“Undress, then,” said Lewis.
“I’ll swim tonight, at Eve’s Spring,” said Dulcy. “I’m supposed to tell you that it’s lunchtime.”
“All right. Wait.”
She dipped a soggy slipper while he dried off. They scrabbled up the path. “Was it nice?”
“It lacks regulation. Move a toe and you’re either freezing or poached.” They stepped around the tethered horses, too many of them chewing through too little hay. Two of the English children rocketed by them on the path.
“Are you fast?” asked Lewis. He was walking ahead of her now, with the towel around his shoulders. Little ribbons of water ran down his calves.
“I don’t know. I’ve never raced anyone since school.”
“Even your sister?”
“I was always faster than my sister,” said Dulcy.
The sister she would never have mentioned, since Mrs. Nash didn’t have one. A flush and a surge of anger before her next step landed: he was enjoying this, and she was too easily caught in his game. She tried to focus on the path rather than the way the water ran over his skin. Then it all moved, pebbles bouncing, air buzzing. The world rumbled, gave a small scream—it was nothing like Salonica, but it was truly happening. Dulcy turned to watch the cliffs on the far side of the river. Lewis moved his feet wide apart like a drunk or a sailor, but he kept his back straight, military-style, as did the Sanborns and Durr. The other men thrashed out of the water and crouched with their mouths agape like gargoyles while Audrey and Beryl screamed.
Acts of god, Dulcy thought. A scattering of rocks growled down the face, and the hum faded. The horses had pulled their pegs and ran in loose circles from one end of the flat to the other, heads up and neighing. Dulcy only realized that she was smiling when she met Lewis’s eyes. “I gather you’ve been through one of these before,” he said.
“Such a strange feeling.” But when they looked at each other it was still about what he’d said before, about the sister.
The champagne bottles spilled onto the dusty gravel. Margaret scrambled around trying to salvage a few cups. Rex and the English children hopped up and down in sheer anxiety, and Grover railed at Durr: one camera had tipped on the rocks. Dulcy enjoyed the fact that Durr ignored the rant for the sake of filming the slowing horses.
While they ate dry bread and moldy cheese, Dulcy felt two more soft long tremors, but no one commented. Durr showed Margaret how to use one of Century cameras, and Dulcy kept her face averted and talked to the Englishwoman, who was packing to leave (“before we all die in lahhhva,”). Rex cranked up the Victrola, and Grover herded Hubie down to the water. He wanted at least one more jump recorded, but Samuel and Lewis wouldn’t budge, and Durr ignored him, and Rex apparently lacked the desired physique. Grover and Hubie weren’t natural companions, but Hubie was at least game, and so, Grover said, he would be the immortal one , the man to put droplets in air, into sunlight, on film.
Lewis sat next to her and rubbed his eyes. “When we get to the springs I might hide in my room. Maybe they’ll have food there.”
“How can Samuel bear listening to Grover?”
Lewis gave her a look—in hindsight, disbelief? Amusement? Out of the corner of her eye Dulcy saw a jump, heard a splash, heard Grover bellow Great one ! And then screams, a hyena-like sound that popped through the melody of the phonograph, bled into the tinny violin; rending, echoing wails that bounced off both sides of the mile-wide canyon. They were on their feet as Hubie staggered, still screaming, out of the pool toward Grover. His skin was a new shade of pink. He knocked the camera over and fell to his knees. “Look out !” howled Grover. “Whatever is wrong with you?”
“The water was fine,” said Rex. “It was fine.”
“I’m not fucking fine,” roared Hubie.
The men helped him down to the cold part of the river, the fresh melted snow flow, and the screams turned into whimpers when Hubie was submerged. But his legs and torso were a bad orangey pink, and he pawed at his privates but howled at everyone not to touch. “He needs to stay there until you know what to do with him,” said Stromberg, the little gray-haired Sanborn. “You keep him here until you have a way of keeping him cool, snow or ice.”
Snow was miles away. Rex babbled: during the earthquake, something new must have come up from below. The burns might not really be that bad. Who knew what could happen to the earth’s plumbing after such a shake; who could know what might happen next?
“What do you think?” Margaret asked Samuel.
“I think it’s bad,” he said. The youngest Sanborn man ran down the hill with a thermometer and a jerry-rigged rod, a candle tied to its line. His first cast fell short, and the candle was intact when he reeled in. His second reached Hubie’s spot, and after a half minute he raised the tip. The wizened, melted candle slid out of its noose.
The ground murmured, and a sliver of shale moved a few centimeters near Dulcy’s dusty slippers. When she looked up they were all watching. “These happen afterward,” she said. “For hours. We’re outside; we needn’t worry.”
“We should if the cliff decides to drop on the road,” said Lewis.
A decision was made to go to Eve’s Spring rather than waiting for the train to town. They soaked cloth scraps in cold water and loaded Hubie, but within minutes the keening began again. Even his face was burned, and they wrapped him like a mummy, with slits so he could breathe and scream. They found ice in Gardiner, and at dusk they reached the resort. Dulcy, pinned in a corner of the last wagon next to Durr and Margaret, saw a scurry of people in white, a stretcher, everyone disappearing into the building beyond the large plunge.
They piled out and wandered past proper guests who were bemused by the frayed look of the new arrivals, a little alarmed, though not alarmed enough, by the noises coming from the man in the stretcher. A gaunt girl at the desk gave them rooms, and they found tables in the dining room and had indifferent food and big whiskey cocktails. Rex jammed biscuits in his mouth and said the doctor didn’t know what to think. The people at the next table began to mutter about the noise coming from the back and talked about the news of a quake in Yellowstone, geysers acting strangely. None of them had felt a thing.
“Let’s swim,” said Lewis. “I’m worried that if I don’t try it now, I’ll never do it again.”
They’d been given the last few rooms at the end of the old wing. A maid brought a selection of swimming costumes—wide, narrow, wool, silk, all bad stripes and polka dots. “I don’t want to do this,” said Margaret, who kept towels wrapped around any visible patch of flesh.