THE GREAT UPHEAVAL
The next five days were of those whose memory oppresses a nation for
countless generations. What with hurricanes, cyclones, floods, swollen
rivers and tidal waves, the coasts of the Channel and in particular
the parts about Fecamp, Dieppe and Le Treport suffered the most
infuriate assaults conceivable.
Although a scientist would not admit the least relation between this
series of storms and the tremendous event of the 4th of June, that is
to say, of the last of these five days, what a strange coincidence it
was! How could the masses ever since help thinking that these several
phenomena all formed part of one connected whole?
In Dieppe, the undoubted centre of the first seismic disturbances, in
Dieppe and the outlying districts hell was let loose. It was as though
this particular spot of the earth's surface was the meeting-place of
all the powers that attack and devastate and undermine and slay. In
the whirlpools, or the water-spouts, or the eddies of overflowing
rivers, under the crash of uprooted trees, crumbling cliffs, falling
scaffoldings and walls, tottering belfries and factory-chimneys and of
all the objects carried by the wind, the deaths increased steadily.
Twenty families were thrown into mourning on the first day, forty on
the second. As for the number of victims destroyed by the great
convulsion which accompanied the tremendous event, it was doubtful
whether this was ever accurately estimated.
As happens in such periods of constant danger, when the individual
thinks only of himself and those akin to him, Simon knew hardly
anything of the disaster save through the manifestations that reached
him directly. After receiving a wireless telegram from Isabel which
assured him of her safety, he spread the newspapers only to make
certain that his flight with her was not suspected. With the
rest--details of the foundering of the _Queen Mary_, articles in which
his presence of mind, his courage and Isabel's pluck were extolled, or
in which the writer endeavoured to explain the convulsions in the
Channel--with all this he had hardly time to concern himself.
He remained with his father. He told him the secret of his love, told
him the story of the recent incidents, told him of his plans. Together
they wandered through the town or out into the country, both of them
drenched and blinded by the showers, staggering under the squalls and
bowing their heads beneath the bombardment of slates and tiles. The
trees and telegraph-poles along the road were mown down like corn.
Trusses of straw, stacks of fodder, faggots of wood, palings, coils of
wire were whirled through the air like autumn leaves. Nature seemed to
have declared a merciless war upon herself for the sheer pleasure of
spoiling and destroying.
And the sea was still trundling its gigantic waves, which broke with
deafening roar. All navigation between France and England was
suspended. Wireless messages signalled the danger to the great liners
coming from America or Germany; and none of them dared enter the hell
that was the Channel.
On the fourth day, the last but one, Tuesday the 3rd of June, there
was a slight lull.
The final assault was marshalling its forces. M. Dubosc worn out with
fatigue, did not get up that afternoon. Simon also threw himself on
his bed, fully dressed, and slept until evening. But at nine o'clock
a shock awakened them.
Simon thought that the window, which suddenly burst open, had given
away under the pressure of the wind. A second shock, more plainly
defined, brought down the door of his room; and he felt himself
spinning on his own axis, with the walls circling round him.
He ran downstairs and found his father in the garden with the
servants, one and all bewildered and uttering incoherent phrases.
After a long pause, during which some tried to escape while others
were on their knees, there was a violent downpour of rain, mingled
with hail, which drove them indoors.
At ten o'clock they sat down to supper. M. Dubosc did not speak a
word. The servants were livid and trembling. Simon retained in the
depths of his horrified mind an uncanny impression of a shuddering
world.
At ten minutes to eleven there was another vibration, of no great
violence, but prolonged, with beats that followed one another very
closely, like a peal of bells. The china plates fell from the walls;
the clock stopped.
All the inmates of the house went out of doors again and crowded into
a little thatched summer-house lashed by slanting rain.
Half-an-hour later, the tremors recommenced and from this time
onwards, were so to speak, incessant. They were faint and remote at
first, but soon grew more and more perceptible, like the shivers of
fever which rise from the depths of our flesh and shake us from head
to foot.
This ended by becoming a torture. Two of the maids were sobbing. M.
Dubosc had flung an arm about Simon's neck and was stammering
terrified and meaningless words. Simon himself could no longer endure
this execrable sensation of earthquake, this vertigo of the human
being losing his foothold. He felt that he was living in a disjointed
world and that his mind was registering absurd and grotesque
impressions.
From the town arose an uninterrupted clamour. The road was crowded
with people fleeing to the heights. A church-bell filled the air with
the doleful sound of the tocsin, while the clocks were striking the
twelve hours of midnight.
"Let us go away! Let us go away!" cried M. Dubosc.
Simon protested:
"Come, father, there's no need for that! What have we to fear?"
But one and all were seized with panic. Everybody acted at random,
making unconscious movements, like a crazy piece of machinery working
backwards. The servants went indoors again, looking about them
stupidly, as do those who go over a house which they are leaving for
the last time. Simon, as in a dream, saw one of them cramming a canvas
bag with the gilt candlesticks and silver boxes of which he had
charge, while another wrapped himself in a tablecloth and a third
filled his pockets with bread and biscuits. He himself, turning by
instinct to a small cloak-room on the ground floor, put on a leather
jacket and changed his shoes for a pair of heavy shooting-boots. He
heard his father saying:
"Here, take my pocket-book. There's money in it, bundles of notes:
you'd better have it. . . ."
Suddenly the electric light went out; and at the same time they heard,
in the distance, a strange thunder-clap, curiously different from the
usual sound of thunder. It was repeated, with a less strident din,
accompanied by a subterranean rattling; and then, growing noisier
again, it burst a second time in a series of frightful detonations,
louder than the roar of artillery.
Then there was a frantic rush for the road. But the fugitives had not
left the garden when the frightful catastrophe, announced by so many
manifestations, occurred. The earth leapt beneath their feet and
instantly fell away and leapt again like an animal in convulsions.
Simon and his father were thrown against each other and then violently
torn apart and hurled to the ground. All around them was the
stupendous uproar of a tottering world in which everything was
collapsing into an incredible chaos. The darkness seemed to have grown
denser than ever. And then, suddenly, there was a less distant sound,
a sound which touched them, so to speak, a sort of cracking noise. And
shrieks rose into the air from the very bowels of the earth.
"Stop!" cried Simon, catching hold of his father, whom he had
succeeded in rejoining. "Stop!"
He felt before him, at a distance of a few inches, the utter horror of
a gaping abyss; and it was from the bottom of the abyss that the
shrieks and howls of their companions rose.
And there were three more shocks. . . .
Simon realized a moment later that his father, clutching his arm, was
dragging him away with fierce energy. Both were clambering up the road
at a run, groping their way like blind men through the obstacles with
which the earthquake had covered it.
M. Dubosc had a goal in view, the Caude-Cote cliff, a bare plateau
where they would be in absolute safety. But, on taking a cross-road,
they struck against a band of maddened creatures who told them that
the cliff had fallen, carrying numerous victims with it. All that
these people could think of now was to run to the seashore. With them,
M. Dubosc and his son stumbled down the paths which led to the valley
of Pourville, whose beach lies in a cove some two miles from Dieppe.
The front was obstructed by a crowd of villagers, while others were
taking shelter from the rain behind the bathing-huts overturned by the
wind. Others again, as the tide was very low, had gone down the
sloping shingle and crossed the sands and ventured out to the rocks,
as though the danger had ended there and there only. By the uncertain
light of a moon which strove to pierce the curtain of the clouds, they
could be seen wandering to and fro like ghosts.
"Come, Simon!" said M. Dubosc. "Let's go over there. . . ."
But Simon held him back:
"We are all right here, father. Besides, it seems to be calming down.
Take a rest."
"Yes, yes, if you like," replied M. Dubosc, who was in a greatly
dejected mood. "And then we will go back to Dieppe. I want to make
sure that my boats have not been knocked about too much."
A squall burst, laden with rain.
"Don't move," said Simon. "There's a bathing-hut a few yards off. I'll
just go and see. . . ."
He hurried away. But there were already three men lying under the hut,
which they had lashed to one of the buttresses of the parade. Others
came up and tried to share the shelter. Blows were exchanged. Simon
intervened. But the earth shook once more; and they could hear the
crash of cliffs falling to right and left.
"Where are you, father?" cried Simon, running back to the spot where
he had left M. Dubosc.
Finding no one there, he shouted. But the roar of the gale smothered
his voice and he did not know in what direction to seek. Had his
father been overcome by fresh fears and gone closer to the sea? Or
had he, in his anxiety for his boats, returned to Dieppe as he had
hinted?
At a venture--but is it right to apply this term to the unconscious
decisions which impel us to follow our destined path?--Simon began to
run along the sand and shingle. Then, through the maze of slippery
rocks, hampered by the snares spread by the wrack and sea-weed,
stumbling into pools of water in which the towering breakers from the
open sea had died away in swirling eddies or in lapping waves, he
joined the ghostly figures which he had seen from a distance.
He went from one to another and, failing to see his father, was
thinking of returning to the parade, when a small incident occurred to
make him change his mind. The full moon appeared in the sky. She was
covered again immediately, then reappeared; and several times over,
between the ragged clouds, her magnificent radiance flooded the sky.
At this juncture, Simon, who had veered towards the right of the
beach, discovered that the fallen cliffs had buried the shore under
the most stupendous chaos imaginable. The white masses were piled one
atop the other like so many mountains of chalk. And it looked to
Simon as if one of these masses, carried by its own weight, had rolled
right into the sea, whence it now rose some three hundred yards away.
On reflection, he could not believe this possible, the distance being
far too great; but then what was that enormous shape outstretched
yonder like a crouching animal? A hundred times, in his childhood, he
had paddled his canoe or come fishing in this part; and he knew for
certain that nothing rose above the waters here.
What was it? A sand-bank? But its outlines seemed too uneven and its
grey colour was that of the rocks, naked rocks, without any covering
of wrack or other sea-weed.
He went forward, actuated in part by an eager curiosity, but still
more by some mysterious and all-powerful force, the spirit of
adventure. The adventure appealed to him: he must go up to this new
ground whose origin he could not help attributing to the recent
earthquake.
And he went up to it. Beyond the first belt of sand, beyond the belt
of small rocks where he stood, was the final bed of sand over which
the waves rolled eternally. But from place to place there rose still
more rocks, so that he was able, by a persistent effort, to reach what
appeared to be a sort of promontory.
The ground underfoot was hard, consisting of sedimentary deposits, as
Old Sandstone would have said. And Simon realized that, as a result of
the violent shocks and of some physical phenomenon whose action he did
not understand, the bed of the sea had been forced upwards until it
overtopped the waves by a height which varied in different places, but
which certainly exceeded the level of the highest spring tides.
The promontory was of no great width, for by the intermittent light of
the moon Simon could see the foam of the breakers leaping on either
side of this new reef. It was irregular in form, thirty or forty yards
wide in one part and a hundred or even two hundred in another; and it
ran on like a continuous embankment, following more or less closely
the old line of the cliffs.
Simon did not hesitate. He set out. The hilly, uneven surface, at
first interspersed with pools of water and bristling with rocks which
the stubborn labours of the sea had pushed thus far, became gradually
flatter; and Simon was able to walk at a fair pace, though hampered by
a multitude of objects, often half-buried in the ground, which the
waves, not affecting the bottom of the sea, had been unable to sweep
away: meat-tins, old buckets, scrap-iron, shapeless utensils of all
kinds covered with sea-weed and encrusted with little shells.
A few minutes later, he perceived Dieppe lying on his right, a scene
of desolation which he divined rather than saw. The light of
conflagrations not wholly extinguished reddened the sky; and the town
looked to him like an unhappy city in which a horde of barbarians had
sat encamped for weeks on end. The earth had merely shuddered and an
even more stupendous disaster had ensued.
At this moment, a fine tracery of grey clouds spread above the great
black banks which were driving before the gale; and the moon
disappeared. Simon felt irresolute. Since all the light-houses were
demolished, how would he find his way if the darkness increased? He
thought of his father, who was perhaps anxious, but he thought
also--and more ardently--of his distant bride whom he had to win; and,
as the idea of this conquest was blended in his mind--he could not
have said why--with visions of dangers accepted and with extraordinary
happenings, he felt vaguely that he would be right in going on. To go
on meant travelling towards something formidable and unknown. The soil
which had risen from the depths might sink again. The waves might
reconqueror the lost ground and cut off all retreat. An unfathomable
gulf might yawn beneath his footsteps. To go on was madness.
And he went on.