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Treasure and Trouble Therewith by Geraldine Bonner

G >> Geraldine Bonner >> Treasure and Trouble Therewith




Lorry raised her head in intolerable pain.

"_Don't_, Aunt Ellen!" she groaned, and got up from the step.

The old lady, seeing her face, cast aside the eiderdown, and rose in
tottering consternation.

"Oh, Lorry dear, you're faint. It's too much for you. Let's get a
carriage and go--somewhere, anywhere, away from here."

Lorry pushed away her helpless, shaking hands.

"I'm all right, I'm all right," she said. "Sit down, Aunt Ellen. Leave me
alone. I'm tired, I've walked a long way, that's all."

Aunt Ellen could only drop back, feebly protesting, into her chair. If
Lorry wanted to walk herself to death _she_ couldn't stop her--nobody
minded what she said anyway. She sat hunched up in her wraps, murmurously
grumbling, and when Fong brought out lunch on a tray, ordered a glass of
wine for her niece.

"I suppose she won't drink it," she said aggrievedly to Fong; "but
whether she does or not I want the satisfaction of having you bring it."

Lorry did drink it and ate a little of the lunch. When it was over she
rose again and made ready to go. She said she wanted to look at the fire
from some high place, see how near it was to Market Street. If it
continued to make headway they might have to go further up town, and
she'd be back and get them off.

She went straight to Mark Burrage's lodgings. She knew the business
quarter was burning and thought the likeliest place to find him was his
own rooms, where he would probably be getting ready to move out. It was
nearer the center of town than her own home and as she swung down the
hills she felt, for the first time, the dry, hot breath of the fire.
Cinders were falling, bits of blackened paper circling slowly down. Below
her, beyond the packed roofs and chimneys, the smoke rose in a thick,
curling rampart. It loomed in mounded masses, swelled into lowering
spheres, dissolved into long, soaring puffs, looked solid and yet was
perpetually taking new forms. In places it suddenly heaved upward, a
gigantic billow shot with red, at others lay a dense, churning wall, here
and there broken by tongues of flame.

On this side of town the residence section was as yet untouched, but the
business houses were ablaze, and she met the long string of vehicles
loaded deep with furniture, office fixtures, crates, books, ledgers,
safes. Here, also, for the first time, she heard that sound forever to be
associated with the catastrophe--the scraping of trunks dragged along the
pavement. There were hundreds of them, drawn by men, by women, drawn to
safety with, dogged endurance, drawn a few blocks and despairingly
abandoned. She saw the soldiers charging in mounted files to the fire
line, had a vision of them caught in the streets' congestion, plunging
horses and cursing men fighting their way through the tangled traffic.

The door and windows of Mark's dwelling were flung wide and a pile of
household goods lay by the steps. As she opened the gate a boy came from
the house, stooped under the weight of a sofa, a woman behind him carding
a large crayon portrait in a gilt frame. The boy, dropping the sofa to
the ground, righted himself, wiping his dripping face on his sleeve. The
woman, holding the picture across her middle like a shield, saw Lorry and
shouted at her in excited friendliness:

"We're movin' out. Goin' to save our things while we got time."

"Where's Mr. Burrage?" said Lorry.

"Mr. Burrage?" The woman looked at her, surprised. "He ain't here; he's
in the country."

"The country?" Too many faces were smitten by a blank consternation, too
many people already vainly sought, for Lorry's expression to challenge
attention.

"Yes, he went--lemme see, I don't seem to remember anything--I guess it
was nearly a week ago. His mother was took sick. He's lucky to be out of
this." Her glance shifted to the boy who was looking ruefully at the pile
of furniture. "That'll do, Jack, we can't handle any more."

As Lorry turned away she heard his desperate rejoinder:

"Yes, we got it out here, but how in hell are we goin' to get it
any farther?"

After that she went to Mrs. Kirkham's. There was no reason to expect
news of Chrystie there, except that the old lady was a friend, had been
a support and help on occasions less tragic than this. Also she knew
many people and might have heard something. Lorry was catching at any
straw now.

In the midst of her wrecked flat, her servant fled, Mrs. Kirkham was
occupied in sweeping out the mortar and glass and "straightening things
up." She was the first woman Lorry had seen who seemed to realize the
magnitude of the catastrophe and meet it with stoical fortitude. Under
her calm courage the girl's strained reserve broke and she poured out her
story. Mrs. Kirkham, resting on the sofa, broom in hand, was disturbed,
did not attempt to hide it. Chrystie might have gone out of town, was her
suggestion, gone to people in the country. To that Lorry had the answer
that had been haunting her all day:

"But she would have come in. They all--everybody she could have gone
to--have motors or horses. Even if she couldn't come herself she would
have sent someone to tell where she was. She wouldn't have left us this
way, hour after hour, without a word from her."

It was dark when Mrs. Kirkham let her go, claiming a promise to bring
Aunt Ellen back to the flat. They couldn't stay in the Pine Street
house. Only an hour earlier the grandnephew had been up to say that the
fire had crossed Market Street that afternoon. No one knew now where it
would stop.

With the coming of the dark the size of the conflagration was apparent.
Night withdrew to the eastern edges of the heavens; the sky to the zenith
was a glistening orange, blurred with shadowy up-rollings of smoke, along
the city's crest the torn flame ribbons playing like northern lights.
Figures that faced it were glazed by its glare as if a red-dipped paint
brush had been slapped across them; those seen against it were black
silhouettes moving on fiery distances and gleaming walls. The smell of it
was strong, and the showers of cinders so thick Lorry bent down the brim
of her hat to keep them out of her eyes. As she came toward the house she
felt its heat, dry and baking, on her face.

In front of her, walking in, the same direction, was a man, pacing the
pavement with an even, thudding foot-fall. The gun over his shoulder
proclaimed him a soldier, and having already heard tales of householders
stopped on their own doorsteps and not allowed to enter, she curbed her
eager speed and slunk furtively behind him, skirting the fence. Through
the trees she could see the lawn, lighted up as if by fireworks, and then
the two chairs--empty--the eiderdown lying crumpled on the grass. In the
shade of branches that hung over the sidewalk, she scaled the fence and
flew, her feet noiseless on the turf. She passed the empty chairs, and
sent a searching glance up toward the windows, all unshuttered, the glass
gone from the sashes. Were they in there? Had Aunt Ellen dared to enter?
Had Fong overcome her terrors and forced her to take shelter? If he had
she would be no farther than the hall.

Like a shadow she mounted the steps and stole in, the front door
yawning on darkness. The stillness of complete desolation and
abandonment met her ears.

She stood motionless, looking down the hall's shattered length and up the
stairs. The noises from without, the continuous, dragging shuffle of
passing feet, calls, crying of children, the soldier's directing voice,
came sharply through the larger, encircling sounds of the city fighting
for its life. They flowed round the house like a tide, leaving it
isolated in the silence of a place doomed and deserted. She suddenly felt
herself alone, bereft of human companionship, a lost particle in a world
terribly strange, echoing with an ominous, hollow emptiness. A length of
plaster fell with a dry thud, calling out small whisperings and
cracklings from the hall's darkened depths. It roused her and she turned,
pushed open the door and went into the drawing-room.

The long side windows let in the glare, a fierce illumination showing a
vista of demolishment. Through broken bits of mortar the parquet
reflected it; it struck rich gleams from the fragments of a mirror, ran
up the walls, playing on the gilt of picture frames. She moved forward,
trying to think they might be there, that someone might flit ghost-like
toward her through that eerie barring of shadow and ruddy light. But the
place was a dry, dead shell; no pulse of life seemed ever to have beaten
within those ravaged walls. She summoned her energies to call, send out
her voice in a cry for them, then stood--the quavering sound
unuttered--hearing a step outside.

It was a quick, firm step, heavier than a woman's, and was coming down
the stairs. She stood suddenly stricken to a waiting tension, dark
against a long sweep of curtain, possessed by an immense expectancy, a
gathering and condensing of all feeling into a wild hope. The steps
gained the hall and came toward the doorway. Her hands, clasped, went out
toward them, like hands extended in prayer, her eyes riveted on the
opening. Through it--for a moment pausing on the sill to sweep the room's
length--came Mark Burrage.

He did not see her, made a step forward and then heard her whisper, no
word, only a formless breath, the shadow of a sound.

"Lorry!" he cried as he had cried the night before, and stood staring
this way and that, feeling her presence, knowing her near.

Then he saw her, coming out of the darkness with her outstretched hands,
not clasped now, but extended, the arms spread wide to him as he had
dreamed of some day seeing them.




CHAPTER XXXV

THE UNKNOWN WOMAN


A few minutes after the Vallejo Hotel had sunk into ruin, a man came
running up the street. Even among those shaken from a normal demeanor by
an abnormal event, he was noticeable; for he was wild, a creature
dominated by a frenzied fear. As he ran he cried out for news of the
hotel, and shouted answers smote against him like blows: "Down--gone
down! Collapsed. Everybody in the lower floors dead!" And he rushed on,
burst his way through groups, shot past others flying to the scene, flung
obstructing figures from his path.

"Mad," someone cried, thrown to the wall by a sweep of his arm, "mad and
running amuck."

They would have held him, a desperate thing, clawing and tearing his way
through the crowd, but that suddenly, with a strangled cry, he came to a
stop. Over the shoulders of a group of men he saw a girl's head, and his
shout of "Pancha!" made them fall back. He gathered her in his arms,
strained her against him, in the emotion of that supreme moment lifting
his face to the sky. It was a face that those who saw it never forgot.

The men dispersed, were absorbed into the heaving tumult, running,
squeezing, jamming here, thinning there, falling back before desperate
searchers calling out names that would never be answered, thronging in
the wake of women shrieking for their children. Police came battling
their way through, forcing the people back. Swept against a fence Garland
could at first only hold her, mutter over her, want to know that she was
unhurt. She gave him broken answers; she had run up instead of down--that
was how she was there. The horror of it came back in a sickening
realization, and she shook, clinging to him, only his arm keeping her
from falling. A man had thrown his coat about her, and Garland pulled it
over her, then, looking down, saw her feet, bare and scratched in
pointed, high-heeled slippers. The sight of them, incongruous reminders
of the intimate aspects of life, brought him down to the moment and her
place in it.

"Come on," he said. "Let's get out of this. You want to get something on.
Can you walk? Not far, only a few blocks."

She could do anything, she said, now that she knew he was safe, and, her
fingers in the bend of his arm, he pulled her after him through the
press. Gaining clearer spaces, they ran, side by side, their faces
curiously alike, stamped by the same exalted expression as they fronted
the rising sun.

She heard him say something about taking her away, having a horse and
cart. She made no answer; with his presence all sensations but
thankfulness seemed to have died in her. And then, upon her temporary
peace, came thronging strange and dreadful impressions, waking her up,
telling her the world had claims beyond the circle of her own
consciousness. She caught them as she ran--a shifting series of sinister
pictures: a house down in a tumbled heap of brick and stone, a sick woman
on a couch on the sidewalk, a family dragging furniture through a blocked
doorway, pillars, window ledges, cornices scattered along the road. Over
all, delicately pervasive, adding a last ominous suggestion, was a
faint, acrid odor of burning wood.

"Fire!" she said. "I can smell it."

"Oh, there'll be fires. That's bound to come."

"Where are we going?" she panted.

"Right round here--the place where I was stayin'. There's a widder woman
keeps it, Mrs. Meeker. She's got a horse and cart that'll get you out of
this. I guess all the car lines is bust, and I guess we'll have to move
out quick. Look!"

He pointed over the roofs to where glassy films of smoke rose against the
morning sky.

"Everyone of 'em's a fire and the wind's fresh. I hope to God this shake
up ain't done any harm to the mains."

They had reached Mrs. Meeker's gate. He swung it open and she followed
him across the garden to where a worn, grassy path, once a carriage
drive, led past the house to the back yard. Here stood Mrs. Meeker, a
hatchet in her hand, trying to pry open the stable door.

"Oh, Lord!" she cried, turning at his step, "I'm glad you've come back.
Every other soul in the place has run off, and I can't get the stable
door open."

Her glance here caught Pancha, her nightgown showing below the
man's overcoat.

"Who's she?" she asked, a gleam of curiosity breaking through the larger
urgencies.

"My daughter. She lives right round here. I run for her as soon as I felt
the first quake. You got to take her along in the cart, and will you give
her some clothes?"

"Sure," said Mrs. Meeker, and the flicker of curiosity extinguished, she
returned to the jammed door that shut her out from the means of flight.
"Upstairs in my room. Anything you want." Then to Garland, who had moved
to her assistance, "I'm goin' to get out of here--go uptown to my
cousin's. But I wouldn't leave Prince, not if the whole city was down in
the dust."

Prince was Mrs. Meeker's horse, which, hearing its name, whinnied
plaintively from the stable. Pancha disappeared into the house, and the
man and woman attacked the door with the hatchet and a poker. As they
worked she panted out disjointed bits of information:

"There's a man just come in here tellin' me there's fires, a lot of 'em,
all started together. And he says there's houses down over on Minna and
Tehama streets and people under them. Did you know the back wall's out of
that new hotel? Fell clear across the court. I saw it go from my
room--just a smash and a cloud of dust."

"Umph," grunted the man. "Anybody hurt?"

"I don't think so, but I don't know. I went out in front first off and
saw the people pourin' out of it into the street--a whole gang in their
nightgowns."

A soldier appeared walking smartly up the carriage drive, sweeping the
yard with a glance of sharp command.

"Say. What are you fooling round that stable for?"

Mrs. Meeker, poker in hand, was on the defensive.

"I'm gettin' a horse out--my horse."

"Well, you want to be quick about it. You got to clear out of here.
Anybody in the house?"

"No. What are you puttin' us out for?"

"Fire. You don't want to lose any time. We've orders to get the people on
the move. I just been in that hotel next door and rooted out the last of
'em--running round packing their duds as if they'd hours to waste. Had
to threaten some of 'em with the bayonet. Get busy now and get out."

He turned and walked off, meeting Pancha as she came from the house. A
skirt and blouse of Mrs. Meeker's hung loose on her lithe thinness, their
amplitude confined about her middle by a black crochet shawl which she
had crossed over her chest and tied in the back.

"A lot of that big building's down," she cried, as she ran up. "I could
see it from the window, all scattered across the open space behind it."

Engrossed in their task neither answered her, and she moved round the
corner of the stable to better see the debris of the fallen wall.
Standing thus, a voice dropped on her from a window in the house that
rose beyond Mrs. Meeker's back fence.

"Do you know if all the people are out of that hotel?"

She looked up; standing in a third story window was a young man in his
shirt sleeves. He appeared to have been occupied in tying his cravat, his
hands still holding the ends of it. His face was keen and fresh, and was
one of the first faces she had seen that morning that had retained its
color and a look of lively intelligence.

"I don't know," she answered. "I've only just got here. Why?"

"Because it looks to me as if there was someone in one of the
rooms--someone on the floor."

The stable door gave with a wrench and swung open. Garland jerked it wide
and stepped back to where he could command the man in the window.

"What's that about someone in the hotel?" he said.

The young man leaned over the sill and completed the tying of his cravat.

"I can see from here right into one of those rooms, and I'm pretty sure
there's a person lying on the floor--dead maybe. The electric light
fixture's down and may have got them."

Garland turned to Mrs. Meeker:

"You get out Prince and put him in the cart." Then to the man in the
window: "I'll go in and see. A soldier's just been here who says they've
cleaned the place out. There's maybe somebody hurt that they ain't seen."

"Hold on a minute and I'll go with you," called the other. "I'm a doctor
and I might come in handy. I'll be there in a jiff."

He vanished from the window, and before Prince was backed into the
shafts, walked up the carriage drive, neatly clad, cool and alert, his
doctor's bag in his hand.

"I was just looking at the place as I dressed. Queer sight--looks like a
doll's house. Bedding flung back over the footboards, the way they'd
thrown it when they jumped. Clothes neatly folded over the chairs. And
then in that third-story room I saw something long and solid-looking on
the floor. Seems to be tangled up in the coverlets. The electric light
thing's sprinkled all over it. That's what makes me pretty sure--hit 'em
as they made a break. Come on."

He and Garland made off as Pancha and Mrs. Meeker set to work on the
harnessing of Prince.

The soldiers had done their work. The hotel was empty--a congeries of
rooms left in wild disorder, opened trunks in the passages, clothes
tossed and trampled on the floors. As the men ran up the stairs, its
walls gave back the sound of their feet like a place long deserted and
abandoned to decay. The recurring shocks that shook its dislocated frame
sent plaster down, and called forth creaking protests from the wrenched
girders. The rear was flooded with light, streaming in where the wall
had been, and through open doors they saw the houses opposite filling in
the background like the drop scene at a theater.

The third floor had suffered more than those below, and they made their
way down a hall where mortar lay heaped over the wreckage of glass,
pictures and chairs. The bedroom that was their goal was tragic in its
signs of intimate habitation strewn and dust-covered, as if years had
passed since they had been set forth by an arranging feminine hand. The
place looked as untenanted as a tomb. Anyone glancing over its blurred
ruin, no voice responding to a summons, might have missed the figure that
lay concealed by the bed and partly enwrapped in its coverings.

The doctor, kneeling beside it, pushed them off and swept away the litter
of glass and metal that had evidently fallen from the ceiling and struck
the woman down. She was lying on her face, one hand still gripping the
clothes, a pink wrapper twisted about her, her blonde hair stained with
the ooze of blood from a wound in her head. He felt of her pulse and
heart and twitching up her eyelids looked into her set and lifeless eyes.

"Is she dead?" Garland asked.

"No," He snapped his bag open with businesslike briskness. "Concussion.
Got a glancing blow from the light fixture. Seems as if she'd been trying
to wrap herself up in the bedclothes and got in the worst place she
could--just under it."

"Can you do anything for her?"

"Not much. Rest and quiet is what she ought to have, and I don't see how
she's going to get it the way things are now."

"We got a cart. We can take her along with us."

"Good work. I'll fix her up as well as I can and turn her over to you."
He had taken scissors from his bag and with deft speed began to cut away
the tangled hair from the torn flesh. "I'll put in a stitch or two and
bind her up. Looks like a person of means." He gave a side glance at her
hand, white and beringed. "You might get off the mattress while I'm doing
this. We can put her on it and carry her down. She's a big woman; must be
five feet nine or ten."

Garland dragged the mattress to the floor, while the doctor rose and made
a dive for the bathroom. He emerged from it a moment later, his brow
corrugated.

"No water!" he said, as he stepped over the strewn floor to his patient.
"That's a cheerful complication."

He bent over her, engrossed in his task, every now and then, as the
building quivered to the earth throes, stopping to mutter in irritated
impatience. Garland went to the window and called down to Pancha and Mrs.
Meeker that they'd found a woman, alive but unconscious, and space must
be left for her in the cart. He stood for a moment watching them as they
pulled out the up-piled household goods with which Mrs. Meeker had been
filling it. Then the doctor, snapping his bag shut and jumping to his
feet, called him back:

"That's done. It's all I can do for her now. Come on--lend a hand. Take
her shoulders; she's a good solid weight."

Her head was covered with bandages close and tight as a nun's coif. They
framed a face hardly less white and set in a stony insensibility.

"Lord, she looks like a dead one," Garland said, as he lowered the
wounded head on the mattress.

"She's not that, but she may be unless she gets somewhere out of this.
Easy now; these quakes keep getting in the way."

They carried her down the stairs and out into the street. Here the
crowd, already moving before the fire, was thick, a dense mass, plowing
forward through an atmosphere heat-dried and cinder-choked. The voices of
police and soldiers rose above the multiple sounds of that tide of egress
urging it on. A way was made for the men with their grim load, eyes
touching it sympathetically, now and then a comment: "Dead is she, poor
thing?" But mostly they were too bewildered or too swamped in their own
tragedy to notice any other.

Prince and the cart were ready. From her discarded belongings Mrs. Meeker
had salvaged three treasures, which she had stowed against the dashboard,
a solio portrait of her late husband, a canary in a gilt cage, and a
plated silver teapot. The body of the cart was clear, and the men placed
the mattress there. The spread that covered the woman becoming
disarranged, Pancha smoothed it into neatness, pausing to look with
closer scrutiny into the marble face. It was so unlike the face she had
seen before, rosy and smiling beneath the shade of modish hats, that no
glimmer of recognition came to her. Chrystie was to her, as she was to
the others, an unknown woman.

Mrs. Meeker, even in this vital moment, knew again a stir of curiosity.

"Who is she?" she said to the men. "Ain't you found anything up there to
tell us where she belongs?"

The doctor's voice crackled like pistol shots:

"Good God, woman, we've not got time to find out who people _are_. Take
her along--get a move on. It's getting d----d hot here."

It was; the heat of the growing conflagration was scorching on their
faces, the cinders falling like rain.

"Get up there, Mrs. Meeker," Garland commanded; "on the front seat. You
drive and Pancha and I'll walk alongside."

The woman climbed up. The doctor, turning to go, gave his last orders:

"Try and get her out of this--uptown--where there's air and room. Keep
her as quiet as you can. You'll run up against doctors who'll help.
Sorry I can't go along with you, but there'll be work for my kind all
over the city today, and I got a girl across toward North Beach that I
want to see after."

He was off down the carriage drive almost colliding with a soldier, who
came up on the run, a bayoneted musket in his hand, his face a blackened
mask, streaming with sweat. At the sight of the cart he broke into an
angry roar:

"What are you standing round for? Do you want to be burnt? Get out. Don't
you know the fire's coming? _Get out."_

They moved out and joined the vast procession of a city in exodus.

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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