Читать книгу Deluge - S. Fowler Wright - Страница 7

CHAPTER I

May 31 was Whit-Sunday. It was one of those rare days that the English climate would sometimes give to those who had grown weary of its more sinister vagaries, green and cool and sunny after a week of showers. It was on that day that Mrs. Templeton lunched at the Websters. She was the wife of a newspaper proprietor; a lean, short-haired, painted woman, such as were common at that period. She had no children, and made a boast of her barrenness, which she implied was deliberate. “Besides,” she said, “how could we afford it, with income tax as it is, and a new car to be bought in the autumn? And then the cost of education!—I always think it is so wicked to bring a child into the world to be handicapped afterwards. Charles? Oh, men are so sentimental, and so inconsiderate—they never think what it means to us women—as Bishop Storr said at the last Congress.... Oh yes, I think your babies are beautiful—I dote on children—but I do hope you won’t be silly again—”

And two days later—well, perhaps it was time.

The woman spoke with the assurance of one whose vices were popular, and who felt it was her hosts, rather than herself, who were on the defensive, for the crime of having two children in the nursery; and Helen was always polite to a guest, and had special reasons of importance (as they appeared then) for conciliating Mrs. Templeton. As for Martin, several years of law court practice had taught him to conceal opinions till they were needed, and he contented himself with eliciting casually that she was a seventh child, and agreeing that there was something to be said for small families.

It was that night that the wind rose. It blew against the house with a steady pressure, free from gusts, and there was a continuous whining sound from the trees, very different from the rustle and creak of swaying boughs that is usual in time of tempest.

Martin, wakeful in an unusual restlessness, found it hard to turn his mind from this sound. It seemed to him that the trees whined in a conscious terror, and as though to an implacable power which they had no hope to propitiate.

The wind increased. He heard the loud crack of a tree-trunk that had snapped at the strain. There were many noises in the night. There was a crash as though a chimney fell at the further end of the house. But Helen slept quietly through it, and while she did so he would not rise to disturb her.

The wind came from the north. The room in which they slept had a northern wall, but the windows were on the western side. The door was on the south. It opened to a passage leading to the room where the children slept. There was no sound to alarm him from that direction.

The side of the house from which the sound of falling had come was vacant that night. The servants—a married couple—had been given leave over the weekend. The sudden illness of a brother had occasioned the absence of the nurse since the previous afternoon. They were alone in the house.

It was toward morning, in an interval of broken sleep, that he heard the telephone ringing in the room below with an unmistakable urgency. He rose and went down.

He found that it was a call from the local police station to tell him that a tree had fallen across the road adjoining his premises, and broken the fence of his field. Had he any animals loose in the field, and, if so, would he take steps to secure them? The inspector added that he had had so many accidents reported during the last hour that he was short of staff to deal with them. Could Mr. Webster’s man put some warning light upon the obstruction, such as would last till sunrise?

Mr. Webster’s man was away, but Mr. Webster would do it. The inspector was hurriedly grateful. He rang off. Martin went upstairs to dress hastily.

Helen was still sleeping peacefully, and when he woke her sufficiently to explain why he was going, she only said, “Don’t be long; it’s too cold to stay out at this time of night,” and was asleep again as she said it.

The house lay at some distance south of the road, and the wind blew from the north, so that it faced him almost directly as he entered the drive, to which the house stood sideways, facing west, and though the trees must have done something to break its force, he found that he could only stand against it with difficulty. He switched on the drive lamps (for the night was still dark) so that he found his way easily, though every yard was an effort, as though the air into which he stepped were solid substance into which a foot must be forced with difficulty.

Turning to the right when he left the drive, and passing a row of adjoining cottages, he came to the place of the accident. An elm had fallen across the road, scattering the bricks of a wall which had bounded the field in which it grew, so that he stumbled against one of them while the dark barrier of the fallen trunk was still at some distance. On his own side, it had crashed through a high fence of saplings, which had fallen for several yards on either side. A flash-light torch which he carried showed the giant bole stretching far into the field, and beyond a shadowy mass of broken or uplifted branches. Having fixed the torch with some labour, and the help of a pocket-knife (rather neatly, as he thought), on the fallen trunk, so that the wind should not displace it, and it would be a warning, however feeble, to any approaching traffic, he made his way back to the house.

The steady violence of the wind was still increasing. Turning in at the gate he found it difficult to move forward without falling. Had it come in gusts of such a force it must have been impossible to do so, but the pressure was so regular that the muscular effort needed for its resistance could be gauged with accuracy, and the greatest difficulty was to avoid an acceleration of pace, when moving before it, which would have become uncontrollable.

As he made his way to the house, he heard a heavy rumbling sound behind him, which he at first supposed to be thunder, but when it came a second time he recognised the fall of some large building that the wind had demolished.

But no fear for his own house, which was very solidly built, entered his mind, and he regained it with a sense of relief and of recovered security.

He was of the temperament that a high wind exhilarates, and the lives of most people of that time were so bare of unexpected incident, that any unusual physical occurrence, even of a threatening character, had an effect of pleasurable stimulus, and dim atavistic instincts moved slightly in their sleep, though they might not waken.

It is a thing almost incredible to tell, but it is simply true, and illustrates the intolerable monotony of their days, that a great industry had arisen which was occupied in collecting daily information respecting the actions or accidents of their fellowmen, and informing others concerning them, so that every day millions of people dissipated their time in learning (and at once forgetting) that a woman of whom they had never heard before, nor would hear again, had left her husband; or that a husband had broken his wife’s head; or a servant had taken his master’s property; that a building had been accidentally burned in a distant town; or a child drowned in a river fifty miles away; and even events of much greater triviality were repeated in a series of unending monotony.

Yet the collection of such details over a vast area gave to their readers, whose intelligences were dulled by the conditions of their existence, an illusion of surrounding incidents; and so they would spend their daily time in the absorbing of such vicarious excitement, while the actual conditions in which they existed were such that they might sometimes lack food or clothing for their children, and the land around them was neglected, or roughly cultivated by the machines which they produced in their crowded settlements, and which had replaced the living men and women by whom the work had been more efficiently performed in earlier days.

Of the joy of present living, of the captured meal and the barred door, of brief safety after hazard, of ecstatic rest after exhaustion, they knew nothing, either by imagination or experience.

So hateful were their own existences, and so hopeless were they of any change or improvement from their own exertions, that many thousands of them found relief in periods of temporary forgetfulness, during which they were enabled, by a supply of imaginary narrations, to occupy themselves with the supposed emotions or actions of invented lives.

As we have seen, the house-front faced sideways to the wind’s course, and it was owing to this circumstance that Martin was able, after a moment’s breathless struggle, to close the door again when he entered it.

As he did this he became conscious that the telephone was again ringing steadily, and he went to it in anticipation that he would hear an inquiry as to the work which he had just completed but a voice was speaking already as he raised the receiver.

“...should be held in readiness until more is known. Message ends. Home Office message begins. Broadcast by all means available. Post public notice this effect in all offices. Terrible calamity in Southern Europe. Land subsidence, and Mediterranean overflowing. Spain and Italy believed submerging. Telegraphic communications ceased except through Denmark. Believed no occasion alarm here, although gale increasing. Movements of population will greatly embarrass Government’s efforts to meet emergency. Public notice ends. Instruct all local authorities take immediate steps control provisions, Arrange population evacuate all unstable buildings. Close all banks. Suspend all transit services, awaiting further instructions. Government taking necessary steps maintain essential services. Precautions in cities against fire urgently necessary. Panic movements of population to be....”

The voice ceased, and the instrument no longer responded to any effort to rouse it. It was clear that he had received the end, and then the beginning of a message which was being repeated incessantly for the benefit of all who could hear it.

Martin went upstairs slowly. He was excited rather than shocked or alarmed by the stupendous nature of the catastrophe. His mind was too active for his feet to move very rapidly. Was it really true? And would his own country sink also into the abyss, and they with it? Was it safe to stay in the house, and if not, what should be the alternative? What food was there in the house, and could any tradesman reach them if this storm should continue? Would the court be closed, or ought he to attempt to reach it? Thank Heaven, that brief—! The fowl-house would never stand this wind—the hens would be loose among those young savoys in the morning, just planted out, if they weren’t dead—he must wake Helen; could anyone sleep through this wind? He would see that the children were safe before he did so; if they were awake he would bring them to her.

So he went first to their room, and found them sleeping as he had hoped, and the sight, illogically enough, gave him a feeling of the stability of established things, so that he went to look out of their window in a quieter and more sceptical mood. He would do nothing rashly. Those who lost their heads at such a time were the ones who suffered now, and were ridiculed afterwards.

The window was over the front door, and he could see the trees on the further side of the drive. They were not swaying at all, but bent before the wind so low that he could see over some of them (for the dawn was faintly widening) to a field beyond that was usually hidden entirely. And then the wind ceased. It ceased absolutely, and as suddenly as a clock ticks. The bent trees leapt upward.

There was a moment’s pause of stillness, and then the wind came again with a sudden and augmented blast, a triumphant downward rush that swept the tortured trees before it. Some that had resisted the gradually increasing pressure half the night now screamed and snapped, or fell full length, with a rending of deep roots, and tons of green-turfed soil flung loose around them. It caught up gate and fence, and carried them like paper till they were flung against a wall that held them back for a moment, and then fell itself in an equal ruin. A crash and rumble of falling bricks came from the farther end of the house at the same moment. Martin supposed it to be another chimney falling. The noise roused him to the need for action. He went quickly toward the bedroom where he had left his wife an hour earlier, but she met him on her way to the nursery. There was no time for explanations then.

“Are they safe?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, with an affected carelessness, “but they’ll be safer outside till the storm quietens. We must go out by the back door. Get yourself some clothes while I fetch them.” He went back, and made a hurried bundle of each, wrapping up their clothes with them in a shawl or blanket, and before he had done it there came a louder, nearer crash than before, with an after-falling of masonry, and the plaster fell heavily from the ceiling. A rush of wind came with it, and the door of the room, which he had left half open, banged loudly. He tried to open it, but it resisted his efforts. He had the living bundles, one under each arm at first, as he did this, but found that he must lay them down if he were to hope to gain his freedom. He pushed them under the bed, as the place which would be safe at least from the falling ceiling. The younger one, a child of two, was crying, loudly no doubt, though the storm drowned it. The elder, nearly twice her age, watched him in a wide-eyed excitement, and said something that he could not hear. She did not appear conscious that her cheek was bleeding freely where the falling plaster had caught it.

He tried the door now with both hands, but it was jammed too tightly to yield to any force that he could apply. He called loudly to Helen, but could hear no answer. He looked round for a weapon which he could use to break it down. He felt sure now that there would be no escape alive unless it were done very quickly. But at the next instant there came an augmented blast of storm, that rocked the house to its foundations. He heard a straining and cracking of woodwork, and a rush of wind in the passage without, and then the door was flung open with a force which might have killed anyone standing near, as it swung backward to the wall behind it.

With a bundle under either arm, Martin fought his way from the room, step by step, against the howling force of the tempest. As he gained the main landing he realised that the structure of the house was still standing, and the stairs were clear, but the bedroom to which Helen had returned was wrecked and piled with debris. A chestnut tree, which grew close against the house on that side, and of the danger of which he had sometimes doubted in times of milder storm, had fallen upon it. The great tree had broken through the roof and outer wall, and the inner wall and door were scattered across the landing.

Burdened as he was, he stumbled on past the stair head, struggling against the wind and calling Helen’s name as he did so, but receiving no answer. He gained the edge of the room, and saw that a part of the floor was broken, and the next step would have precipitated him to the space below. He paused there for a moment, keeping difficult footing, in distraction of mind between the fear that she might be somewhere there, in desperate need of aid, and the desire to place the precious lives he carried in some comparative safety. In the end, the logic of fact compelled him. He could not search so burdened, nor did he know that she might not be already in safety. Where the room had been was now a rubble of fallen bricks and slates and beams, with the great bole of the tree leaning across them, and its shattered boughs intruding.

That anyone could have lived beneath that avalanche was beyond probability.

Slowly, in a reluctant misery, he turned away, and had soon made a successful issue from the rear of the house, and across the stable yard, where he received a cut from a flying slate, which would have had more notice in quieter times, and so, by a struggling, falling course, to a stack of last year’s hay, which was still standing in the field, and which he had made his objective. It was over the ridge, and so protected slightly from the wind’s full pressure, but when he reached it he found that its thatching, and much of its upper portion, had been torn off and scattered.

He rested beneath it for a few moments, gaining strength and breath for further effort, but dared not leave the children there, as he had first intended, lest they should be smothered by a further subsidence. He realised that safety was not easily to be found, and yet to get back was urgent, and to do that, against the torment of wind which was now raging, it was imperative that he should be relieved of his burdens.

There was a marl-pit close at hand, which gave a moment’s hope, till he recalled the steepness of its more sheltered side, and the deep pool it held; there was a larger one, with a dry bottom, farther away, and on this he decided.

It was of unusual width and depth, even for a district where these old pits were frequent, and often of considerable size. It was on the edge of a clump of oak trees, but these were to the south, so that there would be no danger from them while the wind held from its present quarter.

There were some old hawthorns growing within it, on the slope of its northern bank, so that the tops of the trees were about level with the field’s edge.

Here he made his way, and slid and stumbled down its easier slope, and found a sandy spot that was nearly level beneath the hawthorns, and laid his bundles down, and could at last think with some clearness, which had been impossible while the burdened struggle with the storm continued.

The younger child, warmly wrapped and covered from the wind, was surprisingly sleeping, but the elder was very widely awake, with excited wondering eyes. She looked doubtful as he rose to go, and her lip trembled, but when he laughed and told her that she must be good and he would soon be back and her mother also, and that they would have breakfast under the trees, she took it as a new game, and only said: “Muvver come soon?” as she turned away. “Yes, very soon,” he said with a light assurance he was far from feeling, wondering whether she could still be living, or if they or he would be alive when the day ended.

He paused a moment as he gained the pit’s edge before he climbed out to meet the force of the screaming hurricane which raged round him. There was still no rain, but the sky was darkened with low, black clouds that hurried southward at a rate that looked fantastic, and the air had become strangely cold, so that he shivered as the wind met him.

Beneath the clouds, the whole of the south-western horizon was of the colour of heated copper.

This he saw first, because he had climbed to the west of the pit, where the ascent was easier, but when he looked to the further side he was startled by the evidence of nearer calamity. Heavy smoke was driving across the field from the fallen ruins of the house which he had left but a few moments earlier, and from the eastern wing a pillar of flame bent as the wind’s gusts gripped it.

He was never clear in his mind as to how he got back to the burning building. But he had the sense to keep on up the field, so that he should approach it to windward.

When he had done this, in short time or long, he had a moment’s relief in the consciousness that he was not too late, if any rescue were possible.

He stood at last holding to a root of the upturned tree, and partly sheltered from the wind by the mass of earth which it had torn up, but which still held it; and perhaps it was then that he was first subconsciously aware that the heat and suffocation of the air he breathed were not entirely due to the burning of his own house which the wind blew from him, but to the greater conflagration of the city on the outskirts of which he lived, and which must have involved it entirely within a few hours, if it had not then done so. With it, the wind brought a faint, continuous, wailing cry, as of the gathered lamentation of thousands, and beneath his feet a half-fledged thrush fluttered feebly with a broken wing.

Before him, the wall of the house was still standing, to the height of the first floor. The great tree which had broken the roof and the upper story was supported now by the whole structure on which it leaned, its breadth of branch distributing its weight very widely, but it looked as though at any moment the ruin must collapse entirely.

Though the lower wall stood, the window, which opened to the ground, had been blown or broken inward, and by this gap he was able to climb over a debris of fallen bricks, and beams, and shattered furniture, and broken boughs, searching fearfully in a shadowed gloom, to which the smoke of the burning wing was already penetrating, till a voice from the further side said with eager urgency: “Are they safe?”

“Yes,” he said, “but are you?”

“I felt sure you’d saved them. I don’t know. But move carefully.”

He was struggling, in natural haste, toward the site from which the voice came, but now paused as she continued, while his eyes became more accustomed to the gloom, and helped him to understand what she told him. “Wait a moment, and listen. I am pinned under a beam. I don’t feel hurt at all, but I can’t move, and I don’t know whether I am really injured. I didn’t care to struggle hard till you came, because, as you can see, its full weight is not on me now, but if I moved I might bring it. I felt sure when you did not come, and I did not hear them cry, that you had got them safe. You wouldn’t all have been killed at once. So when I heard nothing I just waited. Where have you left them?”

He answered briefly, his mind occupied in overcoming, without any resulting disturbance, the obstacles that still divided them The thoughts that the whole edifice might collapse at any moment; that a hasty movement might bring disaster, that the fire was advancing its own argument of urgency, and that the children would almost surely die unless he should return to them safely, left no mental leisure for the needless words which they had spent so much of their lives in exchanging.

He was one who had lived by words, and he was to find their use again under very different conditions, but there was an earlier lesson to be learned of their more frequent futility.

He saw that when the tree fell the first substantial impact had been given by a great lateral branch which grew toward the house, and which must have struck the roof and penetrated inward and downward as the tree leaned over.

From this cause, as also from the fact that it was built less strongly, the partition wall had been broken down lower, as well as more widely, than the outer one, so that its ruins had given little support to the cataract of brick and slate, of board and rafter, which had descended through the broken floor of the bedroom.

When the crash came, as she afterwards told him, Helen had been standing at an open wardrobe which was placed between the windows. A moment earlier these windows had been blown in on either side of her, with a rush of air which had nearly thrown her off her feet, but she had held her ground, and urged by this catastrophe, she had given up the attempt to clothe herself further, and had just gathered the contents of the wardrobe into her arms when the roof descended upon her. Blinded by dust and plaster, she continued to clutch the door of the wardrobe with one hand, the other arm being filled with the loose clothes she had gathered, while the floor gave way at the further end, causing the wardrobe to slide rapidly forward, carrying her before it; but, probably owing to the pull of her weight on the door, it swung round as it did so, so that it was beneath her as it was precipitated into the room below. It fell on its back which smashed very easily, as, like most of the furniture of those days, the parts which were usually hidden were made of thin and worthless wood.

She found herself lying across it, with the loose clothes beneath her, feeling no pain, and thinking herself free to move when she would, but choked and blinded by the dust. A fresh fall of bricks and rubble came a moment later, at the further side of the room, and she lay awhile uncertain whether it would be more or less risky to remain still or to attempt escape.

As the dust began to clear, and no further fall came, she attempted to rise, and was surprised to find her legs immovable. A heavy rafter lay across them, itself bearing a mass of debris, but so placed that its further end was supported upon the ruin of the inner wall, and holding her only, she thought, as in a gentle vice, with pressure rather than weight. Indeed, she found that with a little twisting she got one leg entirely loose, and would have drawn it from beneath the beam but for the discomfort of the position which would have resulted. But when she attempted to release the other, at the first pull there was a slight movement among the broken bricks on which the beam was resting, and it settled down more heavily, so that the leg which she had loosed before was held again, and the other felt the pain of an increasing weight and pressure. There was an ominous slipping also in the debris which the beam supported, and being confident that Martin would find her, she had decided to remain quiet for a time in the hope that he could co-operate in a safer method of release. After that she had felt faint, though she knew no cause, and had since been sleeping or half-conscious, so that the time had seemed but a few minutes till she was aroused by his coming.

Martin could not tell what risk he took in the work of the next few moments. He tried to reach her with as little disturbance as possible, but as he did so an eddy of denser smoke rolled in from the hall, and he could see nothing clearly. The next moment it came more thickly in a pause of wind, with a blast of heat, and a flame glowed in the hallway.

He felt along the beam to where her legs were beneath it. He said: “When I can I will lift with all my strength and you must pull them out instantly. I can’t say whether I shall be able to do it, or for how long, or what will follow, but it seems the best chance we have. Are you ready? Now.”

Then the beam lifted, tilting somewhat from one end, with some noise and confusion of falling bricks.

Helen said: “I think they are clear now,” and cautiously, not knowing how far its supports might have shifted, he lowered the beam. It rested much as before, and then her voice came again, with an undertone of fear for the first time: “I can’t get up. I am too weak. My legs are cramped, but I think there’s something else wrong. Could you lift me?”

“Rather,” he said lightly, and indeed he was relieved so greatly that they could escape the fire, that he hardly felt the fear of what this incapacity might imply, as he would have done in other circumstances.

The wind was blowing again with recovered force, and they were less choked and blinded than they had been, but the fire in the hall was closer, and a sudden spurt of flame from the stairs lit them, so that he saw her plainly for the first time, lying almost face-downward, on the heap of clothes she had been collecting.

She tried to raise herself when she saw him: “Bring the clothes,” she began, and then her smile changed to an expression of sudden agony, and she sank forward in a faint from which she did not recover until he had carried her out of the burning building into a heavy rain which was now falling. The wind seemed more moderate, and though the rain was strangely cold for the season, it felt even pleasant as he left the stifling heat, the discomfort of which he had scarcely realised in the excitement of the rescue. He breathed deeply of the cooler air as he crossed the lawn, his relief that she was alive and recovered contending with fear as to the extent of her injury, anxiety to return to the children, and the consciousness that their food and all other necessities of life were lost within the burning building.