THE MORNING THAT CAME
When the voice had ceased Mayer stood transfixed at the phone, seeing
nothing. He fumbled the receiver back into its hook and, wheeling,
propped himself against the wall, his mouth slack, his eyelids drooped in
sickly feebleness. The final shock, succeeding the long strain, came like
a blow on the head leaving destruction.
He got to a chair and dropped into it, sweat-bathed, feeling as if cold
airs were blowing on his damp skin. Sunk against the back, his legs
stretched before him, his arms hanging over the sides, he lay shattered.
His mind tried to focus on what he had heard and fell back impotent,
eddying downward through darkling depths like a drowning swimmer. A vast
weakness invaded him, turning his joints to water, giving him a sensation
of nausea, draining his strength till he felt incapable of moving his
eyes, which stared glassily at the toes of his shoes.
Presently this passed; he raised his glance and encountered the clock
face on the mantelpiece. He held to it like a hand that was dragging him
out of an abyss; watched it grow from a circular object to a white dial
crossed by black hands and edged by a ring of numerals. The hour marked
slowly penetrated to his consciousness--a quarter to four. He drew
himself up and looked about; saw his notes on the desk, his hat on the
table, the matchsafe with a cigarette stump lying on its saucer. They
were like memorials from another state of existence, things that
connected him with a plane of being that he had left long ago. He had a
vision of himself in that distant past, packing his trunk, making brisk,
satisfactory jottings on a sheet of hotel paper, standing on the hearth
looking into Lorry Alston's angry eyes.
Groaning, he dropped his head into his hands, rocking on the chair, only
half aroused. He was aware of poignant misery without the force to combat
it, and knowing he must act could only remember. Irrelevant pictures,
disconnected, having no point, chased across his brain--the saloon in
Fresno where he had cleaned the brasses, and, jostling it, Chrystie's
face, just before she had wept, puckered like a baby's. He saw the tules
in the low sun, the green ranks, the gold-glazed streams, Mark Burrage
coming down the long drawing-room eyeing him from under thick brows,
Lorry's hand with its sparkle of rings holding out the letter.
That last picture shook him out of his torpor. He lifted his head and
knew his surroundings for what they were--four walls threatening to close
in on him. The necessity to go loomed suddenly insistent, became the
obsessing matter, and he staggered to his feet. Flight suggested disguise
and he went to the bedroom and clawed about in the bottom of the cupboard
for the old suitcase which held the clothes he had worn on his Sacramento
trips. As he pulled it out he remembered the side entrance of the hotel
accessible by a staircase at the end of the hall; he could slip out
unseen. There would be early trains, locals, going south; an express to
be caught somewhere down the line. By the next night he could be across
the Mexican border. It was the logical place, the only place--he knew it
himself and the voice had said so.
The Voice! Obliterated by the mental chaos it had caused, whelmed in the
succeeding rush of fear, it now rose to recognition--a portentous fact.
He stood stunned, the suitcase dangling from his hands, immovable in
aghast wonder as if it had just come to his ears. A voice without a
personality, a voice behind which he could envisage no body, a voice of
warning dropping out of the unknown, dropping doom!
His surface faculties were now obedient to his direction and
automatically responded to the necessity for haste. As he went about
collecting his clothes, tearing up letters, opening drawers, he ransacked
his brain for a clew to the man's identity, tried to rehear the voice and
catch a familiar echo, went back and forth over the words. And in the
fevered restoration of them, the last sentences, "You thought you'd
struck someone who was helpless. But she could pay you back and she has,"
brought light in an illuminating flash. "Pancha," he whispered, "Pancha,"
and stood rooted, recalling, searching the past, linking the known with
the deduced.
The man was the bandit, the old lover, the one he had supplanted, the
one who had written the message on the paper. He had heard she was
sick--come to see her--and she had told him, called upon him to avenge
her as she said she would. And the man--he couldn't--his hands were
tied. If Mayer had the paper--and the cache showed it was gone--Mayer
could direct the pursuit to Pancha and to Pancha's "best beau." So, fact
marshaled behind fact, he drew to the truth, grasped it, knew why he had
been warned and by whom.
Pancha had found out somehow--but he did not linger on that; his mind
wasted no time filling profitless gaps. Fiercely alive now it only saw
what counted. He turned and looked out of the window, a glance in her
direction. She had made good, kept her word, beaten him. The feeble
thing, the scorned thing, that he had kicked out of his path, had
risen and destroyed him. He stood for a still moment looking toward
where she was, triumphant, waiting for his arrest, and he muttered,
his gray face horrible.
Soon afterward he was ready, the old hat and coat on, the suitcase
packed. There was a look about for forgotten details and he attended to
them with swift competence. The papers on the desk--those expense
accounts--were crammed into his pockets, the shades drawn up, the bed
rumpled for the room boy's eye in the morning. Then a last sweeping
survey and he turned out the gas, opened the door and peered into the
hall. It stretched vacant to the window at the far end, a subdued light
showing its carpeted length. His nostrils caught its unaired closeness,
his ears the heavy stillness of a place enshrining sleep.
Night still held the streets, at this hour dim, deserted vistas, looking
larger than they did by day. He stole along them feeling curiously
small, dwarfed by their wide emptiness, wanting to hide from their
observation. It was typical of what the rest of his life would be,
shunning the light, footing it furtively through darkness, forever
apprehensive, forever outcast.
His heart sank into blackness, dense, illimitable. It stretched from him
out to the edges of the world and he saw himself never escaping from it,
groping through it from pursuers, always retreating, always looking back
in fear. Poverty would be his close companion; makeshifts, struggles,
tricks of deceit, the occupation of his days. The effort of new endeavor
rose before him like a mountain to be climbed and for which he had not
the strength; the ease he was reft of, a paradise only valued now it was
lost. Hate of those who had brought him so low surged in him, dominating
even his misery. He set his teeth, looking up at the graying sky, feeling
the poison pressing at his throat, aching in his limbs, burning at the
ends of his fingers.
There was a faint diffused light when he reached the corner of Pancha's
street, the first gleam of the coming day. Like one who sees temptation
placed before him in living form and hesitates, reluctant yet impelled,
he stood and gazed at the front of the Vallejo Hotel. The lamps showed up
a pinkish orange, two spheres, concrete and solid, in a swimming, silvery
unreality. Beyond the steps a man's figure moved, walking up the street,
his back to Mayer. It was very quiet; the hush before the city, turning
in its sleep, stretched, breathed deeply, and awakened.
Mayer went forward toward the lamps.
He had no definite intention; was actuated by no formed resolution; was,
for the moment, a being filled to the skin by a single passion. He felt
light, as if his body weighed nothing, or as if he might have been
carried by a powerful current buoyant and beyond his control. It took him
up the steps to the door. Through a clear space in the ground glass panel
he looked in and saw that the hall was empty. His heart rose stranglingly
and then contracted; his hand closed on the knob, turned it and the door
opened. That unexpected opening, the vacant hall and stairway stretching
before him like an invitation, ended his lack of purpose. Despair and
hate combined into the will to act, propelled him to a recognized goal.
He entered and mounted the stairs.
Cushing, having found the long vigil at the Vallejo exhausting, had
contracted the habit of slipping out in the first reaches of the dawn to
a saloon down the street. It was a safe habit, for even the few
night-roving tenants the Vallejo had were housed at that hour, and if a
belated reveler should stray in, the door was always left on the latch.
Moreover he only stayed a few minutes; a warming gulp and he was back
again, wide-awake for the call of the day. His was the figure Mayer had
seen walking down the street.
Pancha was asleep and dreaming. It was a childish dream, but it was
impregnated with that imminent, hovering terror that often is associated
with the simple visions of sleep. She was back in the old shack in Inyo
where her mother had died, and it was raining. Juana was sitting on the
side of the bed, her dark hair parted, a shawl over her head framing her
face. From the side of the bed she watched Pancha, who was sweeping,
sweeping with urgent haste, haunted by some obscure necessity to finish
and continually retarded by obstacles. Against the door the rain fell,
loud, and then louder. It grew so loud that it ceased to be like rain,
became a shower of blows, a fearful noise, never before made by water.
Horror fell upon them, a horror of some sinister fate beyond the door.
Juana held out her arms and Pancha, dropping the broom, ran to her, and
clinging close listened to the sound with a freezing heart.
She woke and it was still there, not so loud, very soft, and falling,
between pauses, on her own door. Her fear was still with her and she sat
up, seeing the room faintly charged with light. "Who is it?" she said and
heard her voice a stifled whisper, then, the knocking repeated, she
leaped out of bed and thrust her feet into slippers. She was awake now
and thought of her father, no one else would come at such an hour. As she
ran to the door she called, "What is it--is something the matter?"
Through the crack she heard an answering whisper, "Open--it's all right.
Let me in." It might have been anybody's voice. She opened the door and
Boye Mayer came in.
They looked at one another without words, and after the look, she began
to retreat, backing across the room, foot behind foot. He locked the
door and then followed her. There were pieces of furniture in the way
that she skirted or pushed aside, keeping her eyes on him, moving
without sound. She knew the door into the sitting room was open and with
one hand she felt behind her for the frame, afraid to turn her back on
him, afraid to move her glance, the withheld shriek ready to burst out
when he spoke or sprang.
She gained the doorway and backed through it and here breathed a hoarse,
"Boye, what do you want?" He made no answer, stealing on her, and she
slid to the table and then round it, keeping it between them. In the pale
light, eye riveted on eye, they circled it like partners in a fantastic
dance, creeping, one away and one in pursuit, steps noiseless, movements
delicately alert. Her body began to droop and cower, her breath to stifle
her; it was impossible to bear it longer. "Boye!" she screamed and made a
rush for the door. She had shot the bolt back, her hand was on the knob,
when he caught her. His grip was like iron, hopeless to resist, but she
writhed, tore at him, felt herself pressed back against the wall, his
fingers on her throat.
It was a quarter to five on the morning of April 18, 1906.
The first low rumble, the vibration beneath his feet, did not
penetrate his madness. Then came a road, an enormous agglomeration of
sound and movement, an unloosing of titanic elements--above them,
under them, on them.
They were separated, each stricken aghast, no longer enemies, beings of
a mutual life seized by a mutual terror. The man was paralyzed, not
knowing what it was, but the girl, bred in an earthquake country, clasped
her hands over her skull and bent, crouching low and screaming, "_El
temblor!_" The floor beneath them heaved and dropped and rose, groaning
as the ground throes wrenched it. From walls that strained forward and
sank back, pictures flew, shelves hurled their contents. Breaking free,
upright for a poised second, the long mirror lunged across the room, then
crashed to its fall. On its ruin plaster showered, stretches of ceiling,
the chandelier in a shiver of glass and coiled wires.
Through the dust they saw one another as ghosts, staggering, helpless,
dodging toppling shapes. They shouted across the chaos and only knew the
other had cried by the sight of the opened mouth. All sounds were
drowned in the surrounding tumult, the roar of the shaken city and the
_temblor's_ thunderous mutter. Rafters, crushed together, then strained
apart, creaked and groaned and crunched. Walls receded with a reeling
swing and advanced with a crackling rush. The paper split into shreds;
the plaster skin beneath ripped open; lathes broke in splintered ends;
mortar came thudding from above and swept in a swirling drive about
their feet.
He shouted to her and made a run for the door. Hanging to the knob he
was thrown from side to side by the paroxysmal leaps of the building.
The door jammed, and, his wrenchings futile, he turned and dashed to the
window. Here again the sash stuck. He kicked it, frantic, caught a
glimpse of the street, people in nightgowns, a chimney swaying and then
falling in a long drooping sweep. Somewhere beyond it a high building
shook off its cornices like a terrier shaking water from its hair.
Grinding his teeth, cursing, he wrenched at the window, tore at the
clasp, then turned in desperation and saw the door, loosed by a sudden
throe, swing open. Through reeling dust clouds Pancha darted for it, her
flight like the swoop of a bird, and he followed, running crazily along
the heaving floor.
The hall was fog-thick with powdered mortar, and careening like a ship in
a gale. He had an impression of walls zigzagged with cracks, of
furniture, upturned, making dives across the passage. White figures were
all about; some ran, some stood in doorways and all were silent. He
thrust a woman out of his way and felt her move, acquiescingly, as if
indifferent. Another, a child in her arms, clawed at his back, forced him
aside, and as she sped by he saw the child's face over her shoulder,
placid and sweet, and caught her voice in a moaning wail, "Oh, my baby!
Oh, my baby!" A man, holding the hand of a girl, was thrown against the
wall and dropped, the girl tugging at him, trying to drag him to his
feet. Something, with blood on its whiteness, lay huddled across the sill
of an open doorway.
Pancha was ahead of him, a long narrow shape that he could just discern.
A length of ceiling fell between them, a sofa, like a thing endowed with
malign life, rushed from the wall and blocked his passage. He scrambled
over it and saw the stair head, and a clearer light. That meant
deliverance--the street one flight below. The floor sagged and cracked,
he could feel it going, and with a screaming leap he threw himself at the
balustrade, caught and clung. From above he heard a cry, "Up, up, not
down!" had a vision of Pancha on the second flight, flying upward, and
himself plunged downward to the street.
The litter of the great mirror lay across the landing, the light from the
hall on its shattered fragments, broken glitterings amid a debris of
gold. The balustrade broke and swung loose, the stairs drooped, humped
again, and gave, sinking amid an onrush of walls, of splintered beams, of
ceilings suddenly gaping and discharging their weight in a shoot of
plaster, snapped boards and furniture. Something struck him and he fell
to his knees, struggled against a smothering mass, then sank, whelmed in
the crumbling collapse.
Pancha at the stair top, lurching from wall to wall, felt a slow
subsidence, a sinking under her feet, and then the frenzied movement
settle into a long, rocking swing. A pallor of light showed through the
dust rack, and making her way to it she found an open doorway giving on a
front room. She passed through; crawled over a heap of entangled
furniture toward a window wide to the rising day. She thought she was on
the third story, then heard voices, looked out and saw faces almost on a
level with her own, the street a few feet below her, a clouded massing of
figures, moving, gesticulating, calling up to the windows. The greater
bewilderment had shut out all lesser ones. She did not understand, did
not ask to, only wanted to get out and be under the safe roof of the sky.
Climbing across the sill, she found her feet on grass, stumbled over a
broken railing, heard someone shout, and was pulled to her feet by two
men. They held her up, looking her over, shaking her a little. Both their
faces were as white as if they had been painted.
"Are you hurt?" one of them cried, giving her arm a more violent shake as
if to jerk the answer out quickly.
"Hurt?" she stammered. "No. I'm all right. But--but how did I get out
this way--onto the street?"
She saw then that his teeth were chattering. Closing his lips tight to
hide it he pointed to where she had come from.
She turned and looked. The Vallejo, slanting in a drunken sprawl, its
roof railing hanging from one corner, its cornices strewn on the
pavement, had sunk to one story. Built on the made ground of an old creek
bed, it had buckled and gone down, the first and second stories crumpling
like a closed accordion, the top floor, disjointed and wrecked, resting
on their ruins.