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Treasure and Trouble Therewith by Geraldine Bonner

G >> Geraldine Bonner >> Treasure and Trouble Therewith




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.




CHAPTER XXXIV

LOST


Aunt Ellen always maintained the first shock threw her out of bed, and
then she would amend the statement with a qualifying, "At any rate I was
on the floor when Lorry came and I never knew how I got there." She also
said that she thought it was the end of the world, and pulled to her feet
by Lorry, announced the fact, and heard Lorry's answer, short and sharp,
"No--it's an earthquake. Don't talk. Come quick--run!"

Lorry threw a wrapper about her and ran with her along the hall, almost
dark and full of rending noises, and down the stairs that Aunt Ellen said
afterward she thought "were going to come loose every minute." A long
clattering crash made her scream, "There--it's the house--we're killed!"
And Lorry, wrestling with the front door, answered in that hard,
breathless tone, "No, we're not--we're all right." The door swung open.
"Mind the glass, don't step in it. Down the steps--on the lawn--_quick_!"

They came to a stand by the front gate, were aware of the frantic leaps
of the earth subsiding into a long, rhythmic roll, and stood dumbly, each
staring at the other's face, unfamiliar in a blanched whiteness.

There were people in the street, scatterings, and huddled clusters and
solitary figures. They were standing motionless in attitudes of poised
tension, as if stricken to stone. Holding snatched up garments over their
night clothes, they waited to see what was coming next, not speaking or
daring to move, their eyes set in terrified expectancy. Lorry saw them
like dream figures--the fantastic exaggerations of nightmare--and looked
from them to the garden, the house--the solid realities. The ruins of the
chimney lay sprawled across the flower beds, the splintered trunk of the
fig tree rising from the debris. Stepping nimbly among the bricks, in his
white coat and trousers as if prepared to wait on table, was Fong.

"Oh, Fong!" she cried. "Thank heaven, you're all 're all right!"

Fong, picking his way with cat-like neatness, answered cheerfully:

"I velly well. I see chimley fall out and know you and Missy Ellen all
'ighty. If chimley fall in you be dead."

"Oh, Fong!" Aunt Ellen wailed; "it's like the Day of Judgment."

Fong, having no opinions to offer on this view of the matter, eyed her
costume with disapproval.

"I get you cover. Velly bad stand out here that way. You ketch cold," and
turning went toward the house.

"He'll be killed!" Aunt Ellen cried. "He mustn't go!" Then suddenly she
appeared to relinquish all concern in him as if on this day of doom there
was no use troubling about anything. Her eye shifted to Lorry, and
scanning her became infused with a brisk surprise. "Why, Lorry, you're
all dressed. Did you sleep in your clothes? You certainly never had time
to put them on."

Lorry was spared the necessity of answering. A violent quake rocked the
ground and Aunt Ellen, clasping her hands on her breast, closed her eyes.

"It's beginning again--it's coming back. Oh, God, have mercy--God,
have mercy!"

The figures in the street, emitting strangled cries, made a rush for the
center of the road. Here they stood closely packed in a long line like a
great serpent, stationary in the middle of the thoroughfare. The low
mutter, the quiver under their feet, died away; Aunt Ellen dropped her
hands and opened her eyes.

"Is this going to go on? Isn't one enough?" she wailed. "I'll never enter
a house again, never in this world."

The appearance of Fong, coming down the steps carrying an armchair,
diverted her.

"He's got out alive. Don't you go back into that house, Fong. It isn't
safe, it'll fall at any moment. There's going to be more of this--it
isn't finished."

Fong, without answering, set the chair down beside her, taking from its
seat a cloak and an eiderdown coverlet. He and Lorry wrapped her in the
cloak and disposing her in the chair tucked the coverlet round her knees.
Thus installed, her ancient head decorated with crimping pins, her old
gnarled hands shaking in her lap, she sank against the back murmuring,
"Oh, what a morning, what a morning!"

A lurid light glowed above the trees and sent a coppery luster down the
street. The sun had swum up over the housetops and the people in the
roadway; Lorry, on the lawn, gazed at it aghast, a crowning amazement. It
hung, a scarlet ball, enormously large, like a red seal of vengeance
suspended in the heavens. "Look at the sun, look at the sun!" came in
thin cries from the throng. It shone through a glassy, brownish film in
which its rays were absorbed, leaving it a sharply defined, magnified
sphere. Fong, coming down the steps with another chair, eyed it
curiously.

"Awful big sun," he commented.

"It's shining through something," said Lorry. "It must be dust."

Fong put the chair beside Aunt Ellen's, pressing it into steadiness on
the lawn's yielding turf.

"Maybe smoke," he answered. "After earthquake always fire."

Aunt Ellen gave forth a despairing groan.

"Anything _more_!"

"Don't be afraid," Lorry comforted. "We've the best department in the
country. If there should be any fires they'll be put out."

Aunt Ellen took courage from this confident statement and, life running
stronger in her, sat up and felt at her head.

"Oh, I've got my pins in, but how was I to take them out? Lorry, _do_ sit
down. You're as white as a sheet."

"I'm all right, Aunt Ellen. Don't bother about me. I'm going into
the house."

The old lady shrieked and clutched at her skirt.

"No--no, I won't allow it." Then as the girl drew her dress away,
"Lorry Alston, do you want my death on your head as well as your own?
If you want anything let Fong get it. He seems willing and anxious to
risk his life."

"Fong can't do this. I'm going to telephone; I want to find out if
Chrystie's all right. I'm sorry but I must go," and she ran to the house.

From the first clear moment after the shock her thoughts had gone to
Chrystie. As she had tucked Aunt Ellen into the chair, she had been
thinking what she could do and the best her shaken brain had to offer was
a series of telephone messages to those friends where Chrystie might have
gone. The anxiety of last night was as nothing to the anguish of this
unprecedented hour.

That was why her face held its ashen pallor, her eyes their hunted fear.
But there was no relief to be found at the phone--a dead stillness, not
even the whispering hum of the wires met her ear. "It's broken," she said
to herself. "Or the girls have got frightened and gone."

Out on the lawn she paused a moment beside Aunt Ellen.

"Something's the matter with the wires. I'm going to the drugstore on
Sutter Street."

"But what for--what for?" Aunt Ellen wanted to know. "Telephoning when
the city's been smitten by the hand of God!"

"It's Chrystie," she called over her shoulder as she went out of the
gate. "I want to find out how she is."

"Chrystie's at San Mateo," Aunt Ellen quavered. "She's all right there.
She's with the Barlows."

The man in the doorway of his wrecked drugstore laughed sardonically at
her request to use the phone. All the wires were broken--you couldn't
telephone any more than you could fly. Everything was out of commission.
You couldn't telegraph--you couldn't get a message carried--except by
hand--not if you were the president of the country. Even the car lines
were stopped--not a spark of power. The whole machinery of the city was
at a standstill. "Like the clock there," he said, and pointed to the face
of the timepiece hanging shattered from the wall, its hands marking a
quarter to five.

She went back, jostling through the people. Bold ones were going into the
houses to put on their clothes, timid ones commissioning them to throw
theirs out of the windows. She saw Chinese servants, unshaken from their
routine, methodically clearing fallen bricks and cornices from front
steps to which they purported, giving the matutinal sweeping. She
skirted a fallen stone terrace, its copings strewn afar, the garden above
a landslide across the pavement. People spoke to her, some she knew,
others who were strangers. She hardly answered them, hurrying on. Dazed,
poor girl, they said, and small wonder.

If Chrystie was in the city she would certainly come home. It was the
natural, the only, thing for her to do. But it would be impossible to sit
there waiting for her, doing nothing. The best course for Lorry was to go
out and look for her--go to all those places where she might be. Aunt
Ellen would be at the house, waiting, if she came, to tell her they were
all right. And Lorry would return at intervals to see if she had come. If
by midday she hadn't, then there was Mark Burrage. She would go to him.
But Chrystie would be back before then--she might be there even now.

Her rapid walk broke into a run and presently she was flying past the
garden fence, sending her glance ahead under the trees. No--Aunt Ellen
was alone, looking as if she was participating in a solitary picnic. In
front of her stood a small table covered with a white cloth and set with
glass and silver. She was inspecting it closely as if trying to find
flaws in its arrangement and as Lorry came panting up the steps, said
with a relieved air:

"Oh, there you are! Fong's brought out breakfast. He says the kitchen's a
wreck and he had to make the coffee on an alcohol lamp. The range is all
broken and there's something the matter with the gas in the gas stove.
Did you get the Barlows?"

Lorry sank down on the other chair.

"No. the telephone isn't working. We can't get any word to anyone."

"She'll be all right," said Aunt Ellen, lifting the silver coffee pot.
"San Mateo's a long way off."

It was an unfortunate moment for a heavy shock to send its rocking
vibrations along the ground. Aunt Ellen collapsed against the chair back,
the coffee pot swaying from her limp grasp. Lorry snatched it and Aunt
Ellen's hands, liberated, clutched the corners of the table like talons.

"Oh, God have mercy! God have mercy!" she groaned. "If this doesn't stop
I'll die."

Fong came running round the corner of the house.

"Be care, be care, Missy Ellen," he cried warningly. "You keep hold on
him coffee pot. I not got much alcohol." He saw the treasure in Lorry's
hand and was calmed. "Oh, all 'ight! Miss Lolly got him. You dlink him
up, Miss Lolly. He make you good nerve."

But Lorry could not drink much. It seemed to Aunt Ellen she hardly
touched the cup to her lips when she was up and moving toward the house
again--this time for her hat.

"Hat!" muttered the old lady, picking at a bunch of grapes. "The girl's
gone mad. Wanting a hat in the middle of an earthquake."

Then her attention was attracted by a man stopping at the gate and
bidding her good-morning. He was the fishman from Polk Street, extremely
excited, his greeting followed by a voluble description of how he had
escaped from a collapsing building in his undershirt. Aunt Ellen swapped
experiences with him, and pointed to the chimney, which if it had fallen
inward would have killed her. The fishman was not particularly interested
in that and went on to tell how he had been down to Union Square and seen
thousands of people there--and had she heard that fires had started in
the Mission--a good many fires? Lorry, emerging from the house, drew
near and said, as she had said to Fong:

"But there's no danger of fires getting any headway. You can't beat our
firemen in the country."

The fishman, moving to go, looked dubious.

"Yes, we got a grand department, no one denies that. But the Mission's
mostly wood and there's quite some wind. It looks pretty serious to me."

He passed on and Lorry went to the gate.

"Where are you going _now_?"' Aunt Ellen cried.

"Out," said Lorry, clicking up the hasp. "I want to see what's going on.
I'll be back in an hour or two. If Chrystie comes, stay here with
her-right here on this spot."

Afterward Lorry said she thought she walked twenty miles that day. Her
first point of call was Crowley's livery stable where she asked for a
carriage. There were only two men in the place; one, owl-eyed and
speechless, in what appeared to be a state of drunken stupefaction,
waved her to the other, who, putting a horse into the shafts of a cart,
shook his head. He couldn't give her a carriage for love or money. Every
vehicle in the place was already gone--the rich customers had grabbed
them all, some come right in and taken them, others bought them
outright. He swung his hand to the empty depths of the building; not an
animal left but the one he had and he was taking it to go after his wife
and children; they were down in the Mission and the Mission was on fire.
He had the animal harnessed and was climbing to the seat as Lorry left
the stable.

After that she gave up all hope of getting a carriage and started to
walk. She went to every house in that part of the city where Chrystie had
friends, and in none of them found trace or word of her sister. She saw
people so stunned that they could hardly remember who Chrystie was,
others who treated the catastrophe lightly--not any worse than the quake
of '68, nothing to make a fuss about--a good shake-up, that was all. She
found families sitting down to cold breakfasts, last night's coffee
heated on the flicker of gas left in the pipes; others gathered in pallid
groups on the doorsteps, afraid to go into the house, undaunted Chinamen
bringing down their clothes.

As she moved her ears were greeted with a growing narrative of disaster.
There had been great loss of life in the poorer sections; the injured
were being taken to the Mechanics' Pavilion; the Mission was on fire and
the wind was with it. In this, the residential part, there was no water.
Thrifty housekeepers were filling their bathtubs with the little dribble
that came from the faucets, and cautioning those who adhered to the
habits of every day to forego the morning wash. It was not till she was
near home again that, meeting a man she knew, she learned the full
measure of ill-tidings. The mains had been torn to pieces, there was no
water in San Francisco, and the fire, with a strong wind behind it, was
eating its way across the Mission, triumphant and unchecked.

It gave her pause for a wide-seeing, aghast moment, then her eye caught
the roof of her home and she forgot--Chrystie might be there, ought to be
there, _must_ be there. She broke into a run, sending that questing
glance ahead to the green sweep of the lawn. It met, as it had done
before, the figure of Aunt Ellen in front of the little table, the empty
chair at her side. Even then she did not give up hope. Chrystie might be
in the house; all Aunt Ellen's pleadings could not restrain her if it
suited her purpose to dare a danger.

Before she reached the gate she called, hoarse and breathless.

"Is Chrystie there?"

Aunt Ellen started and looked at her.

"Oh, dear, here you are at last! I've been in such a state about you. No,
of course Chrystie's not here. I knew she wouldn't be. They say all the
trains are stopped--the rails are twisted. How could she get back?"

Lorry dropped on to the steps. She did not know till then how much she
had hoped. Her head fell forward in the hollow of her chest, her hands
clenched together in her lap. Aunt Ellen addressed the nape of her neck:

"I don't know what's going to happen to us. I've just sat here all
morning and heard one awful thing after another. Do you know that the
whole Mission's burning and there's not a drop of water to put it out
with? And if it crosses Market Street this side of the city'll burn too."

Lorry did not answer and she went on:

"The people are coming out of there by hundreds. A man told me--no, it
was a woman. I didn't know her from Adam, but she hung over the gate like
an old friend and talked and talked. They're coming out like rats;
soldiers are poking them out with bayonets. All the soldiers are down
there from the Presidio and Black Point. And lots of people are
killed--the houses fell on them and caught them. It was a man told me
that. He'd been down there and he was all black with smoke. I thought it
was the end of the world and it might just as well have been. Thank
goodness your father and mother aren't here to see it. And, _thank God_,
Chrystie's safe in San Mateo!"

Scottish book of the year goes to Kieron Smith, Boy by James Kelman

The barrister Constance Briscoe has won the libel case brought against her by her mother, Carmen Briscoe-Mitchell, over her bestselling misery memoir Ugly, in which she accused Briscoe-Mitchell of childhood cruelty and neglect.

Briscoe-Mitchell claimed the allegations were "a piece of fiction", and sued Briscoe and her publishers Hodder & Stoughton for libel.

A 10-day hearing at the high court in London concluded earlier today with a unanimous verdict from the jury after more than a day's deliberation. Speaking outside the court, Briscoe, a part-time judge, said she was "very happy" with the verdict.

"It is sad that my mother still feels the need to pursue me. Now I just want to get on with my career," she said. "I can quite understand why my family went into collective denial, but whilst child abuse may be committed behind closed doors, it should never be swept under the carpet."

The hearing saw Briscoe tell Mr Justice Tugendhat and a jury how her mother beat her with a stick for wetting the bed, called her a "dirty little whore" and drove her to attempt suicide by drinking bleach.

Briscoe's account of her upbringing was published in 2006 and has sold more than 400,000 copies in the UK.

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Would you have your ashes scattered in Jane Austen's garden?
American film producer to publish version of the Bible in which God says it is better to be gay than straight

The royal family doesn't need a poet

The power of Jane Austen never ceases to amaze: the myriad film and TV adaptations, the biopics, the spin-off self-help books, the novels about Austen book clubs and Austen obsessives and even, next spring, the publication of a book about "how Jane Austen conquered the world" (Jane's Fame, by Clare Harman). And now comes the just-too-weird story that deceased fans of Jane Austen have been banned from having their ashes scattered in her garden. In a letter to the Jane Austen Society, Louise West, the collections manager of Jane Austen's House Museum, wrote: "While we understand many admirers of Jane Austen would love to have ashes laid here, it is something we do not allow. It is distressing for visitors to see mounds of human ash, particularly so for our gardener. Also, it is of no benefit to the garden!" (Or is it? Surely a small quantity of fresh ashes judiciously placed beneath a hydrangea bush is just the ticket?)

Anyway, leaving aside the Gardeners' Question Time minutiae, what on earth is going on here? I like an Austen novel as much as the next person – I probably reread my way through the complete works every couple of years – but I am baffled as to why one would want to be laid to rest among the flowerbeds of Chawton. The only explanation is the currently unstoppable power of the Austen cult, fuelled by Colin Firth in a wet blouse, by Andrew Davies's adaptations, and by Hollywood. I'm all for enjoying books, but the cult of Austen has reached ridiculous proportions. In a post-feminist world that should know better, she seems to be adored as the comforting provider of romantic, happy-endings nonsense instead of the sharp and acerbic social satirist she deserves to be seen as.

(Does anyone actually believe her, by the way, when she foretells a happy marriage for Darcey and Elizabeth? I fear a woman as interesting as Elizabeth would be sorely disappointed with this standard-issue British Repressed Public-school Man - hopeless emotionally, and probably hopeless in bed.)

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