Part 22

The cabin filled with the odor of burnt flesh as he stripped the coat from Stock's shoulder, where an incandescent pebble had fallen and burned through the cloth. Ointments and bandages were applied before the owner said:

"We must be getting pretty close in the harbor?"

This corked Macready's effervescence. Pugh had been putting the _Saragossa_ out to sea, since he assumed control. It hadn't occurred to the little Irishman that Mr. Stock would put back into the harbor of an island freshly-exploded.

"I dunno, sir. It's hard to see for the rain."

"Go to the door and find out".

The rain fell in sheets. Big seas were driving past, and the steady beat of the engines was audible. There was no smoke, no familiar shadow of hills, but a leaden tumult of sky, and the rollers of open sea beaten by a cloudburst. The commander did not need to be told. It all came back to him--Laird's body hanging over the railing of the bridge; Plass down; Pugh, a new man, in command.

"Up to the bridge, Macready, and tell Pugh for me not to be in such a damned hurry--running away from a stricken town. Tell him to put back in the roadstead where we belong."

Macready was gone several moments, and reported, "Pugh says we're short-handed; that the ship's badly-charred, but worth savin'; in short, sir, that he's not takin' orders from no valet--meanin' me."

Nature was righting herself in the brain of the American, but the problems of time and space still were mountains to him. Macready saw the gray eye harden, and knew what the next words would be before they were spoken.

"Bring Pugh here!"

It was rather a sweet duty for Macready, whose colors had been lowered by the untried officer. The latter was in a funk, if ever a seaman had such a seizure. Pugh gave an order to the man at the wheel and followed the Irishman below, where he encountered the gray eye, and felt Macready behind him at the door.

"Turn back to harbor at once--full speed!"

Pugh hesitated, his small black eyes burning with terror.

"Turn back, I say! Get to hell out of here!"

"But a firefly couldn't live in there, sir----"

"Call two sailors, Macready!" Stock commanded, and when they came, added, "Put him in irons, you men!... Macready, help me to the bridge."

* * * * *

It was after eleven when the _Saragossa_ regained the harbor. The terrific cloudburst had spent itself. Out from the land rolled an unctuous smudge, which bore suggestions of the heinous impartiality of a great conflagration. The harbor was cluttered with wreckage, a doom picture for the eyes of the seaman. Dimly, fitfully, through the pall, they began to see the ghosts of the shipping--black hulls without helm or hope. The _Saragossa_ vented a deep-toned roar, but no answer was returned, save a wailing echo--not a voice from the wreckage, not even the scream of a gull. A sailor heaved the lead, and the scathed steamer bore into the rising heat.

Ahead was emptiness. Peter Stock, reclining upon the bridge, and suffering martyrdoms from his burns, gave up his last hope that the guns of Pelee had been turned straight seaward, sparing the city or a portion of it. Rough winds tunnelling through the smoke revealed a hint of hills shorn of Saint Pierre. A cry was wrung from the American's breast, and Macready hastened to his side with a glass of spirits.

"I want a boat made ready--food, medicines, bandages, two or three hundred pounds of ice covered with blankets and a tarpaulin," Stock said. "You are to take a couple of men and get in there. Get the steward started fitting the boat, and see that the natives are kept a bit quieter. Make 'em see the other side--if they hadn't come aboard."

"Mother av God," Macready muttered as he went about these affairs. "I could bake a potatie here, sure, in the holla av my hand. What, thin, must it be in that pit of destruction?" He feared Pelee less, however, than the gray eye, and the fate of Pugh.

The launch had not returned from taking Charter ashore, so one of the life-boats was put into commission. The German, Ernst, and another sailor of Macready's choice, were shortly ready to set out.

"You know why I'm not with you, men," the commander told them at the last moment. "It isn't that I couldn't stand it in the boat, but there's a trip ashore for you to make, and there's no walking for me on these puff-balls for weeks to come. Macready, you know Mr. Charter. He had time to reach the _Palms_ before hell broke loose. I want you to go there and bring him back alive--and a woman who'll be with him! Also report to me regarding conditions in the city. That's all. Lower away."

A half-hour later, the little boat was forced to return to the ship. The sailor was whimpering at the oars; the lips of Ernst were twisted in agony; while Macready was silent, sign enough of his failing endurance. Human vitality could not withstand the withering draughts of heat. At noon, another amazing downpour of rain came to the aid of Peter Stock who, granting that the little party had encountered conditions which flesh could not conquer, had, nevertheless, been chafing furiously. At two in the afternoon, a second start was made.

Deeper and deeper in toward the gray low beach the little boat was pulled, its occupants the first to look upon the heaped and over-running measure of Saint Pierre's destruction. The three took turns at the oars. Fear and suffering brought out a strange feminine quality in the sailor, not of cowardice; rather he seemed beset by visionary terrors. Rare running-mates were Macready and Ernst, odd as two white men can be, but matched to a hair in courage. The German bent to his work, a grim stolid mechanism. Macready jerked at the oars, and found breath and energy remaining to assail the world, the flesh and the devil, which was Pugh, with his barbed and invariably glib tongue. How many times the blue eyes of the German rolled back under the lids, and his grip relaxed upon the oars; how many times the whipping tongue of Macready mumbled, forgetting its object, while his senses reeled against the burning walls of his brain; how many times the sailor hoarsely commanded them to look through the fog for figures which alone he saw--only God and these knew. But the little boat held its prow to the desolate shore.

They gained the Sugar Landing at last, or the place where it had been, and strange sounds came from the lips of Ernst, as he pointed to the hulk of the _Saragossa's_ launch, burned to the water-line. It had been in his care steadily until its last trip. Gray-covered heaps were sprawled upon the shore, some half-covered by the incoming tide, others entirely awash. Pelee had brought down the city; and the fire-tiger had rushed in at the kill. He was hissing and crunching still, under the ruins. The sailor moaned and covered his face.

"There's nothing alive!" he repeated with dreadful stress.

"What else would you look for--here at the very fut av the mountain?" Macready demanded. "Wait till we get over the hill, and you'll hear the birds singin' an' the naygurs laughin' in the fields an' wonderin' why the milkman don't come."

The market-place near the shore 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 passage. 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 shore or less, they encountered a zone of unendurable heat.

"I could die happy holdin' Pugh here," Macready gasped. "Do you think hell 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 shore 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, shore 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 passed 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 God to whom Macready had prayed once or twice in his life--a God who had the power to strike blasphemers dead, to still tempests, light volcanic fuses and fell Babylons. To this God 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 God, 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 cumulative harshness in the fear that her face, so fragile, of purest line, should meet the coarse 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. Ah, I have waited long, and the man has come back to me--a boy."

"_La Montagne Pelee_ is artistic."

"It may be in this marvellous world, where men carry on their wars and their wooings," she went on strangely, "some pursuing their little ways of darkness, some bursting into blooms of valor and tenderness;--it may be that two of Earth's people, after a dreadful passage through agony and terror, have been restored to each other--as we are. It may be that in the roll of Earth's tableaux, another such film is curled away from another age and another cataclysm."

"Paula," he declared, after a moment, "I have found a Living Truth in this happiness--the Great Good that Drives the World! I think I shall not lose it again. Glimpses of it came to me facing the East--as I wrote and thought of you. One glimpse was so clear that I expressed it in a letter, 'I tell you there is no death, since I have heard the Skylark sing....' I lost the bright fragment, for a few days in New York--battled for the prize again both in New York and yesterday at the mountain. To-day has brought it to me--always to keep. It is this: Were you to die, I should love you and know you were near. This is love above Flesh and Death--the old mystifying Interchangeables. This happiness is the triumph over death. It is a revelation, a mighty adoring--not a mere woman in my arms, but an ineffable issue of eternity. A woman, but more--Love and Labor and Life and the Great Good that Drives the World! This is the happiness I have and hold to-day: Though you died, I should know that you lived and were mine."

"I see it--it is the triumph over death--but, Quentin Charter--I want _you_ still!"

"Don't you see, it is the strength you give me!--that girds me to say such things?"

So they had their flights into silence, while the eternal gray lived in their round summit of sky--until the voices of the rescuers and their own grateful answers.... The sailor was sent back to the boat for rope, while Macready cheered them with a fine and soothing Gaelic oil.... They lifted Paula, who steadied and helped herself by the chain; then sent the noose down for Charter.

"Have you the strent', sir, to do the overhand up the chain?" Macready questioned, and added in a ghost's whisper, "with the fairest of tin thousand waitin' at the top?"

Charter laughed. To lift his right arm was thrashing pain, but he made it easy as he could for them; and in the gray light faced the woman.

She saw his lacerated hand, the mire, fire-blisters upon his face, the blood upon his clothing, swollen veins of throat and temples, and the glowing adoration in his eyes.... She had bound her hair, and there was much still to bind. No mortal hurt was visible. Behind her was the falling sea. On her right hand the smoking ruin of the _Palms_; to the left, Pelee and his tens of thousands slain; above, the hot, leaden, hurrying clouds.... Ernst, Macready and the sailor moved discreetly away. Backs turned, they watched the puffs of smoke and steam that rose like gray-white birds from the valley of the dead city.

"Ernst, lad," said Macready, "the boss and the leadin' lady are havin' an intellekchool repast in the cinter av the stage by the old well. Bear in mind you're a chorus girl and conduct yourself in accord. Have you a drop left in the heel av the flask, Adele, dear?"

* * * * *

They were nearing the _Saragossa_ in the dusk, and their call had been answered with a rousing cheer from the ship....

"Please, sir, you said you would take me sailing," Paula called, as she readied the head of the ladder.

Though he could not stand, Peter Stock had an arm for each; and they were only released to fall into the embrace of Father Fontanel. They saw it now in the ship's light: Pelee had stricken the old priest, but not with fire.... The two were together shortly afterward at supper, in clean dry make-shifts, very ludicrous.

"I came to you empty-handed, and soiled from the travail of the journey," she whispered. "All but myself was in a certain room that faced the North."

"There are booties, flounces and ribands in the shops of Fort de France," Charter replied with delight. "Peter Stock shall be allowed certain privileges, but not to make any such purchases. I carry circular notes--and insist on straightening them out."

"Haven't you discovered that Skylarks are not of the insisting kind--even when they need new plumage? Anything that looks like insistence nearly scares the life out of them. Isn't it a dear world?"

All this was smoothly coherent to him.... Alone that night, they drew deck-chairs close together forward; and snugly wrapped, would have nothing whatever to do with Peter Stock's sumptuous cabins. They needed floods of rest, but were too happy, save just to take little sips of sleep between talk.

"You must have been afraid at first," she said, "of turning a foolish person's head with all that beauty of praise in your letters.... I think you were writing to some image you wanted to believe lived somewhere, but had little hope ever really to find. I could not take it all home to me at first.... I felt that you were writing to a lovely, shadowy sister who was safely put away in a kind of twilight faery--a little figure by a well of magical waters. Sometimes I could go to her, reach the well, but I could not drink at first--only listen to the music of the water, watch it bubble and flash in the moon."

"I love your mind, Paula Linster," he said suddenly, "--every phase of it. By the way--_love's_ a word I never used before to-day--not even in my work, save as an abstraction."

She remembered that Selma Cross had said this of him--that he never used that word.