Restless Earth/Chapter 15

The morning of February 4th, 1932, saw the greatest aggregation of motor vehlcles in one spot in the history of the country.

​Seen from the relief ’plane, which descended upon Napier in this early hour, they swarmed like flies; and, as far as the eye could reach, the black dots moved in continuous processions northwards and southwards. That which moved southwards had lengthy gaps in it, but the northering one formed a continuous wavering line. The environs of the wrecked towns were alive with the black dots, weaving in and out in sluggish, nauseating fashion in the narrow streets.

Taxi-cabs; lorries; tradesmen’s vans; pleasure cars; borrowed cars; stolen cars—every type of vehicle known to Customs and police regulations—were assembled here; and the thousands of sightseers which they had brought walked about the devastated towns, thrilled by the havoc, warmed by the morning sun and the fires which consumed wreckage and human victims, awed by the evidences of mighty force, shocked by a conviction of man’s insecurity, yet increasingly conscious of mortal needs.

Here, where the main stores of foodstuffs had been utterly destroyed by earthquake and fire, wandered hordes of idle people, expecting to be fed; people who complained because their silver could not purchase breakfast; people who felt cheated of one of the greatest pleasures of a holiday; people who expected hospitality in a homeless community.

Some there were who had had the forethought to bring provisions, and who sat comfortably in their cars, or upon the running boards, while they consumed dainties from paper bags and hot liquids from vacuum flasks, as they watched with interest the arrival of ever more visitors and the frequent bursts of smoke and flame in the ruins.

Some there were who had had the foresight to bring with them all the provisions upon which they could lay hasty hands. These moved among the dishevelled refugees, upon the foreshore and in the ​open fields, distributing bread to hungry children and their reluctant, grateful parents.

Here, too, moved the representatives of many charitable organisations and religious bodies, working without rest for the comfort of the homeless.

Like life-giving rafts borne on a destroying torrent, trucks, loaded with clothing, blankets and food supplies, dotted the stream of cars from the south, piloted by capable, curious and kindly men and women—Samaritans with healing oil—the sympathetic leaven which redeemed this conflux from the stigma of pharisaism.

Death brooded over the countryside on this sunny morning; but the cries of those whom He chose made little volume of sound in the excited chatter of Roman holiday-makers.

****

James Harley’s first glimpse of Napier brought him a sense of relief which was almost painful.

The Bluff still stood against the sky!

It had not been levelled. In the distance it appeared as it had always done, save for the heavy smoke which veiled it, and a slight alteration in contour on the seaward face where landslides had buried the road at the foot of the cliffs. The summit and the landward slopes were still green with trees, amidst which stood the dwellings of the fortunate.

Distance obscured the damage to these dwellings, obscured the piles of broken masonry which had been the Public Hospital and the Nurses’ Home, obscured the frantic activity of the hundreds who toiled to improvise a hospital camp in the Botanical Gardens.

However, the Bluff still stood against the sky!

This evidence of exaggeration in the first reports of the disaster induced the first recognisable gleam of hope which James Harley had experienced since he had read those ghastly headlines.

Napier had not been wiped from the map. The evidence was before his eyes. Annihilation was far ​from complete! Only a section of the town burned. He could see a church spire standing where it had always stood. Save that all the houses were minus their chimneys, the suburbs appeared little changed. The dignified row of Norfolk Island pines still rose in perfect alignment along the Marine Parade.

Harley sat up alertly, and chafed audibly at the low speed of the car.

There was a chance that Grace and Joan had survived, after all. There was a chance that the broken-nosed fellow had guessed correctly—that Grace and Joan were out on the beach at the time of the ’shake.

“Step on it!” he snapped at Roy.

“We’re going all out for this class of country,” Roy growled.

Harley laughed in a curious manner and patted Roy’s sleeve by way of apology.

Roy glanced at Harley with something of apprehension in his eyes. He was thinking that the strain had been too much for his passenger.

Harley’s hope grew as they drew nearer to their destination. He remembered that Grace was an ardent lover of the sunshine and a devotee of the morning walk. The weather had been perfect yesterday. Grace would never have wasted such a glorious morning indoors.

He reconstructed her morning, basing his deductions on his knowledge of her. Breakfast at nine o’clock, or a little before. Allowing a full hour for preparation, she and Joan would have been ready to leave the hotel by ten. Possible delay, speaking to acquaintances in the hotel and so forth, say fifteen or twenty minutes. That still left half-an-hour before the shake.

He remembered Grace’s passion for the beach at Fitzroy. Every fine day she had made time to visit it. He smiled as he recalled the wiggings he had received for keeping her waiting on various of her ​excursions while he put the finishing touches to stories.

Yes, he decided, Grace had been on the beach when the shake occurred. She could not possibly have been anywhere else.

There had been no whisper of a tidal wave, such as usually follows a bad shake on the seaboard. The sea had receded, according to all accounts, completely draining the inner harbour and forcing the shipping in the bay to scurry for deep water.

Grace and Joan were alive, and he would find them! They would be scared, no doubt, but safe. When he found them again no other woman should part him from them so long as life lasted, so help him, God!

It did not occur to him that Grace might not want him. Harley was all a man, never doubting his desirability where the mother of his child was concerned.

A nearer view of the BIuff renewed his misgivings for a brief moment.

Supposing Grace had walked along the beach to the north!

All that part of the beach beneath the cliffs now lay buried beneath thousands of tons of rock. The once perpendicular cliffs were now precipitous slopes, over the brinks of which several houses hung precariously. No living thing which had been upon the road, or upon the beach at that spot, could possibly have survived. Assuredly, cars and trucks and their human freight must lie buried, many feet deep, under the terrible slope of rubble, for the road was widely used. But the beach———

No! Grace was a lover of her kind, and few people walked beneath the cliffs. He would find her on the beach, somewhere opposite the Masonic Hotel. He would almost stake his life on it.

He could not restrain his impatience to begin the search. He fidgeted ceaselessly in his seat, increasing Roy’s suspicions of his sanity; and, when the ​car slowed to a walking pace behind a sports coupé which felt its way through the crowd of excited people blocking the southern end of the Marine Parade, he sprang into the road.

“I’ll pick you up later, Roy,” he cried, as he swung the door shut. “Look out for me. I’ll have a couple of passengers for you to take back.”

Roy’s suspicions vanished. He grinned happily.

“That’s the talk!” he replied heartily. “You go and hunt ’em up, and I’ll be right down this end, ready to take you back home. No waiting and no delay. Cheerio!”

He sounded his horn with a flourish as Harley moved into the crowd, waving his hand in acknowledgement. He did not see the woman who walked blindly across the track of the car until he had bumped her mildly with his off mudguard. He pulled up with a jerk.

“Sorry I scared you, lady,” he apologised, “but it’s nothing to what you did to me.”

The woman, who was unhurt, looked at him without comprehension. She was hatless and her hair was dishevelled. She was clothed in something resembling a bathrobe. Roy judged her to be crazy, but she was merely dazed by the magnitude of the disaster which had taken her husband, her child and her home.

Presently she moved away aimlessly, hopelessly lost.

****

Harley made his way to the beach, which was separated from the Marine Parade by a low concrete wall now twisted and cracked in many places.

The Marine Parade itself was littered, for almost its entire length, with masses of broken brickwork and other debris. It was as though some giant hand had swept across the land and brushed the entire row of buildings into the roadway. Telegraph poles leaned at drunken angles, or had snapped like thistle​stalks in a gale. A tangle of wires, like monstrous wind-blown cobwebs, hung in festoons and cluttered the ground.

Beyond, the billowing smoke, rising from a hundred fires and gilded with grandeur by the rising sun, hid the hills and the inferno which had been a busy, hopeful mart only yesterday.

The air quivered with noise. The hum of engines, the nerve-wracking barking of motor-horns, the shouting of excited searchers in the hot ruins, the uneven murmur of hysterical conversation, the continuous crackling and recurring explosions of the conflagration, the eternal thunder of the breakers upon the shore, all the pandemonium of sound which arises when Nature kicks the human hive, set the very air alive.

Harley staggered in his walk, blundering against, and apologising to, people who noticed neither his blundering nor his apologies, so intent were they upon the business of living to the full this exciting episode in their lives.

He had not slept for many hours, and a month of semi-starvation had played havoc with his powers of endurance. The noise bewildered him, and he sat upon the sea wall to shake his head in an effort to throw off an uncomfortable dizziness.

The beach itself was an unforgettable scene.

The sea had receded for a considerable distance, proof that the land in this vicinity had been thrust upwards, and the exposed sea-bottom was white with shell-fish which would presently rot in the heat of the sun and add a zymotic stench to the sickening fetor of desolation. There was laughter here, the shrill laughter of children who knelt and played about the many pools which boiled with the struggles of the small fish entrapped in them, fish which fell a ready prey to childish hands.

The higher stretches of beach were one huge refugee camp. Household furniture of all descriptions had been carried here from wrecked dwellings, ​and whole families lived in the dubious privacy afforded by tables, bedsteads, wardrobes, carpets, bed-linen and other odds and ends, hastily arranged to form screens against the perverted curiosity of that unwholesome element which manifests itself most strongly in times of calamity.

Some there were who scorned the privacy of any kind of shelter, who performed their toilets in full view of the idlers who wandered wide-eyed in the hapless settlement, and who enquired in offensive tones of such whether they had nothing better to do.

Here and there a thief followed his calling, appropriating small articles temporarily left without a guardian; and none voiced a protest, for none knew to whom such trifles rightly belonged. Each had enough to do, attending to the business of his own welfare to care greatly about the welfare of his neighbour’s goods.

To James Harley this hotch-potch of humanity and its pathetic belongings recalled a fanciful story he had once written of whimpering, terrified animals driven from a burning jungle to take refuge upon the margin of a crocodile-infested lake; animals which temporarily forgot their natural antipathies in the common danger; animals which moved aimlessly, unconscious of hunger, subdued by fear.

Here, on this narrow strip of shingle which separated fire and water, were gathered men and women who had shelved their animosities for the moment. Neighbours, who had sneered at each other’s futile social triumphs or tiny ambitions yesterday, now commiserated each other on their respective losses and exchanged experiences in the awful moment of the shake. Business men, who had regarded each other as conscienceless thieves yesterday, now chatted gloomily and pitied each other.

Many, men and women, hopelessly bereaved, moved about aimlessly, unable to rest. Here and there a woman sobbed without restraint, heedless of the sympathisers grouped about her. Numbers were ​curled up in restless slumber, their faces shielded from the morning light by hats, handkerchiefs, or newspapers.

Here a young mother, squatting behind an outspread overcoat, fed a two-weeks-old baby at her breast, while her husband, who held the garment, glared challengingly at all who approached.

In the centre of a sneering and apathetic group, a bare-headed fanatic waved an open Bible and called upon the people of this modern Sodom to repent.

“The end of the world is at hand!” he cried at the top of his voice. “Repent! Repent! The Angel of Death comes with a flaming sword. The goats will be divided from the sheep before another sun shall set. I say unto ye, Repent of your sins, and ye shall be gathered into the Kingdom!”

Here and there showed restless red cap-bands and bonnet-ribbons, where the Salvation Army, putting actions before words in this moment of distress, lived up to its reputation for good works.

And the sea sparkled brilliantly upon the one hand, immutable; and upon the other roared the flames which forever changed and destroyed.

****

In this farrago of distracted humanity, James Harley searched for his wife and child in vain.

He combed the beach from end to end, at first with confident patience, at last with terrifying doubt.

He enquired for them ceaselessly, and his inquiries were invariably met with impatient negatives. He intruded upon families who pointedly resented his presence; he disturbed sleepers who cursed him; he stayed hurrying rescuers who upbraided him for a fool; he hurried here and there as he caught glimpses of women and children who resembled those for whom he searched; he peered beneath every improvised shelter; and at noon-time he despaired.

Again he sat upon the cracked sea-wall, his shoulders hunched, his hands thrust into his pockets, ​his feet piling the shingle into heaps which he immediately flattened with vicious kicks, while the sun beat down upon his bared head. Nausea seized upon the pit of his stomach, and he felt a desire for tears. Physical weariness, hunger and despair had made a woman of him, he told himself bitterly.

A heavy blow in the small of his back tumbled him face down upon the shingle, and his manhood reasserted itself.

He rose to his feet swiftly and turned.

“Who did that?”’ he demanded, clenching his fists.

“I did,” grunted a brutal-faced young giant, who, with two helpers, was struggling to lift an upright piano over the low wall. “Sorry. Didn’t see you there. Give us a hand with this, will you?”

Harley nodded sullenly and reached over to get a grip of the instrument. Together they hoisted it to the top of the wall, where they rested it. The young giant released his hold to spring over the wall and secure a fresh grip. The instrument toppled and crashed back upon the pavement with a mighty jangling. The key-fall split with the impact and the imitation-ivory keys fanned comically.

“What the hell did you let go for?” shouted the young giant to his original helpers.

“We thought you had it,” answered one, feebly, while the other suppressed a laugh.

“Well, I didn’t have it! Now it’s nah-poohed!”

The young giant leapt upon the pavement again and stooped to lift the wreck.

“Come on!” he yelled angrily.

“What are you going to do with it. It’ll do there, won't it?”

“Come on! Heave it over! And none of your back-chat!”

With savage strength they heaved it over, and Harley found it necessary to side-step quickly as it stood upright on the shingle for a moment and crashed upon its face.

​“Yours, mate,” the young giant assured Harley, with a generous wave of his hands. “Play ‘Home, Sweet Home’ on it, and we’ll all come and have a good cry.”

He went back to his work of salvage.

Harley, after regarding the piano and the children who gathered upon it in delight, sighed wearily, turned and followed him across the street.

The incident had revived his courage a little and banished his nausea, and he forced himself to contemplate the possibility that Grace and Joan had been somewhere in the streets at the time of the shake. There had been hundreds of people in the streets at that moment, and comparatively few had been killed and injured. Perhaps Grace had been injured and was now being cared for in the hospital camp. He would not believe that anything worse had happened to her. It was not possible after the divine resurgence of hope of the morning.

He looked up as he approached the mass of smoking ruins which was all that remained of the imposing Masonic Hotel. All the morning he had avoided looking in this direction lest he should be compelled to admit the possibility that his loved ones had died here. Now it obtruded itself, and he found himself looking at the ruins in spite of himself.

A crowd of curious people stood in the roadway at a respectful distance from the walls which threatened to fall at any moment. Under these death-traps were braver folk, straining and sweating to make ingress to the fire-blackened tomb of many victims. Some worked recklessly with black smoke curling around them, their mouths and nostrils shielded with damp rags, prising out smouldering beams with any lever which came to hand. Some had found a way beneath the mass where a doorway had resisted the terrible strain.

It was through this doorway that two men carried a small body just as James Harley elbowed his way unwillingly through the awed crowd. Ten​derly they laid it in a cleared space in the roadway beside two other still shapes covered with a torn curtain. Someone stepped forward and covered the small body with a rain-coat.

James Harley stopped short as he glimpsed the flaxen hair spreading beyond the kindly covering. He stared, blanched, and choked. He put out a hand for support as his knees trembled uncontrollably. A woman’s hand caught it, and he started as though he were stung. He moved forward fearfully. Not for a moment did he doubt who lay beneath the rain-coat.

He knew that he had found his child.

He sank upon his knees, unhindered by the crowd, and lifted a corner of the coat fearfully.

Joan stared at him with sightless eyes. Her face was blackened with smoke and dust; her right hand was raised as though to shield her head, and from between the tiny clenched fingers there protruded the bright edge of a new shilling.

James Harley sobbed, and called her name. He lifted the coat a little further, then dropped it with a cry of anguish. He crouched down and covered his face with his hands. The fire had taken the child’s legs.

He knelt so for many minutes, his agony respected by the silent crowd; then the woman who had caught his hand touched his shoulder gently.

He looked up and moved obediently. Two grim-faced rescuers laid another body where he had knelt. It was but a charred and twisted effigy of a human—a woman.

“We found ’em together,” one of the men said in a low voice.

James Harley shrank in horror from the ghastly figure. He staggered back into the crowd, throwing his arm before his eyes to shut out the horror. He cried out with a strange animal cry of pain, then he raised his face and his clenched fists to the bright sky and cursed Heaven and Patricia Weybourn.

​He cursed the woman who had made him a murderer; he cursed her waking and sleeping, living and dead, with the practised invective and trained phraseology of the writer of romance and with the fervour of a fanatic priest.

“She tempted me!” he cried. “She tempted me!”

It was the feeble excuse of the original Adam mourning his lost Eden, the everlasting admission of man’s inherent weakness.

“The woman tempted me, and I did eat. . . .”

Kindly hands seized him and led him away.

****