When I attempted to wash my hands, I discovered there was no water. A long time after then we learned how the dams had burst at the artificial lakes. The flood that followed is an epochal story in itself. There was a little drinking water left in my pitcher. I took a long swallow and filled a pint bottle to carry with me.
“So you’re off?” Crown asked, when I returned to the lobby.
I nodded.
“Help yourself to cigarettes.” He pointed to the disordered corner that had been the cigar case.
I blew out the candle and put the stub in my pocket.
“Good luck to you!” Crown shook hands. “I hope you find her—safe. Remember, if there are any more shocks, the new buildings are the safest.”
“Are you left here all alone?” I asked.
“There may be some people up in their rooms,” he replied, “but I guess they all went out in the panic. It was unbelievable here, then. They wouldn’t listen to reason. Well, as I said, ‘Good luck!’”
I walked confidently around the hole in the pavement, which had unnerved me when I entered. Overhead, the stars were shining peacefully.
CHAPTER II
Lexington Avenue was, as I have said, littered with wreckage. I could see no living creature on it. It seemed as if a whirlwind must have accompanied the earthquake and, like a mammoth vacuum cleaner, swept up the thousands of men, women and children who had lived along the street. Above Fiftieth Street the old stone and brick buildings that had so long been a disgrace to the neighborhood were almost entirely leveled, crumbled by the repeated shocks. Some walls had tumbled into the cellars while others had spilled over, like children’s blocks, upon the pavement.
Mary Hull’s apartment was on the other, the west side of the city. I went toward Park Avenue without the slightest premonition of the difficulties I was to encounter. It seemed a simple matter to walk those eleven blocks that separated my hotel from her apartment house.
Indeed, it was a strange betrothal night; an improbable, incomprehensible and yet a fascinating experience. Less than three hours had passed since Mary promised to marry me and I felt that I had lived through a week of terror.
Minutes and yards are sometimes inadequate standards for measuring time and distance. Like Stanley, one may be able to throw a stone across a chasm and spend a month in reaching the spot where the pebble landed. Or one may crowd into a single evening the adventures of a normal lifetime.
My toe struck something soft and yielding that lay upon the pavement. I bent over and lighted a match for the starlight was insufficient illumination to permit me to discover what this object might be. It was the body of a man, face down upon the asphalt, the first of many bodies that I passed. In the man’s arms was a paper-covered bundle, containing his most treasured possessions, I suppose, which he had been carrying when a bit of stone rolled down from a roof and pinned him beneath it. I shivered and went on.
At first glance I thought the sumptuous apartment houses along Park Avenue had scarcely been harmed. “Bond Boulevard,” my brother Matt always called those multiple palaces. They were standing, having survived the crash in all their brick and stone magnificence. But a closer view showed the havoc that had been wrought. Like Lexington, Park Avenue was deserted. Whole sections of the pavement and sidewalk had dropped into the underground passage that lay beneath the street, the tunnel through which the New York Central trains passed to the Grand Central Station. These yawning holes were gigantic mantraps; for from them came the roar and hiss of surging water, showing that the passage had been flooded as well as the subway tubes.
For a minute, I thought it would be impossible for me to cross. However, I discovered that steel girders and even some sections of pavement remained to bridge the street. Upon my hands and knees, I crawled along a ragged steel beam to the center of the street, where a whole block of reinforced concrete had remained in place. There I stood, resting, while I looked up and down the thoroughfare, hoping to see one other survivor. In fact, I had begun to wonder if Crown, seated in the hotel lobby, and I were not the only residents of New York left alive.
High up, perhaps on the tenth floor of an apartment hotel a block below, a flickering candle had been placed in a window. Beside it a dark figure leaned upon the window sill, peering out at the desolation. I was seized with a fever to speak to someone.
“Hullo, there,” I called. “Hullo, there!”
The figure—it might have been either a man or a woman—withdrew the candle and closed the window, evidently frightened by my hail.
In order to reach the opposite curb, it was necessary for me to crawl along the jagged steel beams, the skeleton of the street. As I neared the west sidewalk, I slipped and, for a breathtaking second, I hung above the black hole of the tunnel. The water below seemed to rise up like a living monster, to seize me. My left hand was cut on a sharp steel point, but I hung on and managed to go forward.
The cross street on which I found myself at the end of this perilous journey was made impassable also by holes in the pavement. But I was able to make my way along, avoiding both the holes and the piles of stone and brick. In an open doorway of a shop, stood a little dog. He quivered with fright, even as he growled to warn me away from the stock he was guarding.
Between two large holes in the pavement, pinned in its place by a small avalanche of rubble from a building front, stood a large limousine. Five men and three women were seated in it, all of them wearing evening dress as if they were driving home from the opera. Two of the men sat in the chauffeur’s and footman’s places, the others were in the rear. All of them were smoking but not speaking. It was obvious that the car could not move. They watched me with intent curiosity as I passed them.
A man, running at top speed, turned the corner of Madison Avenue and almost knocked me down as he bumped into me. He was without hat or coat and wore neither collar nor tie. In his right hand he carried a number of bills which he grasped by the middle, crumpling them up as many crapshooters do in the excitement of a game. He solemnly handed me one of the bank notes.
“I’m a stranger here,” he announced breathlessly. “Can you tell me the best way to get out of the city?”
“Good heavens, man, I don’t know that myself.” I returned his money.
Plainly, he did not comprehend my reply.
“These damn foreigners don’t understand English,” he grumbled. Then, turning, he ran away from me, retracing his steps toward Madison Avenue. I followed him.
I found Madison Avenue still passable, although greatly littered with brick and stone, glass and stucco. No cars were to be seen on it and, in fact, no street in Manhattan was open for automobile traffic. The only machines I saw stood wrecked or abandoned at the curbs.
Madison had become the route of many fugitives, all of them moving southward, toward the lower end of Manhattan. I joined this throng and walked with them until near Forty-second Street we found our passage blocked by a twisted heap of steel and a great monument of stone that had been catapulted down. We turned westward through Forty-third Street toward Fifth Avenue.
One man who walked through that block beside me did not seem content, as the others were, to shuffle along silently with his eyes on the ground.
“Went up to Central Park,” he observed, in a colorless monotone of a voice. “Couldn’t get in. Dunno where to go.”
“You couldn’t get in Central Park?”
“Nope.” His words came as if he had memorized them and was now repeating them in his sleep. “There ain’t no room to stand in Central Park, now.”
“You mean that there are so many people in Central Park that one can’t find a place to stand?”
“Yes. An’ when women faint, people walk on ’em. One girl didn’t, though. There wasn’t room for her to fall down. So she didn’t get walked on.”
Our crowd halted. I climbed up a pile of debris that stood on the site of a building and looked over Fifth Avenue. Then it was possible for me to believe what he had told me about Cen
tral Park.
* * * *
No spectacle like that march up Fifth Avenue has ever before been staged for human eyes to witness. As far as I could see the great traffic artery was packed solid with a moving mass of human beings. They filled the street from curb to curb, without a break. Because of fallen material and stones, they could not swarm over the sidewalks.
This was not a mob, in the sense that the word is usually used. Rather it was a muster of all humanity, pouring out of every street, from every house, flat and rookery. It crawled uptown at a sick snail’s pace, never quite halting, never really moving. It seemed to me like a river of cooling lava, almost congealed but forced onward by the infinity of pressure pounds behind it.
It was a tremendous parade of the helpless, and of the hopeless, a mighty accumulation of individuals who had reached that crisis of despair when words are impossible. These tens of thousands had been stricken dumb by their common misfortune.
Downtown New York was emptied into that one street, taking part in the pageant of wretchedness and fear. “Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief”—all were there, rubbing elbows as they toiled along.
I did not know how to cross that river of fugitives. It was more terrifying than any physical barrier. The individuals in it looked neither to the right nor left, but plodded on. Before my eyes, almost close enough so that I might have helped him, an old man stumbled. He could not rise. The column moved on, grinding out his life beneath it.
I took a deep breath, as if I were about to dive into ice water.
“Excuse me. Let me through,” I shouted.
No one heeded me. Hemmed in, with men and women so close that their bodies pressed against mine, I was carried along with them.
For a minute I was stupefied. Then I went mad, like an animal caught in a thicket. I felt certain that I would be sucked under by this human ebb tide. I used my fists, my knees, my hands and fists. I fought my way through, inch by inch, always remembering the old man who had fallen and then been unable to rise; recalling how quickly the gap had closed up over him.
Those persons who walked in that nightmare silence made no complaint as I struggled. By the time I had landed on the west curb, they had carried me six or seven blocks toward Central Park with them.
I staggered into a side street which was deserted. On either side the old, brownstone residences had suffered considerably. Outer walls had fallen, leaving rooms exposed like stage settings. In the street was a cloud of plaster dust that burned one’s eyes and partially obscured the starlight. Halfway through the block, as I approached Sixth Avenue, a girl suddenly appeared in an areaway, stepping gingerly over the wreckage that lay on the sidewalk.
“Pardon me,” she said.
I could see that she was young and beautiful. She wore evening dress; her bobbed hair was becomingly disordered, and a great jeweled, silver-snake bracelet was coiled about her upper arm.
I stopped.
“Please tell me your name.” She asked it without the slightest hesitation or embarrassment.
“Alexander Tennay. And I live—I mean I did live at the Kelton.”
“Your occupation, please?” The girl smiled.
“I happen to be New York representative of the South Pacific Transportation & Trading Corporation.”
“Such luck!” announced the girl. She took my hand and led me upstairs toward a room where I could hear voices and laughter.
Although much plaster had fallen in the hall, showering the dark woodwork and wainscoting with a white, volcanic dust, although the great glass chandelier had fallen, breaking the newel post and littering the floor with fine bits of glass, one could sense that the house belonged to and was occupied by people of wealth and good taste. At the top of the stairs, my pretty guide threw open a door and led me into a candle-lighted room.
From the shadows beside a piano, two girls came forward into the circle of light. One, blond like my guide, was evidently her sister. The other, a strikingly dashing brunette, seemed vaguely familiar. Two men also rose to greet me.
“Permit me!” began my guide. “Listen, everybody! May I present Mr. Alex Tennay, of the South Pacific something or other. Anyway it sounds interesting.” She turned to me. “My sister, Alice van der Kel. I’m Julia.” Instantly I remembered their identity. They were the daughters of an old Knickerbocker family whose names and photographs had been spread over pages of Sunday newspapers two years before, when they renounced society to become glorified dancers in a Broadway revue.
“This is Georgianna Lee.” The dark girl nodded. I had seen her only two nights before. She was the prima donna of a popular light opera. I bowed. “Franz Erk, the composer,” Julia continued. We shook hands. She pointed to the remaining man. “Cecil Henry.”
“Having all confessed our right names,” Georgianna said with a little burst of silver laughter, “let’s get down to a little serious-minded drinking.”
“But I—I can’t stop,” I murmured. “Why?” demanded, Julia.
“I’m looking for someone, one of my friends.” For some unknown reason I hesitated to say my fiancée. “They live over on the West Side. I’m on my way there.”
“Bet you a hundred she’s not at home,” said Georgianna, while the others roared with laughter.
Erk took a bottle of champagne from a bucket of ice and water. He poured some of the wine into each of six glasses, then filled them up to the brim with anisette.
“Quicker action,” he explained. “We’ll have to drink the wine first anyway, because our ice won’t keep.”
“Thank goodness,” said Georgianna. “I can get tight without worrying over tomorrow’s matinee.”
Julia and I were sitting on a cushioned window seat.
“I can’t stay here, child,” I protested. “I must go. Damn it, I’ve got to find my friends.”
“Of course you’ll stay. You won’t be able to find anybody. You’ll just make yourself unhappy searching for them,” Julia dismissed the matter.
“After the show tonight,” she continued, “Georgianna and the boys came up here for a drink. We were all talking when”—she shivered slightly—“it happened. My friend, Carl—Carl Watkins, you know—ran out.” It was a minute before she finished her story. “Some of the wall fell. His body’s there, on the steps, under those stones. I ran down after him so—I saw it.”
Her breath came quickly, then she recovered and finished in quite a matter-of-fact tone: “Then I saw you coming and—and you looked so alone, too, so I brought you up. We thought, if we all stayed together, we wouldn’t be so—frightened.” Her voice broke.
“You don’t understand.” I made a final, weak protest. “I must find my friend. You see, it’s the girl I’m engaged to.”
“But you won’t find her. You’ll be lost or crushed in the street. It’s hopeless. Isn’t it better to stay here—among friends than be trampled down out there? Here, at any rate, we can be gay tonight, even if there is no tomorrow.”
Someone struck a chord upon the piano.
“No tomorrow. No tomorrow,” the girl repeated. She must have recognized the composer’s touch upon the keys for she did not look up to see who was playing. “The idea stimulates Franz just as it does me. Listen. He’s improvising.”
I surrendered to her logic. After all, she was right. There would be no tomorrow. It was better to meet the end with gayety here, than to be trampled under the feet of fear-maddened fugitives. How could I hope to find Mary?
The piano rumbled with a peculiar kettle-drum syncopation done upon the bass. Then it picked up a thread of melody, set in strangely harmonious Negroid minors. Twice the composer played it through, to fix it in his memory.
Then he repeated the kettle-drum introduction and sang:
“Angel Gabriel’s a-comin’ to the earth.
Listen to the trumpet of the Lord.
Gabriel’s a-blowin’ now for all he’s worth,
Trumpetin’ the Gospel an’ the Word.
> “Blow, Gabriel—
As th’ world is mendin’, Gabriel,
As th’ world is endin’, Gabriel,
As the Lord is sendin’, Gabriel,
“Blow, Gabriel—
Your chilluns is collected;
Your summons is expected:
Hark to the Word of Israel.”
The first time he sang it mockingly, inventing words to fit the irresistible beat of the melody. Then, as the words became fixed in his and our minds, he chanted it again with all the fire and spirit of a camp-meeting convert. It echoed through that house like the call to the judgment seat.
“Play something else,” implored Georgianna, “or leave that piano alone.”
It recalled me to my senses. I rose to my feet. “What’s the matter?” Julia pleaded. “Don’t mind Franz’s music. He has fits like that.”
“Sorry!” I said. “I really must go on.” I said good-by and hurried down the stairs and out into the street. I carefully avoided stepping on the heap of stones and bricks beneath which Julia’s friend, Carl, was buried.
In spite of the fact that Sixth Avenue was littered with the wreckage of the elevated line, many refugees were moving along it, a crowd that had eddied back from the congestion near Central Park. I was caught in this human maelstrom and carried along to Fortieth Street before I could free myself. I found Broadway nearly impassable, with great holes in the pavement above the subways. It was with considerable difficulty that I crossed Broadway and Seventh Avenue.
Outside the entrance of the Herald-Tribune building a man was seated on a stone, fixedly regarding the people who passed and repassed near him. There was something familiar about his posture. I walked closer and recognized the man. He was Tom McKay, with whom I had worked in my own reporter days. He had become a sort of night-wire editor for his paper’s news service.
“Hello, Tom.”
“Why, it’s Alex Tennay.” He shook hands as casually as if we had met in the Newspaper Club. “How’s Alex?”
The Pulp Fiction Megapack Page 15
