The Nymph and the Lamp (9 page)

The quartermaster at the gangway grinned and said, “Hello, Mr. Carney! Going back?” Sailors working about the forward winch looked up and waved. The chief engineer, stepping out of his cabin as Carney thrust his big form into the alley, announced, “Well, the wanderer returns!” The captain cried “Come in!” at his knock and grasped his hand and shook it vigorously.

“Ha! Knew you'd be back, Carney. When you came off with us someone said you'd had enough of Marina and were going to retire. I knew better and I said so. And here you are. What do you think of life in civilization?”

Captain O'Dell was a fixture in his ship, a thin gray man of sixty with a haggard face and frosty blue eyes. He had the look of a man ill to the point of death and he had looked that way for twenty years. His spare figure had a curious protuberant paunch that gave him, whenever he walked down the gangway, the appearance of smuggling something ashore under his waistcoat. He had a wife and family but nobody in the ship had ever seen them. He spent most of his time aboard, even when the ship lay at the dock. The
Lord Elgin
and the scattered posts and lighthouses were his life, as Marina Island was Carney's, and he looked at Carney now with understanding in his eyes.

“I've done what I came to do,” Carney said quietly, “and I'm glad to be going back. Civilization? You can have it.”

“That's what I expected. And you're absolutely right.” A dreamy look came into the captain's eyes. “You know, I've sometimes thought of putting in for the job of superintendent on Marina, next time the job comes up. I'm getting a bit rickety for knocking about the coast, 'specially in winter weather. And I can't retire. I couldn't stick life in some stuffy little house in town, waiting for the graveyard to swallow me. Besides, the superannuation pay's too small. I've got a boy in college, and my daughter's separated from her husband, with three youngsters on her hands and eighty dollars a month—when she can collect it—to pay the bills. But of course my wife won't hear of Marina. A city woman—I couldn't expect her to change her whole existence at this time of life.”

He fetched a bottle of whiskey from a locker below the berth, and took down glasses and a carafe of water from the rack beside Carney's head. The
Lord
Elgin
had been built in the golden age of Victoria, and the captain's cabin was finished with late Victorian notions of seagoing elegance. The panels were of bird's-eye maple, darkened by time, by the penetrating grime of a coal-burning ship, and by the coats of varnish slapped on by unimaginative painters in the long succession of refits.

The broad berth, with its chest of drawers beneath, was of mahogany, and there was a brass rail, polished like gold, to keep the Old Man from falling out of bed ill heavy weather. Above the berth on a small shelf, guarded by a slat of mahogany, a Presbyterian hymn book, a worn
Coast Pilot,
a
Shipmaster's
Adviser,
the
Public Speeches and Letters of Joseph Howe
and two or three frayed novels huddled together in snug company.

O'Dell stood the glasses on his desk and tipped the bottle. “The sun's not over the yardarm but a small one won't do us any harm. By noon it'll be too hot to drink anything but water. It may sound strange, but I never could enjoy whiskey properly in hot weather. Say when!”

“When!”

“Well, here's down the hatch!”

“Down the hatch,” Carney murmured, and they drank together.

“How do you manage without this stuff on Marina?”

“Whiskey? It doesn't trouble me. I could always take it or leave it anyhow, and when I went to Marina in 1910 I simply left it behind, with a lot of other things I didn't need. It bothers the operators a bit. They usually bring a bottle or two out with them, and when that's gone they talk about old sprees and give themselves a frightful thirst for a time. But on the whole we're teetotalers, and we get along. What about a berth for me?”

O'Dell made an expansive sweep with his glass. “The ship's yours. I've got no passengers except an assistant lightkeeper going up to Saint Paul Rock, unless they send me somebody else at the last minute. That chap Hurd—a bit of a fuss-budget—sent me a chit about your passage several days ago, and I told the steward to give you the best, that cabin off the port alley. You've seen it. Built into the ship for the Deputy Minister of Marine and Fisheries, as if the old chap planned to spend his time knocking about the coast in a thing like this. Rather like mine but in better shape. All plush and mahogany. You'l1 travel like a blooming swell.”

Carney's bearded lips parted in a grin. “The end of a perfect fling!”

O'Dell regarded him curiously. “You make that sound pretty final.”

“It is. I've seen all I want of the outside.”

“Until the next time,” O'Dell suggested.

“No, this is the last time. You'll never see me off Marina again, except for a swim, perhaps.”

O'Dell's thin gray brows shot up over the whiskey glass. He took a long swig.

“You don't mean it! Besides, they'll retire you some day. What then?”

“Then I'll build myself a shack among the dunes, a bit to the east of the wireless station where I can hear the spark when the wind's right. I've even got a spot picked out. But I'm good for a lot of service yet, mind you. You might say I'm part of the government inventory.”

The thin clang of a brass hand bell sounded along the deck outside.

“Lunch!” Captain O'Dell cried. “Come and eat with us, Carney, and you can tell me all about your holiday.”

In the small saloon, already uncomfortable in the forenoon heat despite the open portholes, they found the chief engineer and a young fresh-cheeked third mate leaning against the buffet and talking diffidently, waiting for Captain O'Dell to seat himself. Along one side of the table, and directly under the portholes, extended a long settee padded with red plush. At the head and foot, and along the other side, stood chairs with stout wooden backs and round red-plush seats, each revolving on an iron standard bolted to the deck. The portholes had prim little red curtains to match the upholstery. From the forward bulkhead an electric fan wafted a thin breeze along the table.

They sat, O'Dell at the table head, Carney at his left, and the others in their accustomed places, the chief engineer at O'Dell's right and the third mate lonely towards the farther end, sitting on the settee. The other officers evidently were on leave or errands ashore. A white-jacketed steward bustled about with ice water in a pitcher. When the food appeared, the captain's eyes glistened. That lined gray face, that thin drooped body with its incongruous paunch, the whole being of Captain O'Dell which resembled so much an unburied corpse, had a capacity for food that amounted to gluttony. It was his only vice, and it was famous in the lighthouse service.

With this obsession he had little to say during the course of the meal, and Carney directed his own conversation to the engineer across the table, a heavy red-faced man with drooping mustaches and a shabby uniform. Mr. McIntyre had a glum view of the world which descended on him with especial force whenever the ship was about to sail; but he talked shop with the animation of an expert at his trade, and because Carney had a rough-and-ready knowledge of shipboard machinery they had a common ground. The younger officer sat remote and silent at his food, glancing up the table in wonder at a man who, having once got away from Marina Island, went back there of his own accord.

At the meal's end Captain O'Dell began to converse in the slow vague manner of a man who has eaten heavily and now desires nothing so much as his afternoon nap. The younger officer vanished. The engineer remained politely, glooming over his words with the air of a melancholy walrus. There was another half hour of this, and then Carney took his departure. As he stepped on deck into the muggy heat of the afternoon he cast an instinctive look at the sky.

“Hello! Clouding up fast.”

O'Dell inspected the weather from the doorway. “Humph. Rain at last. A lot of it, too, by the look of things.”

Carney frowned. It was not quite time for the line gales but you never knew. Sometimes a forerunner blew up out of the West Indies in late August and lashed the Nova Scotia coast for two or three days on end.

“If this is a southeaster coming up, it'll raise a sea on the beach at Marina that won't go down for a week.”

“M'yes,” O'Dell acknowledged. “Personally I don't think it'll amount to much. We're due for a big rain—the country's parched. May be a bit of wind behind it. If it turns out to be a real southeaster I'll hold up here a day or two. If it's just a stiff blow I'll pull out about sundown tomorrow and run up the coast to Bold Head. Good shelter inside the Head at Packet Harbor, and the shortest run to Marina when the surf goes down. You'd better be aboard by five tomorrow afternoon, Carney, or six at the outside.” He waved a delicate white hand and vanished towards his couch.

Carney recrossed the harbor under a sky covered with gray scud drifting in from the eastward. A fitful wind wandered about the streets, whirling up little clouds of dust. When he turned in to the office to say Good-bye to Hurd the first drops of rain were spattering on the sidewalk. Hurd was engaged in a long-distance telephone conversation but he asked Miss Jardine to send Carney in at once. The farewell did not take long. Having arranged for the wireless station stores to be shipped, and for Carney's return, Hurd's neat mind had dismissed Marina for at least three months. As Carney came out he paused at Miss Jardine's desk.

“Well, I'm away, Miss Jardine.”

The familiar flush passed over her pale features. She stood up, plucking off the glasses and casting a swift glance into the anteroom, where Miss Benson was being charming to an operator from the French cable-ship in port. She put out a hand and Carney shook it slowly and woodenly and released it. For want of anything else to say she asked, “You're not sailing at once?”

“Oh no, tomorrow evening. I'd thought of sending my gear aboard but I decided I might as well spend my last night ashore.”

“It looks like a storm,” she murmured.

“Yes. The rain won't matter but if it blows hard the skipper may decide to hold up a day or two. In that case he'll probably phone here and you might let me know. I'm at the Travelers' Arms, a small wooden place down by the railroad station. I don't know the phone number but no doubt it's in the book.”

She nodded, and catching up a pencil made a swift scrabble of pothooks in her notebook.

“Let me thank you again…” Carney began.

“Please don't!” Miss Jardine said, with a warning tone.

In the anteroom Miss Benson's voice gave forth the gurgling note that meant another conquest in the making. In the inner office Hurd's voice went on shouting into the telephone. Outside, from the seaward, came a mutter of thunder.

“Good-by,” Carney said.

“Good-by, Mr. Carney, and good luck. I'll think of you on your island when the station reports come in.”

Her face was still pink and there was a self-conscious smile on her lips. She was thinking,
I might have given him one more evening. It wasn't much to
ask, after all.
She raised her eyes to his with a feeling almost of guilt, and saw in his steady gaze only the shy friendliness that made him seem so much like a boy masquerading in a beard. Impulsively she said, “I'm free tonight, if you'd like to take me out.”

She was rewarded at once by the gratitude in his face. “That's awfully kind of you, Miss Jardine!”

“Oh, I'm being quite selfish, I assure you. There's nothing so dull as a wet summer evening in lodgings. I'll meet you at Morgan's—you know, the little place where we had tea—at seven. You can give me something to eat and take me to the movies. Here comes Miss Benson. Don't say anything more.”

He nodded, with a pleasant feeling of conspiracy, and swung away, putting on his new hat firmly and turning up his collar against the rain.

CHAPTER 7

At five o'clock, when the shops and offices of Halifax emptied their human contents into the streets, the rain was falling heavily. There was no wind. The torrent fell straight down and the big drops covered the pavement with an inch of bouncing water. Caught like everyone else without coat or umbrella, Miss Jardine clutched the thin jacket about her throat and ran. There was a brief haven in the post office, where she drew the afternoon mail from her satchel and tipped the letters into the chute. She waited inside for a time, hoping for a pause in the downpour, but there was none.

A gloomy mass of cloud hung over the city like an immense sponge being squeezed by a maniac giant. The thunder, which at first had sounded from the harbor mouth as if the forts were at gunnery practice, now boomed and rattled over the ceiling with violence, and at intervals the unnatural twilight in the streets was torn apart and a dazzling flash revealed all the scampering figures caught in suspended motion like a photograph.

Reluctantly she stepped into a revolving door whose pace was set by a rush of people eager for shelter, and it thrust her quickly and mercilessly into the storm. As she emerged another flash of lightning splashed the wet walls of Province House with luminous blue paint, and in that moment she saw the Boer War monument and the imperturbable soldier holding his rifle above his head as if to ward off a further blow from the sky. She thought of Carney, then, and smiled. The thunder followed, and she ran towards her lodging, thankful that it was not far.