The Isle of Retribution/Chapter 11
XI
Knutsen's brain was entirely clear and sure as he gave his orders on the deck. His hand was steady as iron. His failure to master himself had brought disaster, but he knew how to master a ship at a time like this. From the instant the Charon had struck the reef, he was the power upon that storm-swept deck, and whatever hope McNab had lay in him.
In the lantern light, blasted by the wind and in the midst of the surging waves, the scene had little semblance to reality. It was a mad dream from first to last, never to be clearly remembered by the survivors: a queer, confused jumble of vivid images that could never be straightened out. The head light still threw its glare into the sleet-filled night. The biting, chill wind swept over the deck and into the darkness. The ship settled down like a leaden weight.
Almost at once the four passengers were on deck, waiting to take their meager chance in the lifeboats. The stress, the raging elements, those angry seas that ever leaped higher and nearer, as if coveting their mortal lives, most of all the terror such as had never previously touched them, affected no two of them alike. Of the three women, Bess alone moved forward, out of the shelter of the cabin, to be of what aid she could. Her drawn, white face was oddly childlike in the lantern light. Mrs. Hardenworth had been stricken and silenced by the nearing visage of death; Lenore, almost unconscious with terror, made strangling, sobbing sounds that the wind carried away. And in this moment of infinite travail Ned Cornet felt his manhood stirring within him.
Perhaps it was merely instinct. It is true that men of the most abandoned kind often show startling courage and nobility in a crisis. The reason is simply that the innate virtue of the race, a light and a glory that were implanted in the soul when the body was made in the image of its Maker, comes to the surface and supersedes the base impulses of degeneracy. There is no uneven distribution of that virtue: it is as much a part of man as his hands or his skull; and the difference between one man and another lies only in the degree in which it is developed and made manifest and put in control over the daily life. Perhaps the strength that rose in Ned was merely the assertion of an inner manhood, wholly stripped of the traits that made him the individual he was,—nothing that would endure, nothing that portended a change and growth of character. But at least the best and strongest side of him was in the ascendency to-night. The danger left him cool rather than cost him his self-control. The seeming imminence of death steadied him and nerved him.
Bess saw him under the lantern light, and he was not the man who had cursed her at the door of her room. For the moment all things were forgotten except this. Likely the thing he had spoken would come true, now. Perhaps he would get his wish. For one interminable instant in which her heart halted in her breast—as in death—sea and wind and storm ceased to matter.
Ned came up, and Knutsen's cold gaze leaped over his face. “Help me here,” he commanded. “McNab, you help Forest and Julius launch the larger boat.”
There was not much launching to do. Waves were already bursting over the deck. Knutsen turned once more.
“We want four people in each boat,” he directed sharply. “Cornet, you and I and Miss Hardenworth in this one. The other girl will have to get in here too. The other boat's slightly larger—Mrs. Harden worth, get in with McNab, Forest, and Julius.”
Bess shook herself with difficulty from her revery. This was no time for personal issues, to hearken to the voices of her inmost heart when the captain was shouting through the storm. The only issues remaining now were those of deliverance or disaster, life or death. Even now the white hands of the waves were stretching toward her. Yet this terrible reality did not hold her as it should. Instead, her thoughts still centered upon Ned: the danger was always Ned's instead of her own; it was Ned's life that was suspended by a thread above the abyss. It was hard to remember herself: the instinct of self-preservation was not even now in the ascendency.
There is a blasting and primitive terror in any great convulsion of the elements. These are man's one reality, the eternal constant in which he plights his faith in a world of bewildering change: the air of heaven, the sky of stars, the unutterable expanse of sea. His spirit can not endure to see them in tumult, broken forth from the restraint of law. Such sights recall from the germ-plasm those first almighty terrors that were the title page of conscious life; and they disrupt quickly the mastery that mind, in a thousand-thousand years, has gained over instinct. Yet for herself Bess was carried out from and beyond the terror of the storm. She had almost forgotten it: it seemed already part of the natural system in which she moved. She was scarcely aware that the captain had shouted to make himself heard; that she must needs shout to answer him: it was as if this were her natural tone of voice, and she was no more conscious of raising it above the bellow of the storm than are certain fisherfolk, habitants of wave-swept coasts, when they call one to another while working about their nets.
The reason was simply that she was thinking too hard about Ned to remember her own danger, and thus terror could not reach her. It can never curse and blast those who have renounced self for others; and thus, perhaps, she had blundered into that great secret of happiness that wise men have tried to teach since the world was new. Perhaps, in the midst of stress and travail, she had glimpsed for an instant the very soul of life, the star that is the hope and dream of mankind.
But while she had forgotten her own danger, she was all too aware of the promptings of her own heart. The issue went farther than Ned's life. It penetrated, in secret ways, the most intimate depths of her relations with him. It was natural at such a time that she should remember Ned's danger to the exclusion of her own. The strangeness of that moment lay in the fact that she also remembered his wishes and his words. She could not forget their last scene together.
“Put Mrs. Hardenworth in your boat, so she and Lenore can be together,” she told Captain Knutsen. “I'll get in the other.”
The captain did not seem to hear. He continued to shout his orders. In the work of lowering the lifeboat he had cause to lift his lantern high, and for a moment its yellow gleam was bright upon Bess's drawn, haggard face. Farther off it revealed Ned, white-faced but erect in the beat of the storm.
In one instant's insight, a single glimpse between the storm and the sea, he understood that she was taking him at his word. For some reason beyond his ken—likely beyond hers, too—she had asked to be put in McNab's boat so that his wish he had spoken in anger at the door of her stateroom might come true. How silly, how trivial he had been! Those angry words had not come from his heart: only from some false, superficial side of him that was dying in the storm. He had never dreamed that she would take them seriously. They were the mere spume of a child that had not yet learned to be a man.
“Get in with us,” he said shortly. “Don't be silly—as I was.” Then, lest she should mistake his sentiment: “Mrs. Hardenworth is twice your weight, and this boat will be overloaded as it is.”
The girl looked at him quietly, nodding her head. If he had expected gratitude he was disappointed, for she received the invitation as merely an actuality of her own, immutable destiny. Indeed the wings of destiny were sweeping her forward, her life still intertwined with his, both pawns in the vast, in scrutable movement of events.
He helped her into the dory. Julius, who at the captain's orders had been rifling the cabins, threw blankets to her. Then tenderly, lending her his strength, Ned helped Lenore over the wind-swept deck into the bow seat of the lifeboat, nearest to the seat he would take himself. “Buck up, my girl,” he told her, a deep, throbbing note in his voice. “I'll look after you.”
Already the deck was deserted. The dim light showed that the larger dory, containing McNab, Forest, Julius, and Mrs. Hardenworth, had already been launched. There was no sign of them now. The darkness and the storm had already dropped between. They could not hear a shout of directions between the three men, not a scream of fear from the terrified woman who was their charge.
It was as if they had never been. Only the Charon was left—her decks awash and soon to dive and vanish beneath the waves—and their little group in the dim gleam of the lantern. Knutsen and Ned took their places at the oarlocks, Ned nearer the bow, Knutsen just behind. A great wave seemed to catch them and hurl them away.
Could they live in this little boat on these tumultuous seas? Of course the storm was nothing compared to the tempests weathered successfully by larger lifeboats, but it held the utmost peril here. Any moment might see them overwhelmed. The least of those great waves, catching them just right, might overturn them in an instant.
Already the Charon was lost in the darkness, just as the other lifeboat had been lost an instant before. Not even Knutsen could tell in what direction she lay. Still the waves hurried them along. The chill wind shrieked over them, raging that they should have dared to venture into its desolate domains.
Could they live until the morning? Wouldn't cold and exposure make an end to them in the long, bitter hours to come? The odds looked so uneven, the chances so bitterly long against them. Could their little sparks of being, the breath of life that ever was so wan and feeble, the little, wondering moment of self-knowledge that at best seemed only the fabric of a dream—could these prevail against the vast, unspeakable forces of the North? Wouldn't the spark go out in a little while, the breath be blown away on the wings of the wind, the self-light burn down in the gloom? At any moment their fragile boat might strike another submerged reef. There was no light to guide them now. They were lost and alone in an empty ocean, helpless prey to the whims of the North.
The pillars of their strength had fallen. Man's civilization that had been their god was suddenly shown as an empty idol, helpless to aid them now. The light, the beauty, the strong cities they had loved had no influence here: seemingly death itself could not make these things farther distant, less availing. For the first time since they were born Ned and Lenore were face to face with life, and also with the death that shadows life. For the first time they knew the abject terror of utter helplessness. There was nothing they could do. They were impotent prey to whatever fate awaited them. Captain Knutsen, mighty of frame, his blood surging fiercely through the avenues of his veins, and Bess, schooled to hardship, were ever so much better off than they. They were better disciplined, stronger in misfortune, better qualified to meet danger and disaster. For no other reason than that—holding respect for these northern seas—they were more warmly dressed, their chances were better for ultimate survival.
But what awaited them when the night was done? How slight was the chance that, in this world of gray waters, they would ever encounter an inhabited island. It was true that islands surrounded them on all sides, but mostly they were but wastes of wind-swept tundra, not one in four having human habitations. Mostly the islands were large, and such habitations as there might be were scattered in sheltered valleys along the shore, and it was wholly probable that the little boat could pass and miss them entirely. They couldn't survive many days on these wintry waters. The meager supplies of food and the jugs of water in the lifeboats would soon be exhausted, and who could come to their aid? Which one of Ned's friends, wishing him such a joyous farewell at the docks, would ever pause in his play one moment to investigate his fate?
A joy-ride! There was a savage irony in the thought of the holiday spirit with which he had undertaken the expedition. And the voices he had heard out of the sea had evidently told him true when they had foretold his own death. For all his natural optimism, the odds against him seemed too great ever to overcome. And there was but one redeeming thought,—a thought so dimly discerned in the secret mind of the man that it never fully reached his conscious self; so bizarre and strange that he could only attribute it to incipient delirium. It was simply that he had already fortified himself, in some degree, to meet the training camp thereafter!
The journey through the gray, mysterious seas, the nearing heart of nature, most of all to-night's disaster had, in some small measure, given him added strength. It was true that his old conceit was dying in his body. His old sense of mastery over himself and over life was shown as a bitter delusion: rather he was revealed as the helpless prey of forces beyond even his power to name. This self-centered man, who once had looked on life from the seats of the scornful, felt suddenly incompetent even to know the forces that had broken him down. Yet in spite of all this loss, there was something gained. Instead of false conceit he began to sense the beginnings of real self-mastery. For all his terror, freezing his heart in his breast, he suddenly saw clear; and he knew he had taken an upward step toward Life and Light.
There would not be quite so long a course of training for him, in the Hereafter. He could go through and on more quickly on account of these past days. There was a way through and out—his father had told him that—and it wasn't so far distant as when he had first left home. With death so close that he could see into its cavernous eyes, such was Ned's one consolation as the craft drifted before the wind.
The terror that was upon him lifted, just an instant, as he bent to hear what Lenore was trying to tell him. Lenore was his love and his life, the girl to whom he had plighted his troth, and his first obligation was to her. He must see to her first.
“I'm cold,” she was sobbing. “I'm freezing to death. Oh, Ned, I'm freezing to death.”
Of course it wasn't true. Chill though the night was, the temperature was still above freezing, and the blankets about her largely protected her from the biting winds. She was chilled through, however, as were the other three occupants of the craft; and the fear and the darkness were themselves like ice in her veins. Ned's hands were stiff, but he managed to remove one of his own blankets and wrap it about the shoulders of the girl. The boat lurched forward, sped by the waves and the wind.
The night hours passed over the face of the sea. The wind raged through the sky, biting and bitter for all their warm wraps. It was abating, now, the waves were less high; but if anything its breath was more chill as the hour drew toward dawn. The wind-blown sleet swept into their faces.
Both girls sought refuge in troubled sleep. Ned sat with his arms about Lenore, giving her what warmth he could from his own body. Bess was huddled in her seat. Could their less rugged constitutions stand many hours of such cold and exposure? It was a losing game, already. The North was too much for them. Life is a fragile thing at best: a few hours more might easily spell the end.
But that hour saw the return of an ancient mystery, carrying back the soul to those gray days when the earth was without form, and void. Darkness had been upon the face of the waters, but once more it was divided from the day.
Even here, seemingly at the edge of the world, the ancient miracle did not fail. A grayness, like a mist, spread slowly; and the curtains of darkness slowly receded. The storm was abating swiftly now; and the dawn broke over an easily rolling sea.
Captain Knutsen, who had sat so long in one position—his gaze fastened on one point of the horizon—that he gave the impression of being unconscious, suddenly started and pointed his hand. His voice, pitched to the noise of the storm, roared out into the quiet dawn.
“Land!” he shouted. “We're coming to land!”