The Isle of Retribution

by Edison Marshall

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. Hardenworth, 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.