The Isle of Retribution/Chapter 17
XVII
There were a number of axes in the little work-room that comprised one end of the long cabin, and Doomsdorf flung three of them over his shoulder. “Right up through here,” he urged, pointing to the little hillside behind the cabin. “Of course I can't let you cut fuel from these trees so close to the house. You, as city people, surely know something about house beautifying. You'll have to carry the wood a little farther—but you won't mind, when you know it's for the sake of beauty.”
The snow was noticeably deeper in the two hours since they had come. It clung to Ned's trouser legs almost to the knees, soaking through his thin walking shoes; and both he and Bess found it some degree of labor just to push through it. Doomsdorf halted them before one of the half-grown spruce.
“Here's a good one,” he commented. “Just beyond is another. You can each take one—cut them down with your axes and then hack them into two-foot lengths for the stove. Better split each length into three pieces—the larger ones, anyway. If you have time, you can carry it down to the cabin.”
He swung his axes down from his shoulder. He seemed to be handling them with particular care, but several seconds elapsed before Ned realized that the moment had some slight element of drama. Heretofore he had been unable to observe that Doomsdorf was in the least on guard against his prisoners. He had seemingly taken no obvious precautions in his own defense. It was plain to see, however, that he did not intend to put axes into the hands of these two foes until he had one ready to swing himself.
He took the handle of the largest axe in his right hand; with his left he extended the other two implements, blades up, to Ned and Bess. “I suppose you know we've had no experience” Ned began.
“It doesn't matter. Just be careful the trees don't fall on you. They sometimes do, you know, on amateur woodsmen. The rest is plain brute strength and awkwardness.” He handed them each, from his pocket, a piece of dried substance that looked like bark. “Here's a piece of jerked caribou each—it ought to keep life in your bodies. And the sooner you get your wood cut and split, the sooner you see any more.”
Then he turned and left them to their toil.
Thus began a bitter hour for Ned. He found the mere work of biting through the thick trunk with his axe cost him his breath and strained his patience to the limit. It wasn't as easy as it looked. He did not strike true; the blade made irregular white gashes in the bark; his blows seemed to lack power. The great, ragged wound deepened but slowly.
Finally it was half through the trunk, and yet the tree stood seemingly as sturdy as ever. Reckless from fatigue, he chopped on more fiercely than ever. And suddenly, with the grinding noise of breaking wood, the tree started to fall.
And at that instant Ned was face to face with the exigency of leaping for his life. The tree did not fall in the direction planned. An instant before, weary and aching and out of breath, Ned would have believed himself incapable of swift and powerful motion. As that young spruce shattered down toward him, like the club of a giant aimed to strike out his life, a supernatural power seemed to snatch him to one side. Without realization of effort, the needed muscles contracted with startling force, and he sprang like a distance jumper to safety.
But he didn't jump too soon or too far. The branches of the tree lashed at him as it descended, hurling him headlong in the snow. And thereafter there were three things to cause him thought.
One of them was the attitude of Bess,—the girl to whom, in weeks past, he had shown hardly decent courtesy: the same girl whom in childish fury he had cursed the bitter, eventful night just gone. Above the roar of the falling tree he heard her quick, half-strangled gasp of horror.
The sound seemed to have the qualities that made toward a perfect after-image; because in the silence that followed, as he lay in the soft snow, and the crash of the fallen tree echoed into nothingness, it still lingered, every tone perfect and clear, in his mind's ear. There was no denying its tone of ineffable dismay. Evidently Bess was of a forgiving disposition; in spite of his offense of the past night she had evidently no desire to see him crushed into jelly under that giant's blow. Some way, it had never occurred to him that the girl would harbor a kind thought for him again. She had been right and he had been wrong; in an effort to serve him she had received only his curse, and her present desperate position, worse perhaps than either his own or Lenore's, was due wholly to his own folly. She had not taken part in the orgy of the night before, so not the least echo of responsibility could be put on her. Yet she didn't hate him. She had cried out in real agony when she thought he was about to die.
He thought upon this matter as he lay in the soft snow whence the descending branches of the tree had hurled him. He didn't have many seconds to think about it. Further eccentricity on the part of Bess swiftly gave him additional cause for reflection. She had not only cried out, but she ran to him with the speed of a deer. She was by his side almost before he was aware of the scope of the accident.
The sobbing cry he had heard could very likely be attributed merely to that instinctive horror that a sensitive girl would feel at an impending tragedy, wholly apart from personal interest in the victim; but for a few seconds Ned was absolutely at a loss to explain that drawn, white, terrified face above him. In fear for him, Bess was almost at the point of absolute collapse herself. Nor could mere impersonal horror explain her flying leap to reach his side,—like a snowbird over the drifts. It meant more than mere forgiveness for the terrible pass to which he had brought her. In a few seconds of clear thinking he thought he saw the truth: that even after all that was past Bess still looked to him for her hope, that she regarded him still as her defense against Doomsdorf; and that his death would leave her absolutely bereft. He was a man, and she still dreamed that he might save her.
The result was a quick sense of shame of his own inadequacy. It is not good to know oneself a failure in the face of woman's trust. Yet the effect of the little scene was largely good, for it served to strengthen Ned's resolve to spare the girls in every way he could, and by his own feigned hope to keep them from despair. Above all, he found an in creased admiration for Bess. Instead of a silly prude, a killjoy for the party, she had shown herself as a sportswoman to the last fiber. She had been a friend when she had every right to be an enemy; she had shown spirit and character when women of lesser metal would have been irremediably crushed. He was far away now from the old barriers of caste. There was no reason, on this barren, dreadful isle, why he shouldn't accept all the friendship she would give him and give his own in return.
But this subject was only one of three that suddenly wakened him to increased mental activity. If he were amazed at Bess, he was no less amazed at himself. He had been tired out, hopeless, out of wind, hardly able to swing his arms, and yet he had managed to leap out of seeming certain death. The unmistakable inference was that the body in which his spirit had dwelt for thirty years had strength and possibilities of which hitherto he had been unaware. In the second of crisis he had shown a perfect coordination of brain and muscle, an accuracy of transmission of the brain-messages that were conducted along his nerves, and a certain sureness of instinct that he had never dreamed he possessed. It would have been very easy to have jumped the wrong way. Yet he had jumped the right way—the only possible way to avoid death—choosing infallibly the nearest point of safety and hurling himself directly toward it. Perhaps it would have been better to have stayed where he was, to have let the tree crush the life out of him and be done with Hell Isle for good, yet a power beyond him self had carried him out of danger. The point offered interesting possibilities. Could it be that he had had the makings of a man in him all these years and had never been aware of it? Could he dare hope that this side of him might be developed, in the hard years to come, so that he might be better able to endure the grinding toil and hardship? The thought wasn't really hope—he didn't believe that hope would ever visit him again—it was only an instant's rift, dim as twilight, in the gloom of his despair. The most he could ever hope to do was to fortify himself in order to take more and more of the girl's hardship upon his shoulders.
Thirdly he gave some thought to the matter of felling trees. It was a more complex matter than he had at first supposed. Evidently he had gone about it in the wrong way. It would pay to have more respect for the woodsman's science if he did not wish to come to an early end beneath a falling tree. He might not be so quick to dodge again.
Bess was staring wide-eyed into his face; and he smiled quietly in reassurance. “Not hurt at all,” he told her. Quickly he climbed to his feet. “See that you don't do the same thing that I did.”
Delighted that he had not been hurt but a little aghast at what heart's secret she might have revealed in running to his aid, she started to go back to her toil. But Ned had already reached some conclusions about tree-felling. He walked with her to her fallen axe, then inspected the deep cut she had already made in her tree.
“You're doing the same thing I did, sure enough,” he observed. “The tree will fall your way and crush you. Let me think.”
A moment later he took his axe and put in a few more strokes in the same place. It was the danger point, he thought: a deeper cut might fell the tree prematurely. Presently he crossed to the opposite side, signaled Bess out of danger, and began to hack the tree again, making a cut somewhat above that started on the other side of the trunk. He chopped sturdily; and in a moment the tree started to fall, safely and in an opposite direction.
He uttered some small sound of triumph; but it was a real tragedy to have the tree fall against a near-by tree and lodge. Again he had failed to exercise proper foresight.
There was nothing to do but climb into the adjoining tree with his axe and laboriously cut the lodged tree away. In the meantime Bess went to work on the first tree felled, trimming it of its limbs so to cut it into lengths.
Ned joined her at the work, but long before the first tree was cut into fuel, both were at the edge of utter exhaustion. The point of fatigue he had reached that morning in rowing, when he had rested from the sheer inability to take another stroke, was already far past. There had been a point, some time back, when every muscle of his body had throbbed with a burning ache, when pain crept all over him like a slow fire, but that too was largely passed now. His brain was dulled; he felt baffled and estranged as if in a dream. It was more like a nightmare now,—his axe swinging eternally in his arms, the chips flying, one after another.
He seemed to move so slowly. Hours were passing, one after another, and still great lengths of the trees remained to cut and split. But they couldn't stop and rest. They dared not return to the cabin till the work was done: the brute that was their master would be glad of an excuse to lay on the lash. They had been taught what mercy to expect from him. Here was one reality that their fatigue could not blunt: their cruel master waiting in the cabin. As the rest of their conscious world faded and dimmed he was ever more vivid, ever more real. The time soon came when he filled all the space in their thoughts.
For Ned life was suddenly immensely simplified. All the complexities of his old life had suddenly ceased to matter: indeed that had perished from his consciousness. The world was forgotten, he had no energy to waste in remembering how he had come hence, even who he was. From the supreme egoist, knowing no world but that of which his own ego was the orbit, to a faltering child hardly aware of his own identity: thus had Ned changed in a single night. The individual who had been Ned Cornet had almost ceased to be; and in his place was a helpless pawn of a cruel and remorseless fate.
He knew Fate now. Through the mists of this nightmare that was upon him he saw the Jester with his bells. And as he looked, the sharp, ironic face grew savage, brutal, half-covered with blond hair; the motley became a cap of silver fox. But this changed too, as his axe swung in the air. Once more the face was sharp, but still unutterably terrible to see; but it was livid now, as if sulphurous flames were playing upon it. And the foot—he saw the foot plain against the snow. It was unspeakable, filling him with cold horror all his length. It was some way cloven and ghastly.
The vision passed, broken and dissolved by the noise of the axe on the tough wood. He knew Fate now. He had seen him in all his forms. In his folly he had scorned him, taunted him by his insolence, had dared to dream that he was greater than Fate, immune from his persecution. If this torment ended now, he had paid the price. He had atoned for everything already if he did not lift the axe again. Yet only eternity lay ahead.
Doomsdorf had seemed almost incredible to him at first. It was as if he couldn't possibly be true: a figment of nightmare that would vanish as soon as he wakened. But he was real enough now. Nothing was left to him but the knowledge how real he was.
He must not rest, he must not pause till the work was done. The fact that Bess had fallen, fainting, in the snow, did not affect him; he must swing his axe and hew the wood. Day was dying. Grayness was creeping in from the sea. It was like the essence of the sea itself, all gray, gray like his dreams, gray like the ashes of his hopes. He must finish the two trees before the darkness came down and kept him from seeing where to sink the blade. Otherwise it wouldn't matter—day or night, one year or another. Time had ceased to count; seemingly it had almost ceased to move. But the knout would be waiting, hardened and sharp with wire, if he didn't do his work. Cold fear laid hold of him again.
He did not know that this cold that was upon him was not only that of fear. His clothes had been wet through by perspiration and melted snow, and now the bitter winds off the sea were getting to him. Still he swung his axe. It was always harder to strike true; the tough lengths took ever more blows to split. The time soon came when he was no longer aware of the blows against the wood. The axe swung automatically in his arms; even sense of effort was gone from him. The only reality that lived in him now, in that misty twilight, was the knowledge that he must get through.
It was too dark to see, now, how much of the work remained. The night was cheating him, after all. He struck once more at the tough length that lay at his feet—a piece at which he had already struck uncounted blows. He gave all his waning strength to the effort.
The length split open, but the axe slipped out of his bleeding hands, falling somewhere in the shadows beyond. He must crawl after it; he didn't know how many more lengths there were to split. It was strange that he couldn't keep his feet. And how deep and still was the night that dropped over him!
How long he groped for the axe handle in the snow he never knew. But he lay still at last. Twilight deepened about him, and the wind wept like a ghost risen from the sea. The very flame of his life was burning down to embers.
Thus it came about that Doomsdorf missed the sound of his axe against the wood. Swinging a lantern, a titantic figure among the snow-laden trees, he tramped down to investigate. Bess, semi-conscious again, wakened when the lantern light danced into her eyes. But it took him some little time to see Ned's dark form in the snow.
The reason was, it was lying behind a mighty pile of split fuel. The light showed that only green branches, too small to be of value, remained of the two spruce. And Doomsdorf grunted, a wondering oath, deep in his throat.
They had been faithful slaves. Putting his mighty arm around them, each in turn, he half carried, half dragged them into the warmth of the cabin.