Restless Earth/Chapter 1

JAMES HARLEY dropped his pen, sighed heavily, placed his elbows upon the table, clasped his hands and gnawed his thumbnails as he gazed through the open window at the roof of the bungalow on the opposite side of the gully.

Heat-waves shimmered upon the red-painted roof, giving a semblance of dancing life to the background of pines in the park beyond. The high tecoma hedge which concealed the back of the bungalow was a black inviting shadow outlined in glittering silver where the sunlight struck its polished foliage. Cicadas chirred in the gully, setting up an atmospheric vibration which harmonised with the heat-waves upon the roof. There was no wind. There was only light—hot light flooding this green suburb of a New Zealand port.

It was a perfect February morning; but Harley could not appreciate its serenity in the turbulence of his thoughts. He was looking at the morrow when the little woman who was his wife should receive the letter he had just finished at his fifth attempt. He saw her standing motionless in a small hotel bedroom, letter in hand, gazing blankly at the wall with hopeless eyes while Jean, their daughter of four and a-half years, tugged at her skirts and imperiously demanded to know what had made her mother cry.

Harley stared at the shimmering roof for some minutes, then he threw out his hands in a gesture of despair.

“Why, in the name of God, did this have to happen to me?” he demanded in low tones.

He picked up the letter and read it again. He knew himself to be procrastinating. The letter had to be posted—it just had to be!—but it wasn’t going ​to be easy. Writing it had been difficult enough—posting it would be yet more difficult. And yet there was no other way, no other honorable way.

Perhaps, when he had rid himself of the thing he would feel better. The irrevocable step would have been taken. . . .

A strange nausea seized him when he had read so far. The letter fluttered from his fingers. He leaned forward and covered his eyes with his hands. He felt himself swaying in his chair. His heart seemed to shudder and rise into his throat. His brain seemed to swim with a curious rotary movement.

He diagnosed the trouble, and smiled grimly.

“Starvation. No regular meals since Grace left.”

The nausea and the swaying increased, and it flashed across Harley’s mind that he might die of starvation if the present state of affairs continued.

“Might be the best way out,” he muttered.

The crash of breaking crockery in the kitchenette caused him to raise his head, and the explanation of his nausea became instantly apparent.

The pine trees in the park were swaying, the power lines and telephone wires on the posts in the roadway were swinging—and there was no wind.

Earthquake!

As he scrambled to his feet a number of books fell from the shelves in the corner of the room and a metal vase clanged upon the hearth-tiles.

The earth movement increased steadily. The house protested in a hundred creaks and rattles. ​Harley momentarily expected the chimney to come crashing through the roof as he made his way hurriedly to the door. The instinct to live was strong within him. He ran through the hall.

He caught a glimpse of Ginger, the cat, bounding from the gully to the higher land. He followed the example of the animal and bounded over the porch-railing into a neglected flower bed, then raced for the higher ground behind the house. If the house should slide into the gully he would be above it, instead of underneath it.

He fancied he heard muffled subterranean rumblings, and his fancy lent him speed. He vaulted a wire fence, partially concealed by a healthy growth of eleagnis, and landed in the four-acre pasture upon which his affluent neighbour kept two house cows. It was only by chance that he did not land upon the recumbent form of the labourer whom the affluent neighbour was employing to repair the wire fence.

“Hello,” the labourer greeted him cheerfully. “Nice morning for exercise.”

“Er—yes,” agreed Harley lamely, smiling rather shamefacedly as he realised that the earth tremor had subsided to the faintest vibration. “Quite.”

“Bit ’ot, though.”

The labourer rolled over and elevated himself upon one elbow. He became alert. He stared at the ground.

“What’s that?” he demanded. “Earthquake?”

“Yes. Didn’t you feel it?”

The labourer sat up.

“No. There ain’t been no shake up ’ere,” he answered positively. “I’ve been ’ere all the morning.”

He rose to his feet, and Harley offered him a cigarette.

The labourer yawned, accepted the cigarette with a muttered word of thanks, and became informative.

“These little shakes I never feel nowadays. Used to be a time when any little bit of a bump would get me winging, but since the Murchison shake, year ​before last, it’s got to be a good heavy shake to make me notice it. I was in Westport when that one happened—just outside the Post Office. I feels the thing coming—I can always feel a shake coming: sort of sécond-sight, you know—and I hops it into the middle of the street, quick and busy. There was a little bit of a bump and then the ground heaved up like as though it was alive, and the Post Office tower split. You could see the ground waving, and———”

He became silent abruptly as the earth tremor increased slightly. His eyes widened and stark fear petrified him for a second.

“She’s still going,” observed Harley unnecessarily, looking at the swinging wires in the roadway. “Must be a pretty fierce shake somewhere. Perhaps Murchison is getting it again.”

The labourer leaned against the fence and the cigarette trembled in his fingers.

Harley glanced at him and smiled.

“Sorry, old man,” he said, as he climbed back over the fence. “You might have slept through it if I hadn’t charged over.”

“Such damned uncanny things!” growled the labourer. “Never twice alike. I don’t mind the sharp bumps, but these corkscrew things turn my stomach.”

Harley descended to the patch of tall grass, which had been a lawn a few weeks since. He felt vastly superior. He excused his own momentary panic, but he could find no toleration for the other’s obvious funk. He smoked his cigarette to the end, imagining the earth still shook long after it had ceased to do so. He swayed upon his feet with a curious enjoyment until his gaze again rested upon the telephone wires. He laughed as he observed that they no longer moved.

When he tossed his cigarette-end into the vegetable garden he was almost cheerful with the exhilaration which comes of a knowledge of peril survived.

He returned to the house, glancing around the hall curiously as he entered. No damage there. In the ​breakfast-room a combined bridge-marker and ash-tray lay broken upon the hearth-rug. The clock on the mantel had stopped. Not much damage there. The floor of the kitchenette was sprinkled with salt and the remains of a number of cups and saucers and a plate or two. A peculiar smell filled the tiny room, and Harley remembered that he had not turned out the gas under the kettle at breakfast time. He hastened to turn it out now.

Two soiled cups were perched upon the very edge of the sink-board. He moved them to a safer position. He eyed the pile of dishes in the sink and on the board. They seemed intact. He pushed back a small pile of plates which had slithered forward on a shelf above the sink. The movement caused a jelly jar to topple. It fell upon his scalp and then into the sink, breaking a small jug and a plate.

Harley returned to the small drawing-room, and much of his cheerfulness had departed. Nevertheless he sat down and dashed off a postscript:

The incongruity of such a postscript struck him and he ceased writing. It read as though Grace were merely taking a holiday instead of—of what was happening actually.

The last glow of his new-born cheerfulness faded. ​His heart was sick as he continued to read the letter itself.

He glanced through the postscript and tore it off with a fierce gesture upon the edge of the table. For a second he contemplated re-writing the letter, then he folded it into its envelope quickly, knowing that he had not the courage.

The letter should catch Grace at the Masonic Hotel, Napier. He addressed it so, and, as a precaution, added: ‘Please forward. In case of non-delivery return to J. Harley, Plover Street, New Plymouth.’

The thought that the Dead Letter Office might open it made him shudder.

He looked out of the window and saw the head of Mrs. Percival Quesne Langham thrust above the tecoma hedge which concealed the back of the bungalow on the opposite side of the gully. The lady was ​taking her noon observation of the Harley bungalow.

“Prying old hen!” muttered Harley as he rose and closed the window pointedly.