He cried and prayed till the orders came and she was taken on board.
Cecè, who was put in charge of the taking on board of the fugitives, ordered that the wounded were to be taken
first. He was somewhat surprised that this order was attended to; it was so, however, the wounded were taken in without confusion; but afterwards among the unwounded there was confusion. There was a boy who tried to get on board first, Cecè pulled the boy’s cap off and threw it away, intending it to fall in the sea, but it fell in another boat and the boy went after his cap and gave no more trouble.
The earthquake was at about 5.20 a.m. on 28th December; the Regina Margherita arrived at Messina at 8 a.m. on the 30th December. As soon as Cecè landed, he began searching with others and at 10 a.m. found, in a well-furnished house, a woman dead in bed, killed by a beam which had fallen across her. Under the beam, close to her body, lay a baby girl, very dirty but alive and untouched. It was impossible to say precisely when the child had been born, but certainly only a few hours before the earthquake, just time enough for the midwife to leave the house, for they found no trace of her. Cecè took the baby to the steamer and gave it sugar and water, and when they returned to Palermo they got it a wet-nurse and it was baptised Maria in the children’s hospital. If one has an earthquake in one’s horoscope, surely it could not be placed at a less inconvenient part of one’s life. New-born babies can live three or four days without food; but if this child had not been born before the earthquake, she would not have been born at all, and if she had been born earlier, she would have died of starvation or exposure before she was found. As it happened she was sheltered and her life preserved by the beam which killed her mother. Maria was adopted by a lady of Palermo, and in April, 1910, Cecè told me he had lately seen her and she was beginning to walk.
Cecè had had twenty earthquake babies in his hospital, all with fathers and mothers unknown, and, of course, other hospitals were equally full. When I was at Palermo in 1909 he had only seven of the twenty, the rest having been taken away, some by their fathers and mothers, others by
people who adopted them. Travelling back to England I saw in the railway stations at Rome, Milan, and other places, frames of photographs of unclaimed babies put up in the hope that they might be recognised by chance travellers.
The Regina Margherita stayed at Messina one day, loading, and then returned to Palermo with five hundred unwounded and eighty-two wounded. Cecè remained in Messina, searching, but joined the ship when she returned to Messina, where she took up her station in port as a floating hospital.
He told me of a woman who was in the ruins, alive but unable to move. Her daughter lay dead beside her. It was raining, there was a dripping and she was getting wet. With the morning light she saw it was not the rain that was wetting her, but the blood of her husband and two grown-up sons who were dead in the room above.
He told me of a law-student in Palermo, twenty-four years old, engaged to a young lady who lived in Messina; this young man went to pass his Christmas holidays with his betrothed. He was not in the same house and the earthquake did him no harm; as soon as it was over his first thought was for his fidanzata. He got into the street and made for her house, paying no attention to the cries that issued from the ruins. But, like a wandering knight on his way to assist his lady and embarrassed by meeting other adventures, he was stopped and forced to help in searching a particular house, from which he extricated a beautiful girl, nineteen years of age, unhurt. She would not let him go till he had saved her mother. All the others in the house were killed. Still the girl would not let him go.
“Are you rich?” she asked.