Yet the main force of the hurricane had not yet reached the coast. The great property damage thus far was water damage. The huge tides smashed sea walls, sucking filled land out through the gaps in the shattered concrete, and the shore houses collapsed as fill was sucked out from under them.
Tidal water came up over beaches, across shore roads, moving into houses set hundreds of feet back from the normal high-tide mark. Thousands of sand bags were being filled as people fought to save their homes.
— Emergency Warning Service. All coastal facilities. 2:12 P.M. It now appears that the eye of the hurricane, Hilda, will intersect the coast line in the vicinity of Cedar Key and Waccasassa Bay. Unless there is a change in speed or direction, this intersection should take place at approximately 4:30. Evacuation of all exposed properties from Dead Man’s Bay to Tarpon Springs is recommended.
When Hal Dorn came back into the house. Jean looked up at him, half-smiling, hoping to show him by her expression that she could control her own fear. But when she saw the odd sick expression on his face, her half-smile faded and she got quickly to her feet and went to him.
“What is it, darling? What’s the matter?” She was afraid he was slipping back into resignation and defeat after showing such decisiveness when faced by this emergency.
Hal motioned for Mrs. Sherrel to join them. He sent Stevie back to the corner, to the blankets, out of earshot.
“It was the old fellow. Now I can’t even remember his name.”
“Himbermark,” Mrs. Sherrel said. “He told me it was Himbermark.”
“He was going to help his friend, Flagan. The one who took your car. Tree just came down on him. That big one at the side of the house. He didn’t have a chance.”
Jean gave a little cry of shock, and Virginia Sherrel closed her eyes for a long moment. Hal took his wife by the arm and said, “Stevie may ask about him. If he does, tell him that the old man went after help or something. Understand?”
“Yes, dear,” she said. She saw that the look of shock was gone from his face, saw that once again he seemed to be well in control of himself and the situation. It gave her a curious attitude toward this emergency, this entrapment — a feeling almost of gratitude.
When they had been driving north before it had happened, he had been so very different — remote, uncommunicative — driving along with his thin strong hands on the wheel, knuckles whitened by the strength of his grip. She had seen the odd color of the sky, gray, luminous, faintly yellowed. The look of the sky had made her sense how small they were and how very vulnerable.
All her life she had been vulnerable to the moods of the weather. A bright warm day meant holiday. Heavy winter snows made her feel hushed and secretive. On days of rain she wanted to weep. On this day she had been unable to keep her mind from returning constantly, gingerly, to the thought that they were moving swiftly toward some unimaginable catastrophe, some great disaster.
She remembered reading that, when the barometer was low, it induced an atavistic nervousness and tension in people. It seemed a primitive warning. And she told herself that, with a hurricane in the area, her sense of foreboding had its logical explanation — it was not strange she should feel alarm without any real basis for it. Also, there was another accountable factor. During the early months of pregnancy with both Stevie and Jan she had been moody, depressed. Only in the later months had she achieved a warm, deep sense of waiting and growing and flourishing.
Yet despite all rationalization she could not avoid the recurrent moments of something akin to panic. Once when the car had swayed with a new violence she had gasped. Then she had tried to tell Hal of her fears, but he had been curt with her, so curt and unpleasant she had turned away from him to look out the side window where the landscape was blurred by the warm sting of the tears in her eyes.
Then he had said, after a time, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
“Yes, I suppose it’s all right. The magic forgiveness. The automatic forbearance. No, I don’t mean that either. Don’t pay any attention to me, Jeanie. I’m in foul mood. And now, for God’s sake, don’t say ‘That’s all right’ again.”
It had been easier to say nothing. He was too full of his own defeat. Too far into the blindness of self-pity. She wondered how and why he had lost his resilience, the core of his courage. Or had he been without it from the beginning — and she had simply not known it because this was the first time it had been tested?
She had felt shocked and ashamed of her own disloyalty. Hal had certainly not given up readily. He had maintained his spirits for a long time, even after he had undertaken the exhausting manual labor in the warehouse. Yet when he had given up, when he had wept, he had given up all the way, unlocking all the gates and surrendering all the turrets. She sensed that the collapse was related to his family, to his background. Defeat, to Hal, was the unthinkable thing — the thing that could not have happened.
As they had neared the blocked road, she had been wondering how much better it would have been for him had he not had the burden of wife, two children, and new child to come. Perhaps in his curtness and irritability there was a flavoring of resentment.
The policeman had explained about the detour when they had stopped behind the blue Cadillac. Stevie and Jan had begun to get a whining note in their voices during the boring wait, and she knew they were getting hungry. She had given them the box of fig newtons from the glove compartment with severe injunction to share fairly.
At last they were permitted to go ahead in cautious convoy. It was a primitive road that moved in aimless curves across scrub flats and then dipped toward heavier trees, crossed a precarious wooden bridge, passed a house set in a grove of big trees, a house that looked gloomy and brooding in the strange light. Hal had stopped when the Cadillac stopped, and they had looked ahead and seen the big tree down and the ruin of the second bridge.
During the next fifteen minutes, during the time they had backed and turned around, and found the other bridge impassable — during the episode of the car’s going into the river, the rescue, the moving of the remaining cars close to the house — Jean Dorn had lost her own fears as she had witnessed the transformation of Hal.
At first he had seemed annoyed, bleak, passive — as though he considered this as just another black weight added to the scales that had tilted so radically against him. And then the change had come. She had seen it come, and it had made her heart glad. She knew that he had forgotten himself and his own private problems. With forgetfulness had returned the habit of decision and command. His expression was changed. More alert, more intent. His posture was different. He moved and walked with a briskness. During that time he was not a defeated man.
It was Hal who moved quickly to help get the half-drowned man out of the river, beckoning to the husky blond man to help him. It was Hal who calmly surveyed the swollen river and turned and looked at the house and then, over the wind sound, called to all of them to get the cars close to the house. The others had accepted his decision without question, willing in emergency to respond to orders that made sense and were given in the proper tone by someone who worked hard along with them. Hal had organized the carrying-in of the luggage from the cars and had requested that all blankets, robes, heavy coats be brought into the house. And, somehow, while the work was going on, while they were settling in, he had not only managed to make them all known to each other, but he had created among them the feeling of being a group working wisely and well toward a common end.