The Isle of Retribution/Chapter 19

previous day and night had been full of revelation for Ned; and as he started forth from the cabin with his axe, there occurred a little scene that tended even further to illustrate his changing viewpoint. Gloating with triumph at the younger man's subjection, Doomsdorf called sardonically from the cabin doorway.

“I trust I can't help you in any way?” he asked.

Discerning the premeditated insult in his tone, Ned whirled to face him. Then for an instant he stood shivering with wrath.

“Yes,” he answered. His promise to say “sir” was forgotten in his rage. “You can at least treat me with the respect deserved by a good workman.”

The words came naturally to his lips. It was as if they reflected a thought that he had considered long, instead of the inspiration of the moment. The truth was that, four days before, he had never known that good work and good workmen were entitled to respect. The world's labor had seemed apart from his life; the subject a stupid one not worth his thought and interest. In one terrible day Ned had found out what the word work meant. He had learned what a reality it was. All at once he saw in it a possible answer to life itself.

He stood aghast at the magnitude of his discovery. Why, work was the beginning and the end of everything. Reaching back to the beginnings of creation, extending clear until the last soul in heaven had passed on and through the training camp of the last hereafter, it was the thing that counted most. He had never thought about it in particular before. Strangely it had not even occurred to him that the civilization that he worshipped, all the luxury and richness that he loved, had been possible only through the toil of human hands and brains.

Suddenly he knew that his father had been right and he had been wrong. The life of the humblest worker had been worth more than his. It would have been better for him to die, that long-ago night of the automobile accident, than for Bess to lose one of her working hands! He had been contemptuous of work and workers, but had not his own assumption of superiority been chiefly based upon the achievements of working men who had gone before him? What could he claim for himself that could even put him on the par with the great mass of manhood, much less make him their superior? He had played when there was work to do, shirked his load when the backs of better men were bent.

In his heart Ned had been a little ashamed of his father. He had felt it would have been more to his credit if the wealth that sustained him should have originated several generations farther back, instead of by the sole efforts of Godfrey Cornet. It had made Ned himself feel almost like one of the nouveaux riches. The more the blood of success was thinned, it seemed, the bluer it was; and it wasn't easy to confess, especially to certain young English bloods, that the name emblazoned in electric lights across a great house of trade was, but one generation removed, his own. He had particularly deplored his father's tendency to mention, in any company, his own early struggles, the poverty from which he sprung. But how true and genuine was the shame he felt now at that false shame! In this moment of revelation he saw his father plainly and knew him for the sturdy old warrior, the man of prowess, most of all for the sterling aristocrat that he was. He was a good workman: need anything more be said?

Ever since his college days he had snubbed him, patronized him, disregarded his teachings whereby he might have come into his own manhood. He had never respected good work or good workmen; and now it was fitting retribution that he should spend his natural life in the most grinding, bitter work. Even now he was making amends for his folly at the hands of the most cruel, ironical fate that could befall him. His axe was in his arms; his savage taskmaster faced him from the cabin doorway.

All these thoughts coursed through Ned's keenly wakened brain in an instant. They seemed as instantaneous as the flood of wrath that had swept through him at Doomsdorf's irony. And now would he suffer some unspeakable punishment for insolence to his master?

But little, amused lines came about Doomsdorf's fierce eyes. “A good workman, eh?” he echoed. “Yes, you did work fair enough yesterday. Wait just a minute.”

He turned into his door, in a moment reappearing with a saw and several iron wedges from among his supplies of tools. He put them in Ned's hands, and the latter received them with a delight never experienced at any favor of fortune in the past. The great penalty of such a life as he had lived, wherein almost every material thing came into his hands at his wish, is that it costs the power to feel delight, the simple joy and gratitude of children; but evidently Ned was learning how again. Just a saw of steel and wedges of iron for splitting! Workmen's tools that he once regarded with contempt. But oh, they would save him many a weary hour of labor. The saw could cut through the fallen logs in half the time he could hack them with his axe; they could be split in half the number of strokes with the aid of the wedges.

He went to his toil; and he was a little amazed at how quickly he felled the first of the tall spruce. Seemingly his yesterday's toil had bestowed upon him certain valuable knowledge. His strokes seemed to be more true: they even had a greater degree of power for the same amount of effort. There were certain angles by which he could get the best results: he would learn them, too—sooner or later.

As he worked, the stiffness and pain that yesterday's toil had left in his muscles seemed to pass away. The axe swung easily in his arms. When the first tree was chopped down, he set Lenore and Bess at trimming off the branches and sawing twelve-foot logs for the hut.

It came about that he chopped down several trees before the two girls had finished cutting and trimming the first. Seemingly Lenore had not yet recovered from the trying experience of two nights before, for she wholly failed to do any part of the work. What was done at this end of the labor Bess did alone. The unmistakable inference was that Ned would have to double his own speed in order to avoid the lash at night.

Yet he felt no resentment. Lenore was even more inured to luxury and ease than he himself: evidently the grinding physical labor was infinitely beyond her. Bess, however, still toiled bravely with axe and saw.

The day turned out to be not greatly different from the one preceding. Again Ned worked to absolute exhaustion: the only apparent change seemed to be that he accomplished a greater amount of work before he finally fell insensible in the snow. This was the twilight hour, and prone in the snow he lay like a warrior among his fallen. About him was a ring of trees chopped down and, with Bess's aid, trimmed of their limbs, notched and sawed into lengths for the cabin. They had only to be lifted, one upon another, to form the cabin walls.

Bess had collapsed too as the twilight hour drew on; and Lenore alone was able to walk unaided to the shack. Again Ned lay insensible on the floor beside the stove, but to-night, long past the supper hour, he was able to remove his own wet clothes and to devour some of the unsavory left-overs from the meal. Again the night fell over Hell Island, tremulous and throbbing with all the mighty passions of the wild, and again dawn came with its gray light on the snow. And like some insensible, mechanical thing Ned rose to toil again.

The third day was given to lifting the great logs, one upon another, for the walls of the cabin. It was, in reality, the hardest work he had yet done, as to shift each log into place took every ounce of lifting power the man had. The girls could help him but little here, for both of them together did not seem to be able to handle an end of the great logs. He found he had to lift each end in turn.

Yet he was able to drag to the cabin to-night, and torpid with fatigue, take his place at the crude supper table. He was hardly conscious that he was eating—lifting the food to his mouth as mechanically as he had lifted the great logs into place toward the end of the day—and the faces opposite him were as those seen in a dream, never in the full light, vague and dim like ghosts. Sometimes he tried to smile at one of them—as if by a long-remembered instinct—and sometimes one of the assembled group—a different face than that to which he addressed his smiles—seemed to be smiling at him, deep blue eyes curiously lustrous as if with tears. Then there was a brown, inscrutable face that just now and then appeared out of the shadow, and a stealing, slipping, silent some one that belonged to it,—some one that now and then brought food and put it on the table.

But none of these faces went home to him like the great, hairy visage of the demon that sat opposite. Ned eyed him covertly throughout the meal, wondering every time he moved in his chair if he were getting up to procure his whip, flinching every time the great arm moved swiftly across the table. He didn't remember getting up from his chair, stripping off part of his wet clothes and falling among the blankets that Doomsdorf had left for his use on the floor. Almost at once it was dawn again.

A new, more vivid consciousness was upon him when he wakened. The stabbing ache in his legs and arms was mostly worn off now; but there was a sharp pain in the small of his back that at first seemed absolutely unendurable. But it waned, too, as he went to the work of finishing the cabin, laying the roof and hanging the crude door. To-day he was conscious of greater physical power, of more prolonged effort without fatigue. The whole island world was more vivid and clear than ever before.

It was with a certain vague quality of pleasure that he regarded this cabin he had built with his own hands, finished now, except for the chinking of the logs. It was the first creative work he had ever done, and he looked at it and saw that it was good.

He could forget, now, the dreadful, heart-breaking toil he had put into it. It had almost killed him, but he was no worse for it now. Indeed his arms were somewhat stronger, he was even better equipped to meet the next, greater task that Doomsdorf appointed him. It was curious that, slave of a cruel taskmaster that he was, he experienced a dim echo of something that was akin to a new self-respect.

These logs, laid one upon another, were visible proof that so far he had stood the gaff! He had done killing work, yet he still lived to do more. The fear that his spirit would fly from his exhausted frame at the end of one of these bitter days could soon be discarded; seemingly he could toil from dawn to dark, eat his fill, and in a night's sleep build himself up for another day of toil. More and more of Lenore's work could be laid on his ever-strengthening shoulders.

The cabin itself was roomy and snug: here he could find seclusion from Doomsdorf and his imperturbable squaw. It was blessing enough just to be out of his sight in the long winter nights after supper, no more to watch every movement of his arm! Besides, he was down to realities, and it was a mighty satisfaction to know that here was a lasting shelter from the storm and the cold. The Arctic winter was falling swiftly, and here was his defense.

Doomsdorf gave him a rusted, discarded stove; and it was almost joy to see it standing in its place! With Doomsdorf's permission, he devoted a full day to procuring fuel for it.

Four days more the three of them worked at the task of laying in fuel,—Ned doing the lion's share of the work, of course; Bess toiling to the limit of her fine, young strength; Lenore making the merest pretense. The result of the latter's idleness was, of course, that her two companions had to divide her share of work between them. Every day Doomsdorf allotted them certain duties,—so many trees to cut up into stove wood, or some other, no less arduous duty; and he seemed to have an uncanny ability to drive them just short of actual, complete exhaustion. The fact that Lenore shirked her share meant that at the close of every day, in order to complete the allotment provided, Ned and Bess had to drive themselves beyond that point, practically to the border of utter collapse. The short rests that they might otherwise have allowed themselves, those blessed moments of relaxation wherein the run-down batteries of their energy were recharged, they dared not take. The result was hour upon hour of such sustained toil that it seemed impossible that human frames could bear the strain.

But the seemingly impossible came to pass, and every day found them stronger for their tasks. Evidently the human body has incredible powers of adaptation to new environment. While, at the end of the day's toil, it seemed beyond all possibility that they could ever stagger back to the cabins, when the only wish they had left was to lie still in the snow and let the bitter cold take its toll, yet a few minutes' relaxation in the warmth of the stove always heartened them and gave them strength to take their places at the supper table. As the days passed, it was no longer necessary to seek their cots the instant they left the table. They took to lingering a little while in the crude chairs about the stove, mostly sitting silent in absolute dejection, but sometimes exchanging a few, primitive thoughts. Very little mattered to them now but food and shelter and sleep. They were down to the absolute essentials. As the days passed, however, they began to take time for primitive, personal toilets. They took to washing their faces and hands: Bess and Lenore even combed out the snarls in their hair with Doomsdorf's broken comb. Then the two girls dressed their tresses into two heavy braids, to be worn Indian fashion in front of the shoulders, the method that required the least degree of care.

They consumed great quantities of food,—particularly Bess and Ned. What would have been a full day's rations in their own home, enough concentrated nutriment to put them in bed with indigestion, did not suffice for a single meal. Never before had Ned really known the love of food—red meat, the fair, good bread, rice grains white and fluffed—but it came upon him quickly enough now. Before, his choice had run toward women's foods, exotic sauces, salads and ices and relishes, foods that tickled the palate but gave no joy to the inner man; but now he wanted inner fuel, plenty of it and unadorned. He cared little how it was cooked, whether or not it had seasoning. The sweet taste of meat was loved by him now,—great, thick, half-done steaks of nutritious caribou. He didn't miss butter on his bread. He would eat till he could hold no more, hardly chewing his food; and as he lay asleep, the inner agents of his body would draw from it the stuff of life with which was built up his shattered tissue.

The physical change was manifest in a few days. His spare flesh went away as if in a single night, and then hard muscle began to take its place. His flesh looked firmer; sagging fat was gone from his face; his skin—pasty white before—was brownish-red from the scourge of the wind. Now the manly hair began to mat about his lips and jowls. A hardening manifested itself in his speech. The few primitive sentences, spoken in the tired-out sessions about the stove, became him more than hours of his former chatter. He no longer gabbled lightly like a girl, his speech full of quirks and affectations: he spoke in blunt, short sentences, with blunt, short words, and his meaning was immediately plain.

He was standing the gaff! Every day found him with greater physical mastery. Yet it was not altogether innate strength, or simple chemical energy derived from the enormous quantities of food he consumed that kept him on his feet. More than once, as the bitter night came down to find him toiling, a strange, wan figure in the snow, he was all but ready to give up. The physical side of him was conquered; the primitive desire for life no longer manifested itself in his spirit. Just to fall in the snow, to let his tired legs wilt under him, perhaps to creep a little way back into the thicket where Doomsdorf's lantern would fail to reveal him: then he would be free of this dreadful training camp for good! The sleep that would come upon him then would not be cursed with the knowledge of a coming dawn, as gray and hopeless as the twilight just departed! He would be safe then from Doomsdorf's lash! The Arctic wind would convey his wretched spirit far beyond the madman's power to follow; his aching, bleeding hands would heal in some Gentleness far away. The fear of which psychologists speak, that of the leap into darkness that is glibly said to be the last conscious instinct, was absolutely absent. Death was a word to conjure with no more. It was no harder for him to think of than the fall of a tree beneath his axe. The terror that surrounded it was ever only a specter: and in the clear vision that came to him in those terrible twilights, only realities were worth the effort of thought. The physical torture of staggering through the snow back to the cabin was so infinitely worse than any conception that he could retain of death; the life that stretched before him was so absolutely bereft of hope that the elemental dread of what lay beyond would not have restrained him an instant. The thing went deeper than that. The reason why he did not yield to the almost irresistible desire to lie down and let the North take its toll had its fount in the secret places of the man's soul. He was beyond the reach of fear for himself, but his love for Lenore mastered him yet.

He must not leave Lenore. He had given his love to her, and this love was a thousand times more compelling than any fear could possibly be. He must stand up, he must go on through,—for the sake of this dream that counted more than life. Was not her happiness in his whole charge? Did he not constitute her one defense against Doomsdorf's persecutions? He must live on, carrying as many of her burdens as he could.

Bess too knew an urge beyond herself; but she would not have found it so easy to get it into concrete thought. Perhaps women care less about cause and more about effect, willing to follow impulse and scarcely feeling the need of justifying every action with a laborious thought process. In her own heart Bess knew she must not falter, she must not give up. Whence that knowledge came she had no idea, and she didn't care. There was need of her too on this wretched, windy island. She had her place here; certain obligations had been imposed upon her. She didn't try to puzzle out what these obligations were. Perhaps she was afraid of the heart's secret that might be revealed to her. Her instinct was simply to stay and play her part.

The only one of the three to whom the fear of death was still a reality was Lenore, simply because the full horror of the island had not yet gone home to her. She thought she knew the worst; in reality, she had no inkling of it. So far Ned had succeeded in sheltering her from it.

How long he could continue to do so, in any perceptible degree, he did not know. In the first place he had the girl herself to contend with: now that she was recovering, Lenore would likely enough insist on doing her own share of the work. Besides, the problem was greatly complicated, now that the winter's supply of fuel was laid by, and the real season's activities about to begin. Could he spare her such bitter, terrible hours that he and Bess must endure, following the trap lines over the wild? Must she be cursed and lashed and tortured by the cold, know the torment of worn-out muscles, only to be rewarded by the knout for failing to bring in a sufficient catch of furs? Doomsdorf would be more exacting, rather than more lenient, in these months to come. He had been willing enough for Ned to do Lenore's share in the work of laying in winter fuel; but the size of the fur catch was a matter of greater moment to him. It was unthinkable that Ned could handle to the best advantage both Lenore's trap line and his own. Work as hard as he might, long into the night hours, one man couldn't possibly return two men's catch. For Lenore's sake Ned regarded the beginning of the trapping season with dread, although for himself he had cause to anticipate it.

He hadn't forgotten that the first furs taken would be his, and he needed them sorely enough. Indeed, the matter was beginning to be of paramount importance to his health and life. The clothes he had worn from the Charon, flimsy as the life of which they had been a part, were rapidly wearing out. They didn't turn the rain, and they were not nearly warm enough for the bitter weather to come. Ned did not forget that the month was only October; that according to Doomsdorf, real winter would not break over them for a few weeks, at least. The snow flurries, the frost, the bitter nights were just the merest hint of what was to come, he said: the wail of the biting wind at night just the far-off trumpet call of an advancing enemy. A man could go thinly garbed on such days as this and, except for an aching chill through out his frame, suffer no disagreeable consequences; but such wouldn't hold true in the forty-below-zero weather that impended. Only fur and the thickest woolens could avail in the months to come.

Besides, the trapper's life offered more of interest than that of the woodchopper. It would carry him through those gray valleys and over the rugged hills that now, when he had time to look about him, seemed to invite his exploration. Best of all, the work would largely carry him away from Doomsdorf's presence. If only he could spare Lenore, not only by permission of Doomsdorf but by the consent of the girl herself.

The matter came up that night while Doomsdorf was sorting out some of his smaller traps. “We'll light out to-morrow,” he said. “The sooner we get these things set, the better. The water furs seem to be absolutely prime already—I'm sure the land furs must be too. I wonder if you three have any idea what you're going to do.”

Ned saw an opportunity to speak for Lenore, but Doomsdorf's speech ran on before he could take it. “I don't suppose you do,” he said. “Of course, I'm going to show you—nevertheless it would help some if any of you knew an otter from a lynx. You may not know it, but this island contains a good many square miles—to trap it systematically requires many lines and hundreds of traps. I've already laid out three lines—sometimes I've trapped one, and sometimes another. Two of 'em are four-day lines, and one a five-day line—that is, they take four and five days respectively to get around. On each one I've built series of huts, or shacks, all of them with a stove and supplies of food, and you put up in them for the night. They are a day's march apart, giving you time to pick up your skins, reset, and so on, as you go. Believe me, you won't have any time to loaf. After you get into the cabins at night, eat your supper and get some of the frost out of your blood, you'll enjoy thawing out and skinning the animals you've caught in your trap. If it's a big animal, dead and frozen and too big to carry, you'll have to make a fire out in the snow and thaw him out there. So you see you'll have varied experience.

“You'll be away from me and this cabin for days at a time, but if you're figuring on any advantage from that, just put it out of your mind, the sooner the better. Maybe you think you can sneak enough time to make a boat, smuggle it down to the water, and cast off. Let me assure you you'll have no time to sneak. Besides, this patch of timber right here is nearer to the shore than any other patch on the island—you'd simply have no chance to get away with it. If you think you could cross the ice to Tzar Island, after winter breaks, you're barking up the wrong tree too. In my daily hunts I'll manage to get up on one of these ridges, and I can keep a pretty fair watch of you over these treeless hills. You'd never get more than a few hours' start; and they wouldn't help you at all on the ice fields! I trust there's no need to mention penalties. You already know about that.

“And maybe you are thinking it will be easy enough to slack—not trying to catch much, so you won't have many skins to flesh and stretch—maybe hiding what you do catch. I'll just say this. I have a pretty good idea how this country runs—just how many skins each line yields with fair trapping. I'm going to increase that estimate by twenty per cent.—and that's to be your minimum. I won't say what that amount is now. But if at the end of the season you're short—by one skin—look out! It means that you'll have to be about twenty per cent. smarter and more industrious than the average trapper.”

“But man” Ned protested. “We're not experienced”

“You'll learn quick enough. Aren't you the dominant race? And I warn you again—you'd better drop bitter tears every time you find where a wolverine has been along and eaten an ermine out of a trap!”

The man was not jesting. They knew him well enough by now; the piercing glitter of his keen, gray eyes, the odd fixation about his pupils that was always manifest when he was most in earnest, was plainly in evidence now. Thus it was with the most profound amazement that Lenore's companions suddenly saw her beautiful mouth curling in a smile.

For themselves they were lost in despair. All too plainly Doomsdorf had merely hinted at the cruel rigors of the trapper's trail. Yet Lenore was smiling.

Then Ned saw, with a queer little tug of his heart, that the smile was not meant for him. It was not a gracious signal of her love, meant to encourage him in his despair. A woman herself, and understanding women, Bess never dreamed for an instant that it was; she knew only too well the thought and the aim behind that sudden, dazzling sunshine in Lenore's face. Yet her only reaction, beyond amazement, was a swift surge of tenderness and pity for Ned.

Lenore was smiling at Doomsdorf. She was looking straight into his gray eyes. Her cheeks were flushed a lovely pink; her eyes were smiling too; she presented an image of ineffable beauty. That was what hurt worse,—the fact that her beauty had never seemed more genuine than now. It was the mask of falsehood, yet her smile was as radiant as any he remembered of their most holy moments together. He had not dreamed that any emotion except her love for him could call such a light into her face. It had been, to him, the lasting proof that she was his, the very symbol of the ideal of integrity and genuineness that he made of her; yet now he saw her use it as a wile to win some favor from this beast in human form. The very sacredness of their relations was somehow questioned. The tower of his faith seemed to be tottering.

Yet he forced away the dismay that seemed to cloud him, then began to watch with keenest interest. Not even this man of iron could wholly resist her smile. In a single instant she had captured his mood: he was not so fixed in his intent.

“I'm afraid I wouldn't be much good to you, as a trapper,” she began quietly, her voice of cloying sweetness. “I'm afraid I'd only get in the way and scare the little—ermines, you call them?—out of the country. Mr. Doomsdorf, do you know how well I can keep house?”

Doomsdorf looked at her, grinning in contempt, yet not wholly unresponsive to the call she was making to him. “Can't say as I do”

“You don't know how I can cook, either,—make salads, and desserts, and things like that. You'd better let me stay here and help your wife with the housework. I'd really be of some value, then.”

For an instant the wind seemed to pause on the roof; and all of them sat in startled silence. The only movement was that of Sindy, imperturbable as ever, rocking back and forth in her chair; and the sound she made had a slow and regular cadence, as of a great clock. Ned sat staring at his hands; Bess's gaze rested first on him, then on the two principals of the little drama who still sat smiling as if in understanding. Ned needn't have worried about Lenore insisting on doing her share of the rigorous, outdoor work. The difficulty that he had anticipated in persuading her to let him lighten her burdens had not been serious, after all.

And really there was little cause for his own depression. Lenore meant exactly what she said. After all, this was his own plan,—that she should remain and help Sindy with the housework and the caring for such skins as Doomsdorf himself took, thus avoiding the heart-breaking hardship of the trap lines. Nor could he hold against her the lie in her smile. It was her whole right to use it in her own behalf: to use any wile she could to gain her ends. He was a fool to suppose that there was a moral issue involved! The old moral teaching against compromise with the devil didn't hold here. Perhaps Bess and himself could get farther, make their toil easier, if they also fawned on Doomsdorf. The fact that he would sooner wear his hands to the bone or die beneath the lash did not imply moral superiority. It simply showed that he was of different make-up. The same with Bess; she was simply of a different breed.

And the wile was not without results. The usual scoffing refusal did not come at once to the bearded lips. Perhaps her master was flattered that Lenore was so tamed, perhaps he wished to reward her attitude of friendliness so that Bess might take example. Lenore had never moved him with the same fire as Bess: perhaps by showing leniency now, the latter could be brought to this same pass! Besides, Lenore was the weakest of the three and he had thus less desire to break what little spirit she had, rather preferring, by complying with her request, to heap fresh burdens of toil and hardship on these two proud-spirited ones before him.

“You want to stay here with Sindy and me, eh?” he commented at last. “Well, Sindy might like some help. I'm willing—but I'll leave it up to your two friends. They'll have to work all the harder to make up for it—especially Bess. I was going to have you two girls work together.”

He watched Ned's face with keenest interest. The younger man flushed in his earnestness, his adoring gaze on Lenore.

“I'm only too glad to make it easier for you,” he said, his crooked, boyish smile dim at his lips. “That's the one thing that matters—to help you all I can. In this case, though—Bess is the one to say.”

Lenore perceptibly stiffened as Ned's gaze turned to Bess. It didn't flatter her that her lover should even take Bess into his consideration. She had grown accustomed to receiving his every duty.

But it came about that Lenore and her little jealousies did not even find a place in Bess's thought. She returned Ned's gaze, her eyes lustrous as if with tears, and she understood wholly the prayer that was in his heart.

“Of course she may stay here,” she said. “We'll make out somehow.”