by James Hilton
He stood there, increasingly spellbound by dread, while the whole world seemed poised for some uniquely terrible reckoning. Then all at once there began a distant growling that came rapidly nearer like the roar of a train crossing a metal bridge at full speed. He was so puzzled by it that he was scarcely able to be astonished when he saw, a few yards away across the street, a length of parapet toppling from a first-floor balcony. It fell with such disarming grace, and so soundlessly amidst the greater noise, that the dust- cloud spraying upwards from the smashed stucco seemed no more than necessary proof that the thing had really happened. Not even yet could he think of a reason for both the roar and the fallen parapet, and his perplexity held him aloof from fear until, with a shudder of foreboding, the truth rushed at him, and with it also a sight incredibly grotesque—that of the houses opposite waving like banners, and a hole widening in the roadway as if it were being munched by some enormous and invisible mouth. Then he was struck between the eyes, and staggered back….
… When he recovered consciousness he began to cough and vomit. Behind the clouds of blinding, acrid smoke that swirled about him, patches of copper- hot sky could be seen; the time, from the look of it, was mid-afternoon. Timber and masonry surrounded him in a soaring jumble, but though he felt dazed and ill, he did not think that he had been seriously hurt, if at all. His arms were movable; he could feel his cigarettes and revolver still in his pocket. He stirred his legs carefully from under a beam that had fallen miraculously short of crushing them; they were stiff, but after a few moments he could drag himself upright and climb a heap of debris to survey a little more of the catastrophe. “Well,” he kept thinking, as he strove to regain his numbed senses, “now you know what an earthquake is like.”…
Then he thought of Byrne and began to clamber amongst the litter in impulsive search for his friend. But of course, as he soon reflected, the priest wouldn’t be anywhere near the hotel; he had gone down to the quay- side to visit the customs-officer. Nicky scrambled a few yards over a pyramid of brickwork and caught sight of what looked to be a large red-violet flower growing amidst the rubble. As he approached, the violet spurted out in all directions, leaving the red by itself, and he saw then what it really was—the shambled body of a man, with flies above it, waiting to re- settle. He felt sick again, and shook his head vaguely as the cries of wounded came to him from left and right. As fast as he could he hastened over the ruins Co the river-front. He must look for Byrne first. He saw a few uninjured or slightly injured persons on the way, but they stared at him with half-crazed eyes as he passed them by. He reached the customs-house at last—a mountain of rubbish enclosed by jagged sections of wall. There were several bodies near by, but nowhere that of Byrne. Then he discovered that his hair was clotted with blood, and that blood was also streaming from his left arm. Queer, that was; he hadn’t felt any pain. He sank down to rest for a moment, but the sun flared before his eyes and he felt the world re-vanishing….
… When he recovered consciousness a second time it was night, and there was a full moon in the crimsoned sky. He heard the river lapping near him; he felt thirsty, and dragged himself a few yards forward to scoop the water into his hands. Refreshed after that, he stood up, breathing the hot, smoky air, and saw that sporadic fires had broken out over the ravaged town. Again, in the face of this new peril, his thought was of Byrne. But his choked lungs and smarting eyes led hint instinctively away from the vortex to the outer ring of the inferno. Byrne, alive or dead, might be anywhere here. He clambered over some wreckage, and as he did so there came a curious tinkling sound from his feet. “Good God, what’s that?” he whispered, aloud, and was no less amazed when a cackling laugh answered him and a voice followed it with: “You play tune, betcherlife, heh?” Then he saw that his feet had touched the keys of a half-smashed piano, and that a few yards away a face regarded him with a wide and glittering smile. It was an ugly face, sagging and pewter-coloured in the moonlight, but at that moment Nicky was glad to see it. “Hullo, John,” he said, grinning back. “You one of the lucky ones, too?”
But the Chinese, though possessing a smattering of English, did not appear to comprehend. He merely continued to smile, jerking his thumb in the direction of the town, and chattering: “Betcherlife, all velly dead there, heh?”
Nicky nodded, and was about to pass on when the man strode towards him and gripped his arm. “You want drink, heh?” He produced a flask and offered it, with his smile still broadening.
“Thanks.” Nicky swallowed the raw spirit without a second invitation. It was good, and he felt grateful. “You’re a sportsman, John,” he said.
But the Chinese would not let him go at that. He hovered about, muttering and grinning; his English was insufficient to explain the extent of his own share in the general tragedy, but Nicky guessed that, like himself, he might be searching the ruins for someone he had known. Nicky felt a keen desire to show sympathy and friendliness, or at least appreciation of the drink, but all he could think of was to perform the comic pantomime of smacking his lips and rubbing his stomach. The Chinese cackled delightedly. There was a sense in which the very enormity of the catastrophe all around them imposed this infantile good humour upon the survivors. The springs of the mind were numbed, and behind the numbness one could be companionable, even jocular. The Chinese was evidently in such a mood, and Nicky found it easy and pleasant to respond. He had nothing to offer in return for the drink except a few cigarettes that had been badly crumpled in his pocket, but the gift proved highly acceptable. The Chinese produced matches, and they leaned together amicably over the flame. “Now we go looksee together, heh, betcherlife!” he gabbled, puffing ecstatically.
They entered thus upon a sort of half-comprehended partnership in the search of the locality. If either of them found a body he would call the other’s attention to it, and even in waning moonlight it was easy for Nicky to decide that none of them could possibly be that of the priest. The task of the Chinese was naturally more difficult, for there had been many of his compatriots in Maramba and precise identification could not always be easy. In several instances he had to examine articles in pockets before he could pass on with his quest still unfulfilled. During those hours of probings and ransackings Nicky came quite to like his companion; the man was so unfailingly jolly, despite the grimness of their joint occupation. Sometimes they paused to light fresh cigarettes, and once the Chinese offered another swig of the harsh, but exceedingly heartening, spirit. Nicky wished they could talk, but he had discovered that the other knew even less English than had appeared at first—his phrases being more expletive than meaningful. Still, it was company to have the fellow so near, humming and muttering as he paddled up to his knees in crumbled stucco. The glow over the higher parts of the town was fiercer now….
Suddenly there sounded a sharp cry, and a man in uniform, hatless, but carrying a revolver, came lunging towards them, apparently from nowhere. Nicky could not comprehend a word of his voluble shouts, but felt instinctively that the advance was both frenzied and hostile. The man approached to within a few yards, continuing to shout; while Nicky waited for him, unable to decide whether it would be worth while to shout back in any of the languages that he knew. A sense of the growing absurdity of the situation overspread him, together with regret that he had not learned a few simple phrases in whatever tongue was spoken by uniformed ruffians in Maramba after an earthquake. There were times, and this was one, when his mind seemed to stand a little way off from his body and stare quizzically at a spectacle for which it did not care to accept responsibility.
Abruptly the oncomer swung round and transferred his shouts to the Chinese, who—with tact rather than courage, Nicky thought—was slinking away. Soon the Chinese broke into a scamper, and at that the other raised his revolver and fired after him instantly.
This had an extraordinary effect on Nicky. He heard the Chinese yelp as he was hit, and saw him stagger on with a hand held to his thigh. He saw the man in uniform raise his weapon to fire
again, and at that moment the clench of his own fingers in his pocket reminded him that he was armed himself. And he was swept with a raw, overpowering indignation. As if there had not been enough killing. As if there were not enough agony and mutilation amongst these blood- drenched ruins. All the horrors he had seen during the past night and day were seen again, far more vividly, in that glimpse of a Chinaman’s pain; because it was something so needless, heaped so maddeningly on what had had to happen. He found it unendurable, this comprehension of the lust and wantonness of things; he yelled as the man was about to fire again; then, in sheer illogical rage, he drew his own revolver and pointed it.
The man’s eyes and hand swerved together; and two further shots, nearly simultaneous, rang out over the moon-grey desolation.
They lay there, the three of them, Nicky and the uniformed man quite close together, and the Chinese about a dozen yards away, where he had fallen. Nicky had shot his assailant dead, and the latter, who had fired only a second earlier, had struck the youth in the groin. He felt little actual pain, merely a hot, numbing weariness as he drew breath. He did not fear that his injury was serious, but he knew, without making the effort, that he could not move away unaided. Something confusing had been done to his inside by that bullet, he reckoned. He would have to wait till somebody found him, and the curious thing was that he had full confidence that somebody would. Probably already there were armies of rescuers on the way—wasn’t that what always happened after these big disasters? President Hoover would send a warship, and the League of Nations would vote condolences. Police, doctors, nurses, Y.M.C.A., all sorts of people would soon begin to arrive. Also soldiers, firemen, ambulance-men, insurance-assessors, journalists, photographers, government officials, seismologists—the whole crowd would be here shortly….
He turned to the dead man near him. Quite dead. A very small patch of blood stained the tunic over his left breast, that was all. People would call that a mighty good shot, by Jove, yes. It was the first man he had ever killed, though once before, in Russia, he had aimed at someone and missed. And the joke of it was that in this case he hadn’t aimed at all; he hadn’t really meant to fire even; everything had happened so damned quickly.
He wondered who the man was. He could not see clearly; the moon had gone down. But the first smear of dawn was in the eastern sky, like a child’s breath on a window-pane; he would be able to see everything soon. There was still that smell of smoke and burning coffee in the air, and the Chinese was howling softly, like a dog outside a closed door. “Hello, John,” Nicky cried, and was surprised to hear his own voice diminished to a whisper.
What a piece of work was man, indeed! And what a still greater piece of work was a bullet! No marvel of physical excellence, no superbity of brain or character, could stand against that exquisite fragment of metal. Shakespeare, Cervantes, Galileo, Mohammed, Goethe, Mozart, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, the whole who’s-who parade of history, could all be mown down with a machine- gun in a few minutes.
He wondered what had happened to Byrne. Dead, probably. He had liked that man. There had been some point in knowing him. That was the drawback to most intimacies; you came to like people, you got wildly keen about them, and then suddenly realised that you had wasted a lot of energy over emotions that didn’t matter. But knowing Byrne hadn’t been like that. Indeed, it was as if, in knowing him, one had been on the brink of knowing something else….
It was lighter now, and he could see the Chinese quite clearly against the rosy-tinted sky. The man was lying on his face, and his pockets had emptied—there were coins and purses and a watch and chain. Queer fellows, Chinamen; but this one had been all right. Nicky wished there were still enough in the flask for another drink for both of them.
He kept remembering things he thought he had almost forgotten—that scene, for instance, in the Odessa restaurant that might just as well have ended in his being shot there and then as here and now. And if he had been, if that Soviet Commissar had killed him, in what strange ways the world would have been minutely different—no gyrector experiments in England, no “Red Desert” at Sabinal, no “Raphael Rassova” anywhere. And so also, supposing he were now to die, a thousand other remote and unreckonable things would be withdrawn from possibility. What clue was there, or wasn’t there any, to this mystic template of men and bullets?
He looked at the dead man, clear-outlined now in the growing daylight; a big fellow, with terrific moustaches, and revealed, by a glance at his uniform, as just a simple soldier—probably one of the local frontier garrison. On guard? Patrolling? Watching for smugglers across the border? Then suddenly the idea came…. Good God, it wasn’t contraband the fellow had suspected, but looting! He had seen the two of them poking about the wreckage in the middle of the night, and had taken them for thieves! Why, certainly, it was a likely theory, the likeliest of all, for it explained why he had fired so promptly when the Chinese made to run away.
As Nicky digested the revelation he was filled with a bemused tenderness that included now both the Chinese and the dead soldier. So it had all, then, been a mistake, a pardonable misunderstanding, nobody’s fault but that of the bullets for boring so fast and so far? If he and the soldier had had only sticks in their hands, they would now be apologising to each other for bruises instead of draining their blood into the dust. And the thought came to him that if ever, some day, mankind should invent a machine big and powerful enough to destroy the whole world, it would probably be touched off in just such casual error. He wished he could bring the dead man back to life, if only to talk to him about it, and he would have liked to shout, if his voice had been strong enough: “I say, John, this fellow thought we were a couple of looters—that’s why he was so ready with his gun!”
And then another thought occurred, of such benign simplicity that he accepted it with astonishment that it had come only so late. The Chinaman was a looter. Why, of course, he must be. The way he had been searching the pockets of the victims, and that fine collection of swag that lay beside him now, spilled from his pockets. Nicky found himself wanting to smile. “John, you old rogue,” he cried to himself, “you took me in all right. Reckon I was dazed with that knock on the head, or I’d have spotted your game!” Then he looked at the Chinese, who had ceased to yelp and was lying quite still; and he suddenly knew that he was dead.
The sun rose, comforting at first, but soon too hot to the throat and lips; a drink was all that he really wanted now. In the sunlight he saw what he had missed before—a stream of his own blood, seeping away from his side across a large flat stone. The stream moved slowly, replenished from the wound, but the stone was warm and the blood readily congealed. He thought, watching it: “If it gets to the edge, I shall die; if it doesn’t, I shall live.” That made everything so much easier to understand. It was a faith, anyhow, a philosophy, a theory of the universe, cause and effect linked together no more illogically than in the long, invisible chain of human destiny. He went on watching: a slight stir of his body lent a swell to the viscous tide; it rolled faster for a while, a red, advancing caterpillar. And he thought, with certitude: “I am dying by inches… literally by those inches.” …
Then his brain, that had always been poised hawk-like over words, swooped down and gave him the answer: “Yes, but I have lived by miles.” …
The phrase pleased him and made him able to absorb more calmly the gusts and cyclones of pain as they now assaulted. He closed his eyes and wondered if he could sleep. The stream must nearly have reached the edge by now, but he wouldn’t bother to look.
Then, at the last, he suddenly remembered Sylvia.
* * *
CHAPTER SIX. — LEON MIRSKY
Leon Mirsky rode into Maramba on a white horse five days after the second earthquake had completed the ruin of the town. He was a tall, thin, and ascetic- looking person, with a face remarkable for two things—its smoke- grey, deep-set eyes, and a fair, girlish skin that even the climate of tropical South America had not yet impaired. High-cheekb
oned and slender-nostriled, he had an air of rather unsure aloofness, as if he did not quite know what to make of anything; and he certainly did not know what to make of the Maramba earthquake.
The only son of pre-Revolution aristocrats, he had reached the New World from Russia in 1919, after typical experiences. A little money saved from the wreck had enabled him to settle down and acquire American citizenship; and for ten fairly comfortable years, darkened only by memories, he had lived in a quiet part of New York and established a minor reputation as a poet and writer of highbrow art criticism. He had been for a time engaged to an heiress, but she had broken it off, with no greater effect than to make him write a rather foolish novel, satirising women in general, which no one had wanted to publish. His art criticism, however, was good, and he had written a pleasant little book on El Greco. Then in 1929 had come his second revolution—and perhaps quite as unsettling as the first, for he was twelve years older, and more deeply grooved. It was a financial one; his small income, derived from investments in apparently cast-iron stocks, dwindled rapidly to less than half, forcing him to face the immediate necessity of earning a living. Journalism naturally occurred to him, and at first he had nourished a secret confidence that any of the great American dailies would snap him up with eagerness. A few months had taught him differently, and at length, through friendship with a proprietor and a slight knowledge of Portuguese, he had obtained the post of newspaper-correspondent in Rio. He had been in Rio a week, without finding anything to write about except the development of baroque design in Brazilian architecture, when news came of the earthquake and he had almost simultaneously received a cable from New York to proceed to Maramba at once and send reports.