The Nymph and the Lamp (32 page)

This is the way your mind goes, Isabel told herself. When you come, you don't notice it. During the first winter, during the long nights and the short gray days, during months of hearkening to the wind in the aerials, you begin to feel it. After the second winter you'll believe it. Then you'll be one with the rest of them, a primitive creature in a lost corner of the world, the prey of phantoms, a prisoner of the weather and the sea—and of the dark. Three or four times a year you'll dress up in shabby finery and go down the beach to make your obeisance to O'Dell, to finger some scrap of handwriting from the outside world as if it were a talisman, to regard the other prisoners dressed in clothes like yours, all wearing the same smiling masks, all uttering the same greetings, the same poor gossip, the same little worn-out jokes; and then you'll go back to your hiding-places among the dunes, back to your servitude, to that eternal surveillance by the watchful eyes of the dead.

Oh yes, it was true. True! For a long time Matthew had been immune from all that. His simple mind had been proof against it. He had even preferred to roam about the beaches in the dark; he had loved a storm at night, the turmoil of great seas rolling in, white on black, and breaking and slithering almost to his feet, and the sound of his own rich voice flinging Byron's verses down the wind. No wonder the islanders looked upon him with a certain awe! But now he went no more in the dark. The fall of dusk now closed the prison doors for him as for the Kahns, the Giswells and the rest. Skane still made his lone dark journeys after dreaming at McBain's piano, but it seemed to her that Skane was not immune either. It was just that he was haunted by a different set of ghosts, the shades of that ghastly lifeboat in the winter sea, and nothing here could have much terror for him. As for Sargent, that ingenuous youth had not been long enough on Marina to come under the full spell. He was like herself, a novice in the sepulcher.

With the slow passage of the winter weeks Isabel found herself slipping into these dark moods more often, and they lasted longer. The pattern was always the same; and there was always the same sense of tragedy beside her, all about her, whispering in tones too thin to understand, like some far ship in the phones, calling Marina with signals too faint to be read. At night as she went to draw the blind in the bedroom her own image on the black pane greeted her like another self looking in, and the expression on that other face was always one of sharp anxiety. The shade came down, like a curtain drawn across a picture, and then there was only the lamp and the familiar furniture; but when she arose and dressed in the black winter mornings to prepare breakfast for her men the image was awaiting her at the pane, it appeared at once as the blind went up, and there was the same question on its face.

So the time crawled, as the sun crawled north towards the Line. The men moved about the station like automatons. Their talk was listless. The last magazine had been read to rags, the last fillip wrung out of their battered playing cards. They went on watch with eagerness; it was the one time in the day when each of them became fully alive. With Matthew, with Sargent, but mostly with Skane, as they sat at the instruments, Isabel had come to know that marvelous sensation of release, of flight into another existence, which came by putting on the phones. And because her feminine mind was not hampered by their male self-discipline, the professional boredom with which, instinctively, they masked their interest, she saw more clearly than any of them the romance, the miracle of what they called, almost contemptuously, “pounding brass.”

When you put on the phones it was as if your inner self stepped out of the bored and weary flesh and left it sitting in the chair in that barren room. For a space you were part of another world, the real, the actual living world of men and ships and ports, in which Marina was nothing but a sandbar and a trio of call letters in the signal books. Whistling, growling, squealing, moaning, here were the voices of men transmuted through their finger tips, issuing in dots and dashes, speaking twenty languages in one clear universal code, flinging what they had to say across the enormous spaces of the sea.

Here were the Americans with their quenched-spark sets, their high flute notes; and British tramps with their synchronous rotaries, their hoarse baritone whose tune was halfway down the scale; the Canadians and their high wailing rotaries; the curious musical pop-pop-popping of the Germans with their Telefunkens; the French tramps and trawlers bleating like small sheep lost in the green wet pastures of the sea, and their liners crying out in a quick precise tenor to the shore; the harsh scream of the occasional Japs, whose names were all something-
Maru,
jamming the six-hundred-meter wave with their infernal five kilowatt sparks for an hour at a time, oblivious of international regulations; the quick, jerky piping of the Italians; the ringing manly bosun-tones of the Norwegians, the Swedes and Danes.

All these sparks bellowed, cried, muttered or whispered together on the six-hundred-meter wave, the main channel for ship traffic. At night when the darkness increased their range by three, four or five times the uproar was terrific, the sound of a vast swamp on a spring night filled with vociferous frogs. By day the range and the Babel subsided; but there was seldom quiet. Ships talked to each other, or they demanded notice from the shore, crying the attention of New York or Boston or Cape Race or Marina, that outpost which could pluck messages far out of the ocean air and fling them on to the landline at Halifax. To wireless operators on the North Atlantic run these stations, known indifferently by name but intimately by their call signals—NAH, WBF, VCE, VCT—these were the tongues and ears of North America, the listening posts, the speaking trumpets of the continent.

The great liners with their tall masts and powerful transmitters bestrode the ocean, hurling messages now to one side, now the other. These were the prima donnas of the show, with strong clear voices sheering through the boom and trill of the chorus, uttering a few clipped notes here and there, and then bursting forth in long arias addressed to London, Paris or New York. Their voices rang about the wide sea spaces and all the others shrank to a murmur. But when the last cadenza died in a final dot or dash the chorus rose once more, the vast trampnavy, the rabble of the sea, insistent and tumultuous, demanding the notice of each other or of some distant station on the land.

In all this medley there were certain sounds that had special meaning. Your own call signal first; but that was burned into your mind with letters of fire so that, waking or dozing in a dull watch, or reading or writing or pottering with the dials, its merest whisper brought you erect and alert in the chair, reaching out for pencil and message pad. There was CQ, the anonymous call that might mean anybody, the constant “Hey, Mac!” of the groping tramps. There was QST, the general call to all stations, ship and shore, which usually had to do with navigation warnings, icebergs or derelicts in the lanes, and suchlike matters. But most significant was a simple group of dots and dashes that for convenience were written SOS, although it could have been VTB or any combination of letters involving three dots, three dashes and three dots, all run together without pause. This was the magic symbol by which all the frogs in the great sea-swamp could be hushed in a minute. For every operator, even for cynics like Skane and old hands like Carney, that sound never lost its thrill, its quick clutch at the heart.

Usually the cry came from some foundering tramp, one still small voice in the uproar, barely heard by one or two ships on the edge of its range. But those ships spoke quickly, urgently, and were heard by the nearest shore station, the traffic policeman whose voice was law. Then a lonely man at the key of some outpost like Marina sent a trumpet call ringing through Babel like the voice of God, calling QST—“All Stations”—and demanding silence, adding in a swift flicker of dots and dashes “STD BI FOR SOS.” Silence fell within his range, and on the edge of it other shore stations took up the cry, and it went up and down the coast. Here and there a small ship-voice, uncomprehending, uttered a call or went on with some petty business; but then a shore station or a nearby ship cut in with a savage QRT—“Shut up!”

When this took place at night, with its enlarged range, the great silence spread like an infection all the way from Labrador to Florida, and you felt in that enormous emptiness hundreds of alert men on the coast and in the ships, listening, waiting, straining to catch the voice of distress. It was magnificent—all the traffic, all the urgent business of that vast reach of sea and seaboard held up and silenced because, somewhere in the darkness, a few men were in peril.

Then out of the void that still small voice again, uttering dots and dashes on a small auxiliary set because the engine room was flooded and the main dynamo dead, crying faintly the name of a ship, sinking, latitude so-and-so, longitude so-and-so. Silence again. Then the shore trumpet ringing out, repeating, flinging over the wet wilderness that brief appeal. And again silence. You could imagine, yes, you could
see
the operators in the ships, talking to the bridge by telephone, or running up there with the figures jotted on a message form; and you could see the officers of the watch, the smart liner-officers in blue and brass, the unkempt mates of tramps, the grim skippers aroused from their berths, the heads together under the chartroom lamps, the stalking legs of brass dividers, the slither of black parallel-rulers, the pencil calculations and jottings; and you could hear the rumbling voices—“Sparks? Here's our position and speed”—“Five hours”—“Twelve hours”—“Sorry, we can't do him any good, we're four hundred miles to the east”—“Heavy sea from the nor'ard here, anyone nearer?”—“Make it by daylight, weather holding”—“What's their wind, can you get their wind? If they take to the boats they'll drift.”

Dots-and-dashes in the phones again. Ships reporting position. A stride to the chart on the station wall. Nearest? This one. But he's only a tramp doing seven knots—poor coal, probably. Next one's a tanker doing close to twelve—says he's got a heavy cross-sea on that bearing but can make it. But here's a liner doing twenty, farther off than the others of course, but he could be there in less time. So many hours. Um! Chances are the ship'll be down before that. Case of looking for boats. Head all three of 'em for it, then. That other chap, too, and the Yankee trawler. We can turn 'em back again if the liner does the trick.

Back to the key. The trumpet blaring. Situation thus-and-so. Suggest this, suggest that. (“Never command,” Carney would say. “Remember, you control all wireless traffic in your area but you can't command the skippers. By Jingo, nobody commands a skipper but his owners and his conscience—and you've got no time to contact owners when a ship's going under.”) From there on you sat silent, hearing the cross-talk of the rescuing ships. When all was working properly you notified the rest of the coast that traffic could be resumed. At once the swamp came back to life, but with one conspicuous spot of calm in the area of the ship in distress. There nobody talked but the ships concerned, and you stood by ready to snap at any ham-handed fool who interfered.

Oh yes, it was wonderful. It was exciting. The blood in your veins, gone sluggish in so much monotony, went tingling through them then. You were alive in every nerve. Whenever you put on the phones you felt the importance of the whole complex system of which your lonely outpost was a part; but when a ship cried distress in your area you became a god seeing the sparrow's fall. You
saw.
The pictures came on some sort of screen in your mind. Imagination? Part of it, perhaps. It was hard to explain, and Carney and Sargent and Skane had tried to explain it and had failed; it was not until Isabel had spent many hours beside them at the phones that she began to see, dimly, what they meant. The pictures came into your mind with the far thin fluting of the distant spark; it was an induced effect, conveyed by the invisible operator's hand on the key precisely as the motions of a pen across paper convey in a way subtle but very real the writer's personality and character and the emotions of the moment.

This eerie sixth sense came to every operator in a degree that varied with his experience and with the sensitiveness of his own mind and emotions. On the coastal stations, where there was a good deal of interstation traffic, each operator became known to the others by his “hand,” his style, the color of his personality flung on the mind-screens of the others by the mere contact of his fingers on the transmitting key.

As the forms of her three men dwindled and disappeared over the dunes towards the west, Isabel thought upon these things and wondered if she could ever fully acquire that occult art. At all events, she reflected, adjusting the crystal point, for the next four hours I've got “something to do.” As if to prove the matter a bugle sounded in the phones calling Marina. With the ease of practice, almost of habit, she threw the big transmitting switch with her left hand and slipped her right to the key. Stentor in the engine room awakened at her touch and snarled obediently. She smiled, and wondered why she had ever feared the thing. She made her dots and dashes neatly, with that rhythm on which Skane had been so insistent.

She reversed the switch, gave the crystal an expert tap, and picked up a pencil. The small bugle sang in the phones again. She watched the pencil move across the blue message form. It was as Matthew had assured her. “Once you've got the feel of it, you're simply part of the machine. The stuff comes in on the aerials and runs right down to your fingertips.”

It was a routine message; an Italian tramp inward bound for Halifax, informing the agents of its estimated arrival date and time, the bunkers and water required; asking about pratique.