The Nymph and the Lamp Read Online Free Page B

level with the foreyard when he stood on the jib boom’s end. Ah yes, Cassandra and that voyage to the Azores; the boats discharging salt fish to the shore, the foreign houses white in the sun, the cathedral and the convent bells that rang all day long, the jabber of Portuguese, the women all dressed like nuns, the smatch of new wine from the vineyards on the mountainside. By Jingo, it was all new then, and wonderful. It was something to be young, to go to sea, to suffer, to smile, to sweat with labor and to sweat with fear, to wonder how long the old hooker would last in the seas that ran and the winds that blew; and then to find over the curve of the wet world a place like Fayal, waiting all this time for you. Just for you.
    And yet, not quite. Not all for young Matt Carney of the yellow hair, nineteen and shy and tongue-tied and amazed. He remembered the soft air of an evening, stars on the water, lights in the town, a sound of oars and the giggling voices of women. And then the wine, the laughing drunken sailors, the scrape of the fiddle, the dancing on the foredeck, the scuffling and the laughter and the tumbling in the bunks. Matt liked the taste of wine but would not swill the stuff; something within had rebelled at making a fool of Matthew Carney. And so it was with the women. Excited by the fo’c’sle tales he had dreamed of women, of their soft white flesh, and of conquest, with all the healthy instinct of nineteen, parched by the monkhood of the sea. But in the presence of women all those fine pictures fled. Some men are made for the full feast of life and they have the glib tongue and the bold eye and the bold sure hand. And then there are the Carneys, the tall shy men, the awkward and aloof ones for whom life only passes by. Matt Carney could not bring himself to touch, much less make love to a woman. His shipmates marveled. For women of the easy kind, the lusty kind, the ardent and the impudent, came to Matt Carney in port after port, drawn to his clean strength like flies to honey. And he fled. The other kind, the “nice” ones, the virtuous women, serene and aloof, were beyond his clumsy tongue—beyond his reach. And so as the years and the voyages rolled by Carney had withdrawn into himself, too clean to wallow, too bashful and too proud to beg, until at last he had a shell that nothing could break down. For years he had not thought about a woman except that vague creature of his childhood in the village up the coast.
    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