The morning broke upon a sight almost beyond imagination. Through the
darkness none had been able or had cared to see the city save in
fragmentary glimpses, caught by the fierce light that flared and fell.
Now, in the gray dawn, the city as a whole appeared beneath a smoky
cowl, looking mightier and more austere than ever under the shadow of
this dreadful visitation. All sectional sights aforetime had been of
single streets, of squares, of stray purlieus--but now appeared the
wide, sweeping stretch of the myriad roofs, the sturdy strength of
brick and steel, the compelling magnitude and silent, massive power of
the whole.
In the north, where all was safe, the sky was fairly clear; but where
the fire took its way the smoke haze hung grim and close. From the
east the scene was a striking one. Along the water front of Fort Point
Channel were the buildings gray and red; down Summer Street, which lay
like a canyon between walls of brick and stone, white steam and smoke
rode in a seething mist, lighted at odd times and places by keen
flashes of crude red fire; over the roofs wavered more steam and smoke,
floating in some places like level banners which flapped in the wind,
while in others it seemed to wrap itself in dirty folds about some
skeleton of what had yesterday been a building. At various points, and
suggested by the premonitory roar of dynamite, rose black, sinister
columns of the densest smoke mingled with the dust of shattered
buildings, like the pictured outburst of some volcanic crater; and
through and behind and implicitly within all this the Fire moved upon
its way.
It was about half-past seven in the morning when it was seen that all
efforts to check the flames at Summer Street had failed. Along the
north side of that thoroughfare lay the tumbled ruins of the dynamited
buildings, destroyed in a hopeless hope, for the remedy had been too
homeopathic and the disease too swift. Indeed, it almost seemed as
though the razing of these structures had merely made more easy the
progress of that river of unconsumed gases and air which the steady
wind drove undeviatingly forward upon the windows and the roofs which
the conflagration had not yet reached. It was very much as though this
flood of invisible heat and destruction contained the sharp-shooters
before an army's van; it was like the cavalcade that rode before a
Roman Emperor's triumph two thousand years ago; like the flight of
arrows which preceded the thunderous charge of English heavy soldiery
on Continental battle grounds.
In the little triangle between three streets just west of Dewey Square
stood a solidly built, compact group of five- and six-story structures,
one of them of fire-proof construction. This triangle, by a vagary,
now proved to be a crucial point. If this could be saved, probably so
also could the whole block to the south of Summer Street; but if it
could not, then that block too was doomed, and there was grave danger
beside lest the district east of Federal Street be also involved. So
on this precious spot the combined forces of defense concentrated. In
Fort Point Channel four fireboats gave their powerful pumps to aid the
engines; the firemen, hanging close to their work, sent stream after
stream of water against the attacking flame.
It was in vain. After the most desperate endeavors, this little group
went to join the rest, the only fruit of victory being that Federal
Street found itself the eastern barrier, the fire north of Summer
Street having been checked at that point. Small triumph that! for the
buildings west of Dewey Square were now thoroughly ablaze--and the
South Station was in danger.
In the open space known as Dewey Square, which is really nothing but
the momentary widening of Atlantic Avenue at its intersection with
Summer, the elevated railroad has its tracks. These, raised some
twenty feet above the street, extend north and south along the western
face of the South Station; there is a station at Essex Street, with
stairways leading into the great depot itself. It was this elevated
structure which now proved to be the compelling menace.
Suddenly, in what manner it could not be said, there was seen to be a
serpent of flame swiftly stealing along the Elevated's track. A tiny
frill of fire, under a feathery cloud of smoke, ran down the wooden
ties; sharp crackling sounds were heard; and a moment later the frame
roof of the raised depot burst into light. One would hardly have
thought that there was here sufficient fuel to jeopardize greatly the
stout stone walls of the South Station itself; even to the firemen,
skilled in such matters, risking their heads to drench those walls with
water from a dozen lines of hose, the hazard, while grave, seemed far
from hopeless. But this was not a day of reason nor of precedents. As
the clock in the great facade showed five minutes before nine, the
western eaves of the South Station caught.
In this building, which is one of the busiest of the world's terminals,
was little inflammable material save that which was movable. The
structure was built almost entirely of brick and stone and steel. Much
of the steel work, to be sure, was not so protected as to render it
fireproof; yet in the building there would ordinarily have been scant
fuel for an ordinary fire. But this was not an ordinary fire. Along
the western side of the structure, where were baggage rooms, offices,
and the like, this irreverent intruder found congenial occupation. In
not more than twenty minutes this entire side of the Station was
ablaze, and the flames had begun to eat their way upward to the vast
iron roof of the train shed, which hung in a tremendous arch some
eighty feet above the base of rail. Stretching north and south down
the full length of this mighty shed stood at the summit of the arch a
raised lantern, or texas. Supporting the weight of this roof, wide
spans of steel branched, curving upward from the walls at east and
west--and it was one of these walls whose integrity was now so bitterly
beset.
A great fire makes its own fuel; it finds food where no food seems to
be; stone walls crumble like sugar before it; it devours iron like dry
wood, and plays wild pranks with steel. To its grisly power and its
reckless humor the Station was now to bear witness.
The west wall had begun to crumble, and cracked and spalled by the
intense heat, not alone of the direct fire, but also by radiation from
the burning risks to westward, the stone was giving way. Down part of
its length, where the cross walls came, it stood stoutly; but elsewhere
it began gradually to weaken. Here and there a doorway broke into what
might have been a solid section; in one or two cases arches crumbled;
in many others inside walls or beams or stairways, falling, carried
down with them another modicum of the long wall's resistive power.
Atlantic Avenue near the station was now untenable, and the fire
fighters were divided. Part of them were north, but most of them were
south of this latest scene in the play. The disaster here had done
more than any other single occurrence in the progress of the
conflagration to demoralize the department and spread dismay in its
ranks. It may have been the fact that this great building had been
held to be safe beyond a doubt; it may have been merely that these men
had for nearly twelve hours been achieving and repeating the
impossible, the heroic, and that this last blow had been more than they
could bear. Their faces were gray beneath the smoke and grime, their
eyes stung and smarted almost unendurably from the heat and smoke and
their long vigil; and now for the first time since this whirling
maelstrom had engulfed them, they were finding the opportunity to
realize that human endurance is not supernal.
There was another reason why they realized this now, and that was that
the bitterness of this last defeat had, for the moment, broken their
hearts. So long as they had fought with a gambler's chance, with the
barest hope of success, it was easy to forget they were hungry, were
weary unto death, were human at all. But under the numbing stroke of
this last setback, they suddenly felt all these things.
The most heart-breaking thing, perhaps, in human experience is
impotence in the face of trying need. A man can stand well enough the
ordinary vicissitudes of life; but to be confronted with an exigency
that finds and leaves him utterly helpless is enough to crush the
bravest spirit. The Irish soldiery that four times tried to scale
Marye's Heights, which were not for scaling by any mortal men, felt
this bitterness, and the mere memory of them preserves the image for
the world. It is this same feeling that makes the injured football
player cry like a child after he is recalled to the sidelines, and that
makes a man in the grip of an undertow give up and sink. It is because
they are called upon to combat forces against which their mightiest
muscular efforts are as futile as the flirting of a fan in jeweled
fingers.
Nowhere is this more terribly felt than by men facing a great fire; for
here not only have they to deal with a power out of all proportion to
humanity, but they confront a power perverse, saturnine, malignant,
diabolic. A conflagration is wantonly cruel; not content with the
simple panoply of its might, it summons to its aid the evil whims of an
enraged elephant. It plays, like a kitten, with hope before it crushes
and kills it. The spectacle of a building soaked and saturated in
water from the nozzles of a score of hose lines, with the flames driven
back from it by the sustained heroisms of a hundred men--and then the
spectacle of that building leaping suddenly into light in not one but a
dozen places--this is a thing no man can endure, if many times
repeated, and this is what these men had been enduring for ten hours.
They had done all that men could do--more than men could do--and it was
not enough. At that moment all they wanted in the world was the
privilege of lying down, never to rise.
Long hours before, shortly after midnight, when it had become certain
that help would be needed, the wires had carried to the nearby cities
Boston's appeal for aid. As far as Portland and Worcester and
Providence the call had then gone forth; and later on the urgent word
had been flashed to Springfield, Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, and
New York. The New England cities had loyally responded; their engines
and their men were even now scattered along the battle line and doing
brave service. But these weary men by the South Station had not seen
them; they found it almost impossible to believe that they were not
alone and without aid in this titanic but hopeless task. Help might
have come, their aching brains reflected--but not to them. For them
there had been no help in sea or sky. Gathered together in the yards
below the station, they silently watched it burn.
Of a sudden there came a lurch, a swift sagging of the arch supports at
the western face of the arches; the roof quivered a little, then was
still. It could now, from the open end, be seen that the supports in
several places were wrenched loose from the wall; the steel spans hung
free in air, while white smoke lifted unceasingly toward the summit of
the vast shed. On the tracks the cars were burning briskly. Presently
it could also be seen that the south end of the roof was bending of its
own weight. It bent first just a little--then more. Then for a long
moment it hung motionless, or with but the faintest quiver of
vibration. Then, out of the sightless cavern came the screeching sound
of metal scraping upon metal--a wild sound, like the torture of some
inarticulate thing; a dull, grinding noise followed, and at last, out
of the steaming furnace which the lower part of the train shed was now
become, came the dull roar of some great weight falling.
With a crack like that of a gigantic express rifle the western end of
the great roof arches pitched down to earth; weakened at the angle,
loosened from their laterals, the big roof spans lurched heavily
downward. A thrill seemed to run through the whole structure; the
roof, strained now to an impossible angle, hung breathless above the
abyss. Then slowly, almost in majesty, but with a sound like the
crashing fall of a giant tree, the great arch tottered and fell.
On the tracks beneath the shed the cars which there had been no time to
remove continued to burn cheerfully, in no wise dismayed by this
terrible descent. And far out in the yards, blocked by a mass of
salvaged rolling stock, stood a panting Mogul locomotive which had
traveled the last fifty miles in something less than fifty minutes, and
behind it lay the special train of the New York City Fire Department.
Were it not for the preponderance of the trivial in the affairs of
life, all women and nearly all men would believe in Fate. This is
borne out by the evidence of great men, who are fatalists one and
all--or who were so until these modern, ultrapsychologic days in which
overthinking is held to be so dangerously near a vice. Those persons
now whose ears are close laid to the breathing of the world all believe
in Fate. Not negatively, not foolishly, not in the manner which sets
forth that what will be, will be, and any opposing effort is therefore
futile; but in the way of the true philosopher, of the man who can look
upon the ruin or the loss of all that he held dear, and realize that
what is to him a tragedy must, in some light cruelly hidden from him,
be conserving some higher, some more inscrutable end.
This is the better fatalism; and the closer one approaches the
primitive realities, the nearer this kind of fatalism he comes.
Looking on the naked face of life or the crude fact of death, it is
obvious to all save the most frivolous that these things were meant to
be so. As the Aryan saying has it, looking forward there are a dozen
ways, looking backward on the way each man has traveled, there is but
one. Crude tragedy carries with it its own conviction of
predestination. It would be absurd to suggest that Togral Beg killed
thirteen million people by accident or by an extraordinary succession
of chances. Admit there is such an element as chance, and between it
and Fate is room for a thousand doubts. It is natural enough for men
who deal with the tiny, circling ball of a roulette wheel or with the
turn of playing cards to deny any power higher than chance; but how of
Napoleon, dicing for empires without end?--and how of Columbus, sailing
indomitably westward into the wheel of the sun?--how of Shan Tung,
surveying the rotting corpses of seven times seven cities of Chinamen
slain by the Tartar sword?--and how of Boston, on this February
morning, looking white-faced on its own ruin, a ruin which,
furthermore, seemed scarcely begun? Whether Fate be Fate or not,
Boston believed in it that day.
Only one thing now tended to lift the gloom from the outlook, and this
was the fact that the fire seemed to have spread as far from east to
west as it was possible for it to do. The Common on the west, and on
the east side the Fort Point Channel, held its destructive sweep
apparently safe. To be sure, there was just the possibility that where
the Common ended, the corner of Tremont and Boylston might be turned
and the flames swing west once more; but this, in view of the lower
heights of buildings and the fact that the wind had now shifted and was
blowing toward the east rather than the west of south, seemed unlikely.
Moreover, the combined departments of Charlestown, Cambridge, Lynn, and
a dozen other places were massed along Tremont Street to prevent this
very thing. It was, however, a significant commentary on the
hopelessness of the situation when men could find comfort in the
reflection that a strip of city a half mile wide was alone exposed to
the direct path of destruction.
Smith had been in the lower yards of the South Station at the time the
train shed fell; he had waited only a short time after that, working
for a hot quarter hour to save some of the cars not yet exposed to the
shed fire. The method adopted was one suggested by a lieutenant of
militia from Braintree; his plan, since no locomotives were for the
moment available, was to fix bayonets, stick them in the woodwork of
the car sides, and then, forty men pushing at once, the car would be
rolled out of danger. Dozens of passenger coaches were saved in this
way. When the bulk of the close work here was done, the New Yorker
turned westward, taking care to keep well south of the burning zone.
"How far south on Tremont has it got?" he asked a passing stranger on
Kneeland Street.
"About to the end of the Common," the man replied, without slackening
his pace.
"By Jove! the Aquitaine'll be going next," reflected Smith. "I might
as well retrieve my suitcase. It's the only one I own."
On his way back to the fire from Deerfield Street, the night before, he
had stopped at the hotel, changed his evening clothes for a business
suit, and left his suitcase in his room. It had not occurred to him
that the fire might spread as far as that. Now, his interest quickened
by a touch of amused fear lest he might already be too late, he turned
toward the hotel with faster tread.
The scene at the Aquitaine was one of the utmost panic and confusion.
Only a little way to the north the firemen had been blowing up
buildings in another futile effort to check the fire which would not be
checked, and the dynamiting, coupled with the close approach of the
fire itself, had demoralized most of the hotel attendants. Almost all
the guests had long since taken their belongings and departed.
Porters, waiters, and clerks alike were engaged in collecting whatever
in the building could be moved and carrying it to trucks which were
backed along the curb to receive the property and bear it to a place of
safety.
No one was at the desk; Smith found his own key. The elevator was
piled full of salvaged furniture and curtains, and he walked up to his
room on the fifth floor. There he collected his belongings and
returned to the office. Thinking to himself that he would defer paying
his bill until there was some one in a mental condition capable of
receipting it, he went forth into the street, suitcase in hand.
"Where now?" he thought. The answer was not difficult. There was only
one place where he wanted to go, and he had promised to go there.
To Deerfield Street, then, he went. There he found two anxious women
whose questions he answered as best he could, and whom, after an hour's
rest, he left, having promised that he would warn them if by any chance
the conflagration turned in their direction. Warmed at heart, and much
refreshed by the luncheon they had insisted on his taking, he left the
Maitlands, and turned once again toward the path of the fire.
It had been nearly thirty hours since he had slept; and he found his
eyes hot and dry and heavy in his head. Whether it was the smoke he
had breathed, or the steady strain of the long night, or the lack of
sleep and sheer fatigue, he did not know; but he found developing in
his brain a strange, numb sense of remoteness, a want of coordination
and identity between it and his body. In remembering this day, he was
always afterwards to associate it with a smell of stale smoke in his
nostrils and a vague dimness of sight. Even the thousand vivid
incidents of the great conflagration were always to come back to him
with this haunting sense of unreality, the feeling that it was not
actually he but some one else who had witnessed and shared and lived
through them--some one not alien, yet not wholly kin to himself. The
gray and ochre smoke haze, and the diffused heat, and the sense of
intimate danger long faced and hence grown hardly noted, clouded and
filmed the facts, the colors, and the emotions of this day in the dim
light of a dream.
They were wild facts, too; great deeds; and glorious colors, which
would have been worth a clearer recollection. The color of the
midnight sky, its velvet blackness shot with crimson gleams. The waves
of smoke, now like densest ink pouring up from some unseen funereal
funnel--now blindingly white, flung like the plume of Navarre above the
tumult of the fray. The tall, cold buildings standing almost defiantly
in the winter air, lifting their immobile fronts to face the
onrush--and the same buildings a little later, when the flames had
passed, leaving only gnawed skeletons and heaped and smoldering ruins
in their wake. The grim and terrible anguish of twisted steel girders
that lay writhen like petrified snakes among the ashes, or lifted their
tortured length to reach some last hold on sanity at the wall which
they had once helped maintain. Great heaps and piles of ashes, and
half-consumed beams and crushed and broken brick, lying in smoldering
humility, punctuated by stray relics and remnants of an unburned
world--pieces of furniture, by some miracle left unharmed, or
bric-a-brac of some more than usual inanity. Fireproof buildings
through which the flood of destruction had passed, burning all that was
burnable, and leaving the gaunt frames naked in the air, their
exteriors perhaps scorched and defaced, but with their vast strength
unshaken and undismayed. The thousand sounds and odors of the fearful
night and of the slow dawn; the fire whistles shrilling through the
wintry air, the gongs on truck and cart adding their clangor to the mad
mellay, the shouts of men, the bawling of orders, the screams of
frightened women, the uncanny sound of the mewing of an imprisoned cat
in a window, whose instinct told it what its sense could not. The
hammer of horses' hoofs on the stones of the street, with the sparks
flung out to left and right beneath the flying feet; the steady
chug-chug of the tireless engines with their fireboxes seething
white-hot in the effort to hold the steam to its figure on the gauge.
The far shock and the dull boom of dynamiting that was like the rumor
of a distant heavy cannonade. Then the men, the leagued enemies
against this arch conspirator--the thousand heroisms of these men who
contended without fear against unbeatable odds; the stark, cold bravery
that is a thing outside of human experience save in some sublimated
essence such as this--men who spanned impossible gaps, bore impossible
weights, scaled unscalable heights, died incredibly heroic and
unutterably tragic deaths, and who did these preposterous things as
simply and unquestioningly as a child falling to sleep. The bitter
humors of this prank of fate--the things shattered which should have
been whole, the things preserved which no hand but that of error had
ever created. The ruthless mixture of the farcical and the pathetic;
the fire horse struck to earth by a falling wall, screaming in
anguish--and the coal heaver, carrying hurriedly toward safety a gilt
and white ormolu clock. And behind all this the swaying, eddying,
swirling, but inexorably onward movement of the Fire, and the muffled
drum beat that served it for a pulse; behind all this the Fire's voice,
the low, purring, sinister roar which never ceased and which was deeper
than the sound of any surges on any shore; behind all this the valley
of the shadow, with its grim processional of life and fear and death, a
processional spurred and driven to a speed which never slackened, under
the wind which for twenty hours had hardly tired, but had blown so
steadfastly that to the people of the city it seemed to be what in
reality it must have been--the breath of God out of the north.