The Nymph and the Lamp (54 page)

“The third mate had gone ashore with me that morning. We stepped out of the boat on opposite sides and walked up the beach towards Carney. I suppose we were ten or twelve feet apart. We were both in uniform and about the same height; otherwise we're not a bit alike. Carney was at the beachhead checking stores with one of his operators and I sang out Hello. He straightened up and gazed down the beach, turning his head slowly from me to the Third. And he addressed himself to the Third, calling out something about empty gas drums to be shipped off, and that they were coming up by wagon from the wireless station and mustn't be left behind, and so on. I thought it kind of funny that he should be saying all this to the Third and ignoring me. He was still talking when we got within ten feet of him, and then he stopped, with an odd look on his face, and turned his eyes to me. For a moment he was silent. Then he went on with what he had to say—you know, as if he'd been addressing me all the time.

“After that, as I've said, he didn't seem to have anything more to say, not a personal word, none of the old chummy gam we used to have together on the beach. After a time another boat came in, and out jumped one of the lifesavers who'd gone to Halifax with us in the spring. Chap named Blackburn. He sang out ‘Carney boy!—you know, the way they all do when they see him—and walked up the beach towards him just as we'd done. Carney merely answered hello in a noncommittal sort of way, but when the fellow got about ten feet away—I was watching the distance this time to make sure—Carney suddenly grinned and exclaimed ‘Blackie!' You know, as if the name had just slipped his mind until that moment. Afterwards, in my berth aboard the ship, these things rang a little bell in my mind. Do they ring anything in yours?”

Isabel turned and met his sunken eyes, the small blue eyes that were so keen and alive in that weary cynical face.

“Yes. You mean Matthew's losing his sight. The doctors say he will be blind in another year at most.”

“So you knew! I wondered.”

“I know now. I didn't when you took me off last spring. He concealed it from me. For some months he wouldn't believe what the oculists said. He thought it was just a sudden case of shortsightedness. It wasn't until last winter that he knew they were right. When I last rode along the island with him, last spring, in the bright sunlight, he could still distinguish people at quite a distance. But that was nearly seven months ago.”

“Ah!” O'Dell nodded slowly. “That explains a good deal.” He ground out his cigar in the ash tray before him. “Do you know, when you failed to turn up in August I thought you'd had enough of it—that you'd left the island for good. I used to phone the hospital from time to time when we were in port, to see how you were getting along; and so I knew that you could have come back on the August trip if you'd wished. And Carney knew it. I could see it in his manner there on the beach, when he asked about the passengers and mail. He looked very lonely. And later on, when I realized he was losing his sight—and how fast it was going—I got a double shock. For I remembered something he'd told me long before.

“You know what a reader he was—always quoting Byron and so on. Always after me for any old books or magazines that might be lying about the ship. Some time in '17 or '18, when all sorts of navy people were going about the coast with us, someone left behind a book about the old Norse kings. In English of course. I'd picked it up from time to time and read a bit of it. Well, I gave it to Carney, and you can imagine how he ate it up. When I came, next trip, he was full of it, and he sent off for a book on Norse mythology. You know, he looks like a Viking himself. I don't mean just that he's big and blond but his manner, the way he carries himself, something noble and fearless about him, like one of those old sea kings. I used to kid him about it. I told him once he was living proof that the Norsemen came to Newfoundland. He didn't like that, I remember, and went on to talk about something else.

“Well, one day on the beach he got talking about the old Norse beliefs. This must have been in the spring of '20—the time he went off to see the eye doctors. Told me about Ran, the sea goddess. She had caves at the bottom of the ocean, a sort of Fiddler's Green, where drowned sailors were entertained with food and drink and each found a nymph waiting for him shaped in the image of the woman he'd most desired on earth. It sounded pretty swell. But there was a bit of a catch. It seems that the Lady Ran's a rather mercenary creature. No sailor could get in unless he had a bit of gold to pay for the accommodation. A bit of the real yellow stuff—nothing else would do. That's why those old Norse rovers used to wear a gold bracelet or a ring or an amulet or something of that sort whenever they shoved off to sea. Just in case. A kind of life-hereafter insurance. Carney told me all this and we both laughed. But then he said, quite seriously, ‘It's all bosh, of course, but the idea's sort of splendid. When the ship went down or the fight was lost, when there was no hope left, a man could let himself sink and feel that all would be well.' And he threw out that big right arm of his towards the breakers on the outer shoals, where he often used to swim.”

Isabel was rising from her seat and staring with eyes that seemed to him enormous. “What do you mean?”

“I'm just trying to explain,” O'Dell said quietly, “why I couldn't find words to say when you came up the gangway this morning. My dear, you were the finest sight in the world.”

CHAPTER 39

She was awake long before daylight. When the
Lord Elgin
rounded the west bar she had washed and dressed and was busy packing her things and checking over the multitude of parcels which seemed to fill half the cabin. As she tucked away her nightdress her fingers encountered a piece of paper. She drew forth the old wedding license and stood for a moment in profound thought. It had no value here. She had kept it out of sentiment and a notion that it made her relations with Carney quite respectable. Absurd! Her union with him was ordained and complete in itself. Life had thrown them together on a desolate shore where none of the old rules applied. A marriage of castaways. As for this patch of print and scrawled ink, the license had lost its meaning along with the world of which it was part, the mad world they had put behind. Slowly and firmly she tore the thing to shreds and let them flutter from her fingers out of the porthole.

She appeared at breakfast with a tranquil face; and afterwards, watching the hatches taken off, the boats arriving alongside, the cargo booms sweeping back and forth, the flicker of white surf on the distant shore, she seemed to the glances of the crew no more than a composed wife returning from a holiday on the main. The heavy stores went first, the drums of gasoline and kerosene and lubricating oil, the coal sewn up in hundred-pound bags for ready handling in the boats, the deceptive little cylinders containing mercury that looked so insignificant and weighed so mightily, the bales of pressed hay, the barrels of salt beef and pork, of flour and sugar and molasses, the bags of salt, the machinery parts.

It was well on towards noon when she said good-by to the officers and went down the Jacob's ladder to the boat. Forbes came with her, and O'Dell. The captain, awaiting this moment, had delayed his customary state visit to the shore. He was burning with curiosity. All the way to the beach he watched with sidelong glances the calm face of the young woman in the stern. There was, as he had prophesied, a bit of a slop on the beach. Nothing to be alarmed about, but he regarded Isabel's smart costume and silken legs with some concern. He leaned over to her.

“When we run in, you'd better let one of the boatmen carry you out of the surf.”

“I shall be all right.”

“You should have worn boots and trousers,” he said severely.

The steersman watched his chance. He chose the crest of a long green swell and cried to his oarsmen fiercely. The boat rode in. It was very neatly done. Almost as well, O'Dell thought, as Carney himself could have done it when his eyes were at their best. Not a drop came over the gunwales until the boat's keel touched the sand and the wave broke. There was a rush of island figures about the boat, clutching the gunwales or snatching up the most perishable packages. O'Dell turned swiftly to the steersman, commanding him to lift Mrs. Carney to dry footing. But his breath was wasted with the thought.

Before the words were out of his mouth Isabel stepped upon the thwart and poised a foot on the gunwale. In another moment she was in the water to her knees and wading swiftly to the shore. The captain sprang out and followed her, but at the edge of the dry and trampled sand he stopped. The air on the beach, where the sun was falling now with the full stroke of noon, made a grateful contrast to the cold nip of the water. The spell of Indian summer, which comes to the north country after the first hard frosts, had awakened an almost tropical heat in the sands of Marina. The dunes wavered as if it were July. In the mirage towards the east the tip of the wireless mast sagged in a drunken bow, the surf breaking on the long curved sands past Number Two seemed to spring straight in the air like the spouts of great whales; and the west lighthouse was going up and down like an insane phallic monument.

The brown men on the beach stared at the slender figure coming out of the sea with a wet dress clinging to her legs. But Captain O'Dell was looking past her. Carney stood at the beachhead by the pile of stores, where the little group of island women had gathered after their custom. Like most of the island men he had stripped to trousers and sea boots for the work and his skin gleamed like new bronze after the summer's exposure. Beside the figures of the women he seemed to tower, a sculptor's study posed before the lesser figures of a symbolic group. From the girl running up the beach came a single cry.

“Matthew!”

O'Dell saw Carney start, and throw up a hand to shield his eyes from the water glare. And in that attitude, with the clipped golden beard and hair gleaming in the sun, he looked—yes, by Jove, he looked like one of those Norse kings, right out of the
Heimskringla!
You sought for the winged helmet and the long war ax and saw nothing but the bit of gold, Ran's tribute, slung by the cord upon his breast. He gazed blankly towards the swiftly approaching figure of the woman. When she was almost up to him suddenly the frown dissolved and became a look of wonder, of incredulous delight. Then she was sobbing against his breast, held in those great bronze arms as if he feared the sea might take her back again.

“A fathom's length,” muttered Captain O'Dell, “and not another inch,” as if it were a matter of great moment, something that ought to be marked on the chart. “And noon—full light.” He turned away, swallowing. He was a man who abhorred emotion and he summoned all his cynicism for a final judgment on this affair. Women! What strange creatures! All outward passion, all tears and kisses, all craving ease and pleasure and yet all morbid readiness for sacrifice and martyrdom. And yet—and yet who knew what lay at the bottom of their secret hearts?

Isabel Carney was not what you'd call pretty but she was rather nicely made. She had the ripe attractiveness which comes to slender women in their early thirties, she was at her best, you might say, and she knew it. And could she fail to know, this intelligent young woman, that in the days to come when Carney could see her no more he would go on thinking of her as he saw her now? Could she fail to realize that for Carney she would always be young, her hair would never be anything but that softly shining brown, her skin always fair, her eyes that clear gray, her figure that of a nymph running out of the sea? By Jove, what woman wouldn't chuck up the world for love in a desert on terms like that?

And having satisfied himself with this pronouncement Captain O'Dell startled the gaping boatmen with a shout.

“Look alive, there! D'ye think I've got all winter to drag my hook off this beach?”