The Isle of Retribution/Chapter 15

, like her husband, the brown squaw was a devotee of cruelty, she must have received great satisfaction from the sight of that slender, girlish figure standing in the gloom of the cabin. The fact that there were no shells in the rifle—other wise a desperate agent of escape—seemed nothing less than the death of hope. The strength born of the crisis departed swiftly from her, and her only impulse was to yield to bitter tears. Her erect body seemed to wilt, her sensitive lips, so straight and firm before, drooped like those of a child in some utter, unconsolable tragedy of childhood. It was a curious thing how the light died in her eyes. All at once they seemed to be at some strange, below-zero point of darkness,—like black wounds in the utter whiteness of her face. Yet the squaw gave no sign that she had seen. Her face was impassive, that of an imperturbable Buddha that sits forever in a far temple.

Great terror is nothing more or less than temporary loss of hope. In that moment Bess was finding out what real hopelessness meant, so far as it is ever possible for human beings to know. For that moment she couldn't see a rift in the darkness that enfolded her. In the first place she felt infinitely alone: Knutsen was dead; Lenore still sat yielding to self-pity; Ned still extended to her his solicitous care. The thing went beyond mere fear of death. She could conceive of possibilities now wherein death would be a thing desired and prayed for; a deliverance from a living hell that was infinitely worse. The terror that was upon her was incomparable with any previous experience of her life.

Yet her eyes remained dry. Some way, she was beyond the beneficence of tears; partly because of her terror, partly, perhaps, because the instinct was with her yet to hide the truth from Ned and Lenore so long as possible. Thus she was not, in the last analysis, absolutely bereft of hope. It might be, since Ned was a man and she a woman, he would never become the prey of Doomsdorf to such a degree as she herself. And now there was no time to try to formulate other plans; to seek some other gateway of escape; no time more to listen to Ned's complaints of her inattention to Lenore. She heard Doomsdorf's heavy step at the door.

The man came in, for an instant standing framed by the doorway, the light of morning behind him. Ned looked up, expecting some inquiry as to his own and Lenore's condition, some word of greeting on his lips. It came about, however, that his thought fell quickly into other channels. Doomsdorf closed the door behind him.

The man turned contemptuously to Ned. “What's the matter?” he asked.

Startled and indignant at the tone, Ned instinctively straightened. “I didn't say anything was the matter. Where's Knutsen?”

“Knutsen—has gone on. Hell didn't suit him. He went against its mandates the first thing. I hope it doesn't happen again—I would hate to lose any more of you. I've other plans in mind.”

Ned hardly understood, yet his face went white. Partly it was anger because of the unmistakable insult and contempt in Doomsdorf's tone. Partly it was a vague fear that his good sense would not permit him to credit. “I don't—I don't understand, I'm afraid,” he remarked coldly. “We'll talk it over later. At present I want to know where we can put this girl to bed. She's in a serious condition from her last night's experience.”

The lips curled under the great blond beard. “I may put her to bed, all right—if I like her looks,” he answered evenly. “It won't be your bed, either.”

Appalled, unbelieving, yet obeying a racial instinct that goes back to the roots of time, Ned dropped the girl from his arms and leaped to his feet. His eyes blazed with a magnificent burst of fury, and a mighty oath was at his lips. “You” he began.

Yet no second word came. Doomsdorf's great body lunged across the room with the ferocity and might of a charging bear. His arm went out like a javelin, great fingers extended, and clutched with the effect of a mighty mechanical trap the younger man's throat. He caught him as he might catch a vicious dog he intended to kill, snatching him off his feet. Ned's arm lashed out impotently, and forcing through with his own body, Doomsdorf thrust him into the corner. For a moment he battered him back and forth, hammering his head against the wall, then let him fall to a huddled heap on the floor.

Lenore's voice raised in a piercing scream of terror; but a fiercer instinct took hold of Bess. The impulse that moved her was simply that to fight to the death, now as well as later. A heavy hammer, evidently a tool recently in use by Doomsdorf, lay on the window sill, and she sprang for it with the strength of desperation. But her hand had hardly touched it before she herself was hurled back against the log wall behind her.

The squaw had not sat supine in this stress. With the swiftness and dexterity of an animal, she had sprung to intercept the deadly blow, hurling the girl back by her hand upon the latter's shoulder. If she made any sound at all, it was a single, chattering sentence that was mostly obliterated in the sound of battle. And already, before seemingly a second was past, Doomsdorf was standing back in his place in the center of the room.

Except for the huddled heap in the blood-spattered corner of the cabin, it was as if it had never happened. The squaw was again stolid, moving slowly back to her chair; Doomsdorf breathed quietly and evenly. The two girls stood staring in speechless horror.

“I hope there won't be any more of that,” Doomsdorf said quietly. “The sooner we get these little matters straightened out, the better for all concerned. It isn't pleasant to be hammered to pieces, is it?”

He took one step toward Ned, and Lenore started to scream again. But he inflicted no further punishment. He reached a strong hand, seized Ned's shoulder, and snatched him to his feet.

“Don't try it again,” he advised. “Here in this cabin—on this island—I do and say what I like. I don't stand for any resentment. The next time it won't be so easy, and that will be too bad for everybody. You wouldn't be able to do your work.”

Racked by pain but fully conscious, Ned looked into the glittering eyes. It was no longer possible to disbelieve in this hairy giant before him. The agony in his throat muscles was only too real. And the only recourse that occurred to him was one of pitiful inadequacy.

It was a moment of test for Ned, and he knew of no way to meet it except as he met such little crises as sometimes occurred to him in his native city. The only code of life he knew was that he practiced in his old life: now was its time of trial. His own blood on his hands; the grim, wicked face before him should have been enough to convince a man less inured in his own creed of self-sufficiency and conceit; yet Ned would not let himself believe that he had found his master.

As a child has recourse to senseless threats, he tried to take refuge in his old attitude of superiority. “I don't know what you mean, and I don't care to,” he said at last. In pity for him Bess's eyes filled with tears. “I only know we won't accept the hospitality of such men as you. We'll go—right now.”

Doomsdorf's answer was a roaring laugh of scorn. Presently he walked to the door and threw it wide.

But he wasn't smiling when he turned back to face them, the morning light on his bearded face. The sight of the North through the open door had sobered and awed him, as it awes all men who know its power. Beyond lay only the edge of the forest and the snow-swept barrens, stretching down to a gray and desolate sea.

“It's snowing a little, isn't it?” he said. “Just the North—keeping its tail up and letting us know it's here. Where, my young friend, do you think of going?”

“It doesn't matter”

“There's snow and cold out there.” His voice was deeply sober. “Death too—sure as you're standing here. A weakling like you can't live in that, out there. None of your kind can stand it—they'd die like so many sheep. And as a result you have to bow down and serve the man that can!”

Ned had no answer. The greatest fear of his life was clamping down upon him.

“That's the law up here—that the weak have to serve the strong. I've beat the North at its own game, and it serves me, just as you're going to serve me now. You're not accepting any hospitality from me. You're going to pay for the warmth of this fire I've grubbed out of these woods—you'll pay for the food you eat. You can go out there if you like—if you prefer to die. There's no boat to carry you off. There never will be a boat to carry you off.”

Ned's breath caught in a gasp. “My God, you don't mean you'll hold us here by force!”

“I mean you're my prisoners here for the rest of your natural lives. And you can abandon hope just as surely as if this island was the real hell it was named for.”

Quietly, coldly he told them their fate, these three who had been cast up by the sea. He didn't mince words. And for all the strangeness of the scene—the gray light of the dawn and the snow against the window and the noise of the wind with out—they knew it was all true, not merely some shadowed vista of an eerie dream.

“You might as well know how you stand, first as last,” he began. “When you once get everything through your heads, maybe we won't have any more trouble such as we had just now. You ought to be glad that the seaman—Knutsen, you called him?—is sliding around on the sea bottom instead of being here with you; he'd be a source of trouble from beginning to end. He'd have been hard to teach, hard to master—I saw that in the beginning—and he'd never give in short of a fight every morning and every night. None of you, fortunately, are that way. You'll see how things stack up, and we'll all get along nicely together.”

He paused, smiling grimly; then with an explosive motion, pulled back the lid of the stove and threw in another log. “Sit down, why don't you?” he invited. “I don't insist on my servants standing up always in my presence. You'll have to sit down sometime, you know.”

Lenore, wholly despondent, sank back in her seat. To show that he was still her protector, Ned stood behind her, his hands resting on the back of her chair. Bess stole to a little rough seat between them and the squaw.

A single great chair was left vacant, almost in the middle of the circle. Doomsdorf glanced once about the room as if guarding against any possibility of surprise attack by his prisoners, then sat down easily himself. “Excuse me for not making you known to my woman,” he began. “In fact, I haven't even learned your own names. She is, translating from the vernacular, 'Owl-That-Never-Sleeps.' You won't be expected to call her that, however—although I regret as a general thing that the picturesque native names so often undergo such laceration on the tongues of the whites. When I took her from her village, they gave her to me as 'Sindy.' You may call her that. It will do as good as any—every other squaw from Tin City to Ketchikan is called Sindy. It means nothing, as far as I know.

“'Owl-That-Never-Sleeps,' however, fits her very well. You might make a point of it. And if you are interested in the occult sciences, perhaps you might explain to me how, when she was a pappoose [sic], her parents could understand her character and nature well enough to give her a name that fits her so perfectly. I notice the same thing happens again and again through these northern tribes. But I'm wandering off the point. Sindy, you must know, speaks English and is second in command. What she says goes. Get up and do it on the jump.

“You'll be interested to know that you are on one of the supposedly uninhabited islands of the Skopin group. Other islands are grouped all around you, making one big snow field when the ice closes down in winter. I could give you almost your exact longitudinal position, but it wouldn't be the least good to you. The population consists of we five people—and various bear, caribou, and such like. The principal industry, as you will find out later, is furs.

“There is no need to tell in detail how and why I came here—unlike Caliban, I am not a native of the place. I hope you are not so deficient as to have failed to read 'Tempest.' I find quite an analogy to our present condition. Shakespeare is a great delight on wintry nights; he remains real, when most of my other slim stock of authors fades into air. I like 'Merry Wives' the best of the comedies, though—because we have such fine fun with Falstaff. Of the tragedies I like Macbeth the best and Lear, by far the worst; and it's a curious paradox that I didn't like the ending of the first and did like the second. Macbeth and his lady shouldn't have fallen. They were people with a purpose, and purpose should be allowed to triumph in art as well as in life. In life, Macbeth would have snipped off Macduff's head and left a distinguished line. Lear, old and foolish, got just what was coming to him—only it shouldn't have been dragged over five acts.

“But I really must get down to essentials. It's so long since I've talked to the outside world that I can't help being garrulous. To begin with—I came here some years ago, not entirely by my own choice. Of course, not even the devil comes to such a hell as this from his own choice. There's always pressure from above.”

He paused again, hardly aware of the horrified gaze with which his hearers regarded him. A startling change had come over him when he spoke again. His eyes looked red as a weasel's in the shadowed room; the tones of his voice were more subdued, yet throbbing with passion.

“I remember gray walls, long ago, in Siberia,” he went on slowly and gravely. “I was not much more than a boy, a student at a great university—and then there were gray walls in a gray, snow-swept land, and gray cells with barred doors, and men standing ever on watch with loaded rifles, and thousands of human cattle in prison garb. It was almost straight west of here, far beyond Bering Sea; and sometimes inspectors would come, stylish people like yourselves, except that they were bearded men of Petrograd, and look at us through the bars as at animals in a zoo, but they never interfered with the way things were run! How I came there doesn't matter; what I did, and what I didn't do. There I found out how much toil the human back can stand without breaking, one day like another, years without end. I knew what it was to have a taskmaster stand over me with a whip—a whip with many tails, with a shot and wire twisted into each. I can show you my back now if you don't believe me. I found out all these things, and right then there came a desire to teach them to some one else. I was an enemy of society, they said—so I became an enemy of society in reality. Right then I learned a hate for such society and a desire to burn out the heart of such weak things as you!

He turned to them, snarling like a beast. His voice had begun to rumble like lavas in the bowels of the earth. There could be no question as to the reality of this hatred. It was a storm cloud over his face; it filled his gray eyes with searing fire, it drew his muscles till it seemed that the arms of his chair, clutched by his hands, would be torn from the rounds. To his listeners it was the most terribly vivid moment of their lives.

“I swore an oath then, by the devil himself, that if the time ever came that I'd have opportunity, I'd show society just what kind of an enemy I was. Sometime, I thought, that time would come. What made me think so I can't tell. Sometime I'd pay 'em back for all they had done to me.

“One day the chance came to escape. While more cowardly men would have hesitated, I pushed through and out. On the way I learned a little lesson—that none of the larger creatures of the wild die as easily as men. I found out that there is nothing more to killing a man that is in your way than killing a caribou I want to eat. I didn't feel any worse about it afterward. After that I decided I would never compromise with a man who was in my way. The other method was too easy. Remember it in all our relations to come.

“I had to come across here. I couldn't forever escape the hue and cry that was raised. Ultimately I landed on this little island—with Sindy and a few steel traps.

“In this climate we can trap almost the whole year round. We can start putting them out in a few days more—keep them out clear till June. Every year a ship—the Intrepid that you've likely heard of—touches here to buy my furs—just one trip a year—and it leaves here supplies of all kinds in exchange. But don't take hope from that. Hope is one thing you want to get out of your systems. The captain of the Intrepid and his Japanese crew are the only human beings that know I live here, except yourself—that know there's a human occupant on this island. On their yearly visit I'll see to it that none of them get a sight of you.

“Once I was used to working all day from dawn to dark, with an armed master on guard over me. It isn't going to be that way from now on. I'm going to be the armed master. The next few days you're going to spend building yourselves a shack and cutting winter fuel. Then each of you will have a trap line—a good stiff one, too. Every day you'll go out and follow your line of traps—baiting, skinning and fleshing, drying the skins when you get to the cabins. You'll know what it really is to be cold, then; you'll know what work means, too. With you three I expect to triple my usual season's catch, building up three times as fast the fortune I need.

“All my life I've looked forward to a chance to give society the same kind of treatment it gave to me—and when that fortune is large enough to work with, there will be a new dynasty arise in Russia. In the meantime, you're going to get the same treatment I did—hard labor for life! You're going to have an armed guard over you to shoot you down if you show the least sign of mutiny. You'll obey every command and lick my boots if I tell you to. I said then, when the chance came, I'd grind society down—or any representatives of society that came into my power—just as it ground me down. This is the beginning of my triumph. You, you three—represent all I hated. Wealth—constituted authority—softness and ease and luxury. I'll teach you what softness is! You'll know what a heaven a hard bed can be, after a day in the wind off Bering Straits. You'll find out what luxury is, too.” His wild laugh blew like a wind through the room. “And incidentally, my fur output will be increased by three, my final dream brought three times nearer.

“What I want from you I'll take. You're in hell if there is such a place—and you'll know it plenty soon.” He turned to Ned, his lip curled in scorn. “Your feeble arms over the chair back won't protect that girl if I make up my mind I want her. At present you may be safe from that—simply because some conquests aren't any pleasure if they're made with force. If I want either of you,” his gaze flashed toward Bess, “I'm not afraid that I'll have to descend to force to get you.

“When I said to abandon hope I meant it. You have no boat, and I'll give you no chance to make one. The distance is too great across the ice ever to make it through; besides, you won't be given a chance to try. No ships will come here to look for you. No matter what wealth and power you represented down there, you'll be forgotten soon enough. Others will take your place, other girls will reign at the balls, and other men will spend your money. You will be up here, as lost and forgotten as if you were in the real hell you'll go to in the end.

“Even if your doting fathers should send out a search party, they will overlook this little island. It was just a freak of the currents that you landed here—I don't see yet why you weren't blown to Tzar Island, immediately east of here. When they find you aren't there, and pick up any other lifeboats from your ship that in all probability landed there, they'll be glad enough to turn around and go back. Especially if they see your lifeboat floating bottom upward in the water!

“You should never have come to the North, you three! Society should never move from the civilization that has been built to protect it—otherwise it will find forces too big and too cruel to master. You're all weaklings, soft as putty—without the nerve of a ptarmigan. Already I've crushed the resistance out of you. All my life I've dreamed of some such chance as this, and yet you can't fight enough to make it interesting for me. You'll be docile, hopeless slaves until you die.”

He paused, scanning their pale, drawn faces. He turned to Ned first, but the latter was too immersed in his own despair ever to return his stare. Lenore didn't raise her golden head to meet his eyes. But before his gaze ever got to her, Bess was on her feet.

“Don't be too sure of yourself,” she cautioned quickly. He looked with sudden amazement into her kindling eyes. “Men like you have gone in the face of society before. You're not so far up here that the arm of the law can't reach you.”

The blond man smiled into her earnest face. “Go on, my dear,” he urged.

“It's got you once, and it'll get you again. And I warn you that if you put one indignity on us, do one thing you've said—you'll pay for it in the end—just as you'll pay for that fiendish crime you committed to-day.”

As her eyes met his, straight and unfaltering, the expression of contemptuous amazement died in his face. Presently his interest seemed to quicken. It was as if he had seen her for the first time, searching eyes resting first on hers, then on her lips, dropping down over her athletic form, and again into her eyes. He seemed lost in sinister speculations.

Something seemed strained, ready to break. The four in the little circle made no motion, all of them inert and frozen like characters in a dream. And then, before that speculative, searching gaze—a gaze unlike any that he had bent on Lenore—her eyes faltered from his. Ned felt a wild, impotent fury like live steam in his brain.

Bess's little mutiny was already quelled. Her blue eyes were black with terror.