Restless Earth

Front matter

Restless Earth

W. GRAEME-HOLDER Author of “THE DECKER,” etc.

The Chesterfield Novels

I

First published in the Stratford Evening Post, 1931, under the title, “When the Earth Shook”

…

The characters in this story are entirely imaginary.

CHAPTER I.

JAMES HARLEY dropped his pen, sighed heavily, placed his elbows upon the table, clasped his hands and gnawed his thumbnails as he gazed through the open window at the roof of the bungalow on the opposite side of the gully.

Heat-waves shimmered upon the red-painted roof, giving a semblance of dancing life to the background of pines in the park beyond. The high tecoma hedge which concealed the back of the bungalow was a black inviting shadow outlined in glittering silver where the sunlight struck its polished foliage. Cicadas chirred in the gully, setting up an atmospheric vibration which harmonised with the heat-waves upon the roof. There was no wind. There was only light—hot light flooding this green suburb of a New Zealand port.

It was a perfect February morning; but Harley could not appreciate its serenity in the turbulence of his thoughts. He was looking at the morrow when the little woman who was his wife should receive the letter he had just finished at his fifth attempt. He saw her standing motionless in a small hotel bedroom, letter in hand, gazing blankly at the wall with hopeless eyes while Jean, their daughter of four and a-half years, tugged at her skirts and imperiously demanded to know what had made her mother cry.

Harley stared at the shimmering roof for some minutes, then he threw out his hands in a gesture of despair.

“Why, in the name of God, did this have to happen to me?” he demanded in low tones.

He picked up the letter and read it again. He knew himself to be procrastinating. The letter had to be posted—it just had to be!—but it wasn’t going

to be easy. Writing it had been difficult enough—posting it would be yet more difficult. And yet there was no other way, no other honorable way.

Perhaps, when he had rid himself of the thing he would feel better. The irrevocable step would have been taken. …

A strange nausea seized him when he had read so far. The letter fluttered from his fingers. He leaned forward and covered his eyes with his hands. He felt himself swaying in his chair. His heart seemed to shudder and rise into his throat. His brain seemed to swim with a curious rotary movement.

He diagnosed the trouble, and smiled grimly.

“Starvation. No regular meals since Grace left.”

The nausea and the swaying increased, and it flashed across Harley’s mind that he might die of starvation if the present state of affairs continued.

“Might be the best way out,” he muttered.

The crash of breaking crockery in the kitchenette caused him to raise his head, and the explanation of his nausea became instantly apparent.

The pine trees in the park were swaying, the power lines and telephone wires on the posts in the roadway were swinging—and there was no wind.

Earthquake!

As he scrambled to his feet a number of books fell from the shelves in the corner of the room and a metal vase clanged upon the hearth-tiles.

The earth movement increased steadily. The house protested in a hundred creaks and rattles. Harley momentarily expected the chimney to come crashing through the roof as he made his way hurriedly to the door. The instinct to live was strong within him. He ran through the hall.

He caught a glimpse of Ginger, the cat, bounding from the gully to the higher land. He followed the example of the animal and bounded over the porch-railing into a neglected flower bed, then raced for the higher ground behind the house. If the house should slide into the gully he would be above it, instead of underneath it.

He fancied he heard muffled subterranean rumblings, and his fancy lent him speed. He vaulted a wire fence, partially concealed by a healthy growth of eleagnis, and landed in the four-acre pasture upon which his affluent neighbour kept two house cows. It was only by chance that he did not land upon the recumbent form of the labourer whom the affluent neighbour was employing to repair the wire fence.

“Hello,” the labourer greeted him cheerfully. “Nice morning for exercise.”

“Er—yes,” agreed Harley lamely, smiling rather shamefacedly as he realised that the earth tremor had subsided to the faintest vibration. “Quite.”

“Bit ’ot, though.”

The labourer rolled over and elevated himself upon one elbow. He became alert. He stared at the ground.

“What’s that?” he demanded. “Earthquake?”

“Yes. Didn’t you feel it?”

The labourer sat up.

“No. There ain’t been no shake up ’ere,” he answered positively. “I’ve been ’ere all the morning.”

He rose to his feet, and Harley offered him a cigarette.

The labourer yawned, accepted the cigarette with a muttered word of thanks, and became informative.

“These little shakes I never feel nowadays. Used to be a time when any little bit of a bump would get me winging, but since the Murchison shake, year before last, it’s got to be a good heavy shake to make me notice it. I was in Westport when that one happened—just outside the Post Office. I feels the thing coming—I can always feel a shake coming: sort of sécond-sight, you know—and I hops it into the middle of the street, quick and busy. There was a little bit of a bump and then the ground heaved up like as though it was alive, and the Post Office tower split. You could see the ground waving, and——”

He became silent abruptly as the earth tremor increased slightly. His eyes widened and stark fear petrified him for a second.

“She’s still going,” observed Harley unnecessarily, looking at the swinging wires in the roadway. “Must be a pretty fierce shake somewhere. Perhaps Murchison is getting it again.”

The labourer leaned against the fence and the cigarette trembled in his fingers.

Harley glanced at him and smiled.

“Sorry, old man,” he said, as he climbed back over the fence. “You might have slept through it if I hadn’t charged over.”

“Such damned uncanny things!” growled the labourer. “Never twice alike. I don’t mind the sharp bumps, but these corkscrew things turn my stomach.”

Harley descended to the patch of tall grass, which had been a lawn a few weeks since. He felt vastly superior. He excused his own momentary panic, but he could find no toleration for the other’s obvious funk. He smoked his cigarette to the end, imagining the earth still shook long after it had ceased to do so. He swayed upon his feet with a curious enjoyment until his gaze again rested upon the telephone wires. He laughed as he observed that they no longer moved.

When he tossed his cigarette-end into the vegetable garden he was almost cheerful with the exhilaration which comes of a knowledge of peril survived.

He returned to the house, glancing around the hall curiously as he entered. No damage there. In the breakfast-room a combined bridge-marker and ash-tray lay broken upon the hearth-rug. The clock on the mantel had stopped. Not much damage there. The floor of the kitchenette was sprinkled with salt and the remains of a number of cups and saucers and a plate or two. A peculiar smell filled the tiny room, and Harley remembered that he had not turned out the gas under the kettle at breakfast time. He hastened to turn it out now.

Two soiled cups were perched upon the very edge of the sink-board. He moved them to a safer position. He eyed the pile of dishes in the sink and on the board. They seemed intact. He pushed back a small pile of plates which had slithered forward on a shelf above the sink. The movement caused a jelly jar to topple. It fell upon his scalp and then into the sink, breaking a small jug and a plate.

Harley returned to the small drawing-room, and much of his cheerfulness had departed. Nevertheless he sat down and dashed off a postscript:

The incongruity of such a postscript struck him and he ceased writing. It read as though Grace were merely taking a holiday instead of—of what was happening actually.

The last glow of his new-born cheerfulness faded. His heart was sick as he continued to read the letter itself.

He glanced through the postscript and tore it off with a fierce gesture upon the edge of the table. For a second he contemplated re-writing the letter, then he folded it into its envelope quickly, knowing that he had not the courage.

The letter should catch Grace at the Masonic Hotel, Napier. He addressed it so, and, as a precaution, added: ‘Please forward. In case of non-delivery return to J. Harley, Plover Street, New Plymouth.’

The thought that the Dead Letter Office might open it made him shudder.

He looked out of the window and saw the head of Mrs. Percival Quesne Langham thrust above the tecoma hedge which concealed the back of the bungalow on the opposite side of the gully. The lady was taking her noon observation of the Harley bungalow.

“Prying old hen!” muttered Harley as he rose and closed the window pointedly.

II

CHAPTER II.

Harley continued to stall for time. He changed his mind about posting the letter before lunch. He argued that any time before midnight would do. Besides, the Langham woman was watching, and he would feel like a murderer running the gauntlet of suspicious eyes. After all, what else did it amount to but murder—murder of a woman’s happiness and faith? The letter would strike to the heart as surely as a knife.

He wandered into the bedroom before he remembered that he had decided to lunch. He seemed to have developed a habit of wandering aimlessly about the house of late. Lunch. He would have lunch.

Lunch was a miserable affair.

Even before the earthquake the kitchenette had been hard to endure; now, with broken crockery and salt superimposed upon the stale breadcrumbs on the floor, the place was positively repulsive. Soiled saucepans and a frying-pan half-filled with congealed fat occupied the top of the gas stove in company with the ruined kettle. A three-weeks-old sheet of newspaper did duty as a table cover upon which had rested for days a pot of jam with its paper cover hanging in tatters from its rim, a bread board, three butter dishes, a tin of condensed milk and an accumulation of crumbs.

Cupboard doors were half-open, the dust of weeks throwing their panelling into bold relief; the dishes in the sink and on the board were an unlovely sight; the cleanliness of the tea-towels hanging on the rail behind the door was a reproach; and the lingering

odour of the burnt kettle, added to the mingled odours of stale and forgotten viands, strangled appetite.

Harley sniffed disgustedly as he entered the room. It had been a picture of white neatness when Grace had worked here; now it was a hole. Time it was cleaned up.

He had grown accustomed to the absence of clean cups. He rinsed his breakfast cup beneath the tap, scuffling the broken crockery aside with his feet. The tea-pot had not been emptied since breakfast, and he scuffled the broken crockery in other directions as he made his way to the back door. It did not occur to him to use a broom.

He used four matches in lighting the gas-jet beneath the kettle, and swore whole-heartedly when the kettle leaked as he attempted to fill it. He was compelled to rinse a saucepan, and he handled the dishcloth with a respect engendered by its age. When he had set the water to boil he sorted out the least stale half-loaf in the bread-bin, and carved a thick slice which he coated liberally with butter and jam.

When the saucepan commenced to hiss Harley commenced to search for tea. When the water had been boiling for three minutes Harley was convinced that there was no tea in the house. He had used the last of it for breakfast. He scuffled salt and crockery under the stove as he turned out the gas. The bread-and-jam was dotted with enthusiastic house-flies, while a swarm of others hovered above it. Harley’s appetite departed utterly.

He threw the slice of bread-and-jam into the long grass of the back lawn.

Lunch was finished.

“What an unholy mess!” he exclaimed aloud as he poured some of the hot water into his shaving-mug.

With the steaming mug in his hand he stood and surveyed the kitchenette.

No good. A man could not continue to live like this. No real or regular meals, no order, no anything. Every bed in the house unmade and unaired. Dust everywhere.

Something would have to be done.

One o’clock, and he had not shaved! Two days’ growth, too—or was it three? Not a clean collar in the place! He couldn’t remember to get the things from the laundry now that Grace was not here to jog his memory. And the bulges in the knees of his trousers! Terrible! How many more clean shirts were left in the drawer? One, or two? Or none?

Something would have to be done—now that Grace would not be coming back.

Grace not coming back! Why the devil couldn’t he be pleased about it, instead of wanting to howl? Idiot! He didn’t know his own mind!

As he made his way to the bathroom he planned to boil a copperful of water that very evening and make a clean-up of all the crockery. Perhaps he might wash a few sheets and things, too. The obvious thing to do was to look round for diggings. No sense in keeping a whole house for himself. Better to let it, or sell it. The place was too full with memories. He could never work here again.

He dropped the letter into the post-box which hung upon a telegraph-pole at the corner of the street. He heard it fall, and for a moment, felt a violent desire to recall it.

“Don’t be a fool, Harley,” he admonished himself, and blushed as he realised that loneliness had bred a habit of speaking aloud to himself. He felt extremely foolish as he walked away, although he was alone in the street.

It was done. His decision was made irrevocably. He had chosen Patricia Weybourn and had discarded the little woman whom he had sworn to love and cherish and who was the mother of his child.

He was free to go to Patricia, free to take what he wanted so passionately He should be happy. Why wasn’t he?

Why wasn’t he?

“Because it is a vile thing to do, James Harley,” he answered himself aloud. “You have cast off the little woman who has been unswervingly faithful to you—the woman whose every desire has been for your happiness—the woman who has made you what you are; who made you ‘James Harley, author of this, that, and the other,’—who put you on the literary map. Where would you have been without her?—you, with plenty of language and not a damn plot in the whole of your miserable carcase? Where are you going to be now that you have ditched her? Ass! Idiot! There are not enough epithets in the language to adequately describe you! What is the matter with you? Throwing away a wife and child, a career, a home, everything! For whom? For a woman of whom the whole town speaks uncleanly! For a—a—Oh, hell!”

A doctor, strolling across the footpath to his car after paying a professional visit, failed to recognise James Harley, the gifted writer of scented romances in many journals, in the man who hurried past with hands thrust deep into his pockets, shoulders hunched, hair long and untidy, clothes hanging baggily upon him, and who talked loudly to himself.

The James Harley whom the doctor knew—the man with whom the doctor had played bridge only six weeks since—was a tall man with a fine breadth of shoulder and a deep chest; a man with an easy carriage and a refined taste in clothes; a handsome man whom the gods had designed in the mould of a hero and to whom they had given the gift of tongues; a man destined to go far in his career as a writer of love-stories, but who could whack a golf-ball and put the gloves on with any man in the district.

“Great fellow, Harley!” was the doctor’s way of describing him to his acquaintances. “Heaven alone knows how he manages to think of all the rubbish he writes. Must be money in it, or such a man wouldn’t write it.”

James Harley was thirty-two. The doctor casually judged the hurrying man who talked to himself to be in his forties.

The doctor stepped into his car and drove away.

James Harley did not see him or the car which almost ran him down at the next street-intersection. James Harley had too much to say to himself to bother about his friends at the moment. He was going over all the old arguments, reviewing the whole position for The thousandth time, searching, searching for self-justification and failing to find it.

Harley had been interested when Grace had first mentioned that Patricia Weybourn had arrived in New Plymouth to establish a branch of Picotarde’s, the Auckland modistes, and had been curious to see the girl of whom Grace spoke so warmly.

“You’ll like her, Jimmy,” Grace had said. “All men do—and so do most women, when they know her. I warn you, she’s a flirt of the first water, but she has a heart of gold. There is no real harm in her. Pat, Buzzy Tennyson, Vera Lucas and I were known as the Live Wire quartette in Auckland in our young and giddy days——”

“You’re growing so old, aren’t you?” Harley had laughed. “But I can’t imagine you a Live Wire.”

“Why not? Am I so domesticated and subdued? Jimmy, one of these days I’ll break out and surprise you. Wait until you see Pat! ‘Birds of a feather,’ you know.”

“I know all about you, young lady. You’re such a fast young thing; and if this Pat of yours is of your feather I can hardly wait to see her. When is she coming up?”

“I’ve asked her to dinner on Thursday.”

“Fine! I must climb into a dinner suit for the occasion.”

He had climbed into the dinner suit, and when he had first seen Patricia Weybourn he had felt that the effort of dressing had been wasted. He had expected to see a laughing-eyed, flirtatious tom-boy at whom he could talk after the manner of an eminent author; not the sleek, graceful, blonde mannequin, who flowed rather than walked, and whose artificially-beautiful eyes insolently expressed cold surprise that such an obvious man’s man should demean himself by writing ridiculous love-stories for silly women.

That first evening had not been a success for him. Grace and her visitor had occupied the chesterfield all the evening and had apparently forgotten him in their mutual reminiscences; so that he had had plenty of opportunity to compare the “birds of a feather.” He had found the descriptive phrase inapposite, for the two women were of strikingly dissimilar feather, and his fancy then had been for the quieter plumage of Grace.

Then he had seen Grace as petite, neat and eminently lovable. The mother-light had given her a beauty which the other woman, for all her physical perfection, had lacked. A softness in her eyes and voice, the winning tact and practical sense of which he knew her possessed, her imagination, everything—created to make and grace a real home for a lucky man. He had known himself for that lucky man and had loved her whole-heartedly then.

Patricia Weybourn he had mentally labelled ‘ultra’—ultra-smart in attire, ultra-blonde, ultra-languid, ultra-graceful, ultra-beautiful in a hard fashion, ultra-surprised and disappointed that her friend should have married a man who would have made a sword appear mightier than a pen. Ultra-uninteresting he had found her when he escorted her to the tramcar at the corner of the next street, and he had considered the tales of her conquests to be fairy tales, or her victims half-wits. He would have been ashamed to have been seen abroad in her company then.

“How do you like her?” Grace had asked him later in the evening.

“Not my style, sweetheart,” he had replied, somewhat loftily. “Too much polish and not enough brains.”

“Didn’t she take enough interest in your work, Jimmy.”

“It’s not that—not at all. Why should she? It’s just that—that—well, it’s another of these natural antipathies, I suppose.”

“Oh, I think she likes you, Jimmy, although she did seem rather more stand-offish than I ever remember her with a strange man. Perhaps she is determined to take no risks with my handsome husband.”

He had grinned at that.

“A lot she knows about love,” he had scoffed. “That sort of woman doesn’t know the meaning of the word.”

“Perhaps she thinks similarly about you, Jimmy. After all, you only write about it.”

“Is that so? Come here, young lady, and I’ll show you whether I only write about it. Come over here.”

She had come to him obediently; and in neither of their hearts had there been any fear that any person on earth could ever alter the course of their love.

For some time after that he had excused himself on the plea of work whenever Patricia Weybourn called to spend an evening, and had listened to the two women in the next room chattering like magpies as he smoked and made leisurely notes for further love-stories.

“It’s rude to run away every time Pat comes,” Grace had protested one afternoon.

“I know. It’s how she makes me feel.”

“But you mustn’t offend her, for my sake, Jimmy.”

“Can’t offend that sort of woman, my dear. Besides, I’m out of danger when I’m alone. You don’t want me to fall in love with this blonde siren?”

“She’s too much of a sportswoman to allow you to do that. I’d trust Pat with you anywhere.”

“Is that meant as a compliment to her or to me?”

“To both of you. Jimmy, please be nice to her.”

“I am nice to her.”

“I mean, come and be sociable. She is coming this evening, and I want you to play for her. She sings very well.”

“Don’t you think she despises me enough now? What will she think when she knows that, besides writing love-stories, I tinkle the piano?”

“Do you care?”

“Eh? Not a bit!”

“Then why argue about it? Promise me, Jimmy, you’ll have no urgent work to do this evening?”

“I can’t do that——”

“You can!”

“I can’t.”

“You can!”

Grace had taken advantage of his sitting position to throw her arms tightly about his neck from behind and had fastened her teeth in his right ear.

“Promise?” she had growled ferociously. “Promise?”

He yelled in mock dismay.

“Let go!”

“Promise, you big bully?”

“I promise.”

She had released him then. They had been very happy.

“Next time I’ll take a piece right out of you, young man,” she had threatened laughingly.

“I’ll be good,” he had replied. “But, if I fall in love with this svelte vampire of yours, remember you will have brought it on yourself.”

“I’ll remember to be sorry for you if you do, my dear.”

Grace had remembered. That was one of the worst features of the whole business. And he remembered that he had warned her—that was another.

III

CHAPTER III.

He had kept his promise. He had made himself sociable, and had played Patricia Weybourn’s accompaniments with more pleasure and less self-consciousness than he had believed possible. The woman, for all the ultra-coldness of her attitude towards her accompanist, had sung with real feeling, and her voice had proved ultra-pleasant to listen to.

That had been the first of many pleasant musical evenings; and Harley, who was a desultory composer, wrote two songs especially for Patricia Weybourn.

Grace had remarked on this.

“Love songs, Jimmy!” she had teased him. “Remember, I warned you. You’re falling in love with her.”

“Nonsense,” he had answered with an irritability which surprised himself. “I’m willing to admit that my first impression of the girl was a little wide of the mark, but this continual harping on the danger of my falling in love with her is a little wearing.”

“Jimmy!”

“Can’t you think of something else to say?”

He had stalked out of the room with dignity, and with a queer sense of guilt. He had not been willing to admit that his opinion of Patricia Weybourn had changed altogether.

Why his opinion had so changed he could not have explained. Patricia continued to treat him with the curious pitying condescension with which she had greeted him at their first meeting. She had been no less ultra in her implied assumption that he should consider himself extremely fortunate in

having married a friend of hers. As a man and possible victim she had continued to ignore him.

She had not changed an iota, yet he had seen her differently. He had found her creeping into his love-stories in heroine rôles, ousting the long line of heroines which he had founded upon the characteristics of Grace. His heroines had imperceptibly developed into wonderful blondes who queened it over his heroes and married them more for their titles than their homes. When an editor had dared to say that he preferred the smaller, clinging type of heroine, Harley had dared to suggest that the public was growing tired of the dowdy women who could do nothing for themselves.

Just about this time he had noticed a dowdiness in Grace of which he had not previously been aware. Grace lacked Patricia’s smartness and sense of style. “Old-fashioned” was how he had described one of her gowns.

“But you have always said you loved me best in dove-grey, Jimmy,” Grace had protested.

“Oh, the colour’s all right, but what’s wrong with the style?”

“This is the latest fashion, Jimmy.”

“Is it? Then it must be the way you wear it. You used to be as smart as they made ’em, Grace, but lately you seem to be slipping. Better get Pat to fit you out with something.”

“As a matter of fact this gown came from Picotarde’s, my dear, and everyone admires it but you.”

He had changed the subject abruptly.

“Can’t you stop Joan playing right underneath my window?” he had asked peevishly. “How am I to get any work done?”

“Why, you've never complained of the child before, Jimmy! You’ve often said you liked to hear her there. What is the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter, except that I can’t concentrate while Joan is talking to herself or her dolls.”

Grace had looked at him steadily for some moments, and he had stared at her with something like defiance.

“Jimmy,” Grace had said quietly, “I think I had better ask Pat not to come here again.”

“Don’t be silly,” he had retorted roughly. “Because I dare to complain of something once in ten years, you immediately assume another woman. If you want to know my honest opinion of your friend Patricia, I think she’s next door to impossible. Regards me as though I were a little off mental balance. Her conceit of herself makes me sick!”

Afterwards he had realised, with something of a shock, that he had committed perjury in order to escape his conscience and the pain in the eyes of Grace.

On each of her ensuing visits it seemed that Patricia had taken from him a little more of the contentment which had been his, leaving in its place an increase in restlessness and the tendency to make carping criticism of his home, his wife and his child.

His work began to worry him at this time. He had complained that the fount of inspiration in Grace was running dry. He had accused her of using the same old plots, and had quarrelled with her when she had suggested that his treatment of his themes had become neither one thing nor the other—neither men’s stories nor women’s.

He had begun to resent the smell of cooking in the house.

“How can I write romance when the place reeks of boiling cabbage?” he had demanded of Grace on one occasion.

“Don’t be silly,” Grace had retorted, sharply for her. “The cabbage must be cooked. You must eat.”

“Surely there’s no necessity to feed me cabbage every day.”

“We haven’t had cabbage for over a week, Jimmy. I think you want a holiday, young man.”

“Rot! I want a little consideration, that’s all. Yqu seem to take a delight, lately, in doing everything you can to interrupt my work. If it isn’t cabbage it’s some other beastly smell; or you sing some idiotic endless tune as you bang into things when you’re sweeping the place. I can’t understand what’s come over you.”

Grace had walked into the hall then and had returned with his hat.

“Go and walk yourself into a better temper, my dear,” was all she said; and he had slammed the back door as he took her at her word.

Shortly after the cabbage episode he had begun to realise that Patricia Weybourn was less ultra- than charmingly-smart; but just when he awoke to the fact that he had fallen in love with his wife’s friend he had never discovered. The awakening had been gradual and painful, for he had fought his conscience every moment of the time. He had known that in Grace he had the well-nigh perfect wife; and, in Joan, such a child as the most fastidious parent might pray for; and he had fought back at the insidious adventuring of his heart.