The Nymph and the Lamp Read Online Free Page A

sat back in a shabby chair and smiled as the train lurched off across the wilderness towards Saint John’s. When the conductor, walking like a seaman in a gale, came through the cars calling out each station in his flat singsong the very names seemed like music. Codroy, Fishels, Bay of Islands, Deer Lake—by Jingo, where else in the world could you find names with a sound like that; or Horse Chops, say, or Heart’s Content or Topsails or Come-By-Chance or Joe Batt’s Arm?
    Rain was falling when the train rattled past the little way station where he had spent that stranded year so far from the sea. He pressed his nose against the streaming pane, as eager for a sight of it as on that day, long ago, when he had come there delighted with the prospect of life in the heart of the land. Nothing was altered; the small red shack beside the rails, the sodden bits of washing hanging limp on a cord at the back, the wisp of chimney smoke, and even (in a blurred glimpse of a bored face bent over a telegraph key) what might have been the ghost of himself. Then it was gone, and once more there was only the barren landscape, with the telegraph poles staggering past and the wires swooping up and down in the rain. I might have stayed. I might have been there yet , he thought piously.
    He spent a month in Saint John’s, wandering about the dusty streets and looking down on the blue harbor in the bowl of rocky hills. Once or twice he found himself before the orphanage, trying to make up his mind to go in; but he turned away. No! Nothing to remember there except the bewilderment of a small boy suddenly alone in the midst of strangers, the dreary daylight hours, the weeping in the dark, the slowly fading vision of a familiar young woman-creature, kindly in a placid way, who had called him Matty and let him run wild like the young goats on the hill.
    The law of gravity is not on the books in the Saint John’s courthouse but it governs all that city’s life, and it carried Carney, as it carries everyone, towards the docks. There he found company, boarding ships with a bottle of smuggled Saint Pierre rum for a talisman, and swapping tales of old voyages to the seal-ice and to Spain. Or he sat alone against a bollard at a wharf’s end, sucking slowly on his pipe, with his eyes closed against the dazzle on the water. There was a reek of old blubber where the sealers docked in spring. He sniffed it luxuriously, and like a Chinaman at opium was filled with pictures of his youth.
    First there were pictures of a voyage to the ice fields, his maiden embrace of the sea. It was all very clear; the sealers swarming over the ship’s side, running over the ice like an invasion of gesticulating ants, shouting, striking with their clubs at glistening dark forms that writhed away, and paused, and then were still. The busy flash of knives, the limp bloody masses of pelt and blubber dragged to the ship and hoisted aboard. The long dim cavern in the ’tween decks where at each day’s end officers and crew and seal hunters ate in relays at a common board; the thick reek mingled of food and wet wool, of sweat, of tobacco, of seal blood and fat; the white teeth grinning in rows of gaunt unshaven faces, half lost, like ghosts in the overpowering murk; the voices shouting for more food, more tea, and he, the mess boy, rushing about with mugs and plates and heavy steaming pots.
    And one final vision photographed in every detail on a memory boyish and virgin: the stark beauty of the ice pack, all white fire in the sunshine of a March afternoon, patched with scarlet where the seals had died, veined by the blue water of the leads, silent as death under the spring sky, and fading away astern with one last blink on the horizon as if at an unspeakable outrage.
    But there were other pictures. The old barque—what was her name, Cassandra ?—with her patched sails and rotten timbers, her bowsprit steeved so high that his nose was