The Nymph and the Lamp Read Online Free

birthplace in a remote fishing village in Newfoundland. It was an odd sentiment; for there was nothing to be sentimental about. At seventeen his mother had been seduced by a glib straw-haired Norwegian from a barque loading dried fish for Pernambuco. She never saw the man again, and Carney was brought up under his mother’s name in the little outport, where such accidents were not uncommon. When she married later it was natural that young Matt should be sent to an orphanage in Saint John’s. He had run away from the place at fourteen and shipped as mess boy in a sealing steamer. From that time he had known nothing but the sea and a queer variety of ports in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, in Labrador, Spain, Italy and South America, seen chiefly in barques and schooners engaged in the salt fish trade.
    At twenty-five he had tired of the sea and found a job on the Newfoundland railways. This had led to a post as agent at a small station in the interior, where he used to lie awake on winter nights wondering what was to become of him. The pay was barely enough to cover his board and clothing, and the prospect of advancement had no more substance than the frost that gleamed so white on the nails protruding through the roof above his head.
    Then, by one of those accidents that make the comedy of life—a train delayed in his station by a snowstorm—he had met a man engaged in the strange new business of wireless telegraphy. The man was looking for a few telegraphers, and Carney’s years at sea had given him a knowledge of the rigger’s craft, very useful to a man engaged in setting up masts and aerials about the coast. So Carney’s life was changed by a whirl of snow out of Labrador; and the change had led him through the years to various bleak places on the Canadian east coast, and finally to Marina.
    The orphanage had taught him to read and write. In the first years of his new profession he had sent for books on electrical theory and studied them with dogged persistence in the long dull watches of the night. Up to a point he had learned a good deal, much more than the average operator of his time. But there was a limit. The new invention grew too fast. It became technical beyond his grasp. The higher mathematics were involved and they towered above his head like a mountain range whose peaks were lost in the clouds.
    In the course of his duties he had acquired a knack with the simple inductance coils, transformers, condensers and other apparatus of the early days, and with the gasoline engines that supplied the power. He fell back on this knowledge at last, and rested content with what the orphanage (with marvelous foresight) had termed the station to which it had pleased God to call him.
    The technical books he had thrown aside. Thereafter his reading was confined to the more romantic sorts of prose, and especially to verse, which he admired. In the course of time and solitude he came to regard such people as Wordsworth and Lord Byron in the light of gods, immensely more important than Signor Marconi, a heresy that would have shocked his superiors; and he liked to get away by himself, walking for miles along the barren shore of Marina, shouting aloud the lines that stirred him. Of all the operators’ yarns this at least was true.
    And it must have been this, the music in other men’s words, the romance of memory on which they chiefly played, and a craving to be touched even faintly by its magic, as poets were, that led him now towards the place where he was born. He took a train to North Sydney and crossed over to Port-aux-Basques in the small mail steamer. It was a pleasure to hear the idiom of Newfoundland again, not from the lips of some wanderer but on every side, in its own habitat, murmuring or shouting the trivial things of life like the voice of the land itself.
    All was familiar. Even the railway seemed untouched by time. Nothing had been changed, not even the battered rolling stock. He