The Nymph and the Lamp

Thomas H Raddall

• Publisher: Nimbus
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781551098531
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Fiction
• Index: Literature

From an award-winning, master storyteller, a classic love story set on a barren, post-World War I island known for its shipwrecks. A Nova Scotia classic, The Nymph and the Lamp is the story of Isabel Jardin, a strong and sensitive woman, and the men in her life—the stoic Matthew Carney, a living legend, the passionate Gregory Skane, and the innocent but infatuated Jim Sargent. Set in the 1920s, the story unfolds against the wild desolation of Marina, a wind-swept island off the coast of Nova Scotia, as the characters come to terms with their personal contradictions and the demands of isolated island life.

CHAPTER 1

When the Lord Elgin set Carney ashore at Packet Harbor he was already a legend on the coast. He was one of the small group of telegraphers who had manned the first Canadian wireless stations in the days when Marconi’s invention was brand-new and regarded by most people as a species of black magic. For years he had served in lonely outposts, chiefly on Marina Island, a sandy speck in the North Atlantic eighty miles from the nearest land. It was a desolate place, the scene of many wrecks, and regarded with equal dread by passing shipmasters and the young men of the coastal radio service. Three or four times a year a government ship called with stores and mail for the lightkeepers, the lifesaving crew and the staff of the small wireless station, and then left them to their thoughts.

Among the wireless operators Marina was rated the worst station in the service, and there was an unwritten law that twelve months’ service there entitled a man to a fortnight’s holiday in civilization and then a more congenial post somewhere on the mainland. For a decade Carney had watched his juniors come and go. From the moment they landed in grim resignation at his station they counted the days and talked of the time when they could go “ashore,” as if Marina were some sort of Flying Dutchman forever breasting the long seas rolling down from Newfoundland but never getting anywhere. Most of them were young, and all were convinced that a year on the island was all that a man could stand without losing his wits. Carney’s clear and untroubled mind after all his time on Marina they put down to a freak of nature.

In the service he was regarded as a fixture. In the wireless cabins of grubby Cape Breton colliers, in the smart varnish-reeking radio rooms of liners out of Halifax, in weatherbeaten stations from the butt of Nova Scotia to the peak of Labrador, men spoke of him as “Carney you know, Carney of Marina,” as if he were part of the place like one of the wild ponies on the dunes.

Men who had served at Marina wore that service afterwards like a badge of fortitude. They spoke of it with a wry pride, and their tales of the island and of Carney passed by word of mouth, by letter, and by dot-and-dash gossip from Cape Sable to Cape Chidley. Even inland, on the Great Lakes, young fresh-water radio operators had visions of a giant with a yellow beard and mild blue eyes, a sort of latter-day Robinson Crusoe who lived with two Man Fridays and a morose male cook on the most desolate of desert islands and was content to call it home.

They said that he had gone to sea as a boy and sailed before the mast in square-rigged ships; that he had helped Marconi to fly the kite that picked up the first wireless message across the Atlantic; that he had been in the Arctic with Peary and Bob Bartlett; that he was ill-educated and yet a kind of genius with gasoline engines, dynamos and the mysterious tangle of switches, wires, dials and knobs that made up the world’s greatest miracle.

They vowed that he swam like a seal and rode the wild ponies of Marina like a Cossack; that he was the most fearless boatman in a place where the surf had to be seen to be believed; that on stormy days and nights he liked to stride along the beach with his yellow hair blowing in the wind, shouting lines from Byron at the top of his wonderful voice; that he was fifty or sixty and looked no more than thirty-five; that he had been crossed in love in his youth and had never spoken to a woman since.

Some of this was false, some garbled, and some true. The last was a fable. In the year 1920, when Carney left Marina for his first holiday in years, he was just forty-six; and he spoke to the island women as he spoke to their men, in a pleasant voice that did not distinguish between one and the other, as if they were all made sexless by the barren life they lived. His manner was at once friendly and remote, as if he were separated from the other folk of the island by the mysterious spaces of the ether in which for so many years he had lived and worked and thought.

Young operators in the solitude of Marina found this manner irritating. It was outrageous that Carney should not feel as bereft, as restless and as bored as they. He seemed inhuman. The only women on the island were the wives of lightkeepers and lifesavers, too busy mothering broods of children to notice Carney much. They found him “queer,” and, pressed for an explanation, said that he seemed like a man in a dream. It was perhaps the best description of Carney; at least it could be understood.

In the early days radio work had a dreamlike quality that grew upon a man. As late as 1910, when Carney went to Marina, there was nothing to do but sit for hours with a pair of heavy old-fashioned phones clasped on his head, listening intently in a void. Sometimes for the benefit of new operators who took the modern traffic as a matter of course he liked to recall those days.

“Only a few ships were fitted, you know, before the Titanic went down. The shipowners considered it a fad. It cost a lot of money and it didn’t work very well. Aboard ship you were a bit of a joke, a fellow wearing an officer’s uniform who sailed the sea in a chair, sitting in a cubbyhole and playing with knobs and electric sparks. That was what they called you, Sparks, and they grinned and told you how useless you were, you and your silly box of tricks. Oh, it was hard to keep your faith in it, sometimes. You’d sit, watch after watch, hearing nothing but static, and every half-hour solemnly cracking off CQ-CQ-CQ with your spark—like yelling ‘Hey, Mac!’ down a drainpipe in the dark. If you got a reply it gave you quite a start. Your fingers would tremble on the key. You’d muddle your dots and dashes a bit. You felt like one of those old prophets in a desert somewhere, talking to Jehovah.”

Carney had been at the Marina key when the Titanic struck ice and went down like a punctured can. He talked about that a good deal. The Titanic affair had made a tremendous change. After that Sparks got a grudging respect aboard ship, he was even a hero for a time. Before the fuss died down governments had passed laws, and shipowners had to install the mysterious apparatus whether they liked it or not. By 1914 the sea air was alive with dot-and-dash talk. Then came the German war and there fell another silence, weird and different, prickling with the strain of all those taut men listening about the sea; a silence so intense that it hurt, relieved now and then by some ship, attacked and desperate, flicking a scrabble of letters and figures across the void; or a shore station, solemn and purposeful like the voice of God, pouring out a stream of mysterious cipher and stopping with the final click of a water tap shut off.

Carney had taken the war years as calmly as he took the sinking of the Titanic. There had been some danger. The island, naked and remote, especially the wireless station with its mast thrust into the sky, offered an easy mark for the German submarine gunners. But nothing happened. Bits of ship wreckage came ashore: sometimes a boat or a ship’s raft splintered with bullets, and now and then a sodden ruin of flesh and bone rolling drunkenly in the surf with a lifebelt still knotted about its breast.

Supplies and mails were irregular. The regular system of reliefs collapsed from a chronic shortage of trained men. There were weeks and months when the island crew existed on short rations and what was worse, no news. They seemed abandoned and forgotten, and the strain of their incessant vigil in that evil silence put their nerves on edge. They squabbled over petty matters. Sometimes they tore at each other with fists and claws in sudden explosions of violence that cleared the air of the station for a time. There was one who went queer and began to see beautiful women beckoning over the dunes on moonlit nights, and they had to watch him with care until the supply steamer came and Carney packed him off to Halifax.

But now the war was two years past. The phones buzzed with sea gossip again, musical now in the improved modern manner, dots and dashes on every note from the high canary warble of the German ships to the deep drones of Halifax and Cape Sable and the clear wailing voice of Cape Race. Even Marina’s hoarse bass had been changed to a shrill treble. (“They’ve made a eunuch of us,” operator Skane had grumbled.) But of course these were trivial things compared with what was happening “ashore.” The war had thrust radio forward a good twenty years. The wireless telephone had appeared, and now in one or two American cities there was a strange new business called “broadcasting” that promised literally to set the world by the ears.

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 for...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTENTS
• CHAPTER 1
• CHAPTER 2
• CHAPTER 3
• CHAPTER 4
• CHAPTER 5
• CHAPTER 6
• CHAPTER 7
• CHAPTER 8
• CHAPTER 9
• CHAPTER 10
• CHAPTER 11
• CHAPTER 12
• CHAPTER 13
• CHAPTER 14
• CHAPTER 15
• CHAPTER 16
• CHAPTER 17
• CHAPTER 18
• CHAPTER 19
• CHAPTER 20
• CHAPTER 21
• CHAPTER 22
• CHAPTER 23
• CHAPTER 24
• CHAPTER 25
• CHAPTER 26
• CHAPTER 27
• CHAPTER 28
• CHAPTER 29
• CHAPTER 30
• CHAPTER 31
• CHAPTER 32
• CHAPTER 33
• CHAPTER 34
• CHAPTER 35
• CHAPTER 36
• CHAPTER 37
• CHAPTER 38
• CHAPTER 39