Deluge. S. Fowler Wright
was no time for explanations then.
“Are they safe?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, with an affected carelessness, “but they’ll be safer outside till the storm quietens. We must go out by the back door. Get yourself some clothes while I fetch them.” He went back, and made a hurried bundle of each, wrapping up their clothes with them in a shawl or blanket, and before he had done it there came a louder, nearer crash than before, with an after-falling of masonry, and the plaster fell heavily from the ceiling. A rush of wind came with it, and the door of the room, which he had left half open, banged loudly. He tried to open it, but it resisted his efforts. He had the living bundles, one under each arm at first, as he did this, but found that he must lay them down if he were to hope to gain his freedom. He pushed them under the bed, as the place which would be safe at least from the falling ceiling. The younger one, a child of two, was crying, loudly no doubt, though the storm drowned it. The elder, nearly twice her age, watched him in a wide-eyed excitement, and said something that he could not hear. She did not appear conscious that her cheek was bleeding freely where the falling plaster had caught it.
He tried the door now with both hands, but it was jammed too tightly to yield to any force that he could apply. He called loudly to Helen, but could hear no answer. He looked round for a weapon which he could use to break it down. He felt sure now that there would be no escape alive unless it were done very quickly. But at the next instant there came an augmented blast of storm, that rocked the house to its foundations. He heard a straining and cracking of woodwork, and a rush of wind in the passage without, and then the door was flung open with a force which might have killed anyone standing near, as it swung backward to the wall behind it.
With a bundle under either arm, Martin fought his way from the room, step by step, against the howling force of the tempest. As he gained the main landing he realised that the structure of the house was still standing, and the stairs were clear, but the bedroom to which Helen had returned was wrecked and piled with debris. A chestnut tree, which grew close against the house on that side, and of the danger of which he had sometimes doubted in times of milder storm, had fallen upon it. The great tree had broken through the roof and outer wall, and the inner wall and door were scattered across the landing.
Burdened as he was, he stumbled on past the stair head, struggling against the wind and calling Helen’s name as he did so, but receiving no answer. He gained the edge of the room, and saw that a part of the floor was broken, and the next step would have precipitated him to the space below. He paused there for a moment, keeping difficult footing, in distraction of mind between the fear that she might be somewhere there, in desperate need of aid, and the desire to place the precious lives he carried in some comparative safety. In the end, the logic of fact compelled him. He could not search so burdened, nor did he know that she might not be already in safety. Where the room had been was now a rubble of fallen bricks and slates and beams, with the great bole of the tree leaning across them, and its shattered boughs intruding.
That anyone could have lived beneath that avalanche was beyond probability.
Slowly, in a reluctant misery, he turned away, and had soon made a successful issue from the rear of the house, and across the stable yard, where he received a cut from a flying slate, which would have had more notice in quieter times, and so, by a struggling, falling course, to a stack of last year’s hay, which was still standing in the field, and which he had made his objective. It was over the ridge, and so protected slightly from the wind’s full pressure, but when he reached it he found that its thatching, and much of its upper portion, had been torn off and scattered.
He rested beneath it for a few moments, gaining strength and breath for further effort, but dared not leave the children there, as he had first intended, lest they should be smothered by a further subsidence. He realised that safety was not easily to be found, and yet to get back was urgent, and to do that, against the torment of wind which was now raging, it was imperative that he should be relieved of his burdens.
There was a marl-pit close at hand, which gave a moment’s hope, till he recalled the steepness of its more sheltered side, and the deep pool it held; there was a larger one, with a dry bottom, farther away, and on this he decided.
It was of unusual width and depth, even for a district where these old pits were frequent, and often of considerable size. It was on the edge of a clump of oak trees, but these were to the south, so that there would be no danger from them while the wind held from its present quarter.
There were some old hawthorns growing within it, on the slope of its northern bank, so that the tops of the trees were about level with the field’s edge.
Here he made his way, and slid and stumbled down its easier slope, and found a sandy spot that was nearly level beneath the hawthorns, and laid his bundles down, and could at last think with some clearness, which had been impossible while the burdened struggle with the storm continued.
The younger child, warmly wrapped and covered from the wind, was surprisingly sleeping, but the elder was very widely awake, with excited wondering eyes. She looked doubtful as he rose to go, and her lip trembled, but when he laughed and told her that she must be good and he would soon be back and her mother also, and that they would have breakfast under the trees, she took it as a new game, and only said: “Muvver come soon?” as she turned away. “Yes, very soon,” he said with a light assurance he was far from feeling, wondering whether she could still be living, or if they or he would be alive when the day ended.
He paused a moment as he gained the pit’s edge before he climbed out to meet the force of the screaming hurricane which raged round him. There was still no rain, but the sky was darkened with low, black clouds that hurried southward at a rate that looked fantastic, and the air had become strangely cold, so that he shivered as the wind met him.
Beneath the clouds, the whole of the south-western horizon was of the colour of heated copper.
This he saw first, because he had climbed to the west of the pit, where the ascent was easier, but when he looked to the further side he was startled by the evidence of nearer calamity. Heavy smoke was driving across the field from the fallen ruins of the house which he had left but a few moments earlier, and from the eastern wing a pillar of flame bent as the wind’s gusts gripped it.
He was never clear in his mind as to how he got back to the burning building. But he had the sense to keep on up the field, so that he should approach it to windward.
When he had done this, in short time or long, he had a moment’s relief in the consciousness that he was not too late, if any rescue were possible.
He stood at last holding to a root of the upturned tree, and partly sheltered from the wind by the mass of earth which it had torn up, but which still held it; and perhaps it was then that he was first subconsciously aware that the heat and suffocation of the air he breathed were not entirely due to the burning of his own house which the wind blew from him, but to the greater conflagration of the city on the outskirts of which he lived, and which must have involved it entirely within a few hours, if it had not then done so. With it, the wind brought a faint, continuous, wailing cry, as of the gathered lamentation of thousands, and beneath his feet a half-fledged thrush fluttered feebly with a broken wing.
Before him, the wall of the house was still standing, to the height of the first floor. The great tree which had broken the roof and the upper story was supported now by the whole structure on which it leaned, its breadth of branch distributing its weight very widely, but it looked as though at any moment the ruin must collapse entirely.
Though the lower wall stood, the window, which opened to the ground, had been blown or broken inward, and by this gap he was able to climb over a debris of fallen bricks, and beams, and shattered furniture, and broken boughs, searching fearfully in a shadowed gloom, to which the smoke of the burning wing was already penetrating, till a voice from the further side said with eager urgency: “Are they safe?”
“Yes,” he said, “but are you?”
“I felt sure you’d saved them. I don’t know. But move carefully.”
He was struggling, in natural haste, toward the site from which the voice came, but now