The Nymph and the Lamp (4 page)

At the end of a month the interest of Saint John's grew thin; the old sea pictures faded, and suddenly the harbor smells offended him. It was time for what he had come to regard as the supreme experience of his life. He took passage in a grubby little steamer for the north shore, and stood at the rail for hours in a cold wind blowing down from Greenland, watching the slow procession of rugged islands and the grim gray face of the coast. In a long swell out of the northeast the packet-steamer wallowed with the energy of a dog in grass, flinging up her nose and plunging deeply, and giving first one flank and then the other to the green sweep of the sea.

From time to time a deck hand, a grinning unwashed youth, in a checkered shirt and greasy cap, stopped on his errands about the ship to point out some feature of the land. Carney answered him a little testily. What did the young fool think he was, a tourist of some sort? “Look here,” he wanted to say, “I knew this coast before you were born, from Belle Isle to Port aux Basques, round by the east. When I was your age I'd been to Spain and Italy, and down to Barbados and Brazil—in schooners and square-riggers, mind, none of your stinking steam tubs—and before that I'd been out to the sea-ice five seasons with the swilers. And you tell
me
that's the Horse Chops!”

But he said nothing, of course. The habit of silence had fallen on him once again after those eager conversations in the fo'c'sles of Saint John's. His face was unmoved as the sailor chattered and the miles went past. His blue gaze rested on the passing scene with an immense gravity, as if all this were some solemn tale read before, but whose climax he had forgotten and was trying to recall.

He slept in a cabin redolent of unwashed passengers coming down from Labrador in the years gone by. There was a scurry of rats behind the bulkhead. When he switched out the light a host of cockroaches emerged from the ancient woodwork and ran about the cabin ceiling, dropping on the floor with the persistent tap of a leaky roof in rain. He smiled in the darkness. Like the sealers, that! Life hadn't changed much, up here at any rate. And tomorrow…ah, tomorrow! He felt a glow of excitement in his big frame, lying in the unclean bunk.

On the next afternoon the ship crept into a steep nook of the coast. She put ashore Carney and his baggage, disgorged a few packages of small freight, and then departed with a single absurd shriek that fled along the cliffs. Carney picked up his suitcases and trudged up the stony street like a man in a trance. By Jingo, it was here all right! Fishing stages clinging like a wooden growth to the face of the rock; small gray houses with curled and weatherbeaten shingles perched amongst the rocks, each chimney with a blue wisp of wood-smoke, each dooryard with its nets spread out to dry, its brushwood flakes covered with split fish, its heap of firewood sawed and split, its beaten path to the village street.

Here was the church, and there the rickety schoolhouse, the village shop, the post office sign that traveled across the street whenever the government changed, the nimble goats with their silly gray faces, the ragged children playing, the women dragging buckets from the wells, the old men with brown withere-dapple faces smoking in the sunshine—it was like a photograph, lost for years in the bottom of a ditty box, and suddenly held to the light.

Outside the shop he put his burdens down. A small bell swung and jingled when he opened the door, and a young woman appeared through an inner doorway and stepped behind the counter.

“I'm looking for a Carney woman,” he said, in the idiom of the coast, “who married a man from up-along, Betts Cove way. He came this way to fish, thirty-five or thirty-six years ago.”

The woman sucked in her lips. “That's a long time—'fore I was born. I'll have to ask Pa.” She opened the inner door and cried Carney's errand to a presence within. A voice replied, old and thin, quavering indistinguishable words.

“I dunno,” the woman cried again. “He's a big man with a beard off the boat.” Again the distant whisper, trembling, halting, going on again. She turned to Carney with an apologetic smile.

“He says she's gone—dead, years and years ago. She marrit a man Lewis from up-along, and died in childbed the next spring.”

For a full minute he was stunned, a bearded statue towering in the midst of the shop. Then, “I…I see. And Lewis?”

“Lewis, he went away after she died and got some longshore work in Saint John's. Never came back here. Marrit again, 'slikely.”

Another long silence, broken only by the tick of the old alarm clock on the wall.

“The Carney girl—would there be any of her folk hereabouts?”

The woman echoed this through the doorway. Again the old voice like a whisper from the grave itself.

“He says there's none. Her folk died long ago. She was a fine upstandin' gel, he remembers that. Her folk were big people, quiet like. Never had much to say. No Carneys left here now. That's all he knows. 'Course, he's gettin' old now and forgetful-like.”

“Yes, of course.” Carney turned away quickly lest she see his tears. All the charm of his romantic journey had vanished with that final whisper through the door. He thought of all the years in ships, in dismal waterfront boardinghouses, in isolated radio shacks about the coast, where at growing intervals he had promised himself to go back, to seek out his mother and see her face. He had conjured visions of finding her in poverty and alone, of stepping through the doorway like a prince out of a fairy tale, flinging down money and crying, “I'm Matthew—I'm your son!” And all that time she had been dead, thrust away and forgotten in some patch of soil amongst the rocks!

So end the dreams of so many of the waifs, the gypsies of the sea, who never find time to write letters, who hug to themselves a notion that some day they will return, and never do, or who come back like Carney and perceive that life has played a trick upon them after all.

Carney looked past the village to the harsh cliffs and the windy sea, with a sudden anger, as if they were responsible for the cheat. God! All that time in lonely places, doing the job faithfully, lost in a round of days that came and passed and turned up as tomorrows like the nags of a shabby merry-go-round—and what had he got to show for it? Money in a bank at Halifax—too much for his wants, and a smirking compliment from that fellow in the office!

The suitcases were at his feet. He sank upon them in the village street like a traveler in a railway station, thankful for one familiar object in a vast confusion. The urchins paused in their play and stared, and from behind the tobacco advertisements in her window the woman of the shop peered at him curiously. They saw the stranger throw up his head and laugh, his big shoulders shaking, as if he had come upon an enormous joke in the dust of the street. The children drew away, as if he were accursed. And so he was.

CHAPTER 3

A man accursed must find something to occupy or to dull his mind. For Carney the usual ways were closed. His pride of soul refused the indignity of drunkenness. Women were out of the question. Work was weeks and miles away. Movement and change were his only resources, and he spent a great part of the next two months in coastal packets, in trains, in strange hotels, with the air of a somnambulist. He remembered little of it afterwards. Quebec was a hill and an accent. Montreal a rush of faces, trams and motorcars, Toronto a hot desert of brick and stone.

Towards the end of August he found himself back in Halifax, not quite sure how he got there, making his way towards the waterfront with the instinct of a stranded fish. For a long time he stood on a pier, sniffing the harbor air, and with a summer rain beating on his face. He found a room in a small hotel near the railway station and walked about looking at the shop windows. At noon he dropped into a seat in a small restaurant near the docks and saw across the tablecloth a young woman whose face was vaguely familiar.

She acknowledged his presence with a flick of gray eyes and busied herself with her meal. In all innocence Carney uttered the glib greeting of the men he most despised.

“Haven't I seen you before somewhere?”

She looked up and said straitly, “Of course. In the wireless office. You came in to see Mr. Hurd.”

“Ah! You're the young lady with the glasses. I didn't know you without them.”

“I only wear them at my work.”

“It makes a difference.”

Another gray look, suspicious, this. But there was no guile in his bronzed face. She said quickly, “I can see quite as well without them. They're just for easing the strain of my work—all that typing. At least, that's what the optometrist told me. They always sell you a pair of glasses, whether you need them or not.”

“You look better without them.”

He said it with no desire to please but as he would have remarked, for the sake of polite conversation, that the sky was blue or the breeze a little cool for August. The girl stirred her tea and considered him as he talked to the waiter. The wrinkles at Carney's eye corners gave him the look of a man who has laughed a good deal in his life, but there was nothing of the jester about him. The sun, she surmised, beating up from the sea and those bare sands at Marina. She pictured him on a lonely beach, squinting against the glare. He turned to her again.

“Can you tell me when the boat leaves for my station?”

“Next week—Thursday, I think. Are you sorry to be going back?”

“No. When I came ashore I felt like a kid out of school. But things didn't turn out the way I expected. I daresay I've been too long away from all this. Everything's changed. I feel like the fellow in the book, Rip Van What's-his-name. It came to me suddenly, in a hotel somewhere, Toronto, I think, that Marina was the only place that had meaning for me. Sounds funny, doesn't it?”

“I think it sounds rather sad. Tell me about your island—why is it called Marina?”

“Well, that's a Spanish word for sailor. The story goes that in early times a Spanish explorer came upon the island and found a wreck and a lot of dead seamen flung up the beach. So he marked it Isla de Marinas on his map. Our people dropped the ‘s,' that's all.”

“What sort of place is it?”

“Just a lot of sand, shaped like a half moon. Not a stone big enough to throw at a bird. Sand all stretched out in beaches and tossed up in heaps and partly covered with dune grass. Little ponds of fresh water in the hollows, and a rim of turf and reeds and cranberry vines. Wild strawberries, beach peas, a few low bushes of wild rose, blackberry and blueberry and so on. Nothing higher than your hips.”

“No trees?”

“None. Even the bushes only grow in the deepest hollows, where there's shelter. We get the force of every wind that blows. In winter sometimes the sand's like a blast out of a shotgun. Twenty years ago a Deputy Minister of Marine sent down a lot of trees to be planted. Some kind of tree that grows in sandy places on the coast of France. Thought they'd take root and stop the drift of the dunes, make shelter for the wild ponies, make the island show up better from the seaward, all that. Well, they didn't last a year. The ponies took the plantation—five thousand saplings, fancy that—for a new kind of forage. Gnawed off all the bark they could reach, and the sandstorms did the rest. The whole thing was dead by spring and buried in the fall. God may make trees, but the Devil made Marina—and he writes the rules out there.”

“You make it sound very wild and terrible,” Miss Jardine said.

“It's wild, anyhow. Mind you, it's all right in summer when the wind's warm and the sea behaves. Miles of the finest kind of sand, pony rides, good swimming in the lagoon, surf bathing everywhere else—if you could tow the whole jingbang down off New York somewhere or Boston, say, you'd make a fortune just renting bathing suits and beach umbrellas. But you can't. You can't even sink the thing and get rid of it. That's the devil of it.”

She smiled at him over an uplifted teacup. “You seem to have a great respect for the Devil.”

Carney grinned. “Well, he's clever, you've got to admit. And he works hard at his trade. Who but Old Nick would have thought of shoveling up twenty-odd miles of sand, right out there in the North Atlantic ship lane, where it's got no right to be? There's no other way to account for it, in spite of what they say about the Gulf Stream, and the Labrador Drift, and the Saint Lawrence Current, and the silt of ages and the rest of it. Pooh! The Devil, I say. And look at the beggar's patience! He had to wait for Columbus to discover America before the thing began to pay. But after that—phew! Do you know what sailors used to call it—what the newspapers still call it? The graveyard of the Atlantic!”

Carney could not remember when he had talked so much to a woman. It was a relief to talk to anyone after all that mute wandering in strange towns and cities, caught like a chip in a flood of indifferent and even hostile faces. And it was easy to run on about the one thing he knew well, especially to someone who at least knew what he was talking about. He offered her a glance of apology and found her looking at him curiously, as if she had taken him too carelessly at first and now found him of interest.

“Go on,” she said.

“The only people there are on the government establishment lightkeepers, the lifesaving crew, the wireless operators, and a number of wives and children. About forty or fifty in all. We're all there to beat the Devil, so to speak. Everybody has a job to do or a watch to keep, so we don't see much of each other except when the steamer comes and we all get together at the west end of the island to pick up our stores and mail. That's three or four times a year. There's a telephone line, of course. The stations are scattered along the whole length of the island and there's a lighthouse at each end.”