Everybody’s Magazine
September, 1909
THE TILTING ISLAND
by Thomas J. Vivian and Grena J. Bennett
THE authors Thomas J. Vivian and Grena J. Bennett are unknown today, yet in the first decade of this century they were regular contributors of fiction to the leading magazines of the period. They were authors with considerable technical skill, able to build their point by subtlety and indirection.
It can be seen that The Tilting Island follows the same basic formula as does The Thames Valley Catastrophe by Grant Allen. A physical flaw is found in the location of a great metropolis and the anticipated occurs. The story depends for its effectiveness not only upon the unusual central phenomenon, but also through the careful mirroring of people’s reaction to it.
Everybody’s Magazine was founded in 1896 by the New York branch of Wanamaker’s as a 10-cent magazine. In its early years it obtained a substantial portion of its material, particularly fiction, by a reprint arrangement with The Royal Magazine of London, a half-price imitation of The Strand with a necessarily lower standard of excellence, published by the owners of Pearson’s Magazine.
Everybody’s made steady progress and eventually was purchased by Erman J. Ridgway, John A. Thayer, and George W. Wilder. It was the golden age of magazines, and those that were managed well made fortunes. Everybody’s was well-managed. The issue from which The Tilting Island was taken had over 150 pages of advertising and 144 pages of editorial matter. The lead story was preceded by two full-page, four-color illustrations.
Everybody’s would carry Conan Doyle’s story of life forms existing at great altitudes, The Horror of the Heights (November 1913); it would serialize Victor Rousseau’s The Messiah of the Cylinder (June to August 1917); and after the war it would become an all-fiction magazine and finally a pulp featuring occasional science fiction. During this later period it ran a particularly interesting scientific detective series, along the lines of Craig Kennedy by S. Goodhue, of which there were four in number.
THE historians, when all the mass of contradictory reports had been winnowed out, established the fact that it was Joe Angel, the White Wing, otherwise Giuseppe Angelotti, otherwise No. 964 of the Street Cleaning Department of New York, who first saw it.
It was two hours past midnight of a still, murky summer night. Heat and humidity had settled like a blanket over the city, and a ragged moon swam, melting, in a sullen sky. Joe was wiping his brow with his sleeve as he trundled his refuse pail across 125th Street, just east of Eighth Avenue. The motion, and the dullness born of the heat, prevented him from seeing the crack in the pavement until the wheels of his cart bumped into it. The street was well lighted; he had no difficulty in seeing the crack after his attention had been called to it by the jolt. He stopped and looked at it, puzzled. He had swept that section of the street but a quarter of an hour before, and he had noticed no rift in the asphalt then. It was quite a crack, too—six inches wide, and so long that it ran from a point opposite Kinsman’s drug store as far east as Joe could see.
Inspector Rafferty strolled along just then. “Another av thim rotten asphalt jobs,” he said. He was turning away, when a snapping, crackling noise proceeded from the break. And immediately it became a cleft. Joe and Rafferty jumped for their lives; the barrow went clanging down into the gap of a two-foot trench. With an uneven rattling like the discharge of a Gatling gun with a rusty cog, the trench widened and deepened. The handles of the barrow sank slowly out of sight.
“‘Tis either the sewer or the water main that’s gone!” cried Rafferty. But he was crossing himself with a trembling hand which gave the lie to his materialistic explanation. Something in the hot stillness of the night, in the regularity with which the crack widened and deepened, gave the whole phenomenon a sinister portent. But he gathered himself together and rushed to notify Police Headquarters that 125th Street was falling in.
By the time Rafferty had hung up the telephone, he was aware that the crackling of the breaking asphalt had increased to a booming. There was a strange vibration underfoot, too—not the violent shaking of an earthquake, but a continued disturbance of the earth more haunting and terrible because more persistent. Rafferty hurried out of doors.
A group of men passed him on a stumbling run. Farther on, three street cars were piled up, end to tail. A fourth stopped with a jarring jolt as though it had struck something. And Rafferty saw that the crack had changed in aspect. Not only was it widening, but it had also affected the level of the pavement. The northern side was lower than the street level, or the southern higher—which, it was impossible then to determine. At the point where it neared the car tracks, the rails, lifted from their fastenings, had parted. A flash of electric light illuminated violently all the blockaded cars—and their lamps went out all together. The underground feed rails had snapped.
Among the sleepy, irritated passengers who tumbled out to find the cause for this stoppage of traffic was a stout, Teutonic gentleman—Heinrich Herman, Professor of Geology at Columbia. Though Americanized and a disciplinarian, he still felt at, times the old Heidelberg call within, which only much beer and protracted penuchle could assuage. The call had been answered and he was returning to his bachelor quarters on Riverside Drive for a few hours of preparatory sleep.
With an air of ponderous irritation, then, he joined the gaping, pushing crowd which edged that irregular trench along 125th Street. As he stood, there came one of those slight tremors which had been recurring at intervals ever since Joe the White Wing had first seen the crack. The professor heaved his great bulk against the crowd and pushed forward to the edge of the trench. As he looked, the gap shivered and widened again.
The mouth of the Herr Professor Herman dropped open like the mouth of the trench; then his whole frame stiffened. “Himmel!” he gasped under his breath, “can it be—that which I thought?”
And now a compact line of police was bearing down on the crowd, which, like all street gatherings in New York, seemed bent on thrusting itself obstinately into any danger that might threaten. Professor Herman found himself pushed back with the eddy, whirling away from the official night sticks. Suddenly a new vibration, no longer indefinite, shook the earth, and the whole north side of the street seemed to drop a foot. Only seemed to drop; in reality the south side had risen. The optical illusion (it was afterward explained) was like that of a passenger on a stationary car who thinks that he is moving backward because he sees a car on a parallel track moving forward.
The police line, on the edge of the crack, got the full force of the shock. Lieutenant Tiernan, in command, was thrown off his feet. He jumped up shouting: “It’s an earthquake—get them back if you have to kill them!”
Then, as the police rallied and charged, a hissing, streaming sound ran the length of the crack. Immediately from the broken mains a geyser of water and gravel spouted thirty feet in the air and struck the line of police midway. Two more geysers sprang up to right and left; then they died down into gigantic springs which made the street a shallow, but turbulent river.
When the terrified crowd had recovered a little from the shock of this new catastrophe, that happened which drove in the chill. They moved in darkness. The gas and electric lights had gone out. The flying, dancing drops from the river which had been 125th Street flickered only in the faint light of the ragged old moon. And in this darkness they heard the roar of the three dying geysers change to the rush of a cataract. The water main had given way all along its length. The river became a Niagara which coursed through the cross-streets, tumbling and tossing those who had been slowest to run. The police line, which had reformed and held again, was now quite broken and in the rush of the torrent many men were caught and dashed shrieking against the tottering houses and the iron pillars of the elevated.
Then, a new horror appeared. The electric wires, the telephone and telegraph conduits being snapped, their broken ends came into contact with the twisted street car rails. In a twinkling there was a series of g
reat zigzag flashes. The rivers that had been streets blossomed suddenly with a thousand lambent flames, which no water could quench. As the waters dashed the wires here and there, these flames died and lived again; darted like the fires of St. Anthony. The horses of a milk wagon came floundering into the current of the main river. They struck one of these writhing, flaming spots, and tumbled over so suddenly that the wagon piled up on top of them.
It was by this intermittent glare from the wires that Jimmie Dalton, Harlem Department man for the Chronicle, made his spectacular appearance on the scene, as a recognized actor in the tragedy. The Harlem office of the Chronicle was on the north side of 125th Street and just about opposite the point of breakage from which the first and central geyser spouted, and Dalton had been trying to get into communication with the city editor. The great stream washed out the office as though ten fire department nozzles rolled into one had been directed against it; and in the washout, Dalton, who was a small man, went along with the ruins of the wooden counter.
He was clinging to this, raft-fashion, and paddling his way toward Eighth Avenue when the geysers turned into a cascade and, from paddling with some degree of individual action, Dalton was carried helplessly away in the rapids. These, as luck would have it, struck the south front of Kinsman’s drug store and eddying there, bore him in a wild backwater down Eighth Avenue, and so on into the shelter of an Italian bootblack’s stand which was built against the east wall of the Colonial Hotel. Also he dashed against a stout and elderly gentleman who was splashing through the flood.
Dalton’s raft hit the stranger violently.
“Care, care! Have a care,” said the stranger, “or you will impale me.”
Dalton, reporter to the core, noticed that he spoke with a German accent.
A flicker of moonlight shone across the professor’s face. “Herman of Columbia!” said Dalton. “I reported your extension lectures last spring for the Chronicle.”
He got to his feet and shoved his raft into the central eddy of the stream. “I guess I can get along without this now. Safe and sound, are you? My God! I wonder what’s happened.”
Professor Herman stood dripping in the moonlight, something more solemn than terror in his face. “Perhaps I alone know—I of all that see this—what it is that may happen!” His expression changed. “Where can we get a telephone that is working? The newspapers—the whole city— should be notified!”
This practical consideration woke the reporter again in Jimmie Dalton.
“Two-thirty!” he said, “and only five minutes to catch the last edition —it will be an extra if I don’t! Wires all down on 125th Street—we’ll have to see if the Adams Express Company wire is working.”
They splashed down Eighth Avenue. The driven crowd had rallied on the edge of the torrent; Dalton perceived three men dragging a limp form out of the waters. On the edge of the gutter he stumbled against another.
“Two dead, anyway!” he cried. They were now in an outpost of light; for here, it seemed, gas and electricity were not yet affected. The affected district stood like an unlit vacant lot in the midst of an illuminated tenement area. It was Sergeant Farley of the 34th Precinct Reserves who saw the first slinking figures edging their way into the darkened doors. At once he called his men, battered out these undesirables, set up the fire lines back of which the crowd was held, and so, it was afterward said, averted the looting of the Harlem business district.
The barricade did more than save property, it saved life; for barely had 125th Street been cleared when a sickening, wavelike motion seemed to run from east to west across the whole district south of that thoroughfare, and in that undulation a business house and a fashionable restaurant building on Seventh Avenue quavered and collapsed, while high over the rattle and boom of the falling buildings sounded the sharp alarm whistle of the elevated. Dalton threw a swift glance upward. The luminous mass of a train shone from the structure above them; then suddenly it was blotted out.
“Run!” he cried. “The L is toppling!”
It did not fall then, however. It only shook and buckled to some tremendous strain, and swayed like a rope ladder against the side of a tumbling ship. And then—panic. The crowd, bursting through the police lines, broke into knots and scattered in twenty courses of flight. The babble of that fear sounded even from above; the passengers of the elevated, threading a course made dangerous by the twisted structure, were pressing their dreadful way along the tracks to the station stairs.
Save for the police, it seemed that only Dalton and the Professor kept their ground. They stood for a time holding each to the other’s shoulder and swaying as the crowd swayed about them. But German stability, together with that other mysterious thing which shone in his eyes, held the Professor firm. As for Dalton the reporter, his soldier-like sense of duty was simplicity itself—he must report to his office.
On Hancock Square, a watchman of the Adams Express Company was dragging shut the big door to keep out the panicky crowd. Dalton fought his way to the watchman, whom he knew, and begged for the use of the wire.
“What’s the matter—an explosion?” asked the watchman.
“Yes,” snapped Dalton, as the shortest way out of it. “Quick—I must get the Chronicle!”
The transmitter, as he put it to his ear, still gave the buzzing which showed that the wire was alive. Yet he was an age getting the office. The watchman and the Professor, standing close, each eager for news, heard both sides of the conversation.
“Hello—the city desk—quick—well, I don’t care if there is a big story down there, this is a better one. Is this Wilson?”
“No, Perkins—is that Dalton?—For God’s sake, get down to the Battery!”
“Wait! I’ve got a smasher up here. Earthquake or something in Harlem. Houses down, water mains running in the street, lights all off—Hello —must be a lot killed—I saw two—safe to play many dead for the extra—”
“That’s a big story,” came an agitated voice from the other end of the wire. “But there’s a bigger one here. Subway tunnel has caved in or something, and the whole bay is pouring into the hole. Five trains in there—must be dead—Hello—never mind up there—Mr. Wilson wants you at the Battery—no, come to the office—” A dead silence and the stoppage of all sensation in the wire; and at the same instant the lights which illuminated the great warehouse went out.
Out of the darkness came the Professor’s voice, sharp, thrilling. “Where are you going now—where do you go now?”
Dalton’s voice had a shiver in it. “To the office,” he said.
The Professor’s speech was an explosion again. “You go to your duty —I go, too—to mine!”
“But what has happened?” asked Dalton, as the watchman had asked him live minutes before.
They were outside the warehouse now. From half a dozen quarters came hazes of rosy light, as though dawn were breaking all about the horizon. A fire engine clattered down the street, splashing through the water, bumping upon this obstruction or that.
“Fire!” whispered Dalton. “Why, it’s San Francisco over again!”
“Yes,” said the voice beside him. “San Francisco and more. Come— if we are to see. Come, let us go! It is too late to warn, but not, I hope, too late to see the end. But we must hasten ourselves.”
All southbound lines of transportation seemed broken. The elevated structure down to 110th Street was so badly warped that a stalled train had been left deserted on the tracks just beyond the station, and below that the problem of effecting a shortened traffic by switching the cars had not yet been solved. The Eighth Avenue surface was disorganized as far along Central Park West as one could see; the Lenox Avenue subway was flooded and a man running wildly northward panted out the information that the Broadway tube was jammed, dark, and out of running.
“Let us walk,” said the Professor, “the further we walk downtown the sooner it may be shall we come to some means of transportation. Anyway it will be a Forwards.” But as fortune would ha
ve it they had not to walk far, for when they reached 110th Street, Dalton, who had been keeping his sharp eyes busy, pointed up Cathedral Parkway. Across its vista a flat-wheeled Amsterdam Avenue car could be seen clap-clapping downtownward.
“Ah,” said the Professor, “evidently the disturbance thus far is very much localized.”
Evidently the Professor’s ideas of “localization” were drawn on a generous scale, for as the two reached the Cathedral Close and looked down over the valley of Morningside Park they could see the quick lighting up of the houses, could hear the rush of frightened families into the open slopes of the park as they ran from their quivering homes; while from the blackened area about 125th Street came the dull roaring of an excited multitude, punctuated here and there with the rattle of some explosion, the thud of some falling building, or the sudden leaping of a flame where one of the great fires that devastated so much of Harlem had started. And near at hand out of the darkness there came a dreadful monotone from some crazed man “Prepare ye, for the Day of the Lord is come!” When they reached Amsterdam Avenue eight crowded cars filled with turbulent, wild-eyed passengers, flew past them before they could find squeezing room in the ninth.
“Step lively if you want to get downtown,” said the conductor, “we’re all gone plum crazy up here.”
“Do you think,” asked Dalton as the car bumped slowly southward, “that we are really in for anything like the San Francisco shake-up?”
“No,” said the Professor, “I think not. In the case of San Francisco there was a break and consequent subsidence in the earth’s crust—a slip, a displacement that extended downward, perhaps for miles, and the tremor of which was felt all over the world. Here, there has been but a displacement in a local geological formation.”
“You mean that the disturbance is limited to New York?” asked Dalton.
Science Fiction by Gaslight: A History and Anthology of Science Fiction in the Popular Magazines, 1891-1911 Page 12