The Isle of Retribution
I
The manifold powers of circumstance were in conspiracy against Ned Cornet this late August afternoon. No detail was important in itself. It had been drizzling slowly and mournfully, but drizzle is not uncommon in Seattle. Ned Cornet had been passing the time pleasantly in the Totem Club, on Fourth Street, doing nothing in particular, nothing exceedingly bad or good or even unusually diverting; but such was quite a customary practice with him. Finally, Cornet's special friend, Rodney Coburn, had just returned from one of his hundred sojourns in far places,—this time from an especially attractive salmon stream in Canada.
The two young men had met in Coburn's room at the Totem Club, and the steward had gone thither with tall glasses and ice. Coburn had not returned empty-handed from Canada. Besides pleasant memories of singing reels and throbbing rods and of salmon that raced like wild sea horses down the riffles, he had brought that which was much less healthful,—various dark bottles of time-honored liquors. Partly in celebration of his return, and partly because of the superior quality of the goods that had accompanied him, his friend Ned raised his afternoon limit from two powerful pre-dinner cocktails to no less than four richly amber whiskies-and-sodas. Thus their meeting was auspicious, and on leaving the club, about seven, it came about that Ned Cornet met the rain.
It was not enough to bother him. He didn't even think about it. It was only a lazy, smoky drizzle that deepened the shadows of falling twilight and blurred the lights in the street. Ned Cornet had a fire within that more or less occupied his thoughts. He didn't notice the rain, and he quite failed to observe the quick pulsation of the powerful engine in his roadster that might otherwise have warned him that he had long since passed the absolute limit that tolerant traffic officers could permit in the way of speed.
Cornet was not really drunk. His stomach was fortified, by some years of experience, against an amount somewhere in the region of a half-pint of the most powerful spirits,—sufficient poison to kill stone dead a good percentage of the lower animals. Being a higher animal Ned held his liquor surprisingly well. He was somewhat exhilarated, faintly flushed; his eyes had a sparkle as of broken glass, and he felt distinctly warm and friendly toward all the hurrying thousands on the street, but his motor centers were not in the least impaired. Under stress, and by inhaling sharply, he could deceive his own mother into thinking that he had not had a drink. Nevertheless a pleasant recklessness was upon him, and he couldn't take the trouble to observe such stupid things as traffic laws and rain-wet pavements.
But it came about that this exhilaration was not to endure long. In a space of time so short that it resembled some half-glimpsed incident in a dream, Ned found himself, still at his wheel, the car crosswise in the street and the front wheels almost touching the curb, a terrible and ghastly sobriety upon him. Something had happened. He had gone into a perilous skid at the corner of Fourth and Madison, the car had slid sickeningly out of his control, and at the wrong instant a dark shape, all too plainly another automobile, had lurched out of the murk of the rain. There had been no sense of violent shock. All things had slid easily, the sound at his fender was slow and gentle, and people, in the fading light, had slow, peculiar expressions on their faces. Then a great fear, like a sharp point, pricked him and he sprang from his seat in one powerful leap.
Ned Cornet had had automobiles at his command long before it was safe for him to have his hands on them. When cold sober he drove rather too fast, none too carefully, but had an almost incredible mastery over his car. He knew how to pick his wheel tracks over bumpy roads, and he knew the exact curve that a car could take with safety in rounding a corner. Even now, in the crisis that had just been, he had handled his car like the vet eran he was. The wonder was not that he had hit the other car, but rather, considering the speed with which he had come, that it should continue to remain before his sight, but little damaged, instead of being shattered into kindling and dust. His instincts had responded rather well. It was a somewhat significant thing, to waken hope in the breast of an otherwise despairing father, that in that stress and terror he had kept his head, he had handled his brakes and wheel in the only way that would be of any possible good, and almost by miracle had avoided a smashing crash that could have easily killed him and every occupant in the colliding car. Nevertheless it was not yet time to receive congratulations from spectators. There had been serious consequences enough. He was suddenly face to face with the fact that in his haste to get home for dinner he had very likely obliterated a human life.
There was a curious, huddled heap on the dim pavement, just beyond the small car he had struck. It was a girl; she lay very still, and the face half covered by the arm seemed very white and lifeless. And blasted by a terror such as was never known in all his wasted years, Ned leaped, raced, and fell to his knees at her side.
It seemed to him that the soft noise of the crash was not yet dead in the air. It was as if he had made the intervening distance in one leap. In that same little second his brain encompassed limitless areas,—terror, remorse, certain vivid vistas of his past life, the whiteness of the eyelids and the limpness of the little arms, and the startled faces of the spectators who were hurrying toward him. His mental mechanism, dulled before by drink, was keyed to such a degree that the full scope of the accident went home to him in an instant.
The car he had struck was one of the thousands of “jitneys” of which he had so often spoken with contempt. The girl was a shopgirl or factory worker, on her way home. Shaken with horror, but still swift and strong from the stimulus of the crisis, he lifted her head and shoulders in his arms.
It was a dark second in the life of this care-free, self-indulgent son of wealth as he stared into the white, blank, thin face before him. He was closer to the Darkness that men know as Death than he had ever been before,—so close that some of its shadow went into his own eyes, and made them look like odd black holes in his white skin, quite different from the vivid orbs that Rodney Coburn had seen over the tall glasses an hour before. For once, Ned Cornet was face to face with stern reality. And he waited, stricken with despair, for that face to give some sign of life.
It was all the matter of a second. The people who had seen the accident and the remaining passengers of the “jitney” had not yet reached his side. But for all that, the little instant of waiting contained more of the stuff of life than all the rest of Ned Cornet's time on earth. Then the girl smiled in his face.
“I'm not hurt,” he heard her say, seemingly in answer to some senseless query of his. She shook her head at the same time, and she smiled as she did it. “I know what I'm saying,” she went on. “I'm not hurt—one—bit!”
A great elation and enthusiasm went over the little crowd that was gathering around her. There could be no doubt but that she told the truth. Her voice had the full ring of one whose nerves are absolutely unimpaired. Evidently she had received but the slightest blow from one of the cars when its momentum was all but spent. And now, with the aid of a dozen outstretching hands, she was on her feet.
The little drama, as if hurled in an instant from the void, was already done. Tragedy had been averted; it was merely one of the thousands of unimportant smash-ups that occur in a great city every year. Some of the spectators were already moving on. In just a moment, before half a dozen more words could be said, other cars were swinging by, and a policeman was on the scene asking questions and jotting down license numbers. Just for a moment he paused at Ned's elbow.
“Your name and address, please?” he asked coldly.
Ned whirled, turning his eyes from the girl's face for the first time. “Ned Cornet,” he answered. And he gave his father's address on Queen Anne Hill.
“Show up before Judge Rossman in the morning,” he ordered. “The jitney there will send their bills to you. I'd advise you to pay 'em.”
“I'll pay 'em,” Ned agreed. “I'll throw in an extra twenty to pay for their loss of time.”
“This young lady says she ain't hurt,” the policeman went on. “It certainly is no credit to you that she ain't. There is plenty of witnesses here if she wants to make a suit.”
“I'll give this young lady complete satisfaction,” Ned promised. He turned to her in easy friendliness, a queer little crooked smile, winning and astonishingly juvenile, appearing at his mouth. “Now let's get in my car. I'll take you home—and we can talk this over.”
They pushed together through the little circle of the curious, he helped her courteously into the big, easy seat of his roadster, and in a moment they were threading their way through the early evening traffic.
“Good Lord,” the man breathed. “I wouldn't have blamed that mob if they had lynched me. Where do we go?”
She directed him out Madison, into a district of humble, modest, but respectable residences. “It's lucky you came along—I don't often get a ride clear to my door.”
“Lucky! I want to say if it wasn't for all the luck in the world you'd be going to the hospital instead. I'm taking all the blame for that smash back there—I got off mighty lucky. Now let's settle about the dress—and a few other things. First—you're sure you're not hurt?”
He was a little surprised at the gay, girlish smile about her lips. “Not a particle. It would be nice if I could go to the hospital two weeks or so, just to rest—but I haven't the conscience to do it. I'm not even scratched—just pushed over in the street. And I'm afraid I can't even charge you for the dress. I've always had too much conscience, Mr. Cornet.”
“Of course I'm going to pay”
“The dress cost only about twenty dollars—at a sale. And it doesn't seem to be even damaged. Of course it will have to be cleaned. To save you the embarrassment I see growing in your face, I'll gladly send the bill to you if you like”
In the bright street light he looked up, studying her face. He had never really observed it before. Before he had watched it for a sign of life that was only the antithesis of death, but now he found himself regarding it from another viewpoint. Her slender, pretty face was wholly in keeping with her humor, her honesty, her instinctive good manners. If she were a factory worker, hard toil had not in the least coarsened or hardened her. Her skin had a healthy freshness, pink like the marvelous pink of certain spring wild flowers, and she had delicate girlish features that wholly suited his appraising eye.
She was one of those girls who have worlds of hair to spend lavishly in setting off piquant faces. It must have been dark brown; at least it looked so in the street light. Below was a clear, girlish brow, with never a line except the friendly ones of companionship and humor. Her eyes seemed to be deeply blue, good-natured, childishly happy, amazingly clear and luminous, a perfect index to her mood. Now they were smiling, partly with delight in the ride and in the luxury of the car, partly from the sheer joy of the adventure. Ned rather wished that the light was better. He'd like to have given them further study.
She had a pretty nose, and full, almost sensuous lips that curled easily and softly as she smiled. Then there was a delectable glimpse of the little hollow of a slender throat, at the collar of her dress.
Ned found himself staring, and he didn't know just why. He was no stranger to women's beauty; some degree of it was the rule rather than the exception in the circle in which he moved; but some way this before him now was beauty of a different kind. It was warm, and it went down inside of him and touched some particular mood and fancy that had never manifested itself before. He had seen such beauty, now and again, in children—young girls with the freshness of a spring flower, just emerging into the bloom of first womanhood, and not yet old enough for him to meet in a social way—but it had never occurred to him that it could linger past the “flapper” age. This girl in his car was in her early twenties—over, rather than under—of medium height, with the slender strength of an expert swimmer, yet her beauty was that of a child.
He couldn't tell, at first, in just what her beauty lay. Other girls had fresh skins, bright eyes, smiling lips and masses of dark, lustrous hair,—and some of them even had the simplicity of good manners. Ned had a quick, sure mind, and for a moment he mused over his wheel as he tried to puzzle it out.
In all probability it lay in the soft, girlish lines about her lips and eyes. Curiously there was not the slightest hardness about them. Some way, this girl had missed a certain hardening process that most of his own girl friends had undergone; the life of the twentieth century, in a city of more than three hundred thousand, had left her unscathed. There were only tenderness and girlish sweetness in the lines, not sophistication, not self-love, not recklessness or selfishness that he had some way come to expect.
But soon after this Ned Cornet caught himself with a whispered oath. He was positively maudlin! The excitement, the near approach to tragedy, the influence of the liquor manifesting itself once more in his veins were making him stare and think like a silly fool. The girl was a particularly attractive shopgirl or factory worker, strong and athletic for all her appealing slenderness, doubtless pretty enough to waken considerable interest in certain of his friends who went in for that sort of thing, but he, Ned Cornet, had other interests. The gaze he bent upon her was suddenly indifferent.
They were almost at their destination now, and he did not see the sudden decline of her mood in response to his dying interest. Sensitive as a flower to sunlight, she realized in a moment that a barrier of caste had dropped down between them. She was silent the rest of the way.
“Would you mind telling me what you do—in the way of work, I mean?” he asked her, at her door. “My father has a business that employs many girls. There might be a chance”
“I can do almost anything with a needle, thank you,” she told him with perfect frankness. “Fitting, hemstitching, embroidery—I could name a dozen other things.”
“We employ dozens of seamstresses and fitters. I suppose I can reach you here—after work-hours. I'll keep you in mind.”
An instant later he had bidden her good night and driven away, little dreaming that, through the glass pane of the door, her lustrous blue eyes had followed the red spark that was his tail-light till it disappeared in the deepening gloom.