Restless Earth/Chapter 14

Hastings.

The town which had turned a cheerful face to the skies but a few hours since, whose streets had been animated with the characteristic leisurely bustle of the smaller towns—streets upon which the sun had shone benignly—now lay with its heart shattered and smoking in its wrenched and twisted body.

Its commercial area had collapsed, and the once clean streets were foul with wreckage, and spotted with grim stains, hastily covered with dust, where frantic rescuers had laid broken bodies.

The leisurely bustle of its streets had given place to intent labour, as of the ants which burrow in the ruins of their demolished habitation heedless of the ​careless foot which may be lifted to make the destruction more complete.

Human ants tunnelled beneath mounds of tumbled roofing iron, timbers, bricks and fractured concrete, smashed household furniture, splintered glass—a chaos which had been an orderly array of shops and dwellings only yesterday. They tunnelled ceaselessly, forcing their ways to where helpless fellows cried wildly for succour, or moaned and wept in terror or unbearable pain.

Some worked in purposeful silence, their gleaming, sweating bodies almost bare, their mouths agape and parched with the heat and the everlasting dust, their muscles aching with long-sustained effort, contemptuous of the death which hovered as they tore a path through the trembling wreckage. Others worked timidly, delving downwards and throwing the debris well clear, terrified at every faint tremor and prepared to leap to safety at the first renewed growling of the unquiet earth.

Surely these latter possessed fined courage, dreading yet daring?

At one spot a crowd of people stood silent and helpless, watching thick, flame-shot smoke belching from the ruins of a corner store. Silent, save for an occasional hysterical sob or a savage oath, when childish voices screamed in terror as the flames ate their way inexorably to where a number of children were imprisoned beneath the fallen verandah. Near the burning mass were men in partial uniform, firemen deprived of their principal weapon by the breaking of the water-mains, shielding their faces with uplifted arms and making futile dashes into the flames in an attempt at rescue.

The fire roared at them derisively, played with them. It allowed them to wrench up a corner of a sheet of the iron which roofed the fallen verandah, it allowed them to see the children pinned down upon the pavement, then it threw them back with a scorching tongue. The iron clanged down again. ​Presently it curled as it became-red-hot, and roaring flames sprang aloft through the reopened hole. A child screamed for its mother—the mother lying dead beneath the blazing pile—then the glowing iron buckled, twisted, and fell with a crash, sending a fountain of sparks into the sky—fiery escorts of young souls torn from a world which has been a paradise for them.

Horror walked abroad in this terrible dawn. It laid its paralysing hand upon Harley’s heart as the car, forced to a halt by a traffic block, drew up beside an improvised ambulance in a suburban street.

Several men were engaged in carrying bandaged and moaning bodies from the wide porch of a private residence and placing them on oddly-assorted mattresses spread upon the floor of the ambulance which, in normal times, was a furniture van. They carried their burdens with excessive care, for these were the badly injured who must be rushed to hospital in Waipukurau or Palmerston North.

Eight, Harley counted mechanically; five men and three youths, or women. He could not be certain about the latter, for two had their heads concealed in bandages, brown-stained and horrible, while the other’s refined, waxen features might have belonged to either sex.

Harley shuddered and closed his eyes. He opened them again as a man spoke close beside the car.

The speaker, one of the volunteer stretcher-bearers, was fastening the tail-board of the ambulance as silently as he could.

“That’s the lot, Harry. The doctor says to go easy round the bends, but you can hit it up on the straights. He says to tell you to be careful of the woman we’ve just put aboard. If she should roll on her side, she won’t last the distance.”

“Right, I’ll watch it,” replied the ambulance-driver in a subdued tone. “They tell me they’ve dug out Jerry Wade,” he added. “Got him about half-an-hour ago.”

​“Hurt?”

“Lost one hand. He was about all in, but as cheerful as though he’d won a double. All he seemed to be worrying about was whether the Grand Hotel had gone.’

“Which hand?”

“They didn’t say. It’s going to be pretty hard for him, whichever it is. I’ve only met one hair-dresser with one hand, and he lost his other as a kid. Jerry’s too old to learn new tricks.”

“He’ll have to concentrate on the book. Book-makers don’t need two hands.”

“Except in the silly season. Am I to go straight through to Palmerston?”

“Expect you’ll have to. Waipuk. is overcrowded now. Here’s the doctor’s report on your cases. The woman I told you about was hauled out of Roach’s. She’s———”

Harley heard no more, for the two moved away to the front of the ambulance conversing in a lower tone. He saw that the driver was moved by the other’s information, for he shook his head pityingly as he climbed into his seat.

The ambulance lumbered away, operated with a care to which it was completely unused.

There had been silence in the car since it had halted, save for the unobtrusive ticking of the idling engine. Roy had watched the operations of the stretcher-bearers with half-closed eyes, his stubby fingers drumming silently on the wheel the while, his lips pursed. His thoughts were back in France, where he had often sat at a wheel, waiting while hospital orderlies dumped “blightys” into his rattling ambulance. He had worn a steel helmet then—a helmet which had been very useful for boiling eggs or to sit on in the mud—and none had thought to tell him to be careful on the bends.

The background of shattered walls, visible between the slightly-battered and chimneyless suburban houses, aided the illusion of war, and, when ​Harley spoke, he was smiling inwardly at the recollection of a happy evening—one of many—when he had parked his cargo of suffering men just within the fringe of a copse while he had made merry with little Minette. “Half-a-minute” he had called her. He was wondering where she was now. Grown old and fat, most likely, and married to a farmer who gave her second place in his heart to the heap of manure in the front-garden. “Half-a-minute.” The “blightys” were not to know that it was a girl’s name and not a promise. They———

“What are we waiting for this time?”

Roy started.

“Dreaming,” he admitted, noting with surprise that nothing prevented him from proceeding. “Just about asleep, I suppose. These all-night tours are pretty wearing.”

He yawned widely and loudly as he engaged the gears and let in the clutch. Harley and the elderly man yawned also, although sleep had no place in their thoughts or desires.

The car had proceeded only a few yards when Harley clutched Roy’s arm.

“Pull up!” he ordered sharply.

The car came to a sudden stand, jerking a frightened ejaculation from the elder woman and causing her daughter to stare wildly.

Harley opened the door by his side with a hurried movement and sprang into the road. For a moment it seemed that he would set out afoot in pursuit of the disappearing ambulance; then, as it rounded a a corner and vanished he shook his head in a confused manner and climbed back into the car slowly.

Roy, who had watched this manœuvre in surprise, stared enquiringly as Harley seated himself with a sigh and pulled the door close.

“What is it, Mr. Harley?” he asked in concern.

“Eh? Oh, nothing—nothing,” mumbled Harley, shuddering as though with cold, and wiping a sudden sweat from his forehead with his palm. “I merely ​had an uncanny feeling that we were going in the wrong direction, that’s all. Napier is ahead, isn’t it?”

“Dead ahead. We turn to the rlght at the next corner and then to the left, and we’re on the main road.”

“That’s all right, then. Go ahead. I suppose I’m suffering from loss of sleep, too.”

“Feeling all right, now?” asked Roy anxiously.

“Quite all right, thanks.”

The driver seemed doubtful on the point. He let in his clutch with a thoughtful expression, and several times during the remainder of the journey shot watchful glances at the overwrought man beside him.

Harley sat as still as he might in the swaying car, his thoughts upon death. He had forgotten the perfumed romances which were his livelihood. He had forgotten the “voice of the soul,” the “call of like to like, though seas divide”; all the poetic phrases in which he had described telepathy—the “thought transference” of which he had written so much and in which he had no faith.

He did not recognise, in the impulse which had lifted him from the car and had urged his feet to take the southern road, the call of the woman whose soul walked in the blackness of delirium, the soul which cried in the darkness for the man beloved above everything which moved upon the earth or in the heavens above the earth.

The woman lay upon a narrow mattress, her head swathed in brown-stained bandages, while the ambulance which bore her southwards rounded the bends with care and sped along the straights.