He heard his mother’s scream; his father’s reassuring answer.  Hurriedly he reached for his clothes.  Downstairs he found his father endeavoring to calm the frightened servants, one of whom appeared to have hysterics.  Presently his mother entered with the smelling salts.  Soon the maid’s unearthly laughter ceased.

“Anyone hurt?” Frank questioned anxiously.

“No,” his father answered.  “Thought the house was going over ... but there’s little damage done.”

Suddenly Frank thought of Bertha.  He must go to her.  She would be frightened.

He ran into the debris-cluttered street.  Cable cars stood here and there, half twisted from the tracks, pavements were littered with bricks from fallen chimneys, bits of window glass.  Men and women in various degrees of dishabille, were issuing from doorways.  As he mounted higher, Frank saw smoke spirals rising from the southeastern part of town.  He heard the strident clang of firegongs.

Automobiles were tearing to and fro, with a great shrieking of siren whistles.

It seemed like a nightmare through which he tore, without a sense of time or movement, arriving finally at the marble vestibule of Bertha’s home.  It was open and he rushed in, searching, calling.  But he got no answer.  Bertha, servants, aunt—­all apparently had fled.

CHAPTER XXXIX

THE TURMOIL

Frank never knew just why he turned toward the town from Bertha’s empty dwelling.  It was an involuntary reaction.  The excitement of those lower levels seemed to call, and thence he sped.  Several times acquaintances—­newspaper men and others—­accosted him.  Everyone was eagerly alert, feverishly interested, as if by some great adventure.  Japanese boys were sweeping up the litter in front of stores.  In many places things were being put in order, as if the trouble were over.  But at other points there was confusion and dread.  Half-dressed men and women wandered about, questing for a cup of coffee, but there was none to be had, for the gas mains had broken.

People converged toward parks and open spaces.  Union Square was crowded with a strangely varied human mass; opera singers from the St. Francis Hotel, jabbering excitedly in Italian or French, and making many gestures with their jeweled hands; Chinese and Japanese from the Oriental quarter hard by; women-of-the-town, bedraggled, sleepy-eyed and fearful; sailors, clerks, folk from apartment houses.

Near the pansy bed a woman lay.  She screamed piercingly at intervals.  Frank learned that she was in travail.  By and by a doctor came, a nurse.  They were putting up tents on the green sward.  Automobiles rolled up, sounding their siren alarms.  Out of them were carried bandaged men who moaned, silent forms on litters, more screaming women.  They were taken to the tents.  Extra police appeared to control the crowds that surged hither and thither without seeming reason, swayed by sudden curiosities and trepidation.