"I (kik) got hose!" cried Rusper.
He had. He had a stock of several thousand feet of garden hose, of
various qualities and calibres, and now he felt was the time to use
it. In another moment his shop door was open and he was hurling pails,
garden syringes, and rolls of garden hose out upon the pavement.
"(Kik)," he cried, "undo it!" to the gathering crowd in the roadway.
They did. Presently a hundred ready hands were unrolling and spreading
and tangling up and twisting and hopelessly involving Mr. Rusper's
stock of hose, sustained by an unquenchable assurance that presently
it would in some manner contain and convey water, and Mr. Rusper, on
his knees, (kiking) violently, became incredibly busy with wire and
brass junctions and all sorts of mysteries.
"Fix it to the (kik) bathroom tap!" said Mr. Rusper.
Next door to the fire station was Mantell and Throbson's, the little
Fishbourne branch of that celebrated firm, and Mr. Boomer, seeking in
a teeming mind for a plan of action, had determined to save this
building. "Someone telephone to the Port Burdock and Hampstead-on-Sea
fire brigades," he cried to the crowd and then to his fellows: "Cut
away the woodwork of the fire station!" and so led the way into the
blaze with a whirling hatchet that effected wonders in no time in
ventilation.
But it was not, after all, such a bad idea of his. Mantell and
Throbsons was separated from the fire station in front by a covered
glass passage, and at the back the roof of a big outhouse sloped down
to the fire station leads. The sturdy 'longshoremen, who made up the
bulk of the fire brigade, assailed the glass roof of the passage with
extraordinary gusto, and made a smashing of glass that drowned for a
time the rising uproar of the flames.
A number of willing volunteers started off to the new telephone office
in obedience to Mr. Boomer's request, only to be told with cold
official politeness by the young lady at the exchange that all that
had been done on her own initiative ten minutes ago. She parleyed with
these heated enthusiasts for a space, and then returned to the window.
And indeed the spectacle was well worth looking at. The dusk was
falling, and the flames were showing brilliantly at half a dozen
points. The Royal Fishbourne Hotel Tap, which adjoined Mr. Polly to
the west, was being kept wet by the enthusiastic efforts of a string
of volunteers with buckets of water, and above at a bathroom window
the little German waiter was busy with the garden hose. But Mr.
Polly's establishment looked more like a house afire than most houses
on fire contrive to look from start to finish. Every window showed
eager flickering flames, and flames like serpents' tongues were
licking out of three large holes in the roof, which was already
beginning to fall in. Behind, larger and abundantly spark-shot gusts
of fire rose from the fodder that was now getting alight in the Royal
Fishbourne Hotel stables. Next door to Mr. Polly, Mr. Rumbold's house
was disgorging black smoke from the gratings that protected its
underground windows, and smoke and occasional shivers of flame were
also coming out of its first-floor windows. The fire station was
better alight at the back than in front, and its woodwork burnt pretty
briskly with peculiar greenish flickerings, and a pungent flavour. In
the street an inaggressively disorderly crowd clambered over the
rescued fire escape and resisted the attempts of the three local
constables to get it away from the danger of Mr. Polly's tottering
façade, a cluster of busy forms danced and shouted and advised on the
noisy and smashing attempt to cut off Mantell and Throbson's from the
fire station that was still in ineffectual progress. Further a number
of people appeared to be destroying interminable red and grey snakes
under the heated direction of Mr. Rusper; it was as if the High Street
had a plague of worms, and beyond again the more timid and less active
crowded in front of an accumulation of arrested traffic. Most of the
men were in Sabbatical black, and this and the white and starched
quality of the women and children in their best clothes gave a note of
ceremony to the whole affair.
For a moment the attention of the telephone clerk was held by the
activities of Mr. Tashingford, the chemist, who, regardless of
everyone else, was rushing across the road hurling fire grenades into
the fire station and running back for more, and then her eyes lifted
to the slanting outhouse roof that went up to a ridge behind the
parapet of Mantell and Throbson's. An expression of incredulity came
into the telephone operator's eyes and gave place to hard activity.
She flung up the window and screamed out: "Two people on the roof up
there! Two people on the roof!"