She Buildeth Her House Part 30

The market-place near the sh.o.r.e was filled with the stones from the surrounding buildings, hurled there as dice from a box. Smoke and steam oozed from every ruin. The silence was awful as the sight of death. The streets of the city were effaced. Saint Pierre had been felled and altered, as the Sioux women once altered the corpses of the slain whites. There was no discernible way up the _Morne_. Breathing piles of debris barred every pa.s.sage. Under one of these, a clock suddenly struck three--an irreverent survival carrying on its shocking business beneath the collapsed walls of a burned and beaten city, frightening them hideously. It would have been impossible to traverse _Rue Victor Hugo_ had the way been clear, since a hundred feet from the sh.o.r.e or less, they encountered a zone of unendurable heat.

"I could die happy holdin' Pugh here," Macready gasped. "Do you think h.e.l.l is worse than this, Ernst, barrin' the effrontery of the question?

Ha--don't step there!"

He yanked the German away from a puddle of uncongealed stuff, hot as running metal.... The sailor screamed. He had stepped upon what seemed to be an ash-covered stone. It was soft, springy, and vented a wheezy sigh. Rain and rock-dust had smeared all things alike in this gray roasting shambles.

"Won't somebody say something?" the sailor cried in a momentary silence.

"It looks like rain, ma'm," Macready offered.

They had been forced back into the boat, and were skirting the sh.o.r.e around by the _Morne_. Saint Pierre had rushed to the sea--at the last.

The volcano had found the women with the children, as all manner of visitations find them--and the men a little apart. Pelee had not faltered. There was nothing to do by the way, no lips to moisten, no voice of pain to hush, no dying thing to ease. There was not an insect-murmur in the air, nor a crawling thing upon the beach, not a moving wing in the hot, gray sky--a necropolis, sh.o.r.e of death absolute.

They climbed the cliffs to the north of the _Palms_, glanced down through the smoke at the city--sunken like a toothless mouth. Even the _Morne_ was a husk divested of its fruit. Pelee had cut the cane-fields, sucked the juices and left the blasted stalks in his paste. The old plantation-house pushed forth no shadow of an outline. It might be felled or lost in the smoky distance. The nearer landmarks were gone--homes that had brightened the heights in their day, whose windows had flashed the rays of the afternoon sun as it rode down oversea--levelled like the fields of cane. Pelee had swept far and left only his shroud, and the heaps upon the way, to show that the old sea-road, so white, so beautiful, had been the haunt of man. The mangoes had lost their vesture; the palms were gnarled and naked fingers pointing to the pitiless sky.

Macready had known this highway in the mornings, when joy was not dead, when the songs of the toilers and the laughter of children glorified the fields; in the white moonlight, when the sea-winds met and mingled with the spice from tropic hills, and the fragrance from the jasmine and rose-gardens.... He stared ahead now, wetting his puffed and tortured lips. They had pa.s.sed the radius of terrific heat, but he was thinking of the waiting gray eye, when he returned without the man and the woman.

"It'll be back to the bunkers for Dinny," he muttered.... "Ernst, ye goat, you're intertainin', you're loquenchus."

They stepped forward swiftly now. There was not a hope that the mountain had shown mercy at the journey's end.... They would find whom they sought down like the others, and the great house about them. Still, there was a vague G.o.d to whom Macready had prayed once or twice in his life--a G.o.d who had the power to strike blasphemers dead, to still tempests, light volcanic fuses and fell Babylons. To this G.o.d he muttered a prayer now....

The ruins of the plantation house wavered forth from the fog. The sailor plucked at Macready's sleeve, and Ernst mumbled thickly that they might as well get back aboard.... But the Irishman stood forth from them; and in that smoky gloom, desolate as the first day, before Light was turned upon the Formless Void, bayed the names of Charter and the woman.

Then the answer:

"_In the cistern--in the old cistern!_"

Macready made a mental appointment with his G.o.d, and yelled presently: "Didn't I tell you 'twould take more than the sphit of a mountain to singe the hair of him?... Are you hurted, sir?"

TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER

PAULA AND CHARTER IN SEVERAL SETTINGS FEEL THE ENERGY OF THE GREAT GOOD THAT DRIVES THE WORLD

Charter roused, after an unknown time, to the realization that the woman was in his arms; later, that he was sitting upon a slimy stone in a subterranean cell filled with steam. The slab of stone held him free from the four or five inches of almost scalding water on the floor of the cistern. The vault was square, and luckily much larger than its circular orifice; so that back in the corner they were free from the volcanic discharge which had showered down through the mouth of the pit--the cause of the heated water and the released vapors. An earthquake years before had loosened the stone-lining of the vault. With every shudder of the earth now, under the wrath of Pelee, the walls, still upstanding, trembled.

Charter was given much time to observe these matters; and to reckon with mere surface disorders, such as a bleeding right hand, lacerated from the rusty chain; a torn shoulder, and a variety of burns which he promptly decided must be inconsequential, since they stung so in the hot vapor. Then, someone with a powerful arm was knocking out three-cushion caroms in his brain-pan. This spoiled good thinking results. It is true, he did not grasp the points of the position, with the remotest trace of the sequence in which they are put down. Indeed, his mind, emerging from the depths into which the shock of eruption had felled it, held alone with any persistence the all-enfolding miracle that the woman was in his arms....

Presently, his brain began to sort the side-issues. Her head had lain, upon his shoulder during that precipitous plunge, and her hair had fallen when he first caught her up. He remembered it blowing and covering his eyes in a manner of playful endearment quite impossible for an outsider to conceive. Meanwhile, the blast from Pelee was upon the city; traversing the six miles from the crater to the _Morne_, faster than its own sound; six miles in little more than the time it had taken him to cross the lawn from the veranda to the cistern. A second or two had saved them.

The fire had touched her hair.... Her bare arm brushed his cheek, and his whole nature suddenly crawled with the fear that she might not wake.

His head dropped to her breast, and he heard her heart, light and steadily on its way. His eyes were straining through the darkness into her face, but he could not be sure it was without burns. There was c.u.mulative harshness in the fear that her face, so fragile, of purest line, should meet the coa.r.s.e element, burning dirt. His hands were not free, but he touched her eyes, and knew that they were whole.... She sighed, stirred and winced a little--breath of consciousness returning.

Then he heard:

"What is this dripping darkness?"

The words were slowly uttered, and the tones soft and vague, as from one dreaming, or very close to the Gates.... In a great dark room somewhere, in a past life, perhaps, he had heard such a voice from someone lying in the shadows.

"We are in the old cistern--you and I----"

"I--knew--you--would--come--for--me."

It was murmured as from someone very weary, very happy--as a child falling asleep after a dream, murmurs with a little contented nestle under the mother-wing.

"But how could you know?" he whispered quickly. "My heart was too full--to take a mere mountain seriously--until the last minute----"

"_Skylarks--always--know!_"

Torrents of rain were descending. Pelee roared with the after-pangs.

Though cooled and replenished by floods of black rain, the rising water in the cistern was still hot.

"It was always hard for me to call you Wyndam----"

"Harder to hear, Quentin Charter...."

"But are you sure you are not badly burned?" he asked for the tenth time.

"I don't feel badly burned.... I was watching for you from the window in my room. I didn't like the way my hair looked, and was changing it when I saw you coming--and the Black behind you. I tried to fasten it with one pin, as I ran downstairs.... It fell. It is very thick and kept the fire from me----"

"From us." He would have preferred his share of the red dust.

She shivered contentedly. "What little is burned will grow again. Red mops invariably do."

" ... And to think I should have found the old cistern in the night!...

One night when I could not sleep, I walked out here and explored. The idea came then----"

"I watched you from the upper window.... The shutter wiggled as you went away. It was the next day that the 'fraids got me. You rushed off to the mountain."

Often they verged like this beyond the borders of rational quotation.

One hears only the voices, not the words often, from Rapture's Roadway.

"Just as I begin to think of something Pelee erupts all over again in my skull----"

"I didn't know men understood headache matters.... Don't you think--don't you really think--I might be allowed to stand a little bit?"

"Water's still too hot," he replied briefly.

The cavern was not so utterly dark. The circle of the orifice was sharply lit with gray.... They lost track of the hours; for moments at a time forgot physical distress, since they had known only mystic journeys before.... They whispered the fate of Saint Pierre--a city's soul torn from the shrieking flesh; shadows lifted from the mystery of the little wine-shop; clearly they saw how the occultist, his magnetism crippled, had used Jacques and Soronia; and Charter recalled now where he had seen the face of Paula before--the photograph in the Bellingham-cabin on the _Panther_.... A second cloudburst cooled and eased them, though they stood in water.... It seemed that Peter Stock should have made an effort to reach them by this time. Save that the gray was unchangeable in the roof the world, Charter could not have believed that this was all one day. The power which had devastated the city, and with unspent violence swept the _Morne_, might have reached three leagues at sea!... Above all these probabilities arose their happiness.

"It seems that I've become a little boy," he said, "on one of those perfect Christmas mornings. Don't you remember, the greatest moment of all--coming downstairs, partly dressed, into the room _They_ had made ready? That moment, before you actually see--just as you enter the mingled dawn and fire-light and catch the first glisten of the tree?...

I'm afraid, Paula Linster, you have found----"

"A boy," she whispered. Her face was very close in the gray.... "The loved dream-boy. The boy went away to meet sternness and suffering and mazes of misdirection--had to compromise with the world to fit at all.