the farms, the How-ya-gonna-keep-'em boys. They attend the business meetings in the clubroom and I'm continually trying to talk them out of crackpot resolutions addressed to the government—demands for more gratuities, which they'd only spend on bootleg liquor; and demands for public works which presumably would provide 'em all with well-paid jobs—and actually would only provide new profits for smart operators like your boss.”

“Mr. Markham?”

“Yes. That makes you sit up, doesn't it? Do you know what the war veterans call him? Old Dollars-and-Deuteronomy. To them he's the archetype of the profiteer, the man who made money out of their sweat and blood overseas, and is still making it, hand over fist, while they're out of work. Oh, he's a very holy gentleman, I admit. But you can see their point.”

Isabel could not. But she was sitting up. Her back was one straight line of indignation. “What awful nonsense! Mr. Markham started his business long before you or any of your ‘boys' were born, when Kingsbridge was nothing but a dozen houses and a ferry across the river. Everybody knows that, or should. He's been making money by hard work ever since, and he's got a reputation for honest dealing up and down the valley. Just now there's a good deal of money to be made by a man with energy and brains, and why should he sit back and do nothing about it? Would you, in his place?”

“Probably not. But I don't think I could be so smug about it.”

“You sound very smug to me,”' she retorted.

“I'm merely giving you the viewpoint of the war veteran, the chap who made it possible for every Markham in the country to hang on to his money and add a lot more to it. In their eyes he's a very disreputable character.”

“Indeed!”

Brockhurst enlarged his theme with the same air of cool indifference. There was nothing new in what he said. It was the reaction of the soldier to those who have lived snugly far from the noise of battle, and all over the world there were Brockhursts putting it into words. The Mr. Markhams of the world called them Bolsheviks. However, most of this was new to Isabel and she gasped at the schoolmaster's effrontery, knowing full well that she only had to repeat one or two of his more pungent phrases in Markham's ear to have the man discharged from his post as a menace to the innocent children of Kingsbridge, not to mention religion, law and order and the other foundations of government. In his recital of these heresies and her spirited rebuttals the evening passed very quickly. At eleven o'clock the schoolmaster caught up his hat and limped to the door.

“Have I bored you?”

“Of course not.”