The Isle of Retribution/Chapter 7

Charon sped straight north, out of the Sound, through the inside passage. Days were bright; skies were clear, displaying at night a marvelous intricacy of stars; the seas glittered from the kindly September sun. They put in at Vancouver the night following their departure from Seattle, loaded on certain heavy stores, and continued their way in the lea of Vancouver Island.

Straight north, day after day! To McNab, a man who had cruised ten years on Alaskan waters, the air began to feel like home. It was crisp, surging cool in the lungs, fragrant with balsam from the wooded islands. Already Ned had begun to readjust some of his ideas in regard to the North. It was no longer easy to believe that his father had exaggerated its beauty and its appeal, its desolation and its vastness. It was a strange thing for a man used to cities to go day upon day without seeing scarcely a village beside the sea, a single human being other than those of his own party. Here was one place, it seemed, that the hand of man had touched but lightly if at all.

The impression grew the farther north he went. Ever there was less sign of habitation upon the shore. The craft passed through narrow channels between mountains that cropped up from the sea, it skirted wooded islands, it passed forgotten Indian villages where the totem poles stood naked and weather-stained before the forsaken homes of the chiefs. The glasses brought out a wonderland scene just beyond the reach of their unaided sight,—glacier and snow-slide, lofty peaks and waterfalls. The mystic, brooding spirit of the North was already over them.

They had touched at Ketchikan, the port of entry to Alaska, and thence headed almost straight west, across the gulf of Alaska and toward the far-stretching end of the Alaskan Peninsula. During these days they were far out of sight of land, surrounded only by an immeasurable ocean that rolled endlessly for none to see or hear.

They were already far beyond the limits of ordinary tourist travel. The big boats plied as far as Anchorage at the head of Cook Inlet—to the north and east of them now—but beyond that point the traffic was largely that of occasional coastal traders, most of them auxiliary schooners of varying respectability. They seemed to have the ocean almost to themselves, never to see the tip of a sail on the horizon, or a fisherman's craft scudding into port. And the solitude crept into the spirits of the passengers of the Charon.

It became vaguely difficult to keep up a holiday atmosphere. It was increasingly hard to be gay, to fight down certain inner voices that had hitherto been stifled. Some way, life didn't seem quite the same, quite the gay dream it had hitherto been. And yet this immeasurable vista of desolate waters—icy cold for all the sunlight that kissed the up-reaching lips of the waves—was some way like a dream too. The brain kept clear enough, but it was all somewhat confusing to an inner brain, a secret self that they had scarcely been aware of before. It was hard to say which was the more real,—the gay life they had left, the laughter of which was still an echo in their ears, or these far-stretching wastes of wintry waters.

They couldn't help but be thoughtful. Realities went home to them that they had no desire to admit. A fervent belief in their own sophistication had been their dominant point of view, a disillusionment and a realism that was the tone of their generation, denying all they could not see or hear, holding themselves superciliously aloof from that gracious wonder and simplicity that still blesses little children; but here was something that was inscrutably beyond them. They couldn't laugh it away. They couldn't cast it off with a phrase of cheap slang; demeaning it in order to hold firm to their own philosophy of Self. Here was something that shook their old attitude of self-love and self-sufficiency to its foundations. They thought they knew life, these three; they thought they were bigger than life, that they had mastered it and found it out and stripped all delusions from it, but now their unutterable conceit, the pillar of their lives, was threatening to fall. This sunlit sea was too big for them: too big and too mighty and too old.

The trouble with Ned's generation was that it was a godless generation: the same evil that razed Babylon to the dust. Ned and his kind had come to be sufficient unto themselves. They had lost the wonder and fear of life, and that meant nothing less than the loss of their wonder and fear of the great Author of life. To these, life had been a game that they thought they had mastered. They had laughed to scorn the philosophies that a hundred generations of nobler men had built up with wondering reverence. Made arrogant by luxury and ease, they knew of nothing too big for them, no mystery that their contemptuous gaze could not penetrate, no wonder that their reckless hands could not unveil. They were drunk with their own glories, and the ultimate Source of all things had no place in their philosophies or their thoughts. It was true that churches flourished among them, that Charity received her due; but the old virile faith, the reverent wonder, the mighty urge that has achieved all things that have been worth achieving were cold and dead in their hearts. But out here in this little, wind-blown craft, surrounded by an immensity of desolation beyond the power of their minds to grasp, it was hard to hold to their old complacency. Their old philosophies were barrenly insufficient, and they couldn't repel an ever deepening sense of awe. The wind, sweeping over them out of the vastness, was a new voice, striking the laughter from their lips and instilling a coldness that was almost fear in their warm, youthful blood. The sun shone now, but soon vast areas, not far off, would be locked tight with ice; never the movement of a wave, never the flash of a sea-bird's wing over the wastes; and the thought sobered them and perhaps humbled them a little too. Sometimes, alone on the deck at night, Ned was close to the dearest reality, the most profound discovery that could possibly touch his life: that the dreadful spirit of God moved upon the face of these desolate waters, no less than, as is told in Genesis, at creation's dawn.

Everything would have been different if they had come in a larger boat, for instance, one of the great liners that plied between Seattle and Anchorage. In that case, likely they would have had no trouble in retaining their old point of view. The brooding tone of the North would have passed them by; the journey could still have remained a holiday instead of the strange, wandering dream that it was. The reason was simply that on a liner they would not have broken all ties with their old life. There would have been games and dancing, the service of menials, social intercourse and all the superficialities and pretenses that had until now composed their lives. Their former standards, the attitudes from which they regarded life, would have been unaltered. There would have been no isolation, and thus no darkening of their moods, no haunting uneasiness that could not be named or described, no whispering voices heard but dimly out of the sea. They could have remained in their own old ramparts of callousness and scorn. But here they were alone,—lost and far on an empty sea, under an empty sky.

There was such a little group of them, only eight in all. The ship was a mere dot in the expanse of blue. Around them endlessly lay the sea, swept by unknown winds, cursed by the winter's cold, like death itself in its infinity and its haunting fear. The life they had left behind was already shadowed and dim: the farewell shouts, the laughter, the gaiety, the teeming crowds that moved and were never still were all like something imagined, unspeakably far off. Only the sea and the sky were left, and the craft struggling wearily, ever farther into the empty North.

Lenore found herself oppressed by an unreasoning fear. Realities were getting home to her, and she was afraid of them. It would have been wiser not to come, yet she couldn't have told why. The launch was wholly comfortable; she was already accustomed to the cramped quarters. The men of the crew were courteous, Ned the same devoted lover as always. The thing was more an instinct with her: such pleasure as the trip offered could not compensate for an obscure uneasiness, a vague but ominous shadow over her mood and heart that was never lifted. Perhaps a wiser and secret self within the girl, a subconsciousness which was wise with the knowledge of the ages before ever her being emerged from the germ plasm was even now warning her to turn back. It knew her limitations; also it knew the dreadful, savage realm she had dared to penetrate. The North would have no mercy for her if she were found unworthy.

Perhaps in her heart she realized that she represented all that was the antithesis of this far northern domain. She was the child of luxury and ease: the tone and spirit of these wintry seas were travail and desolation. She was the product of a generation that knew life only as a structure that men's civilization had built; out here was life itself, raw and naked, stripped and bare. She was lawless, undisciplined, knowing no code but her own desires; all these seas and the gray fog-laden shores they swept were in the iron grip of Law that went down to the roots of time. She had never looked beyond the surface of things; the heart that pulsed in the breast of this wintry realm lay so deep that only the most wise and old, devotees to nature's secrets, could ever hear it beat. She had the unmistakable feeling that, in an unguarded moment, she had blundered into the camp of an enemy. Ever she discerned a malevolence in the murmur of the wind, a veritable threat in the soft voices of the night.

The nights, her innate sense of artistry told her, were unspeakably beautiful. She had never seen such stars before. They were so large, so white, and yet so unutterably aloof. Sometimes the moon rose in a splash of silver, and its loveliness on the far seas was a thing that words couldn't reach. Yet Lenore did not like things she could not put in words. For all their beauty those magic nights dismayed and disquieted her. They too were of the realities, and for all her past attitude of sophistication, she found that realism was the one thing she could not and dared not accept. Such realities as these, the wide-stretching seas and the infinity of stars, were rapidly stripping her of her dearest delusions; and with them, the very strongholds of her being. Heretofore she had placed her faith in superficialities, finding strength for her spirit and bolstering up her self-respect with such things as pride of ancestry, social position, a certain social attitude of recklessness that she thought became her, and most of all by refusing to believe that life contained any depth that she had not plumbed, any terrors that she dared not brave, any situation that she could not meet and master. But here these things mattered not at all. Neither ancestry nor social position could save her should the winter cold, hinted at already in the bitter frost of the dawns, swoop down and find her unprotected. Her own personal charm would not fight for her should she fall overboard into the icy waters. Here was a region where recklessness could very easily mean death; and where life itself was suddenly revealed utterly beyond her ken. But there was no turning back. Every hour the Charon bore her farther from her home.

Mrs. Hardenworth, whose habits of thought were more firmly established, was only made irritable and petulant by the new surroundings. Never good company except under the stimulation of some social gathering, she was rapidly becoming something of a problem to Ned and Lenore. She was irritable with the crew, on the constant verge of insult to Bess, forecasting disaster for the entire expedition. Unlike Bess, she had never been disciplined to meet hardship and danger; her only resource was guile and her only courage was recklessness; so now she tried to overcome her inner fears with a more reckless attitude toward life. It was no longer necessary for Ned and Lenore to seek the shelter of the pilot house for their third whisky-and-soda. She was only too glad to take it with them. More than once the dinner hour found her glassy-eyed and almost hysterical, only a border removed from actual drunkenness. Never possessing any true moral strength or real good breeding, a certain abandon began to appear in her speech. And they had not yet rounded the Alaskan Peninsula into Bering Sea.

To Ned, the long north and westward journey had been even more a revelation. He also knew the fear, the disillusionment, a swift sense of weakness when before he had been perfectly sure in his own strength; but there was also a more complex reaction,—one that he could not analyze or put into words. He couldn't call it happiness. It wasn't that, unless the mood that follows the hearing of wonderful music is also happiness. Perhaps that was the best comparison: the passion he felt was something like the response made to great music. There had been times at the opera, when all conditions were exactly favorable, that he had felt the same, and once when he had heard Fritz Kreisler play Handel's “Largo.” It was a strange reaching and groping, rather than happiness. It was a stir and thrill that touched the most secret chords of his being.

He felt it most at night when the great, white northern stars wheeled through the heavens. It was good to see them undulled by smoke; they touched some side of him that had never been stirred into life before. At such times the sea was lost in mystery.

The truth was that Ned, by the will of the Red Gods, was perceiving something of the real spirit of the North. A sensitive man to start with, he caught something of its mystery and wonder of which, as yet, Lenore had no glimpse. And the result was to bring him to the verge of a far-reaching discovery: that of his own weakness.

He had never admitted weakness before. He had always been so sure of himself, so complacent, so self-sufficient. But curiously these things were dying within him. He found himself doubting, for the first time, the success of this northern adventure. Could he cope with the realities that were beginning to press upon him? Would not this northern wilderness show him up as the weakling he was?

For the first time in his life Ned Cornet knew what realism was. He supposed, in his city life, that he had been a realist: instead he had only been a sophist and a mocker in an environment that was never real from dawn to darkness. He had read books that he had acclaimed among his young friends as masterpieces of realism—usually works whose theme and purpose seemed to be a bald-faced portrayal of sex—but now he saw that their very premise was one of falsehood. Here were the true realities,—unconquerable seas and starry skies and winds from off the waste places.

Unlike Lenore, Ned's regrets were not that he had ever launched forth upon the venture. Rather he found himself regretting that he was not better fitted to contend with it. Perhaps, after all, his father had been right and he had been wrong. For the first time in his life Ned felt the need of greater strength, of stronger sinews.

What if his father had told the truth, and that strict trials awaited him here. It was no longer easy to disbelieve him. Almost any disaster could fall upon him here, in these wastes of sunlit water, in the very shadow of polar ice. The sun itself had lost its warmth. It slanted down upon them from far to the south, and it seemed to be beguiling them, with its golden beauty on the waters, into some deadly trap that had been set for them still farther north. It left Ned some way apprehensive and dismayed. He wished he hadn't been so sure of himself, that he had taken greater pains, in his wasted years, to harden and train himself. Per haps he was to be weighed in the balance, and it was increasingly hard to believe that he would not be found wanting.

In such a mood he recalled his father's words regarding that dread realm of test and trial that lay somewhere beyond the world: “some bitter, dreadful training camp for those that leave this world unfitted to go on to a higher, better world.” He had scorned the thought at first, but now he could hardly get it out of his mind. It suggested some sort of an analogy with his present condition. These empty seas were playing tricks on his imagination; he could conceive that the journey of which his father had spoken might not be so greatly different than this. There would be the same desolation, the same nearness of the stars, the emptiness and mystery, the same sense of gathering, impending trial and stress. The name of the craft was the Charon! The thought chilled him and dismayed him.

For all his boasted realism, Ned Cornet had never got away from superstition. Man is still not far distant from the Cave and the Squatting Place, and superstition is a specter from out the dead centuries that haunts all his days. The coincidence that their craft, plying through these deathly waters, should bear such a name as the Charon suddenly suggested a dark possibility to Ned. All at once this man, heretofore so sure, so self-sufficient, so incredulous of anything except his own continued glory and happiness and life, was face to face with the first fear—the simple, primitive fear of death.

Was that his fate at the journey's end? Not mere trial, mere hardship and stress and adventure, but uncompromising death! Was he experiencing a premonition? Was that training camp soon to be a reality, as terribly real as these cold seas and this sky of stars, instead of a mere figment of an old man's childish fancy?

The thought troubled and haunted him, but it proved to be the best possible influence for the man himself. For the first time in his life Ned Cornet was awake. He had been dreaming before: for the first time he had wakened to life. Fear, disaster, the dreadful omnipotence of fate were no longer empty words to him: they were stern and immutable realities. He knew what the wolf knows, when he howls to the winter moon from the snow-swept ridge: that he was a child in the hands of Powers so vast and awful that the sublimest human thought could not even reach to them! He could see, dimly as yet but unmistakably, the shadow of that travail that haunts men's days from the beginning to the end.

His father's blood, and in some degree his father's wisdom, was beginning to manifest itself in him. It was only a whispered voice as yet, wholly to be disregarded in the face of too great temptation, yet nevertheless it was the finest and most hopeful thing in his life. And it came particularly clear one still, mysterious night, shortly after the dinner hour, as he faced the North from the deck of the Charon.

The schooner's auxiliary engines had pumped her through Unimak Pass by now, the passage between Unimak and Akun Islands, and now she had launched forth into that wide, western portal of the Arctic,—Bering Sea. Still the wonderful succession of bright days had endured, no less than marvelous, along the mist-swept southern shore of the peninsula, but now the brisk, salty wind from the northwest indicated an impending weather change. It had been a remarkably clear and windless day, and the night that had come down, so swiftly and so soon, was of strange and stirring beauty. The stars had an incredible luster; the sea itself was of an unnamed purple, marvelously deep,—such a color as scientists might find lying beyond the spectrum. And Ned's eyes, to-night, were not dulled by the effects of strong drink.

For some reason that he himself could not satisfactorily explain he hadn't partaken of his usual afternoon whiskies-and-sodas. He simply wasn't in a drinking mood, steadfastly refusing to partake. Lenore, though she had never made it a point to encourage Ned's drinking habits, could not help but regard the refusal as in some way a slight to herself, and was correspondingly downcast and irritable. Wholly out of sorts, she had let him go to the deck alone.

The night's beauty swept him, touching some realm of his spirit deep and apart from his mere love of pleasing visual image. His imagination was keenly alive, and he had a distinct feeling that the North had a surprise in store for him to-night. Some stress and glory was impending: what he did not know.

Facing over the bow he suddenly perceived a faint silver radiance close to the horizon. His first impression was that the boat had taken a south easterly course, and this argent gleam was merely the banner of the rising moon. Immediately he knew better: except by the absolute disruption of cosmic law, the moon could not rise for at least four hours. He knew of no coast light anywhere in the region, and it was hard to believe that he had caught the far-off glimmer of a ship's light. Seemingly such followers of the sea had been left far behind them.

But as he watched the light grew. His own pulse quickened. And presently a radiant streamer burst straight upward like a rocket, fluttered a moment, and died away.

A strange thrill and stir moved through the intricacy of his nerves. He knew now what this light portended; it was known to every wayfarer in the North, yet the keenest excitement took hold of him. It moved him more than any painted art had ever done, more than any wonderful maze of color and light that a master stage director could effect. The streamer shot up again, more brightly colored now, and then a great ball of fire rolled into the sky, exploded into a thousand flying fragments, and left a sea of every hue in the spectrum in its wake.

“The Northern Lights!” he told himself. A quiver of exultation passed over him.

There could be no mistake. This was the radiance, the glory that the Red Gods reserve for those who seek the far northern trails. Ever the display increased in wonder and beauty. The streamers were whisking in all directions now, meeting with the effect of collision in the dome of the sky, remaining there to shiver and gleam with incredible beauty; the surging waves of light spread ever farther until, at times, the sky was a fluttering canopy of radiance.

He thought of calling Lenore and Mrs. Hardenworth; but some way the idea slipped out of his mind. In a moment he was too deep in his own mood even to remember that they existed. But not only his exterior world faded from his consciousness. For the moment he forgot himself; and with it the old self-love and self-conceit that had pervaded every moment of his past life, colored all his views, and shaped the ends of his destiny. All that was left was that incredible sky and its weird, reflected glamor in the sea.

This was Aurora Borealis, never to be known, in its full glory, to those that shun the silent spaces of the North. Suddenly he felt glad that he was here. The moment, by measure of some queer balance beyond his sight, was worth all the rest of his past life put together. Great trials might lie ahead, temptations might tear him down, his own weakness and folly of the past might lay him low in some woeful disaster of the future; yet he was glad that he had come! It was the most profound, the most far-reaching moment of his life.

Always he had lived close to and bound up in a man-made civilization. In his heart he had worshipped it, rather than the urge and the inspiration that had made it possible: he had always judged the Thing rather than the Source. But for the first time in his life he was close to nature's heart. He had seen a glory, at nature's whim, that transcended the most glorious work of man ever beheld in his native city. He was closer to redemption than at any time in his life.

A few feet distant on the deck Bess's eyes turned from the miracle in the skies to watch the slowly growing light in Ned Cornet's face. It was well enough for him to find his inspiration in the majesty of nature. Bess was a woman, and that meant that man that is born of woman was her work and her being. She turned her eyes from God to behold this man.

And it was well for her that Lenore was not near enough to see her face in the wan, ghostly radiance of the Northern Lights. Her woman's intuition would have been quick to lay bare the secret of the girl's wildly leaping heart. Bess's eyes were suddenly lustrous with a light no less wonderful than that which played in glory in the sky. Her face was swiftly unutterably beautiful in its tenderness and longing.

And had she not fought against this very thing? She had not dreamed for a moment but that she had conquered and shut away the appeal that this man made to her heart. It would have been easy enough to conquer if he had only remained what he had been,—selfish, reckless, self-loving, inured to his tawdry philosophy of life. But to-night a new strength had come into his face. Perhaps it would be gone to-morrow, but to-night his manhood had come to him. And she couldn't resist it. It swept her heart as the wind sweeps a sea-bird through the sky.