The Nymph and the Lamp (2 page)

In fact the world that Carney had last seen in 1910 had changed beyond his imagination and far beyond the bits and pieces of news that reached Marina in old Halifax papers and the operators' letters. He could not grasp the magnitude of the war, which had been for him chiefly a silence. He measured the struggle in Europe in terms of the Boer War, a romantic affair below the Equator that had been the chief excitement of his youth.

The world's change did not strike Carney at once. The
Lord Elgin
had taken him off the island in the course of her regular round of the outposts, and now she set him down at the first port on the mainland and went on about her work. The land was as he remembered it, the gray stone face of the coast, the crown of somber woods, and between the forest and the sea the fishermen's sheds and cottages clinging to the rock like weathered wooden barnacles. It was a hot May day and he smelled the warm air from the forest as he stepped out of the ship's boat. By Jingo! For ten years his nostrils had known nothing but the salt wind blowing over Marina, where nothing grew higher than the tough dune grass. Trees—you missed the trees! Often you dreamed of trees, the pleasure of their shade, the way they rustled in the wind, and the smell of them, especially the smell of pines. It was something to smell pines again. He was glad he had come.

With an ancient suitcase in each of his big hands he walked up the rickety wharf, sniffing the westerly breeze with the enjoyment of a boy approaching a bakeshop. The local idlers stared. Packet Harbor was not a regular port of call for anything bigger than a lobster smack, and a visitor like Carney might have come from the moon. He was not quite the giant of the operators' fables but he stood six feet and had the chest and shoulders of a wrestler. The island cook had cut his hair and trimmed his beard in the close-clipped mode of Edward the Seventh, which was the accepted mode of British seamen when Carney went to Marina. That King Edward and his beard had been dead for years did not occur to Carney, and the knowledge would not have troubled him if it had. He had never shaved in his life.

He was clad in the faded blue serge suit that he had taken to the island ten years before. He had preserved it all this time with care, hanging it out occasionally to air; and the sight of these sober garments dancing obscenely in the breeze never failed to send his junior operators into fits of laughter. Imagine Carney in a rig like that! His island costume was a gray flannel shirt and a pair of duffel trousers tucked into heavy leather sea boots. He seldom wore a coat except in storms, and then it was a brown canvas thing lined with sheepskin that he had bought long ago at a trading post on the Labrador. He never wore a hat.

The cook had washed and ironed his small stock of white shirts and starched his half-dozen collars. An old mackintosh was slung over his shoulder. A pair of new shoes, ordered by mail last year, gleamed in the hot sunshine and creaked at every step. He felt quite well dressed. After all there shouldn't be anything strange, in Nova Scotia anyhow, about a man coming from the seaward a little too big for his clothes, and his clothes a bit out of style. It was not until he had boarded a train, and the train had put him down in the city, that he noticed people staring.

Carney stared himself. Everybody looked queer, especially the women—skirts up to their knees and hats down over their ears. Most of them seemed to have cut off their hair. Some of them looked like young men. What the deuce! Even the streets looked queer. All these motorcars! On his way to Marina in 1910 he had counted six on a Halifax street and thought it marvelous. Now they were everywhere, dodging among the horse traffic, blowing horns, giving off a great stink of gasoline. Even the people on foot seemed to be in a new and frantic hurry. Young women rushed about with anxious faces as if their lives depended on getting in or out of the shops in the least possible time.

They brushed past Carney trailing exotic scents like a swift procession of flowers. And their faces were like flowers, the kind you saw in florists' shops, very pretty and unreal and very much alike. He recalled something Skane had said, about women painting themselves like Indians since war began in '14. Skane said things like that, of course. He disliked women and you took what he said about them with a grain of salt. Yet here they were, painted right enough. He thought how in 1910 a painted woman was said to be “fast.” Now they were all fast—going like mad, in fact. What had happened? Was it the war? Or was this “progress”?

He was bewildered. After all, ten years was not a long time. It had gone by very quickly now that he looked back on it. It seemed only yesterday that he was driving down to the waterfront in a horse-cab, on his way to the ship for Marina, and pleased as Punch with his first post as chief operator. He remembered the hack rattling down George Street, the steady clip-clop of the cabby's nag, the first sight of masts above the shops and sheds, and the reek of codfish drying on the flat roofs of the warehouses. Everything then had seemed decent and fixed in its pattern. Women in big hats, with masses of piled hair, with puffed shoulders, and skirts that came down to the toes; women without legs, almost without feet, moving along like images on wheels, towed by invisible cords. And men in bowlers, in waistcoats with large and drooping watch chains, in wrinkled trousers with a comfortable look about them; men with big mustaches, with handsome beards. He looked about him now. Not a mustache anywhere except those comic clipped things under the young chaps' noses. And where were all the beards?

The wireless office was in a street near the wharves, where he had left it. Something unchanged anyhow! He approached the door with the air of a man coming home. It had always been more like a men's club than an office. The Superintendent, a fat red-haired man, and his clerk, both former operators, had faced each other over a big oak desk whose edge was scored by their heels in leisure moments, and charred by neglected cigarettes. Operators from ships in the port had drifted in and out, filling the air with smoke and tales. Now and then a chap looked in for mail or to pick up travel-money on his way from one shore station to another, joshing with the seagoing “ops” about the joys of life at Cape Race or the Lurcher Shoal or some other Godforsaken corner of the coast. It was a kind of cult, speaking a language of its own that had to do with keys and phones and sparks and aerials; a band of men, most of them young, set apart from the rest of mankind by a curious knowledge, and having about them an air of the sea and of something else, not easy to define.

In those days ops were comparatively few, and most of the shore-station chaps you knew. You shouted their names and punched them in the ribs, as if you were all a band of wandering brothers who came together now and then for old times' sake. Everyone talked at once, the names of ships and ports and capes and islands flew back and forth, and the Superintendent put up his heels and lit another cigarette and enjoyed the racket. Aboard ship you were Sparks, a young lubber playing with dangerous and weird devices. On far coastal stations, where the only neighbors were Eskimos or fishing folk, you were a lucky devil who got fifty or sixty dollars a month for sitting in front of a magic box. But here in this room above the Halifax docks you were a god who talked across the world and knew your worth.

Carney's anticipation faded as he stepped inside the door. He found himself in a severe little anteroom stinking of fresh paint. Half a dozen hardwood chairs were arranged along the wall like those of a dentist's waiting room. Through an open door he could see two young women typing busily, and beyond them another door with frosted glass bearing the words Superintendent, Atlantic Division. Two youngsters of nineteen or twenty, in merchant marine uniforms with twined golden cords on the cuffs, sat with a resigned air in the row of chairs. They inspected Carney for a moment and turned their eyes away.

One of the girls came to the doorway and inspected Carney with care. He did not look like an operator. Operators were cheerful youngsters, usually in uniform, and inclined to be flip if you gave them the slightest encouragement. The present Superintendent had impressed that upon his typists. It had taken him some time to clear out the old easygoing atmosphere and put the office on what he called a proper business footing. The old days were gone. There were so many operators now, and so many more important things than personnel. “Find out what they want,” he had told the girls, “and get them out as quickly as you can.”

The big man in the shabby clothes was obviously different. His thick blond hair, his crisp beard, his calm blue gaze, the slow instinctive gesture towards his forehead as she approached, his whole fish-out-of-water attitude set him apart from the young men on the chairs. She summed him up as a tramp skipper wanting to sign on an operator, or perhaps to inquire about a wireless set.

“Yes,” she said, lifting her brows. She was a tall girl, rather pale, with tortoise-shell glasses. Her brown skirt was neat but too long to be fashionable, and she wore a cool white blouse. Her dark hair was done up in, a thick bun at the back of her head. The young ops on the chairs ignored her. Their eyes were focused on the other girl, whose shorn blond head caught the afternoon sun and whose silken legs, generously displayed through the open door, they regarded with a frank and cheerful lust.

“The Superintendent,” Carney murmured in his deep voice. “Is he in?”

“Mr. Hurd's rather busy. Is there something I can do?”

He hesitated. He pictured the mysterious Hurd engaged in matters of importance to which the affairs of Matthew Carney were as dust. The whole atmosphere of the place, including this young woman with her strictly business air, made him feel an interloper.

“My name's Carney,” he said awkwardly, but in that rich musical tone. “I'm from Marina—Marina Island, that is. I've come ashore on leave and I was told to report here.”

“Oh!” she gave him another long glance and turned away, walking past the blond girl, and rapped on the glass of the inner door. She stepped inside and reappeared almost instantly saying briskly, “Go right in, Mr. Carney, please.”

Carney passed inside and found a slim neat-featured man of thirty rising behind a glass-topped desk and thrusting out a hand. Carney had never seen him before. Mr. Hurd wore pince-nez, which added a note of cleverness to an otherwise undistinguished face. His gleaming black hair was neatly brushed and there was a carnation in his buttonhole. There was a touch of the sea about him, faint and remote, as if it had not lasted long and as if a good deal of office air had intervened. He had the look of a man who for years had enjoyed good meals, steam heat, a soft bed and the embraces of a satisfactory wife. At this moment his eyes were curious but his smile was like the sun.

“Carney? Carney of Marina? Well, well! At last we get a look at you!” They shook hands. The Superintendent waved him to a chair.

“This is an occasion, Carney! You know, you're rather famous. The operators tell all sorts of tales.” And seeing Carney's uplifted brows, “Well, you know, they talk of Marina as if it were the last place God made. And of course they're a foot-loose lot. Any man who's stayed in one place for ten years is a phenomenon. Anyone who's stayed that long on Marina is, well, a kind of monstrosity. Nonsense, of course. They haven't a sense of duty nowadays, not like the old-timers; not like you. Why, you're a pioneer, one of the originals. Is it true that you helped Marconi fly his kite in Newfoundland?”

“Yes. What's queer about that?”

“Nothing at all. It's magnificent! You're—you're one of the great few. Everybody on the Canadian coast has heard of you. Everybody knows your hand at the key on Marina. Everybody talks about ‘Carney of Marina.' Do you mean to say you don't know that?”

Carney regarded him seriously. “There must be other chaps who've stayed in one place a long time. Nothing wonderful in that. When I went to Marina I'd planned to ask for relief in a year or two, but the time went by. Then the war came, all the young chaps off to the navy or the army or some other excitement; somebody had to stay, so I stayed. Foot-loose? I used to be that but I got over it. Went to sea as a boy and got it out of my system. I wouldn't have asked for leave now if it wasn't a bit important—one or two things I've put off too long.”

“Of course,” Hurd murmured, all solicitude. Men like Carney were hard to find. Life on the shore station was lonely and monotonous and the new generation of operators wanted nothing of that sort. Young, feckless, no thought for tomorrow—the war, no doubt—all for the blue water and the far ports of the world, the taste of strange drinks and the tingle of foreign women. When you hinted at a job up the coast they said, “I got through the war alive, why bury myself now?” And off they went, cap on one ear, flashing gold braid and brass buttons like admirals, and winking at the girls.

“I'm going back of course,” Carney said.

“Ah! Good! Meanwhile a run about the mainland won't do you any harm, old man. Look after your business, whatever it is, and then take a holiday—you've earned it. The
Elgin
won't be going back to Marina till the end of August, so you've three months clear. Have a good time. Anything you want? Money?”

Carney shook his head. “My pay's been banked all this time, you know. Nothing I want really, thanks.”

“What about the station? You left Skane in charge, eh? A queer sort, but a good man, I think. I sent young Sargent down to take the empty watch, and he'll stay the full year.”

“Yes, I talked to him on the beach, when he got out of the boat. Seemed a nice young chap. Stick it all right, once he gets used to it. Of course he'll find it's not like life aboard ship. MacGillivray's year is up in July. He'll want to come away when I go back.”