It was like Harry Chalender to wear dancing pumps to a fire on a
midwinter night.
“Harry will have ’em on Judgment Day,” said one of the other members of
the fire company, and they laughed at him through chattering teeth.
This did not amuse RoBards. He wanted to hate Chalender; but justice
was his foible, and he had to confess to his own prejudice that, while
it was Chalenderish to appear in pumps at a fire, it was equally like
him to be absent from no heroic occasion no matter what his garb.
Harry played the fool, perhaps, but he was always at King Lear’s side.
And though he never forgot his bauble, it tinkled and grinned wherever
there was drama.
And there promised to be drama enough this night.
The gathering volunteers flung back the folding doors and disclosed the
engine, a monster asleep and gleaming as with phosphorescent scales in
the light of the brass and silver trimmings polished often and piously.
A light was struck with a tinder-box and the signal lantern and torches
brightened the room.
The Fire King Engine Company had been proud of its tamed leviathan,
though there had been some criticism because on one side of the engine
an allegorical figure of Hope had been painted with almost no clothes
on her. But New York was advancing artistically with giant strides, and
a painting of a semi-nude Adam and Eve had been exhibited that summer
without provoking anything more violent than protest. Also, the Greek
casts were displayed nowadays without interference, though of course
ladies did not visit them at the same time with gentlemen.
But Heaven rebuked the ruthless allegory of Hope before this night was
over; and with the ruination of Hope went the beautiful scene on the
opposite flank of the engine, a painting of the recent burning of the
Roman Catholic Church in Nassau Street. The Fire Kings had played a
noble part there, and had almost saved the church.
Now, as they dashed into the street they were thrown into a tangle to
avoid the rush of the Naiad Hose Company swooping past with a gaudy
carriage, whose front panel presented the burning of Troy and the death
of Achilles, while the back panel showed an Indian maid parting from
her lover. The hosemen might have been Indians themselves from the wild
yell they gave.
There was no time for the usual gay dispute over the right of way, and
the cobblestones and brickbats with which the road would have been
normally challenged were frozen in the ice. Besides, the Fire Kings
were sparse in numbers.
Such Fire Kings as braved the elements would long tell of the
catastrophe. Getting to the neighborhood of the blaze was adventure
enough of itself. For the road was grooved with the tracks of sleigh
runners and chopped up with a confusion of hoof-marks impressed
in knife-edged ridges. The men inside the square of the draw-rope
alternately slipped, sliddered, fell, rose, stumbled, sprawled, and
ran on with wrenched joints and torn pantaloons. Their progress made
a sharp music as if they were trampling through a river of crackling
glass.
But they ran on because there was tonic in the community of misery.
RoBards was touched by the sight of Chalender’s lean face above the
satin stock and the frilled white shirt. The others were in red
flannel, and cold enough. Chalender’s great beaver hat was a further
trial to keep on, and finally the wind swirled it out of sight
and seeking. RoBards bared his own head and offered Chalender his
brass-bound helmet of glazed leather, but Chalender declined it with a
graceful gesture and a chill smile drawn painfully along the line of
his white mouth. The only color in his cheeks was imposed by the ruddy
flare of the sky.
The fire, wherever it was, seemed to retreat as the company advanced.
It grew in vastitude, too. The scarlet heavens were tormented with
yellow writhings, as if Niagara were falling upwards in a mist of smoke
and a spume of red spray.
Chalender’s patent leather pumps were soon cut through and his nimble
feet left bloody traces on the snow. This offended RoBards somehow.
Footprints on the snow were the sacred glory of the patriot troops at
Valley Forge. What right had a fop like Chalender to such martyrdom?
When the puffing Fire Kings covered the long half-mile to City Hall
Park, the fire was just as far away as ever.
From here on the way was clogged with engines and hose carts plunging
south and fighting through a tide of flight to the north. RoBards was
reminded of the retreat from the cholera, until a wrangle for priority
with a rival company engaged his thoughts, his fists, and his voice.
Wagons of every sort toppling over with goods of every sort locked
wheels while their drivers fought duels with whips and curses.
Merchants who had gone early to bed were scampering half-clad to
open their shops and rescue what they might. Everywhere they haggled
frantically for the hire or the purchase of carts. Two hundred dollars
was offered in vain for an hour’s use of a dray that would not have
brought so much outright that afternoon, with its team thrown in.
The commercial heart of the city was spurting flames, and the shop
in Merchant Street where the volcano first erupted had spread its
lava in circles. Everything was burning but the frozen river, and
ice-imprisoned shipping was ablaze at the docks. Whole warehouses were
emptied and their stores carried to apparent safety as far as Wall
Street, where they were heaped up in the shadow of the cupola of the
new Merchants’ Exchange.
Certain shopkeepers of pious mind shifted their wealth into the Dutch
Reformed Church for safety. In the deeps of its gloom some invisible
musician was playing on the big pipe-organ. The merchants lugging in
their burdens felt that he interceded for them harmoniously against
the din of the fiends whose fires danced on the windows, as if they
reveled in the sacrilege of attacking the temples of both Mammon and
Jehovah. First the fiends made a joke of the costly pretence that the
Merchants’ Exchange was fireproof. Then they leaped across a graveyard
to seize the church and sent Maypole ribbons twirling around and around
its high spire. In half an hour the steeple buckled and plunged through
its own roof, and the roof followed it, covering organ, pulpit, pews,
and merchandise.
Pearl Street, whose luxurious shops had made lower Broadway a
second-rate bazaar, was sinking into rubble. Copper roofs were melting
and red icicles dripped ingots on the street.
The Fire Kings pushed on, with ardor dwindling as the magnificence
of their task was revealed to them. They were scant of breath and
footsore and cold, and their helmets rattled with flying embers. Embers
were streaming across the river to Brooklyn and the people there sat
on their roofs and wondered if their town must follow New York to
destruction. On all the roofs in New York, too, shadowy bevies fought
off the embers and flung them into the street.
The fire companies were driven back in all directions. They felt as
tiny and futile as apes fumbling and chittering against a forest blaze.
By and by the bells ceased to ring. The tollers were too cold to pull
the ropes—and what was the use of going on alarming those who were
already in a panic? Yet the silence had an awe of doom in it.
Merchants and their women cursed and wept, and tears smeared smoky
faces. It was maddening to be so useless; firemen sobbed blasphemies
as soldiers did when wet powder rendered them ridiculous and mocked
their heroism. Their nostrils smarted with the acrid stench from
bubbling paint and varnish, from mountains of chewing tobacco, cigars,
and snuff, from thousands of shoes and boots and hats and household
furnishings. Miles of silk and wool and cotton, woven and prettily
designed, were all rags now that smoldered, or flew on the wind like
singed birds, awkward ravens frightened out of some old rookery.
Stage coaches and busses were caught in the lanes and consumed. The
shops of the jewelers crumpled and broke inwardly as well as the hovels
of the carpenters. Diamonds and rubies, emeralds, chains of fine gold,
and cunning devices in frosted silver were fused and jumbled among
black piles of rubbish.
Numberless casks of liquor blew up and shot curiously tinged sheets
of fire through the wallowing flames. Thieves rifled liquor stores,
and drunken wastrels, hilarious or truculent, reeled about as if an
insane asylum had opened its gates. These wretches had to be saved from
themselves, and they added a new terror to the reign of terror. Every
distress and mockery imaginable seemed to combine to make the night
maudlin, an infamous burlesque.
As a part of the night’s irony the firemen were blistered by both fire
and frost. While cold gales bit their necks and backs, and the wet
streets congealed their feet to mere hobbles, the blast from the flames
blistered their cheeks.
Everywhere the pavements squirmed with black snakes of hose, limp
and empty; for the hydrants were frozen, the cisterns sucked dry. In
the face of such fire, little new fires had to be started around the
hydrants to thaw them out, but when the water came it turned to ice in
the hose as the chilled engines refused to work.
It was madness to stand and wait in imbecile palsy while the holocaust
flourished.
“Water! water! in God’s name where can we get water!” the men shrieked
at one another.
Finally Harry Chalender seized a trumpet and bawled through it:
“To the wharf!”
The Fire Kings and the Naiad Hose Company ran to their places and
hurried down the nearest street to the nearest dock. The hose flopped
on ice, for the ice above had dammed the current and the water was not
only low but frozen.
RoBards seized an axe and clambered down a slimy pile toward the
surface. He smote at the ice and split it. Black water leapt at him and
he felt hands clutching his ankles to drag him under.
It was ungodly lonely down there in the dark and he was afraid to stay.
But when he would climb up again, the slippery log refused its aid.
Clinging to the cold ooze about the pile and watching the river smack
its lips and wait, he felt death hideously near. He yelled for help
again and again. At last a bare head was thrust out above, a hand was
reached down to him. He knew by its soiled white glove that it was
Chalender’s hand, but he seized it and was drawn up from the solitude
of the muttering waters to the glare of the upper world. The cinders
rained upon his white face now as if they were shoveled at him.
He ran to join the men at the engine, gripping the long pump handles
and working them up and down. It was good to be at work at something.
“Jump her, boys, jump her!” they cried, and heaved and grunted, hoisted
and squatted in alternate effort.
But only a little water came. It hardly swelled the hose. The engine
choked. Before it was put in order the hose was stopped with a mush
of freezing water. They built a fire from the too abundant fuel, and
stretched the hose over it like a long snake being warmed.
As the taskless volunteers waited, twiddling their wintry thumbs and
stupidly regarding the dark building before them, the fire subtly
arrived in its eaves. Along the cornice it ran like an autumnal vine
of poison ivy reddening on a wall. Soon the roof was a miter of white
flame. The whole warehouse was a huge fireworks, a set piece like “the
Temple of the Union” that the city displayed at Vauxhall Gardens every
Fourth of July. It lacked only the 1776 in silver lace-work and the
stars of the twenty-six states.
Just as the set-piece frames would crack, this building became
wreckage. The top floor ripped free and took the next one with it to
crush a lower. Then with a drunken belch of crimson, the roof went up
and back and spewed flame in a giant’s vomit upon a store that had
been called fireproof. Its somber dignity was now a rabid _carmagnole_.
Stone and brick and steel grew as soft as osiers, bending and twisting.
Inside there were thuds of detonating barrels of spirits. The stout
walls billowed, broke outwards, spilling themselves across the street.
The Fire Kings fled with cries of terror, many of them battered to
their knees with missiles.
When they turned to look back from safety, their engine was buried in
the flaming barricade that had been a street.
Now the Fire Kings were idle indeed. As they loafed despondent, they
saw boats coming slowly across the river among the floes of ice. Newark
was sending firemen to the rescue. But what could they do? There was no
water.
The alarm was on its way to Philadelphia. The hills of Germantown,
indeed, flickered with the illumination a hundred miles away, while
swift riders and men in sleighs were carrying the news of the end of
New York to its old rival. Before sunset of the next day four hundred
Quakers would be setting out with their engines across the white roads.
When they arrived on the second day they would find the fire still
ravening and the fighters overwhelmed with fatigue and hopelessness.
Forty-five miles away on a steamboat from Albany returning New Yorkers
hung over the rail and wondered if Judgment Day had indeed been sounded
for the metropolis of the new world.
Deeply as he had abhorred the town, RoBards felt his heart ache for
it now. Pity turned to love, and it seemed abominable that the work
and the treasure and the destinies of so many poor people should be
annulled in this pure wantonness of destruction.
Odd, that a man should love or hate a city or a nation, or feel sorry
for a jumble of buildings or a stretch of land, a shore, or a hill. But
RoBards knew a sudden tenderness for New York. His heart suffered a
revulsion like that of the English soldiers, who wept for Joan of Arc
when she turned beautiful and pitiful as she blistered and browned in
the faggots they had heaped and lighted about her.
A little after midnight Harry Chalender at his elbow shouted aloud his
meditations:
“Only one thing can save this poor town—gunpowder! The Brooklyn Navy
Yard! There’s plenty of powder there!”