After a time Adelle became confusedly conscious of some disturbance
around her. She thought at first that it must be Archie noisily entering
the neighboring chamber. But soon she heard loud cries and sat upright,
listening. Then she became aware of a thick, suffocating atmosphere and
the acrid taste of smoke in her mouth. The electric light would not
respond to her touch. She knew what it meant--Fire! With one bound she
leaped from her bed and ran, just as she was in nightdress, for the hall
from which the large staircase led up to the upper story--the only
approach to her child's rooms from this end of the house. The staircase
was a bank of roaring flame and the hall itself was vividly streaked
with dashes of eating flame. She rushed chokingly straight for the
blazing staircase and would have died in the fire had not one of the
servants caught her in time and dragged her back outside through the
open door. She quickly slipped through the man's grasp, and without
uttering a cry started around the house for the servants' entrance.
Archie came stumbling into the light, half dressed in his evening
clothes, struggling to put an arm into one of the sleeves of his coat.
She cried,--
"The boy--the boy--save him!"
One glance at Archie's nerveless, vacant face was enough. There was no
help to be had in him!
"Dell--where is he?" Archie called, still fumbling for the lost sleeve.
But she had disappeared.
At the servants' door some men were pounding and shouting. The door was
locked and bolted and stood fast. Adelle threw herself against it,
pounding with her fists; then, as if divining its unyielding strength,
she sped on around the corner of the house to the open terrace. There a
number of the servants and helpers on the estate were running to and fro
shouting and calling for help. Already the fire gleamed through the
house from the front and the wind lifted great plumes of flame against
the dark hillside, painting the tall eucalyptus trees fantastically. The
fire, starting evidently in the central part of the house which
contained the drawing-room, had shot first up the broad staircase and
was now eating its way through the second floor and reaching across to
the farther wing that hung directly above the canon. More and more
persons arrived while Adelle ran up and down the terrace, like a hunted
animal, moaning--"Boy! Boy!" There was talk of ladders, which had been
left by the workmen at the garage half a mile away. Before these could
be got or the hose attached to the fireplugs, the flame had swirled out
from the lonely wing where the child and his nurse slept. Even if the
ladders came, they would be of no use over the deep pit of the canon,
and the center of the house was now a roaring furnace. Adelle clung to
the rough rock of her great wall--the supporting wall to this part of
her house--the wall she had watched with such interest, such admiration
for its size and strength. It reached away from her slight, white figure
down into the gloom of the canon, and upon it rested the burning house.
While she clung there dry-eyed, moaning, she was conscious of Archie's
attempt to pull her back. He was the same bewildered figure, collarless,
in evening clothes--the same feeble, useless man, failing her at this
crisis as always. She shook off his touch with repugnance and crouched
close to the wall, as near as she could get to her child.
Then there passed a few of those terrible moments that are as nothing
and as a lifetime crowded with agony to the human being. The wind poured
noisily through the canon, bending before its blast the swaying trees,
but even louder than the wind was the roar of the conquering fire that
now illuminated all the hillside like day and revealed the little
figures of impotent men and women, who ran this way and that confusedly,
helplessly, crying and shouting. The center of the great house was a
solid pillar of flame, and the fire was eating its way on either side
into the wings. The wing where the child slept rose from the canon like
a walled castle, impregnable--Adelle might remember that "Boy" had
chosen these rooms in the remote corner of the house, fascinated by
their lofty perch over the deep canon. And there, at the bottom of the
wall that she had built, the mother clung, helpless, beyond reach of her
child.
A man ran out on the parapet of the terrace past Adelle. He stopped
where the parapet touched the sheer wall of the building, looked up at
the burning house which cast out great waves of heat, knocked off his
shoes, threw down his coat, and dove as it seemed into space. She knew
it was Clark, the stone mason. People crowded around Adelle and leaned
over the parapet to see what had become of him. They shouted--"See him!
There! There!"--pointing, as the wreaths of smoke rose and revealed the
man's dark figure clinging to the wall, creeping forward, walking, as it
were, on nothing in space. With fingers and toes he stuck himself like a
leech to the broken surfaces of the rock wall, feeling for the cracks
and crannies, the stone edgings, the little pockets in the masonry that
he himself had laid. He climbed upwards in a zigzag, slowly, steadily,
groping above his head for the next clutch, clinging, crawling like a
spider over the surface of sheer rock. As he rose foot by foot he became
clearly visible in the red light of the flames, a dark shadow stretched
against the blank surface above the gulf. The Scotch foreman said,--
"He's crazy--he can't skin that wall!"
Adelle knew that he was speaking of the stone mason; she knew that Clark
was daring the impossible to get at her child, to save her "Boy." She
felt in every fiber of her body the strain of that feat--the clinging,
creeping progress up the perpendicular wall over the canon. Those around
groaned as they watched, expecting each moment to see the man's body
fall backwards sickeningly into space.
But he stuck to the wall as if part of it, his arms widespread, his
fingers feeling every inch for hold, and now he was mounting faster as
if sure of himself, confident that he could cling. If he could keep hold
until his hand touched the first row of window-sills, he had a chance. A
long red arm reached up; groped painfully; the finger-tips touched the
end of a blind. There was dead silence except for the roar of the
wind-driven fire while the mason pawed along the window-sill for safe
lodgment; then--"He's caught it!"
A shout went up, and while her breath seemed to choke her, Adelle saw
the man in the glare of the flame pull himself up, inch by inch, until
his head was level with the glass, butt his head against the heavy pane,
and with a final heave disappear within while a black smudge of smoke
poured from the vent he had made.
A long, silent, agonizing emptiness while he was gone, and he was back
at the window, standing large and bloody in the light, his arms about
the figure of the nurse, who had evidently fainted. Adelle felt one
sharp pang of agony;--"Why had he taken her, not the child?" But her
soul rejected this selfish thought;--"He knows," she said, "he knows--he
must save her first!"
Clark had tied the sheets under the woman's shoulders, and holding the
weight of the body with one hand, he crept lightly from one window ledge
to the next until he came within reach of the terrace, then swung the
woman and cast her loose. She fell in a heap beside Adelle. They said
she was living.
Already the mason had groped his way back along the sills to the open
window and disappeared. When he reappeared he had the small boy in his
arms, evidently asleep or unconscious, for he lay a crumpled little
bundle against the mason's breast. This time Clark continued his course
along the sills until he reached a gutter, clinging with one hand,
holding his burden tight with the other. It was a feat almost harder
than the skinning of the naked wall. When he dropped the last ten feet
to the ground cries rose from the little group below. It was the
unconscious recognition of an achievement that not one man in ten
thousand was capable of, a combination of courage, skill, and perfect
nerve which let him walk safely above the abyss across the perpendicular
wall. It was more than human,--the projection of man's will in reckless
daring that defies the physical world.
Adelle always remembered receiving the child, who was still sleeping,
she thought, from the mason's arms. Clark was breathing hard, and his
face was slit across by a splinter from the window-pane. He was a
terrible, ghastly figure. The blood ran down his bare arms and dripped
on the white bundle he gave her.... Then she remembered no more until
she was in a bare, cold room--the place that was to have been the
orangery, where they kept the garden tools. She was kneeling, still
holding in her arms her precious bundle, calling coaxingly,--"Boy, wake
up! Boy, it's mother! Boy, how can you sleep like that!" calling softly,
piteously, moaningly, until she knew that her child could never answer
her. He had been smothered by the smoke before the mason reached him.
Then Adelle knew nothing more of that night and its horrors.