Читать книгу The Incendiary - William Augustine Leahy - Страница 4

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It was about half-past three in the afternoon when Bertha, the housemaid, came running down the steps, with a shrill cry of "Fire!" and fell plump into the arms of the bake-shop girl, who had seen the smoke curling from Prof. Arnold's window and was hastening across to warn the occupants of his house. The deep bark of a dog was heard within and presently Sire, the professor's old St. Bernard, rushed by the two young women and darted hither and thither, accosting the bystanders distractedly, as if burdened with a message he could not communicate.

"Ring the alarm!" cried Bertha and the bake-shop girl in a breath, as soon as they had recovered from the shock of their collision. Their cry was taken up by a knot of three boys, who, as usual, were the first on the spot; passed along till it reached some loungers on the corner, whose inertia was more gradually overcome; and presently half the neighborhood, as if by a spontaneous impulse, came thronging into Cazenove street, each following his leader, like a flock of startled ewes. Bertha, caught in the middle of this ring of sight-seers, stood paralyzed a moment; then singling out the one man of action, she broke through the crowd and stopped him midway in his advance.

"For the love of heaven, will you ring the alarm?"

The postman turned and scudded to the box. There was an interval of suspense that seemed an age.

"Is there any one in the house?" was the first question of Patrolman Chandler, when he galloped up to the scene. He had been attracted at once by the barking of Sire.

"Mr. Robert," cried Bertha, wringing her hands. "Mr. Robert was in the study." The crowd looked up and measured the swift gains of the destructive element.

"Young Floyd?" said Chandler. Then he rushed into the house and up the first flight of winding stairs, the dog, as he did so, following him with a great fusillade of delighted barks.

"There's some one inside," said the crowd, and the rumor passed from mouth to mouth.

"Fire! Fire!" called Chandler from the corridor window above. "Yell, you fellows, as you never yelled before!"

In response a cry of "Fire!" went up from man, woman and child, bass and treble intermingling, loud enough to have waked the seven sleepers from their trance. But no one stirred inside. Just at this moment the tardy bells rang out the number of the box, and almost immediately, as an engine came rounding a distant corner and the great gray horses bounded up the grade, the uproar began to subside. On, on, past the doomed house, now enveloped in flames, to the nearest hydrant, the driver lashed his pair. The hydrant cover had been thrown off and the first block of coal flung into the engine's furnace before Patrolman Chandler reissued from the door which he had entered.

"There is no one there," he gasped, as if choking with the smoke. But the dog continued to leap about, accosting the bystanders appealingly, until his barks and pawing became a nuisance to several and they spurned him pettishly away.

Now engines from many directions came clattering by and the air was full of clangor. Lines of hose were unraveled, ladders hoisted against the walls, and finally, amid hoarse shouts that pierced the deep sighing of the flames within, a rubber-clad, helmeted fellow, with a nozzle strapped to his body, slowly led a line up to the second-story window, where the fire had apparently started. There was another interval of suspense, orders to and fro, and then a helpless pause. Something refused to work.

But the fire met no such impediment. Suddenly an explosion of uncertain origin shook the air, and the onlookers retreated in terror, as if the ground were yawning beneath them. Of a sudden one, two, three slack, snaky hose lines rounded out, and a burst of foam, battering in window-panes and sashes, inaugurated the great combat of elements—one angry, vindictive, as if ravening to sunder the bonds of control cast about it by the pigmy, its master, the other docile and benignant, but in the end the more puissant of the two.

"Exactly nine minutes from the start before a drop of water fell on that fire," said the bake-shop girl, who was noted for her accurate observation of time. By the "start" she meant the moment when Bertha and she collided on the doorsteps, but the fire must have gained a strong headway before that. For every timber in the house was flaming now. The heat scorched the firemen's cheeks and made frightened children in the windows opposite turn away. All the neighbors were packing up their valuables, preparing for the worst. Singed and blinded, the firemen had been driven back down their ladders and compelled to fight from the street. At 3:40 the district chief ordered a second alarm rung in, and, as this was followed by another explosion, a third alarm immediately after. Amid a great clanging of bells, engine after engine, with drivers standing at the reins and firemen riding backward, drove up and sought out positions of vantage.

With the arrival of Chief Federhen their plan of attack seemed to assume a definite shape at once. The ding, ding, ding, of his light carriage, riding over distended and bedraggled hose, told the impatience of the man on the seat. A tall, gaunt figure, wrapped in a cloak, which he threw off as the excitement grew on him, he first turned his attention to the police and the crowd.

"We want room to do this work in," he cried in a loud voice, and the bluecoats began vigorously routing the onlookers back until the fire was to them like something seen through an inverted opera glass, and the sagging ropes nearly broke under the black weight of humanity which they fended off.

Federhen's practiced eye saw the doom of the dwelling-house. So he called off his engines and threw up ladders against the great mercantile buildings to leeward and in the rear. It was from one of these, presumably the fireworks-room of Schnitzler Bros., that the second explosion, scattered and prolonged like an enfilading volley of musketry, had come, and already a thatch of flame had run around under the projecting roof of the structure. Against this the fire tower was slowly brought into position and sloped over, its tip just topping the eaves, but the axes of the squad sent up failed to make any impression on the solid sheathing of the roof. When the tower ladder itself began to take fire, and a stream had to be played on it constantly, the order was given, none too early, "Come down!" and the firemen's first ambition, to get above the enemy, had to be abandoned for less efficacious measures. Fountain jets, rising from the street, and level streams from the roofs of the dwelling-houses opposite, did their ineffectual best to quench the red thirst of the triumphing element.

"This is glorious!"

"Tristram!"

The girl pulled a dolman over her shoulders, fear simulating cold, before the savage dance of the flames. Their carriage had passed through Broad street, in the rear of Cazenove, a few minutes before, and when the alarm sounded Tristram had ordered the coachman to turn and drive them back.

"Glorious, Rosalie!" he repeated, looking up at the red streamers and the swirling smoke.

"It was just here we met your friend, Harry Arnold," murmured Rosalie. "Did you notice he had only one glove on?"

"Glorious!" echoed her enraptured brother, as a section of the wall fell in, disclosing an oven view like the interior of a Bessemer blast furnace.

"See the horses pawing. The sparks will fall on them. Let us drive away."

"My palette!" was Tristram's answer. "Brush! Easel! Canvas! Oh, the lost chance of a lifetime!"

"Doesn't it make you shudder?"

"Certainly, my dear. That is the very deliciousness of it"

"But the danger!"

"Ah, you know I'm a perfect Bluebeard in the taste for horrors. I really envy Parrhasius his enjoyment in flaying the old slave—or did he flog him? But it's of no consequence which. He tortured him somehow, you remember, and chained him to a stake in his studio, so that he might paint Prometheus' writhings to the life."

But just here something happened which cut short his tirade of irony.

It was on the Broad street side of the Harmon building (such the great six-story structure was called), just where the Marches' coachman had halted their span, that the most pitiful incident of this memorable fire took place. By 4 o'clock everybody conceded that the Harmon building was lost. Occupied principally by dry-goods firms, whose light wares, spread over the counters, were like so much hay to the flames, it needed scarcely more than the touch of a match to convert it into smoke. At the sound of the second explosion hundreds of salesgirls and male employes had rushed to the exits, barely outstripping the fire. It was supposed that all had been warned and escaped, and only a signal shriek from the top story in the rear notified the beholders that human lives were in peril. Looking up, they saw at the windows a dozen girls and half as many youths huddling together with the blanched faces of deadly fear. Thick smoke was already curling up and enveloping them and reflections of the flames, like an aurora rising in the north, were visible behind. The cries they made could not be understood, but their gestures were dumbly eloquent.

"Jump!" came the cry from a hundred throats below. A teamster pulled the rubber covers off the Protective company's wagon. Firemen and policemen improvised nets of canvas, which they tore from the awnings near by and spread under the shrinking group. Two or three of the girls, who leaped for a telegraph pole on the outer edge of the sidewalk, almost miraculously succeeded in scrambling down. Others climbed out on the ledge and made as if to jump, but drew back from the awful plunge. The fire was upon them now, and one could weep to see the men, brave fellows, coaxing their timid companions to take the leap. One woman of coarser build ran along the dizzy ledge, which scarcely yielded footing for a sparrow, and sprang into the branches of a tree on the corner, her dress saving her at the cost of fearful laceration. Then a form came crashing down into the outspread nets, another and another, without pause, without certainty of aim. Two struck the sidewalk and were carried off shapeless and silent. One young girl's fall was broken by a policeman's brawny arms—no other than Patrolman Chandler. She picked herself up laughing, only to faint away, while her rescuer was borne off groaning. It was all over soon—a tragedy of five minutes—but those who witnessed it felt as if their hearts had been standing still for a century.

"Let us drive away," said Rosalie, a sickness seizing her.

"Yes," answered Tristram; "the people are beginning to stare at you." His sensitive lips were pale and he shut his eyes lest their film of pity should be seen. It was true, some of the bystanders had pointed out his companion to one another as Rosalie March. The face of this beautiful girl had become familiar since Manager Mapletree the season before had persuaded her to come out from the privacy of her home and assume two or three roles in his revival of Shakespeare's comedies. Perhaps they wondered who the gentleman beside her might be. Brother and sister bore each other little specific resemblance.

"What's that carriage halting here for? Do you think this is a procession? Pass on!" cried Federhen to the coachman, who whipped up his horses in a hurry. The police had not yet got around to this side of the block, but the fire chief seemed at all times to be where the crisis was. At a word from him ambulances arose from the very ground and the dead and injured were carried off to the hospital. His straggly gray beard confronted the fire-fighters everywhere, goading on the laggards, cheering the valiant. Indomitable, tireless, he sent them again and again at the ruined shell, drowning the neighboring dwelling-houses meanwhile in a flood of water. The calm air favored him. People said "him," for somehow the forces of salvation seemed to be embodied and centralized in one implacable form. But the wind created by the fire was carrying sparks and brands to a distance of half a mile. The awed spectators winced and scattered at these hot showers. It was still a speculation where the holocaust would end.

If the Southern depot caught, then the whole Bay quarter, a warren of tinder-box tenements, swarming densely with poor tenants, was in peril. To save the depot was to win the day. But special editions of the newspapers, appearing at 5 o'clock, were only able to announce, under half-column scare-heads, that the result was still in doubt; and when twilight came it was not the sunset glow (for a storm was gathering in the overcast sky) which burnished the factory windows across the harbor till they shone like plates of gold.