OF AN EARTHQUAKE AND JAMES CHALLONER
The experiences of James Challoner on that day of ruin at Valparaiso
were various, but none of them were pleasant. It was his twenty-eighth
birthday and up to two o'clock in the afternoon he was, as for the
last six weeks he had been, a clerk in the great house of R. C. Royle
& Sons. There was no sort of business in Chile which R. C. Royle &
Sons were not prepared to undertake and carry through with efficiency,
from a colossal deal in nitrates to the homeward freight of your
portmanteau. It was, to be sure, upon the latter class of work that
James Challoner was asked to concentrate his abilities. But
advancement was a principle of the house, and in the vast
ramifications of its business, opportunities of advancement came
quickly. James Challoner, who for the best part of five years had been
drifting unsuccessfully up and down the Pacific Coast, between Callao
and Concepcion, was consequently accounted a lucky man to have secured
employment in that house at all.
"If he can only keep it!" said his friends, shrugging their shoulders,
and his young wife, in the little house up the hill, bent over her
child and whispered the same words. But in her mouth they were a
prayer.
At two o'clock, then, upon his birthday, James Challoner returned from
his luncheon to the office, but as he took his seat he was summoned to
the manager's room. He walked down the long room between the tables on
which samples of produce were exhibited, then past the cashier's
brass-fenced desks where the banking business was done, to a little
compartment partitioned off in a corner. There Wallace Bourdon, a
young partner in control of this branch of the firm, sat in a tilted
chair, with his knees against a table, awaiting him.
"Mr. Challoner, it is within your knowledge, I suppose, that we are
negotiating with the Government at Santiago for the construction of a
new railway in the north."
Challoner shook his head.
"That's not in my department, sir," he said.
"Quite true," said Wallace Bourdon. He opened a drawer of the table
and threw half a dozen letters down on the top of it under Challoner's
eyes. "These letters are copies of our proposals. There are two firms
competing with us to which these copies would be valuable. They were
found in your desk while you were out at luncheon. What were they
doing there?"
James Challoner stared at the letters and pulled at his moustache.
"I can't think, sir. They must have been put there," he said, and then
with a cry of indignation: "I must have an enemy in the office."
"Well, that's hard," said Wallace Bourdon sympathetically. "For he
seems to have got back on you good and strong. You can draw your money
from the cashier, Mr. Challoner, and clear out of this house just as
soon as you can find it convenient;" and Wallace Bourdon dropped the
legs of his chair onto the floor.
James Challoner took his money and went out into the town. He sat
moodily on a high stool at a bar for an hour or so. Then some men of
his acquaintance joined him, and from moody he became blusterful and
boisterous. But both the moodiness and the bluster were phases of the
one deep-seated feeling--a reluctance to go up the hill and meet his
wife. It was seven o'clock before he had gained the necessary courage,
and when he did face his wife he followed the usual practice of his
kind and blurted out aggressively the news of his dismissal.
"I was lowering myself by going into the office at all as a clerk," he
cried. "I told you so when you urged me to do it. Upon my word it
almost serves me right, Doris. I have never known any good come from a
man's lowering himself. He is bound to make enemies amongst his new
associates. Jealousy is a despicable thing, but there's a deal of it
floating about in the world, and one's a fool to shut one's eyes to
it. However, we can't let the business rest there. My honor's
impugned. That's the truth of it, Doris. I lie under a dishonorable
charge. There's a stigma on our child's name, and it must be removed."
He drew a chair briskly up to the table, pulled a piece of note-paper
toward him, and dipped his pen in the ink.
"Let me see, now! Who can my enemy be? Who is it that hates me? Can't
you think of some one?" and in an instant he pushed the blotting pad
from him. "You might say something, Doris. You just stand and look and
never open your mouth."
That was James Challoner's trouble, and the cause of his uneasiness.
His wife neither buoyed him up with high-sounding phrases, nor
afforded him the opportunity by any reproach to work himself into a
fine heat of indignation. She had given him one dreadful look, her
whole countenance a quivering cry of dismay made visible, and
thereafter she had just stood with no word on her lips, her great eyes
disconcertingly fixed upon his face and her mind quite hidden. She
went out from the room and left him sitting in great discomfort. He
detested her habit of silence, but he feared still more the thought of
him which it might conceal, and he dared not break it with acrimonies.
When she returned again into the room it was to say:
"Dinner is ready."
"Well, we must dine," said Challoner.
"It is fortunate that after all I didn't hire that servant at once,"
said Doris.
"Yes, that was lucky. We can't afford a servant now," said James
Challoner.
Fear lest his wife should "lower herself" did not trouble him at all.
During dinner he talked in self-defence, flurriedly, about his enemy,
pointing vaguely to this man or to that, and watching keenly for some
droop of disdain about Doris's lips. But she gave no sign, and at the
back of all his thought was the wounding question:
"What does she think of me?"
He smoked his pipe outside the door after dinner, with the lighted
streets of the town spread out below him. The house stood apart, high
up on the great amphitheatre of hills above Valparaiso; and on the
opposite side of the road the ground fell steeply. The great bay lay
open beneath his eyes to the distant tip of its northern horn; no
inland pool could have slept more quietly than did the Pacific on that
summer night; still water and mirrored stars, it widened out in the
warm dusk to the sky's rim. A huge black steamer lay out beyond the
edge of the jetty, with the great lights blazing from its saloon
windows and the little lights steady on its masts. From the
close-built streets at the water's edge there rose a pleasant murmur
of many voices. No warnings were being given. Valparaiso, like any
other tropical city, was taking its ease in the cool of the evening.
At ten o'clock James Challoner, having nothing better to do and no
money to spend, went indoors. He locked the front door and with a
definite relief found that his wife had already gone to bed. He stood
in the empty, barely furnished sitting-room, and his thoughts were
swept back to the morning at Southampton, five years ago, when Doris
had crept on board the steamer which was to take them to South
America. He remembered bitterly the buoyant hopes with which that
runaway marriage had begun and Doris's fears that her flight had been
already discovered and that an attempt at the last moment might be
made to stop her.
"It has been a bad mistake for me," he said, as all the wonderful
things which he might have done, had he not been hampered with a wife,
glittered in his mind. The truth, however, was not to be grasped by
him unless he would face truthfully the history of his marriage, and
that he was not constituted to do. It was a story common enough: A
young man with no will and caressing manners, who was hastily packed
off to South America, with a few hundred pounds in his pocket, to
avoid exposure in his own country, and a young girl too staunch to her
beliefs--these were the characters, and, given them, the story tells
itself. "Yes, it has all been a very bad mistake for me," thought
James Challoner, and switching off the lights he betook himself to
bed. A door in the inner wall of his bedroom opened into the room
where his wife and child slept. He listened for a moment with his ear
against the panel. All was silent in that room.
"She can sleep," he grumbled, finding even a grievance here. But he
did not sleep for long. For, just at the moment when the chandelier
began to swing in Mr. Daventry's dining-room, he was shaken out of his
slumber. He lay for a few seconds in the vague and pleasant space
between wakefulness and dreams, playing with the fancy that he was in
a cabin on a ship at sea. But the fancy passed, and he was beset by a
stranger illusion. He happened to be lying upon his side, with his
face turned toward the outer wall of his bedroom; and as he lay he saw
quite distinctly the wall gently and noiselessly split open. It split
open high up and near to the ceiling, and it let through the stars and
a strip of sky. Then the wall closed neatly together again, brick
fitting with brick, so that not a chink was left. The room once more
was black, the stars shut out.
Challoner was still pondering upon this remarkable phenomenon when a
third sensation shook him altogether out of his lethargy. He was
violently jolted. This could be no illusion. It was as if some one,
crouching beneath the bed, had suddenly risen on hands and knees and
struck the mattress with his shoulders. Challoner sprang out of bed,
tottered, and clung to the bedpost for support. The room was rocking
like a tree in a gale and underneath his feet the boards strained and
heaved. It was his first experience of an earthquake, but he had no
doubt that he was undergoing it, and fear made his hands grip the iron
post of the bed so that his palms were bruised. His chief terror was
the floor. The feel of it moving unstably beneath his feet, the sound
of its boards cracking loosened his knees. At any moment it might
burst upward and explode. At some moment and very soon it must. He had
no fear that it would collapse and gape open; it would surely burst
like a shell; and in his fear of that explosion the rocking of the
walls was of no account.
He tried to think, and instinct reminded him of civilized man's chief
necessities.
"My shoes, my money."
He groped along the bed for the switch of the light, but light did not
answer to the summons. In the darkness he stooped, found his shoes,
and slipped them on. His few dollars, drawn that afternoon from the
cashier of R. C. Royle & Sons, were in the drawer of a night-table by
his bed. He found them. There was a cupboard in the inner wall. He
lurched across to it, and, tearing a long overcoat from a hook,
slipped it on and dropped the money in his pocket. Close by the
cupboard was the door of his wife's bedroom. He remembered her now,
and flung the door open.
"Doris," he cried, and no answer was returned to him.
"Doris," he cried again, and this time the wail of his child answered
him from her cot.
He crossed to the bed. He leaned over it and put out his hand to shake
his wife by the shoulder out of her deep sleep. And with a shock he
became aware that she was leaning upon her elbow in the darkness. She
was wide-awake all the time.
"Quick!" he cried, in a sudden exasperation. "There is an earthquake.
The house is falling."
She replied in a strange, quiet voice:
"I know."
She made no beginning of a movement. She was awake, had been, perhaps,
longer awake than he himself; she knew the swift peril which had
befallen them; yet she remained propped on her elbow in the darkness,
passively expectant. Or was she dazed? Even at that moment the
question flashed through Challoner's mind and brought him a queer
relief. But it was answered in a moment.
"I called to you twice," he said; and his wife answered:
"I heard;" and there was again no hint of bewilderment in her voice.
It was the voice of a woman who had all her wits about her; not of one
who was stunned.
Meanwhile the earth rumbled beneath them and the room shook. Challoner
felt for a candle by the bedside, struck a match, and lighted it. His
wife watched him quietly. Her dark eyes shone in the candle-light,
inscrutably veiling her thoughts.
"Quick!" he cried. "Get up. There's no time to lose." He lifted the
child out of the cot, still wrapped in her bedclothes.
"Come."
His wife rose, as it seemed to him, with incredible slowness. He could
have screamed in his terror. As he stumbled across the floor to the
door, she opened a wardrobe and, taking out a cloak, drew it about her
shoulders. In the door-way he turned and saw her.
"Good God!" he cried, and the question in his mind leaped to his lips
and was uttered. "Do you want to kill us all?"
"I had to find a cloak."
"A cloak!" he cried contemptuously. He himself had tarried to slip on
his overcoat, but, no doubt, that was different. Certainly his wife
made no rejoinder. "To be buried under this house for the sake of a
cloak," he cried, his lips so chattering with terror that he could
hardly pronounce the words.
"Go first," she said; and he ran out of the doorway. She followed him,
leaving the door open behind her, and the candle burning in the room.
They were still in the passage when an appalling roar deafened their
ears. The lighted candle shot up into the air and was extinguished,
and in the darkness the splitting of timber, the overthrow and the
wreckage of furniture, rent the air and ceased. Of a sudden the
throats of the fugitives were choked with dust. The fear which had so
terrified him was justified. The floor had exploded, like artillery,
in the room he had this moment quitted. His terror became a panic. He
would have killed his wife had she stood in his way. He rushed
downstairs, inarticulately crying. He fumbled in the darkness for the
bolt of the front door, sobbing and cursing. He found it, flung the
door open, and leaped out into the open air. He ran across the road,
and as he ran a great stone fell with a crash, from the archway of the
door, and the walls of the passage clashed together behind him. With a
loud clatter of thunder the whole house crumbled down into a smoking
heap of bricks. Challoner turned. He was quite alone with the child in
his arms. And for a little while he stood very still.
But he was no longer in darkness. About many of the villas on the
hillside the flames were creeping, and their inhabitants were racing
upward to the open heights, or searching desperately among the ruins
for those whom the earthquake had entrapped. While lower down by the
water's edge the city was ablaze and over all the bay the sky was red.
The ground still shook beneath Challoner's feet, and the child in his
arms began to cry. He laid it down against the low wall of the path
and crept cautiously back to the ruins of his house.
"Doris," he called, and again, "Doris."
His voice was low, but there was more of awe than grief audible in the
cry. "Doris," he called a third time, but in a louder and more urgent
tone. A few bricks, hanging to a fragment of wall dislodged themselves
and clattered down upon the heap of ruin. But no other answer came. He
stooped suddenly where the archway of the entrance door had been. The
great stone had fallen with so much force that one end had sunk into
the ground; the other, however, rested upon a fragment of the stone
pillar of the door; and so the stone lay under a pile of bricks titled
at an angle. Through the space left by the angle a woman's hand and
arm protruded. It was not pinned down by the stone. It pointed with
limp fingers toward Challoner, and beside it a trickle of blood ran
out. Challoner knelt and touched the hand.
"Doris," he said.
Her voice had not answered to his, and now there was no response in
her fingers to his touch. The arm moved quite easily. The walls of the
passage had borne her down and crushed her. Challoner remembered with
a shiver the crash and clatter of them as they had knocked together
just behind his heels. His wife had been killed in that downfall. She
could not have survived.
Challoner rose again to his feet.
"She was awake," he said, and he talked aloud to himself. "She should
have hurried. She could have escaped had she hurried;" and the picture
of her leaning upon her elbow in her bed in the dark troubled his
soul. There is no terror like the terror which comes from the shaking
of the earth and the overthrow of its houses. Yet she, a woman--so ran
his thoughts--had endured it. Her hand pointing, from beneath the
stones, accused him for all the limpness of its fingers. She had
welcomed it.
The child wailed from the other side of the road. Challoner crossed to
it. He stood and looked at it doubtfully. Still in doubt, he looked
away. From the blazing town rose a babel of cries, a roar of flames, a
crash of buildings falling in, and every now and then, quite distinct
from the confusion, a shrill, clear scream would leap into the air
like a thin fountain of water. But the sea was calm; the great ship,
with every cord of its rigging strung black against the glowing sky,
lay without a movement. Boats were plying between it and the shore.
Challoner could see the tiny specks of them on the red water.
"There's no tidal wave," he said in a dull voice. "That's
extraordinary;" and then he picked up his daughter in his arms, and
climbed higher up the hill to await the dawn.