The Tremendous Event Page 4

  CHAPTER IV

  THE GREAT UPHEAVAL

  The next five days were of those whose memory oppresses a nation forcountless generations. What with hurricanes, cyclones, floods, swollenrivers and tidal waves, the coasts of the Channel and in particularthe parts about Fecamp, Dieppe and Le Treport suffered the mostinfuriate assaults conceivable.

  Although a scientist would not admit the least relation between thisseries of storms and the tremendous event of the 4th of June, that isto say, of the last of these five days, what a strange coincidence itwas! How could the masses ever since help thinking that these severalphenomena all formed part of one connected whole?

  In Dieppe, the undoubted centre of the first seismic disturbances, inDieppe and the outlying districts hell was let loose. It was as thoughthis particular spot of the earth's surface was the meeting-place ofall the powers that attack and devastate and undermine and slay. Inthe whirlpools, or the water-spouts, or the eddies of overflowingrivers, under the crash of uprooted trees, crumbling cliffs, fallingscaffoldings and walls, tottering belfries and factory-chimneys and ofall the objects carried by the wind, the deaths increased steadily.Twenty families were thrown into mourning on the first day, forty onthe second. As for the number of victims destroyed by the greatconvulsion which accompanied the tremendous event, it was doubtfulwhether this was ever accurately estimated.

  As happens in such periods of constant danger, when the individualthinks only of himself and those akin to him, Simon knew hardlyanything of the disaster save through the manifestations that reachedhim directly. After receiving a wireless telegram from Isabel whichassured him of her safety, he spread the newspapers only to makecertain that his flight with her was not suspected. With therest--details of the foundering of the _Queen Mary_, articles in whichhis presence of mind, his courage and Isabel's pluck were extolled, orin which the writer endeavoured to explain the convulsions in theChannel--with all this he had hardly time to concern himself.

  He remained with his father. He told him the secret of his love, toldhim the story of the recent incidents, told him of his plans. Togetherthey wandered through the town or out into the country, both of themdrenched and blinded by the showers, staggering under the squalls andbowing their heads beneath the bombardment of slates and tiles. Thetrees and telegraph-poles along the road were mown down like corn.Trusses of straw, stacks of fodder, faggots of wood, palings, coils ofwire were whirled through the air like autumn leaves. Nature seemed tohave declared a merciless war upon herself for the sheer pleasure ofspoiling and destroying.

  And the sea was still trundling its gigantic waves, which broke withdeafening roar. All navigation between France and England wassuspended. Wireless messages signalled the danger to the great linerscoming from America or Germany; and none of them dared enter the hellthat was the Channel.

  On the fourth day, the last but one, Tuesday the 3rd of June, therewas a slight lull.

  The final assault was marshalling its forces. M. Dubosc worn out withfatigue, did not get up that afternoon. Simon also threw himself onhis bed, fully dressed, and slept until evening. But at nine o'clocka shock awakened them.

  Simon thought that the window, which suddenly burst open, had givenaway under the pressure of the wind. A second shock, more plainlydefined, brought down the door of his room; and he felt himselfspinning on his own axis, with the walls circling round him.

  He ran downstairs and found his father in the garden with theservants, one and all bewildered and uttering incoherent phrases.After a long pause, during which some tried to escape while otherswere on their knees, there was a violent downpour of rain, mingledwith hail, which drove them indoors.

  At ten o'clock they sat down to supper. M. Dubosc did not speak aword. The servants were livid and trembling. Simon retained in thedepths of his horrified mind an uncanny impression of a shudderingworld.

  At ten minutes to eleven there was another vibration, of no greatviolence, but prolonged, with beats that followed one another veryclosely, 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 intoa little thatched summer-house lashed by slanting rain.

  Half-an-hour later, the tremors recommenced and from this timeonwards, were so to speak, incessant. They were faint and remote atfirst, but soon grew more and more perceptible, like the shivers offever which rise from the depths of our flesh and shake us from headto 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 stammeringterrified and meaningless words. Simon himself could no longer endurethis execrable sensation of earthquake, this vertigo of the humanbeing losing his foothold. He felt that he was living in a disjointedworld and that his mind was registering absurd and grotesqueimpressions.

  From the town arose an uninterrupted clamour. The road was crowdedwith people fleeing to the heights. A church-bell filled the air withthe doleful sound of the tocsin, while the clocks were striking thetwelve 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 workingbackwards. The servants went indoors again, looking about themstupidly, as do those who go over a house which they are leaving forthe last time. Simon, as in a dream, saw one of them cramming a canvasbag with the gilt candlesticks and silver boxes of which he hadcharge, while another wrapped himself in a tablecloth and a thirdfilled his pockets with bread and biscuits. He himself, turning byinstinct to a small cloak-room on the ground floor, put on a leatherjacket and changed his shoes for a pair of heavy shooting-boots. Heheard 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 theusual sound of thunder. It was repeated, with a less strident din,accompanied by a subterranean rattling; and then, growing noisieragain, 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 notleft the garden when the frightful catastrophe, announced by so manymanifestations, occurred. The earth leapt beneath their feet andinstantly fell away and leapt again like an animal in convulsions.

  Simon and his father were thrown against each other and then violentlytorn apart and hurled to the ground. All around them was thestupendous uproar of a tottering world in which everything wascollapsing into an incredible chaos. The darkness seemed to have growndenser than ever. And then, suddenly, there was a less distant sound,a sound which touched them, so to speak, a sort of cracking noise. Andshrieks rose into the air from the very bowels of the earth.

  "Stop!" cried Simon, catching hold of his father, whom he hadsucceeded in rejoining. "Stop!"

  He felt before him, at a distance of a few inches, the utter horror ofa gaping abyss; and it was from the bottom of the abyss that theshrieks and howls of their companions rose.

  And there were three more shocks. . . .

  Simon realized a moment later that his father, clutching his arm, wasdragging him away with fierce energy. Both were clambering up the roadat a run, groping their way like blind men through the obstacles withwhich the earthquake had covered it.

  M. Dubosc had a goal in view, the Caude-Cote cliff, a bare plateauwhere they would be in absolute safety. But, on taking a cross-road,they struck against a band of maddened creatures who told them thatthe cliff had fallen, carrying numerous victims with it. All thatthese 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 valleyof Pourville, whose beach lies in a cove some two miles from Dieppe.The front was obstru
cted by a crowd of villagers, while others weretaking shelter from the rain behind the bathing-huts overturned by thewind. Others again, as the tide was very low, had gone down thesloping shingle and crossed the sands and ventured out to the rocks,as though the danger had ended there and there only. By the uncertainlight of a moon which strove to pierce the curtain of the clouds, theycould 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 greatlydejected mood. "And then we will go back to Dieppe. I want to makesure 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'lljust 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. Otherscame up and tried to share the shelter. Blows were exchanged. Simonintervened. But the earth shook once more; and they could hear thecrash of cliffs falling to right and left.

  "Where are you, father?" cried Simon, running back to the spot wherehe had left M. Dubosc.

  Finding no one there, he shouted. But the roar of the gale smotheredhis voice and he did not know in what direction to seek. Had hisfather been overcome by fresh fears and gone closer to the sea? Orhad he, in his anxiety for his boats, returned to Dieppe as he hadhinted?

  At a venture--but is it right to apply this term to the unconsciousdecisions which impel us to follow our destined path?--Simon began torun along the sand and shingle. Then, through the maze of slipperyrocks, hampered by the snares spread by the wrack and sea-weed,stumbling into pools of water in which the towering breakers from theopen sea had died away in swirling eddies or in lapping waves, hejoined the ghostly figures which he had seen from a distance.

  He went from one to another and, failing to see his father, wasthinking of returning to the parade, when a small incident occurred tomake him change his mind. The full moon appeared in the sky. She wascovered 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 thebeach, discovered that the fallen cliffs had buried the shore underthe most stupendous chaos imaginable. The white masses were piled oneatop the other like so many mountains of chalk. And it looked toSimon as if one of these masses, carried by its own weight, had rolledright into the sea, whence it now rose some three hundred yards away.

  On reflection, he could not believe this possible, the distance beingfar too great; but then what was that enormous shape outstretchedyonder like a crouching animal? A hundred times, in his childhood, hehad paddled his canoe or come fishing in this part; and he knew forcertain that nothing rose above the waters here.

  What was it? A sand-bank? But its outlines seemed too uneven and itsgrey colour was that of the rocks, naked rocks, without any coveringof wrack or other sea-weed.

  He went forward, actuated in part by an eager curiosity, but stillmore by some mysterious and all-powerful force, the spirit ofadventure. The adventure appealed to him: he must go up to this newground whose origin he could not help attributing to the recentearthquake.

  And he went up to it. Beyond the first belt of sand, beyond the beltof small rocks where he stood, was the final bed of sand over whichthe waves rolled eternally. But from place to place there rose stillmore rocks, so that he was able, by a persistent effort, to reach whatappeared to be a sort of promontory.

  The ground underfoot was hard, consisting of sedimentary deposits, asOld Sandstone would have said. And Simon realized that, as a result ofthe violent shocks and of some physical phenomenon whose action he didnot understand, the bed of the sea had been forced upwards until itovertopped the waves by a height which varied in different places, butwhich certainly exceeded the level of the highest spring tides.

  The promontory was of no great width, for by the intermittent light ofthe moon Simon could see the foam of the breakers leaping on eitherside of this new reef. It was irregular in form, thirty or forty yardswide in one part and a hundred or even two hundred in another; and itran on like a continuous embankment, following more or less closelythe old line of the cliffs.

  Simon did not hesitate. He set out. The hilly, uneven surface, atfirst interspersed with pools of water and bristling with rocks whichthe stubborn labours of the sea had pushed thus far, became graduallyflatter; and Simon was able to walk at a fair pace, though hampered bya multitude of objects, often half-buried in the ground, which thewaves, not affecting the bottom of the sea, had been unable to sweepaway: meat-tins, old buckets, scrap-iron, shapeless utensils of allkinds covered with sea-weed and encrusted with little shells.

  A few minutes later, he perceived Dieppe lying on his right, a sceneof desolation which he divined rather than saw. The light ofconflagrations not wholly extinguished reddened the sky; and the townlooked to him like an unhappy city in which a horde of barbarians hadsat encamped for weeks on end. The earth had merely shuddered and aneven more stupendous disaster had ensued.

  At this moment, a fine tracery of grey clouds spread above the greatblack banks which were driving before the gale; and the moondisappeared. Simon felt irresolute. Since all the light-houses weredemolished, how would he find his way if the darkness increased? Hethought of his father, who was perhaps anxious, but he thoughtalso--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 nothave said why--with visions of dangers accepted and with extraordinaryhappenings, he felt vaguely that he would be right in going on. To goon meant travelling towards something formidable and unknown. The soilwhich had risen from the depths might sink again. The waves mightreconqueror the lost ground and cut off all retreat. An unfathomablegulf might yawn beneath his footsteps. To go on was madness.

  And he went on.