Restless Earth/Chapter 9

A silent crowd of people, completely blocking the side-walk and overflowing into the roadway, swayed ceaselessly in front of the offices of the Taranaki Herald. James Harley elbowed his way into it without apology, unaware of the roughness with which he thrust men and women alike from his path, intent only on reading the scribbled bulletins from the earthquake area which were pinned upon a felted board in a small lighted window.

Those whom he elbowed took little notice of him beyond snapped words of instinctive remonstrance. They had no capacity for resentment in this tragic hour. Like Harley, most of them were wrapped in their anxiety for friends and relatives; for in this thinly-populated country families drift widely apart—but seldom out of ken—intermingling and marry- ​ing, submerging brogue, lilt, dialect and accent in one common speech, levelling class distinctions, attaining a homogeneity impossible in older and more crowded communities.

In its power to shock, the disaster assumed the aspect of an overwhelming family catastrophe in these first few hours.

From Pandora in the north, from The Bluff a thousand miles to the south, and from every town and city in the length and breadth of the country between, Napier and Hastings had attracted native sons and daughters to build their rapidly-increasing populations. The prosperity of the district, its reputation for sunshine and its natural attractions, had been lodestones to draw and hold the ambitious and the pleasure-loving, who had built these towns, towns which had given promises of rivalling the cities in commercial importance.

And on this night every town and city, every hamlet and pah, in the length and breadth of the country, was astir—and would be astir during all the hours of darkness—awaiting the fragmentary tidings of death and destruction broadcasted by nameless heroes beneath whose feet the restless earth still quivered, grumbled and shook.

Harley scanned the brief list of names of the identified dead. He experienced no sense of relief when he saw that the names of his wife and child were not mentioned. These were Hastings’ dead. Grace and Joan were in Napier, fifteen miles north of Hastings, in the very centre of the earthquake area, and the crowd about him whispered that the death-roll in Napier already exceeded five hundred; that the town was utterly destroyed; that fire had rendered it for ever impossible to calculate the loss of life accurately; that the majority of the dead would never be found, being reduced to unrecognisable ashes; that the death-roll would eventually run into thousands!

​The whisperings filled Harley with a desire to fight the rumours with his hands.

“Stop it, for God’s sake!” he snarled, turning upon a lank individual in flannels who stood at his elbow.

The lank individual, under the impression that Harley thus vehemently expressed his abhorrence of the gum-chewing habit, ceased his noisy mastication to remark that he presumed the country to be a free one.

Harley muttered under his breath and returned to his reading of the bulletins. The lank individual masticated defiantly, and edged out of the crowd prudently.

As he read, Harley’s every hurrying heartbeat cried the name of the little woman whom he loved better than he knew. Grace! Grace! Grace! . .

Harley pictured the two cruisers racing at their highest speed; black, flattened smoke streaming aft; roaring walls of water rising at the impact of knife-like bows; officers, grim-lipped, snapping orders; physicians, vested with brief power, giving instructions to nurses and bluejackets alike.

The Navy was out! Harley thanked God for so much. Already the Veronica, by a lucky chance, tied to the Napier Wharf only a few minutes before the shake, was rendering valuable assistance to the injured and the homeless, and to-morrow the whole area would be under efficient control.

The Bluff carried away! Exactly what was meant by that? The whole of the scant bulletin was so carelessly worded that it might mean anything.

The Bluff—the rising headland thrusting out to sea; the remnant of a range of hills, such as edged the bay to the west and north, its seaward face a sheer cliff, at the foot of which jutted wharves. Upon its heights and upon its landward slopes the homes of the moneyed and the elite. The residential suburb. The Botanical Gardens spreading themselves over its choicest undulations. God’s acre rearing its monuments upon it. The Public Hospital capturing its topmost breezes. . . .

The Bluff carried away! The Hospital and the Nurses’ Home collapsed! God! It must be frightful! If the Bluff had flattened out, like the Murchison Hills in ’29, then fully half of Napier must be buried!

Harley groaned aloud.

“Grace! Grace! Grace! . . . ” in every heartbeat! Strangely, no beat for Joan. Joan was merged in Grace. Where Grace was there Joan would be—both dead or alive. He did not then think they might be merely injured. There were no half-measures with him at this moment, either in his newly-awakened love or shame.

Harley was familiar with the narrow streets of Napier’s business area. Uninspiring streets of brick buildings, shops, warehouses and offices; streets of architecturally repellent, cramped, often mean, buildings bedaubed with advertisements or bleakly bare; clean streets which appeared to be dirty because of their lack of breathing space; streets lined with shop verandahs, beneath which one sweltered in summer and shivered in winter; streets strangely old in so young a country.

Death-traps in an earthquake!

Harley read no further. With an inarticulate cry he turned about and literally clawed himself free from the crowd, and ran.

A short, thick-set man, with a flattened nose and curious ears, who had been toppled into the gutter, bounced to his feet, raced after Harley, and pulled him to a halt with a strong hand upon his shoulder. Harley spun round and snarled:

“Keep your hands off me!”

“You may be in a ’ell of a hurry, cobber,” said the broken-nosed one grimly, “but that ain’t no excuse for knocking a man into the gutter. What ’a’ y’got t’say about it?”

“Nothing,” snapped Harley, pointing to the lighted window of the Herald office with a shaking ​hand, “except that my wife and child are somewhere in the ruins of the Masonic in Napier!”

He swung away sharply and continued on his way at a rapid walk. He was sobbing, and was unaware of it.

The strong hand touched his shoulder again, but it made no attempt to stay him. The broken-nosed one fell into step beside him.

“Sorry, cobber.”

“That’s all right,” grunted Harley, looking blindly ahead.

“How do you know your wife and kid is in the Masonic?” asked the broken-nosed one.

“That’s where they were staying.”

“That ain’t no reason for believin’ they was in the pub at the time of the shake. They might have been anywhere. I’ll betcha they was on the beach—the beach is only just across the Parade. I wouldn’t believe nothin’ until I was sure, if I was you, cobber. No good looking for the worst———”

Harley interrupted the well-intentioned phrases by halting suddenly, turning upon his unwelcome visitor, and thrusting his face forward belligerently while he clenched his fists in threat.

“Leave me alone!” he cried. “Leave me alone!”

The broken-nosed one looked hurt for a moment, then his mouth twisted in a one-sided sneer.

“Awright, cobber, awright. I don’t want to push in where I ain’t wanted. Just thought you might like somebody to talk to———,” . . . .

“I don’t. I want to be alone.”

“Yeh. I can see that.”

The broken-nosed one moved away a pace, then turned.

“You never want to wave them flippers of yours like that, cobber, when you meet a bloke with a nose and ears like mine,” he said significantly. “Cheerio!”

He waved a hand in farewell and walked into a ​shop-doorway, where he pretended to be interested in a display of bath-towels.

Harley hurried on, muttering to himself.

A lone taxi stood in Brougham Street. Its owner-driver, a stockily-built, happy-go-lucky individual, known to the town at large familiarly as “Roy,” upon whose head the conventional visored cap sat ridiculously, upon whose face shrapnel had designed a perpetual smile, and who earned a tenuous living because of his reputation for reckless driving, leaned against a verandah-post and conversed with a constable and a youth who straddled a bicycle.

His eyes lighted as he noted Harley’s approach.

“Here’s a chap who isn’t afraid to ride with me,” he said confidently. “My one reliable customer. What’s the betting?”

“I’d ride with you, Roy, if I had the chance,” declared the constable enviously.

“And pinch me for speeding—like you did before.”

Harley strode to the car and opened a door before the driver could reach it.

“Thank God, it’s you, Roy!” he said, as Roy hurried to his seat behind the wheel. “Napier! And burn the tyres off her!”

Roy waved a triumphant and somewhat derisive hand to the constable and released the brakes. The car slid down the hill, jerking forward as the engine started.

“Going over for one of the papers, Mr, Harley?”

“No.”

“Just going for some real atmosphere for another story?”

“No.”

Harley passed a shaking hand over his eyes as though to shut out the illumination on the dash.

Roy saw the action.

“Somebody over there?” he asked with quick sympathy.

Harley nodded.

​“Wife?”

For a moment Harley sat bolt upright, staring wildly ahead and beating his breast with clenched hands.

“I ought never to have let her go!” he cried. “Oh, what a damned fool a man can be! What a damned fool!”

His head fell forward upon his clenched fingers and he slumped in his seat.

Roy became intent on his driving. The low whine of the engine rose in pitch and volume until it became a subdued shriek—a shriek which drowned the distressing sound of a grown man’s sobbing.

****