The loss of relatives and friends was one of the following features of the great disaster. With every means of communication cut off, with a great area flaming, impossible to cross, enormous to circle, with the exodus in some places so hurried no time was left for plans or the sending of messages, with the spread of the fire so rapid no one knew where the houseless thousands would end their march, families were scattered, individuals lost track of. Groups that at dawn had been a compact whole, an hour later had broken, been dispersed, members vanished, disappeared in the inconceivable chaos. To those who suffered this added horror the earthquake remains less a national calamity than the memory of a time when they knew an anguish beyond their dreams of what pain could be.
So it was with Lorry. The wide, encompassing distress touched her no more than the storm does one sick unto death. The growing demolition, spread out under her eyes roused no responsive interest. It was like a story someone was trying to tell her when she was writhing in torment, a nightmare coming in flashes of recollection through a day full of real, poignant terrors.
For two days she and Mark searched. There were periods when she sought the shelter of Mrs. Kirkham's flat, dropped on a bed and slept till the drained reservoir of her strength was refilled, then was up and out again. Mark and the old lady had no power to stay her. He went with her, and Mrs. Kirkham kept a fire in the little oven of bricks in the gutter so that food might be ready when they came back. Returning from their fruitless wanderings, they found the old lady seated in a rocking-chair on the sidewalk, a parasol over her head to keep the cinders off, the coffeepot on the curb and the brick oven hot and ready.
It was Mrs. Kirkham who found Aunt Ellen—safe with friends near the Presidio. Lorry would not go to her, unable to bear her questions. So, Mrs. Kirkham, who had not walked more than three blocks for years, toiled up there, sinking on doorsteps to get back her wind, helping where she could—a baby carried, a woman told to come round to the flat and get "a bite of dinner." She quieted Aunt Ellen, explained that Lorry was with her, said nothing of Chrystie, and toiled home, dropping with groans into her chair by the gutter. When she had got her breath she built up the fire and brewed a fragrant potful of coffee, which she offered to the worn and weary outcasts as they plodded past.
There was not a plaza or square in that part of the city to which Lorry and Mark did not go. They hunted among the countless hoards that spread over the lawns in Golden Gate Park, and covered the hillsides of the Presidio. They went through the temporary hospitals—wards given to the sick and injured in the military barracks, tent villages on the parade ground. They saw strange sights, terrible sights; birth and death under the trees in the open; saw a heroism, undaunted and undismayed; saw men and women, ruined and homeless, offering aid, succoring distress, gallant, selfless, forever memorable.
Night came upon them in these teeming camping grounds. Along the road's edges the lights of tiny fires—allowed for cooking—broke out in a line of jeweled sparks. Women bent over them; men lighted their pipes and lay or squatted round these rude hearths, all that they had of home. The smell of supper rose appetizingly, coffee simmering, bacon frying. Calls went back and forth for that most valued of possessions, a can opener. There was laughter, jokes passed over exchanges of food, an excess of tea here swapped for a loaf of bread there, a bottle of Zinfandel for a box of sardines. It was like a great, democratic picnic to which everybody had been invited—the rich, the poor, the foreign elements, white, black and yellow, the old and the young, the good and bad, virtue from Pacific Avenue, vice from Dupont Street, the prominent citizen and the derelict from the Barbary Coast.
The fire flung its banners across the sky, a vast lighting up for them, under which they went about the business of living. At intervals, booming through the sounds of their habitation, came the dynamite explosions blowing up the city in blocks. When the muffled roar was over, the gathering quiet was pierced by the thin, high notes of gramophones. From the shadow of trees Caruso's voice rose in the swaggering lilt of "La Donna e Mobile," to be answered by Melba's, crystal-sweet, from a machine stored in a crowded cart. There were ragtime melodies, and someone had a record of "Marching Through Georgia" that always drew forth applause. Then, as the night advanced, a gradual hush fell, a slow sinking down into silence, broken by a child's querulous cry, a groan of pain, the smothered mutterings of a dreamer. Like the slain on a battlefield, they lay on the roadside, dotted over the slopes, thick as fallen leaves under the trees, their faces buried in arms or wrappings against the fall of cinders and the hot glare.
In all these places Lorry and Mark sent out that call for the lost which park and reservation soon grew to know and echo. Standing on a rise of ground Mark would cry with the full force of his lungs, "Is Chrystie Alston there?" The shout spread like a ring on water, and at the limits of its carrying power, was taken up and repeated. They could hear it fainter in a strange voice—"Is Chrystie Alston there?"—then fainter still as voice after voice took it up, sent it on, threw it like a ball from hand to hand, till, a winged question, it had traversed the place. But there was no answer, no jubilant response to be relayed back, no Chrystie running toward them with welcoming face.
Late on the second night he induced her to go back to Mrs. Kirkham's. She was heavy on his arm, stumbling as she walked, not answering his attempts at cheer. He delivered her over to the old lady, who had to help her to bed, then sat and waited in the dining room. No lights were allowed in any house, and this room was chosen as the place of their night counsels because of the illumination that came in through the open hole of the fireplace, wrenched out when the chimney fell. When Mrs. Kirkham came back he and she exchanged a somber look, and the old lady voiced both their thoughts:
"She can't stand this. She can't go on. She's hardly able to move now.
What shall we do?"