The Nymph and the Lamp (45 page)

“Go on.”

“So our financial health depends on matters in Britain, on the other side of the Atlantic. That's too far away to bother people like your Mr. Markham, who can't see past the local bargains right under his nose, but it's bound to catch up with him and everyone else in Canada pretty soon. Don't forget the British bore the chief burden of the war. They were in there slugging away from the start, and after the Russians quit and the French and Italians were ready to fold up the British fought practically the whole war till the Yanks got there in force in the summer of ‘18. That was quite a contract. I well remember it because I got a bullet in my knee at Ypres, where we slugged it out with the Germans in the mud for months just to keep old Hindenburg's attention on us instead of the French, who were in a state of mutiny and strolling home by whole divisions.

“Look at the financial side of it. The British spent enormous sums on their own side of the show and lent as much to the French and Russians and others who'll never pay it back. Well, now that the postwar inflation's at its height they've got to face the facts, including a whacking big debt to the U.S.A. That means John Bull's got to take a big reef in his belt. The signs are plain if you read the English newspapers as you should—you and old Dollars-and-Deuteronomy. We're going to feel the squeeze ourselves and it's going to come hard.”

“How soon?” asked Isabel, for the sake of conversation. She was used to his dialectics by now and she listened with the tolerance of one who has heard all this before and does not believe a word of it. Brockhurst had always refused to talk about his war experiences (“I won't play Othello to your blooming Desdemona”) but she knew they had affected him powerfully, and in her opinion they had crippled his outlook no less than his knee.

“Ah, who knows? Within two years at most. Maybe this year. This could be the year that we'll all look back on as the Black Year '21, when the bottom dropped right out of the barrel.”

“Poor Mr. Markham!” She smiled as she said it.

“Oh, he'll be all right, I don't doubt that. Probably got a lot of his war profits tucked away in tax-free Victory Bonds, like all his kind. It's the rest of us who'll be out of luck.”

“You seem quite cheerful about it.”

For answer he began to whistle “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag,” and the horse, startled out of a somnolent amble, broke into a sudden trot.

Some days later as she lay in the sun beside the stream Isabel reflected idly upon these matters. Brockhurst talked a lot of nonsense but she enjoyed the vigor of his mind, and sometimes she wondered if she had any attraction for him apart from her role as listener and antagonist. He had never betrayed a trace of sentiment in their friendship. That was as she wanted it; but now and then in idle moments she felt a twinge of loneliness.

Rising on one elbow to get another cigarette from her hand-bag she contemplated the pale golden body stretched out upon the grass. She was conscious of a sense of waste. She had passed her thirtieth birthday, that ominous milepost on the way to withered age, and she wondered how many more years she could retain this physical perfection. She had never felt so much alive. In this orchard country amid the ceaseless talk of fruit in all its stages and values the similitude of women and apples came instinctively to mind. Some were best quite early in the season and these first fruits had the most potent attraction in the market. Others attained their ripeness later, and these usually were the ones that kept their quality longest. But all of them were made to be enjoyed in their time. After that they withered and were spoiled forever, Gravensteins, Pippins, Golden Russets—and Isabel Jardines.

In the rush of business through the week there was never time for such wistful introspections; and when on an occasional impulse she drew forth the photograph of Skane and Carney with poor shipwrecked Clélie it was only to face once more the enigma of her life on the island and to put it away once more unsolved. It was in these hours of self-contemplation, stretched beside the clear mountain water, that the future oppressed her. She wondered if it was because this place reminded her of that reedy pool amongst the dunes. Or was it merely that summer was passing, the warm and lovely time that seemed so like the best years of a woman's life? August was all but gone.

And then all self-examination perished in a single blinding thought. The end of August! With shaking fingers she caught up the newspaper that lay, half read, upon the grass. For their daily news the people of Kingsbridge, like everyone else in the valley, depended on a bundle of Halifax newspapers flung off the “up” train at each stop, and it was Isabel's custom to bring one of these to be read in the leisure of her sun bath. She flicked over the pages hurriedly and ran a swift glance down the Marine News column. And there it was. The letters seemed to jump out of the surrounding print.

“Arrived:
Lord Elgin,
O'Dell master, Marina Island, passengers.”

CHAPTER 32

All the way back to Kingsbridge Isabel's thought ran furiously upon that scrap of news. “Passengers”! Among others Gregory Skane. No doubt of it. She could see him with that firm jaw and the hard blue challenge in his eyes, striding into Hurd's office and demanding the address of Mrs. Carney. She could see Miss Benson simpering, and Hurd putting on the quick glad smile and thrusting forth the quick glad hand that he reserved for crack shore-station operators. And she could hear Hurd murmuring that he was sorry, that Mrs. Carney had left the hospital without a forwarding address, that doubtless she was convalescing quietly somewhere, and how were things on Marina?

All those vague yearnings and speculations by the stream had perished. She was again Miss Jardine of Markham's office, the determined young woman who had set her future on a business career and would have no more of men. Skane would be angry and amazed, no doubt. But there was nothing he could say or do. She had disappeared and that was that. He would fume about Halifax for a day or two and then go off to see his people and spend his leave. She told herself (and admitted with a curious reluctance) that he would find other women charming and quite willing to meet his wants. It was silly to say that no woman could resist Greg Skane. The truth, she suspected, was that only a rare woman in good health and under forty could escape an impulse to throw herself into his arms, whether he wanted her or not. It was a strange gift, one of the sardonic jokes that life plays on its creatures here and there, for Skane was no Lothario. Lotharios are gay, they flash and whir like hummingbirds exploring every flower along the way, whereas Skane was a mixture of self-pride and self-contempt, he wanted to be whole master of himself and hated the need that could make him slave, even for an hour, to a woman; and there was a kind of fury in the passion that he expended in her flesh when at last he admitted, not her victory, but his own defeat.

Oh yes, that was Greg Skane. And she would have no more of him. She had never loved him, never!—any more than Skane had really loved her. They had both given way to something that sprang out of the emptiness of winter in the lonely gray station, a hot quick spark that leaped and flamed and trumpeted a message that had no beginning and no end and then was silent, leaving nothing but the tang of ozone and an echo down the dunes.

And now she was quite safe from that dangerous quality in him and in herself. She went over the points again and again. The hospital? She had told them nothing but that she was leaving the city. Hurd? Miss Benson? She had left without a word to them. There was no way that Skane could seek her out with that confident “D prefix” he had mentioned in his letter. She had never mentioned Kingsbridge or even the valley, not so much from reticence as because he had never been curious enough to ask her anything about her background before she met Carney.

Nevertheless for several weeks she started whenever a quick new step came through the shop towards the office, whenever the telephone rang and a man's voice demanded “Miss Jardine?” At evening when Brockhurst came on one of his erratic visits and Mrs. Hallett let him in and called, “Here's a man to see you, Miss Jardine,” in the arch way she had, there was always a tense moment until Isabel heard his voice. Brockhurst himself remarked that she seemed “jumpy”; and on one of their buggy wanderings he paused in the midst of a scathing denunciation of the capital system and remarked with his wise grin, “You're not listening. Am I slipping or are you? I can't get a rise out of you any more.”

“I'm sorry. I was thinking of something else.”

“Something important, I hope.”

“In a way, yes.”

“May I ask what it was? Or is that impertinent? I'd like to know what could be more important than the rule of Canada by a handful of bloated capitalists in Toronto and Montreal.”

“You're forgetting the one in Kingsbridge.”

“Just ignoring him for the moment. What's the trouble? Business, I suppose, you poor weak tool of the capitalist class. Old Markham must be worrying about the fall in pulp and paper prices in the States. All his wood goes to pulp mills over the border, and the price of groundwood pulp over there has dropped from something over a hundred dollars a ton to something under forty—or does he know that yet? He never reads anything but his Bible and the
Courier
.”

“He knows.”

“Ah, then he's begun to taste the pickle his greed has got him into. I happen to know that the mills have stopped buying wood—presto!—like that. They've all got big stocks on hand, and they're carrying 'em on their books at values that don't exist any more. The mills won't get their breath back till they've ground up the wood on hand and got it off their inventories.

That means a year at least, from all I can learn. In the meantime there's old Dollars-and-Deuteronomy left with at least ten thousand cords of spruce and fir, cut and piled in the woods or stacked at sidings all the way from Windsor to Karsdale. In the round! With the bark on! Do you see the pretty picture? Wood left like that will rot within twelve months and then the mills won't take it as a gift. So there's our local Midas stuck for ninety thousand dollars at the very least, unless he can sell the stuff for firewood. Even at that it's almost a dead loss. Why are you turning the horse?”

Isabel's mouth was set in an angry line. “We're going back to Kingsbridge. And there I'm dropping you, Brock, not just for this evening but for keeps. I've had enough of you and your everlasting sneering at my boss.”

She gave the horse a smart flick of the whip and they rattled off towards town. For a time Brockhurst said nothing, watching her frigid profile and the vexed set of her lips.

“Look here, I didn't mean to upset you,” he said seriously at last. She did not reply.

“After all I'm just a student of economics and Markham only interests me as a specimen of his type.”

“You've said that before,” she exclaimed scornfully. “You've been repeating yourself all summer. ‘Specimen of his type'! Brock, you're a specimen of your own type. The man who got hurt in the war and feels he owes the world a grudge. I met your type once before; only he didn't go about preaching a backwoods version of Marx; he went off to sulk on a desert island. There seem to be a good many others—all this talk about a ‘lost generation'! And you're all alike, the lot of you. All you've lost is your sense of decency. Sooner or later you hurt other people. Not always in the same way, but they suffer just as much.”

“But,”' he protested, “you used to take all I said as a lark. Why the sudden change?”

“I just couldn't stand any more.”

Isabel flung out these remarks without looking at him, without relaxing for a moment that fixed stare on the road ahead. The buggy clattered into Main Street at the same brisk pace. When Isabel pulled up at the sidewalk the horse turned its head reproachfully, no doubt wondering like the schoolmaster what had so changed the peaceful evening ramble. Brockhurst limped down and put his hands on thy side of the buggy, looking up at her. There were people strolling under the elms and he waited for a group to pass before he spoke.

“You don't mean what you said about dropping me for keeps?”

Isabel turned her head and met his eyes firmly. “Yes, Brock.”

“Surely you know that on that night we first met, when you were so annoyed with poor Mrs. Hallett and so much on your guard with me, I deliberately threw out some remarks that would sting—as a kind of challenge—because you seemed to me a mysterious and rather attractive personality that I wanted to know better? And, well, it worked.”

A youth and a girl passed arm in arm, and Brockhurst waited again. He went on in a low voice, “I'm not trying to imply that I didn't mean all I said then or since, I meant a good deal of it, the basic things, the principles in which I believe. But I stuck in some fireworks here and there because it seemed to stimulate you, because I enjoyed hearing your retort. Have I misjudged you all this time? Is it possible that you haven't a sense of humor?”

“I daresay not,” she said acidly, and turned to jerk the reins.

“One moment!” he begged quickly. “You're determined to have no more to do with me, I can see that in your face. And I'm quite sure it's not entirely due to things I've said. There's something else. You've been queer for the past few days. Won't you tell me what it is? You see, I'm afraid I'm in love with you and I can't let you drop me without knowing fully why.”