The Nymph and the Lamp (52 page)

She had brought nothing to read and she rejected the notion of going to a show. Nothing on stage or screen could approach her own small drama in importance. Indeed when she thought of the island far off in the night, with its living and its dead, all gripped and imprisoned by the sea, then the lights and noise and human scramble of the city became obscene. How selfish and how petty all these creatures seemed. They lived off the sea, they admitted that in the very motto of the port, and yet each day they scurried away from their shops and offices, their docks and wharves, and never gave a thought to what passed beyond the harbor heads. Sometimes they saw in their newspapers that a steamer had rammed another in a fog, that a schooner had foundered in a gale, that fishermen had gone adrift in a dory on the Banks or that a lobster smack had been blown off the coast to oblivion; and always there were men dead or missing who only a few nights back had been whistling along Water Street and winking at the girls. But nobody cared.

Isabel knew none of the phrases that were to become so worn and shabby in the time to come, and it did not occur to her even vaguely as she looked from the hotel window that she was gazing upon the brave new world, the world fit for heroes to live in, the world of the lost generation, the world made safe for democracy in terms of jazz and bootleg whiskey and money, that grew on the bushes, the era of wonderful nonsense that could ignore the slump of '21 and go on to the crash of '29. Along the sidewalks passed the bobbing heads, male and female, intent upon an evening's pleasure after the day's pursuit of cash, and she looked upon them with resentment and contempt. And she saw again the figure of Carney wandering these streets, the blond bearded man from the sea with his simple dignity, his strength, his faith in duty, his honest heart, a lost and lonely figure in the rush. She could see him now, standing outside the post office, looking sternly at that preposterous soldier on the South Africa monument, and waiting for the pale young woman from Hurd's office. And she could smile now at the memory of herself slipping up to him, hoping that no one she knew would see her with this outlandish character, and praying for a quick end to the evening.

With recollections of that embarrassed friendship and its climax she filled the wakeful spaces of the night, for she was too excited to sleep properly. The port's small yellow tramcars clanged and droned past the hotel, the arc lights cast a blue-white glare into the room, the voices of passers-by floated up to her window until the small hours. When at last the city lay dead under its lights like a great corpse in state she could think of nothing but the morning, and she lay full length on her back in the big hotel bed praying devoutly that the
Lord
Elgin
was where it ought to be, loading stores at the Dartmouth wharf. At a quarter to nine in the morning she was part of the daily throng, walking quickly to the office as if the events of the past fourteen months had not happened at all and she were simply on her way to work like all the others. When she entered she found the anteroom and the stenographers' room deserted. Evidently Miss Benson and the new girl had stopped at the post office to pick up the mail. There was a sound of movement in Hurd's sanctum. She rapped on the door and went in, and found him hanging his bowler hat and black topcoat on the tree behind his desk. He looked up casually and his eyes went very wide.

“Miss Jardine—Mrs. Carney, I mean! It was so natural to see you standing there that for a minute I was taken quite aback. Where on earth have you been?”

“Convalescing in the country,” Isabel replied coolly. He adjusted his pince-nez and looked her up and down.

“You look very well. You've fully recovered?”

“Oh yes, and now I'm on my way back to Marina.” She said it glibly but she held her breath until he spoke.

“I see. Well, there's no rush. The
Elgin's
just begun to load the winter stores for the island, and it'll take two more days—all that coal and so on. There's some mail for the operators; do you want to take it or shall I put it in the mailbag? There are one or two mail-order parcels.”

“In that case you'd better put it in the mailbag—all but Matthew's. I'll take that. I've got some shopping to do. Will you send word to Captain O'Dell and arrange about my berth?”

“Yes, of course.” Hurd sat at his desk and adjusted his tie.

“You really intend to stay this time? I mean of course you really like the life out there?”

“I'd much rather live there than here.”

“Did you see that chap Skane? He had a message for you and seemed quite anxious about it.”

“Yes. It wasn't important after all.”

She heard Miss Benson come in, and she withdrew to the outer office, closing Hurd's door behind her. The new typist, a petite brunette with a skirt as short as Miss Benson's, was talking vivaciously to a brass-bound young sea op in the anteroom. Miss Benson was at her desk, looking a little drawn.

“Hello!” she said in an astonished voice, like Hurd. “You're going back to Marina? Really?”

“Really.”

“How do you feel?”

“Wonderful.”

“That,” Miss Benson said curiously, “is just the way you look—as if you were going to meet a lover somewhere down by the Dartmouth ferry. Do sit down and talk.”

“I can't, I'm sorry. I've such a lot of things I want to do. I'll try to drop in again on my way to the ship; but in case I don't—Good-by.”

“That means you won't.” Miss Benson took the proffered hand and squeezed it, thinking
She's not a bit good-looking but what makes her
skin light up so?
She was still wondering when Isabel's figure vanished into the street.

There was more time for her shopping than on that other frantic occasion and it was just as well, for there were many things to buy. Apart from her own winter needs there were things for Matthew, carefully chosen in the men's-wear shops. And there was a pair of expensive briar pipes to be hidden until Christmas, along with tobacco of his favorite brand; and cigarettes for the other operators and various little gifts for the McBains, the Kahns and the Lermonts. She went to an optician and bought a large reading glass, the most powerful in his stock. The man looked at her curiously. “Anyone who needs a thing like that should be wearing proper glasses,” he suggested.

“In this case,” she told him, “it's someone whose sight is going rapidly, and in a place where there's no chance to get a new prescription every two months. Will you wrap it carefully against breakage, please? All my baggage must be handled aboard a ship and then in an open boat.” He stared and nodded.

Her last errand took her to the government Education Office. A man with smoothly brushed silver hair and shrewd brown eyes sat behind a desk and listened gravely to what she had to say. It was a somber room with framed photographs of past Superintendents of Education looking down from the walls.

“Marina!” he murmured. “That's the island they call the graveyard of the Atlantic, isn't it? Romantic sort of place—all those wrecks. And very exciting, I should say.”

Isabel smiled tolerantly. It was what everybody said when you mentioned Marina. They pictured a sand bar studded with the picturesque ruins of ships, and the islanders forever engaged in daring rescues with a lifeboat.

“I'm afraid it's not what you think,” she said. “Not nowadays. All that went out with sailing ships. Marina's long and low, with shallow bars out from both ends. You can't see it until you're right on top of it. The windjammers used to get caught on a lee shore and there was nothing they could do to save themselves. With steamers it's altogether different.”

“But in fog—you have a lot of fog out there, don't you?”

“Oh, there's always some danger, of course. But most ships nowadays have modern sounding equipment. And since the war they can get cross bearings any time they want them, from the radio direction-finding stations on the mainland. A lot of the passenger liners now have their own D.F. equipment, and my husband says it won't be long before everything down to the smallest tramps will carry it. There's no guesswork in navigation any more.”

He regarded Isabel with interest. This brisk nautical talk fell from her lips with fluent ease. She did not look or talk the least bit like a former school ma'am.

“Then what on earth do the islanders find to do?”

“Ah, that's my point. They attend to the lighthouses and they patrol the beaches in thick weather. They practice with the lifeboat and the breeches-buoy equipment—just in case. But most of the time they just exist, in stations miles apart, month after month, summer and winter, watching the sea, waiting for something that almost never happens. And yet they must be there in case it does. Don't you see? The monotony! The monotony! Nowhere to go, nothing to do, nothing to read—a lot of them can't read—nothing to see but their own strip of dunes and the surf breaking miles out on the bars. The utter dreariness of life in such a place—neither land nor sea, a foothold you might say in the midst of the Flood, with an Ark that turns up three or four times a year with supplies!”

“The people,”' he asked, “What are they like?”

She thought before replying. “The lifeboat crew are all sorts, mostly single men, or men without women anyhow. They come and go. The others are the real islanders, most of them born there. In some cases the post has been handed down from father to son or to daughter's husband for generations. They're very superstitious, as you may readily understand; but they're good people, they do their duty faithfully, and they're always ready to risk their lives if an occasion should arise. Marina's their home and they don't look upon it as anything else. They don't get much pay, but of course money doesn't mean very much out there, They're housed and supplied with food and fuel—none of the ordinary worries of existence. It satisfies them. And that's the trouble, that's their actual danger—the inertia of a life in which nothing ever happens but a duck shoot or a pony ride. That's what I've come to talk to you about. The older people are settled in their ways and nothing can be done about it. For them it's an ideal existence. But I think the children ought to have a chance.”

He tapped a pencil on the desk. “What you propose, as I understand it, is to hold classes for the children on certain days of the week, from April to November—the fine months of the year. How could the youngsters get there? You say the stations are scattered from east to west and the island's twenty-odd miles long.”

“On pony-back. It will be a long ride for those from the east end. But in case of a sudden storm they could stay overnight with us or at Main Station—a mile away. The McBains would be very glad to help in that way.”

“Any children of your own?”

“None—yet.”

“I see. Of course you understand this is very unusual. You say you can't guarantee to hold school more than two or three times a week, and none at all in the winter months. I'm afraid the Board wouldn't approve paying a teacher on that basis.”

“Oh, I don't want pay!” she exclaimed. “All I want is a set of schoolbooks, pencils, scribbling paper—all that kind of thing— for about a dozen youngsters.”

“I see.” There was a friendly gleam in the eyes behind the desk. “Well, we can do that all right. I'll see that the stuff is sent down to the ship in time for sailing.” He arose and put out his hand. “May I say that this is not only an unusual but a very heart-warming experience. It's splendid!”

Isabel flushed. “I'm thinking purely of myself,” she explained. “I'll have my household duties—I've got a very good husband to look after—but there will be times when like everybody else on Marina I shall need something else to do.”

She walked out with her own words ringing in her ears on a gentle note of mockery. That awful phrase!

CHAPTER 38

The
Lord Elgin
cast off her lines and drew away from the wharf on a gray November afternoon, in a drizzle of cold rain. Captain O'Dell invited Isabel to the bridge to watch the departure, and she stood in the starboard wing in her plain khaki raincoat and brown tam. The city's smoke hung low over the rooftops and the long waterfront slid past, a succession of dingy wharf ends and the fat round sterns of ships, like a caricature of the horse stalls at the Kingsbridge Fair.

“Depressing, eh?” said O'Dell's voice at her side. “I like Halifax, mind you, but when you're pulling out on a day like this it looks like the city that God forgot. The war, I suppose. The big explosion of '17 played skittles with the wharves and warehouses, and they were just patched up on a make-do basis. Now there's a shipping slump and I suppose there won't be a lick of paint or a new nail driven on Water Street for years. But all ports look the same, by and large. The citizens see towards the water and everything town-side is fixed up pretty well. Nobody cares a hoot what Jack thinks, coming in at the back door. That's the way the world lives, when you stop to think of it; all paint and plate glass where the street goes by, and the garbage and the dead cats at the back. How do you like that starboard cabin? Are you comfortable?”

“Oh yes, it's very nice.”

“Sorry I couldn't let you have the one you had before. It was booked for an inspector of lighthouses, making the round.”