The obvious course now to be pursued was to mass the opposing forces along the east flank of the conflagration, restricting so far as possible its spread in that direction, for since the wind made it impossible to face the fire, no hope lay in direct opposition save perhaps through the thunderous agency of dynamite. On these lines the defense set to work anew.
After a thrilling struggle Old South Church had been saved; the concentration of the fire fighters around its corner had been efficacious. The stout old structure which had survived so many years of winters out of the east had survived one peril more. Its brick walls stood with their paint cracked and split, its tower tottered, scorched and feeble, but the building itself was intact. Score one to Boston, and to the indomitable forces battling for her preservation.
Not without a fearful cost, however, had this victory been gained, for the east side of Washington Street, from theTranscriptdown, was now a flowing field of raging flame. Here there were no fireproofs to give momentary obstacles; one risk, it is true, had automatic sprinklers inside and out, but the water from these, while it lasted, only added steam to the confusion and fuel to the fire, while the great roof tank in its falling tore out the very heart of the stricken building. Hawley Street, farther on, was no barrier at all to a fire of such fury as this, and the unprotected windows at the rear of the Franklin Street row added their helpless nakedness to a situation in which nothing was a buckler.
Very orderly, irresistible without vagary, now became the fire's progress. Terrible in its absolute precision, in its measured advance down the wind, this implacable river of flame rolled down the city. Far ahead of the actual fire itself ran its fatal forerunner, the sheet of gases and superheated air, sometimes level, sometimes high lifted at the whim of the breeze, but always fierce, always southward, always with annihilation in its grip. There was no staying this deadly force and no facing it; farther than any hose stream could reach sped this outrider in advance of the devastating thing whose messenger it was.
Men from the United States Navy Yard at Charlestown were dynamiting buildings along Summer Street now, in the hope of gaining a respite by reducing the amount of fuel in the path of the main advance. The air was heavy with smoke, with the odor of charred embers and burning wood and merchandise, and the shock of the dynamiting added new heaviness to an almost unbreathable element. So acrid had the atmosphere become that the men in the front ranks of the struggle were compelled to breathe through rags and handkerchiefs soaked in water. Many men dropped where they stood, to be dragged back by their comrades and revived by the ambulance surgeons.
Franklin Street proved no more of a southern barrier than had the others before it. On the corner of Hawley Street stood an eight-story fireproof, sprinklered building, filled principally with crockery. Upon this the conflagration advanced as relentlessly as fate. Long before the flames themselves had reached it, the windows broke under the heat of the advancing gases, and little fires began to appear on the upper floors. Soon all the windows were alight, and this building too shook beneath the force which there was no escaping. Its frame, to be sure, stood bravely up, and after the fire was still to be seen, almost intact, a tribute to its maker and design; but its contents, alas, were not fireproof, and proved pabulum most welcome to the element which welcomed almost all things.
The firemen along the eastern fringe had been laboring with desperation. It was the seventh hour of steady battle, and many of them were almost overcome by exhaustion; but those who faltered found their places taken by others, and the unequal struggle went on. At this point Smith, with his fire-line badge pinned to his coat in case of challenge, was turning his hand to anything which seemed to need the doing. A solid wall of fireproofs along Arch Street had held the fire from spreading eastward there, but as Franklin Street was passed in the southward sweep, the eastward urging was not wholly to be denied. At five o'clock in the morning the four faces of Winthrop Square were all involved, and the buildings along Devonshire Street had begun to yield. Over at Washington and Tremont Streets the fire had now spread as far south as Bedford—and the wind was still blowing steadily.
Gradually, for the last half hour, the velvet blackness of the upper sky had been fading; gradually the sparks, as they mounted unceasingly, had begun to seem less luminous; and the waves of smoke which had been rising all night into the upper air became for the first time a little dark against the sky. All night had this smoke been flung up from the burning city, and always had it seemed white or reddish or dirty brown, as it rose; all night had the air hung close in its smoky pall, seeming to shut in the sad theater wherein this drama was being played; all night had the fire been torch and lantern and moon and stars to those who faced the fire.
Now, dimly across the eastern sky, was spread the first faint hint of a wondering dawn. Far out over the harbor a lightening could be seen, a prescience of day, and a ghostly half light, like that in a dim cathedral, replaced the flame-lit darkness. There were mists above the water, and the light gained progress slowly; still, it gained, and presently the salt sea odors came rolling in from the bay. The water turned from black to silver-gray, the shadows faded silently into nothingness, the hush that precedes daybreak seemed trying to steal into the tortured air. And men's eyes, turning from the flame and smoke and crashing walls, gave hopeless welcome to the Day.
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 onKneeland 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.
It was nearly nine o'clock in the evening when there came a ring at the Maitlands' doorbell. It had not been the easiest waiting in the world, that of the two women in the half-deserted apartment building through the long night and longer day. Helen would have preferred to go out of doors, feeling that there she could see and follow, at a distance at least, the progress of the conflagration; but Mrs. Maitland in a strange and unlooked-for obstinacy absolutely declined to leave the apartment or to permit her daughter to do so.
"I don't know anything about fires, but if this one starts in this direction I want to be here, and not away somewhere," she repeated to her daughter's urging; nor could she be induced to take any other viewpoint. So in their rooms they remained, and their only news from without was transmitted to them from the servants and visitors to the building. The telephone was out of commission, and Helen felt as though she were marooned in full sight of a civilization with which she could not communicate and which afforded her no benefits.
It had been past one o'clock in the morning when Smith had brought her home from the fire. Long after that the excitement had kept her awake; but she had fallen asleep at last, and wakened again only when it was broad day. It was, however, to be one of the longest days in her calendar, and by noon she felt as though she had been waiting for years in expectation of she did not know what. She tried to read, but found it impossible to fix her attention on the book. She began to run over some operatic scores on the piano, but the sound seemed to ring so oddly that she gave up this also. Between her mother and herself conversation languished—and thus the slow hours wore on. She could not but think how infinitely more desirable it was to be out in the streets, even though that might mean a certain amount of physical danger, than to remain in unsatisfactory helplessness thus. If it be woman's heritage to wait, that heritage certainly did not appeal to Helen on this occasion. It is doubtful if it ever appeals to any one.
Only two incidents of relief had marked the passage of the dragging hours. The first was when Smith had called, in the morning, to leave his suitcase and to promise to return in case the fire should come dangerously near; the second was a visit from Mr. Silas Osgood. This latter call occurred in the middle of the afternoon, when the suspense of doing nothing at all had become almost intolerable and the nerves of both women had come almost to the snapping point, and they both consequently greeted him with even more than their usual affection.
"I'm so glad you've come, Uncle Silas, I can hardly speak!" Helen said; and her mother's welcome, while somewhat less extreme in expression, was equally sincere.
"I tried to get you on the telephone, but I couldn't, so I thought I'd better come and see how you were getting on," Mr. Osgood explained. "I'm glad you're all right. This is a fearful thing, a terrible business! Nobody knows where it may end."
"Tell us about it—everything," the girl demanded. "We have really heard nothing all day. What we have heard has been chiefly what we could learn from the servants, and they understand so little of what is actually happening."
"I have been out near the Public Gardens," said her uncle; "and though I couldn't see much, I probably could see almost as much as though I had been a good deal nearer. On the whole, things seem very favorable. I would not go so far as to say that the end is in sight; but in a certain sense the fire is under control, and I believe that the worst is over at last."
"How far does it extend now?"
"Well, they have managed to prevent its getting across Tremont Street; in fact, they have held it on both east and west. You see, most of the railroad yards below the South Station were cleared in time, and that left little or no fuel on the east side. The fire now, instead of having a clean sweep from the Common to the Channel, has a path barely half that width. It is now as far south as Oak Street, and Hollis Street west of that."
"Dear me! Has the good old Hollis Theater gone, then?"
"I don't see how it could very well have escaped. But it wasn't a very attractive theater, though, anyway. Why do you ask about it? They have needed a new building there for a long time."
"Yes—but some of the happiest evenings I have ever had were there. It isn't the upholstery of the seats or the mural decorations or what the theater looks like, but what you hear there. Don't you think that a theater gets to retain some of its traditions and its greatest associations? It sounds as though I were an old woman; but every time I go there, I seem to feel that the theater remembers, just as I do, the thrills that its walls have known."
"Would you rather it had been left to be torn down, then?" inquired her uncle, with a smile.
"Well, possibly not. That would be worse than this. Perhaps it is better to 'give her to the God of Storms,' after all."
"Perhaps," agreed Mr. Osgood, gently.
For a half an hour longer they talked, and he told them as much as he knew of what already had been destroyed, and what the final reckoning would unclose. He spoke as cheerfully as he could, but Helen, watching him closely, saw that back of this there was a profound sadness.
"Is it so very terrible, Uncle Silas?" she asked at last, laying her hand affectionately on his sleeve.
"Very. It is as bad as it could be, my child," he answered. "Bad for Boston—bad for us all. I have been through this sort of calamity before; but that was many years ago. I did not mind it so much when I was a young man. It is different now."
"But surely the city can survive it, can it not?"
"Yes—the property loss, no doubt; and I am glad to say that very few lives have been lost. But it is a fearful catastrophe. The city is crippled—shaken to its very heart! Think of the hundreds of families driven into the streets, the businesses wrecked, the uncountable number of men left without employment, even if the fire cease at once!"
A new idea had come to Helen.
"What difference will it make to Silas Osgood and Company?" she asked, with some hesitation. "It won't injure your firm, will it?"
"Oh, to a certain extent, temporarily, but nothing to be troubled about. Of course the local agent does not have to pay any part of his companies' losses. But—" he paused.
"But what?" asked the girl.
"Well, I have been in the business so long, my dear, that I have come to look at this sort of thing more from the standpoint of my companies than my own. I am ashamed—yes, sorry and ashamed—to have my city hurt my companies so sorely."
"But you couldn't have helped it—it isn't your fault," said Mrs.Maitland, somewhat mystified, but guessing a little of what he felt.
"No," said Mr. Osgood, slowly; "I couldn't have helped it. But if it had to happen in Boston, I'm sorry it didn't wait until I was through."
"Then I hope it would be never!" Helen said, a little incoherently; but the point was plain.
"On the business side there is only one feature that cheers me," continued Mr. Osgood, "and that is the fact that my old friend James Wintermuth and his company, the Guardian of New York, are practically out of it all."
"How do you mean—out of it?" Helen's mother asked.
"You see, the Guardian, when it had to leave my office, lost all its local business. A good deal of it was naturally in this very part of the city which is burning. They undoubtedly have some term lines still in force,—policies written for three or five years,—but not many. They will escape with a very light loss indeed—whereas two years ago this conflagration would have involved them for an amount such as not many companies would care to meet."
"Then there must be other companies now who will lose more in this fire than they can pay?"
"Without a doubt. There has never been a fire of this magnitude that has not absolutely ruined many of the smaller companies. It takes either a very strong or a very conservative insurance company to weather a great conflagration. After each of our big city fires in this country many and many a company has found that after it paid its losses there would be nothing left to carry it to further existence—capital and surplus were both wiped out. And it must be said to their credit that most of them, at a time like this, pay every cent they owe, even if they have to go out of business directly afterwards."
"But if they haven't enough money to pay their losses? Suppose their capital and surplus isn't sufficient?"
"Then they either fail, and the receiver pays what he can to each claimant, or else they call upon their stockholders—assess them. Once in a while you will find a company refusing to pay, on the ground that so great a calamity is an act of God, which no indemnity was ever designed or intended to cover. Quite a few foreign companies took this stand after the San Francisco earthquake-fire; but the leading companies, American and foreign, paid dollar for dollar. The smaller fry tried to compromise a bit; but most of them eventually made pretty fair settlements, in the main. We'll see what they'll do in Boston."
"After the fire is out."
"Yes; and I really must go now, for I'm very anxious to see how they're handling it."
"It was very good of you to come."
"I'll come again, if there is anything of consequence to report. I'm certain you'll be all right here. You haven't worried too much, have you?"
"Well, the waiting has been pretty bad," the girl confessed.
"Then don't worry any more, either of you, for if there should be the slightest danger, I'll come back at once."
Helen hesitated a moment.
"Mr. Smith promised to come and 'save us,' if we needed saving," she said, with the merest trace of a flush.
"Ah," replied her uncle, slowly. "Then I think we may safely leave your rescue to him. I will come as a reporter only. Good-by."
From the time of his departure there had been no visitor from the outside world until Smith's ring came as the clock made ready to strike nine. Helen herself opened the door, as the maid had gone downstairs for further enlightenment from the authorities below; and Miss Maitland found herself confronted by a man whom at first she hardly recognized, so hollow-eyed, so weary, and withal so grimy did he look. Her little start at seeing him was noted by Smith, and he guessed the reason for it.
"Don't be alarmed," he said, with a shadow of his old smile. "Under all the disguises it's really I. I know that I must look like a dissipated coal heaver, but I flatter myself that you'll be glad to see me, just the same, for I came to tell you that the danger is over—the fire is practically out."
"Then you must come in and let me get you something to eat," said the girl.
"Thank you very much, but I don't think I will. Somehow I don't seem to feel very hungry. But I'm horribly sleepy. I don't believe I was ever so sleepy in my life. So good-night."
But she stood with her back to the door.
"Where did you intend to go?" she demanded. "The hotels that are not burned are probably filled to the brim. Besides, your clothes are here. You can't go away. You must stay here."
"That's awfully kind of you, to offer to take me in," the other rejoined; "but you cannot house a disreputable chimney sweep. Besides—"
But she did not give him any opportunity to complete the sentence.
"Don't be absurd; you're usually quite sensible. Mother and I had it all decided hours ago. You're to stay with us. Your room is all ready for you—and your bath," she added.
He acknowledged the touch with an appreciative but weary smile.
"Well, then, if you really don't mind, I'll take you up," he said.
"Will you have supper first?"
"Thanks, no—nothing but sleep. I'm ashamed of being so fearfully tired—you must excuse me. But I don't believe any man can stay awake indefinitely."
"No, I don't believe any man can," Helen agreed.
It was ten o'clock the next day when Smith opened his eyes once more upon a normal world. The sun was shining brightly, but it was some moments before he could assure himself that he was actually awake again. The twelve hours' sleep, during which apparently not one muscle had he stirred, had gone far to repair the ravages of thirty-six hours' steady wakefulness, and a cold bath did the rest. The two ladies were found to be in the dining room, still absorbed in the morning edition of a newspaper whose building had escaped the sweep of the conflagration.
"Why, it's only half-past ten!" was Helen's greeting. "I didn't expect you so early. Mother suggested that we wait breakfast for you; but I said it would be much closer your wishes if we waited lunch instead."
"Well, I think I must have condensed an enormous amount of sleep into the last twelve hours," said Smith; "for I feel as well as ever. Tell me what has happened—I see you have the papers."
"What is going to happen is also important—your breakfast," the girl responded. "Go over there, where you see that napkin sitting expectantly on its haunches, and Marie will be in directly."
"Thank you. I hope you won't be scandalized at my appetite. Is the fire entirely out?"
"Yes—practically. Here's the paper."
"That's very good of you. You'll pardon me if I just look at the headlines?"
"Of course." And for a few moments there was little conversation in the sunny dining room.
"And now will you do me a favor?" said Miss Maitland.
Smith looked at her; a long moment.
"I will do anything in the world for you," he said, "except one thing."
The girl flushed a little.
"I want you to take me out to the fire," she responded.
The other looked at her in surprise.
"Why, of course," he said. "I never thought of doing anything else. If my calculations are correct, it will take me exactly as long to finish those three pieces of toast as for you to get ready. Better wear old clothes—it may be pretty dirty."
Five minutes later they descended to the street.
"Why, it's been snowing!" said Smith, in surprise.
A light fall of snow covered sidewalk and lawns; there were few men this day with sufficient leisure to sweep away snow. As the two went northward through the bright morning, they walked for the most part in silence. All seemed very still, for there were no street cars moving, and most of the customary confusion of a city's streets was oddly hushed. Few people were abroad, at least along where their path lay; it was almost as though they were passing through a deserted city.
"Look at that," Smith said once. "I don't believe you were ever on this corner when you couldn't see a single person."
"Where do you suppose every one is?" asked Helen, curiously.
"At the ruins. Do you know, this reminds me of one of the strangest things I ever saw."
"What was that?" the girl inquired, turning toward him.
"The only absolutely deserted town in America—at least I think it must be the only one. I never heard any one speak of another. But I know this one exists, for I saw it myself."
"Where is it? I never heard of such a thing. It sounds like Herculaneum or some of those Assyrian cities where they are always digging up statues and tablets and things."
"But this isn't a buried town. It's a real town, built perhaps twenty or thirty years ago; and it's located out in northern Indiana. And a perfectly nice little town, with brick stores and a couple of paved streets and other advantages. Everything—except inhabitants. No one lives there."
"Why not? Is this really true?"
"True as gospel. I saw it myself. I walked through the deserted streets. And a rather uncanny feeling it gave me, too."
"Was it unhealthy? Why did the people leave?"
"I haven't the vaguest idea," said Smith; and as he answered he raised his arm to point eastward along the street they had that moment reached. Following the direction in which he was pointing, Helen saw a thin line of smoke rising feebly from a pile of débris upon the ground. Near by were similar piles, sullenly smoldering.
"There's where they stopped it," said Smith.
They walked quickly along until they came to the very corner on which the last ebbing wave of the sea of fire had turned. This corner was at the intersection of Shawmut Avenue with the railroad's right of way. Over the tracks at this point was a raised steel bridge, and to this they now directed their steps. At the end of the bridge they stopped. The bridge was elevated sufficiently so that they could see a considerable distance northward, and for some moments they stood and looked in silence at the sight which lay beyond them.
It was something which is only to be seen once in the course of an ordinary lifetime—the complete ruin of the integral part of a great city. With something too remote yet too bitterly real for any words gripping at her heart, Helen stood looking out over a scene such as she never could have imagined. Here was ruin incarnate, desolation supreme; this was the bitter tragedy of that which once was great turned suddenly into pitiful nothingness before her very eyes.
In the foreground, at their feet, lay the heaped débris of the bricks, timbers, and contents of a whole row of dynamited buildings—the sacrificed buildings which by their own destruction had checked the conflagration at the last. There they lay, still smoldering or blazing in some places, utterly still and lifeless in others, with stray beams and bits of cornice or of tin roofing, twisted into weird shapes, sticking out at odd angles. Here and there unconsumed and hardly damaged articles that had been contained in these buildings lay unheeded; for here where the flames had died, they had not destroyed everything combustible, as they had seemed to do almost everywhere else. On the west side of Shawmut Avenue, where the houses still stood intact, a few men were to be seen; these were the state militiamen in their fatigue uniforms, patrolling the ruins. Smith called Helen's attention to them.
"Why are they there?" she asked.
"To watch the vultures gathering for the feast. See! There goes one of them now—over there to the left."
Helen looked; skulking along in the shadow of a ruined wall was a shabby, rough-looking man who stole swiftly out of sight behind a pile of rubbish.
"One of the scavengers. They come almost automatically after every great disaster—fire, flood, battle, or pestilence. Ghouls, you understand, from heaven knows where. That man's great-grandfather probably robbed the dead grenadiers of the Legion of Honor at Waterloo."
"Thieves?" said the girl, in horror.
"Worse than thieves. Vandals, body-snatchers, murderers, if it came to that. The kind of man who'd cut the finger off a dying woman to get her wedding ring. Unpleasant, isn't it? Well, the militia are under orders to shoot them on sight, if caught in the act. But let's go a little farther on; I think we can get a better view from farther north."
"Wait," said his companion. "I am not ready to go—yet."
Smith heeded her voice, and for another unnoted interval they stood agaze upon their little eminence.
Far to the northward the scene of ruin stretched away. Almost as far as the eye could reach was only the shadow, the terrible and disfigured skeleton of what had been the city. Everywhere were smoldering piles with occasional tongues of sullen, orange flame and their myriad threads of smoke trailing upward in the still air like Indians' signal fires. Here was a brick building, apparently hardly touched or harmed, lifting its lonely height over its prostrate neighbors. Here a partly burned structure, gutted but still erect, stood like a grim, articulated skeleton, a gaunt scarecrow against the skyline. Everywhere were mounds and hollows, hills and valleys, so that the natural contour of the earth, unseen now these hundred years, once more appeared. And over it all, everywhere that the fire had wholly burned out, lay the heart-breaking beauty and whiteness of the snow, and of the ashes under the snow.
"How terribly white it is!" said Helen, in a low voice.
Smith only nodded. Feeling her mood, he left her to speak when she was ready, and presently she did so.
"Shall we go now?" she asked.
"Suppose we do. I want to show you, if I can—and to see myself—what is left of the shopping and hotel and theater district. There can't be much left."
They turned back in the way they had come, for Tremont Street above this point was no thoroughfare. By a somewhat circuitous route at last they reached the corner of the Common; and here, at the edge of the great throng of curious onlookers, they paused.
"There's where I didn't sleep last night," said Smith.
The Hotel Aquitaine, such as it was, stood gauntly staring at them from its dozens of empty windows. The building itself was intact, but every piece of inflammable material in its contents seemed to have been wiped out of existence as utterly as though made of tissue paper. With a little shudder Helen turned away, and they moved onward.
For all Smith's fire-line badge, they were not permitted to enter the patrolled district, and they could only join the throng which was circling about the outskirts. This was not a very inspiring nor even a very interesting thing, although the people for the most part were oddly silent, seeming to have been numbed by the extent of the disaster. Helen found before very long that she had seen enough.
"What a fearful crowd! I think I'd rather go where there aren't quite so many people," she told Smith.
"All right—wait until I see what happened to Jordan's store; then we'll go."
Five minutes later they were heading back southward in the direction of their bridge.
"It is beyond words, isn't it?" observed Smith. "There is nothing at all adequate that a man can say when he is confronted by such a thing as this, and almost nothing that he can do."
"Isn't there something, though?" the girl asked. "There must be hundreds of people homeless, without food or money or anything! Cannot we do anything to help them?"
"No doubt," said the man. "Individually we could scarcely be of much assistance; but I fancy that the local charity organizations or the Red Cross would see that any contribution went where it would do the most good."
Only a few minutes later they found where one of these institutions had opened temporary headquarters in an old church.
"Let us go in," said Miss Maitland.
As they entered they saw that the church was filled with refugees, come in to escape the cold. They were most of them sitting in groups, talking eagerly to one another. Some were lying asleep, stretched out full length on the pews. A woman was going about, serving hot coffee and soup and bread. The refugees ate hungrily, but on the faces of almost all of them rested the same dispirited look of dazed wonder. Apparently they were chiefly foreigners, the majority Italians, and it was evident that they had lost everything they had possessed. Helen stood watching them with a sad heart from the back of the church, and Smith, looking at her, saw that her eyes were full of tears. He laid his hand gently on her arm. "Please don't," he said gravely. But he understood.
"But it seems so unfair for them to have lost everything," the girl said. "They had so little to lose."
She turned her face to his.
"There is no answer to that," he said; "but we can help them a little."
To the woman in charge they gave what they could afford to give, and turned toward home. It was nearly four o'clock, and Mrs. Maitland might be growing anxious about their safety. They walked forward in a silence which neither wished to break.
It was soon broken, however, by a chance occurrence. They were passing by an open street on the edge of the burned district. Across the street, under a none too steady wall, a woman whose distress had evidently touched the good nature of the militiaman patrolling the other end of the block was hunting about among heaps of débris, searching for things which might perhaps have been spared by the flames. On top of the house wall was a battered stone coping, which, as Smith and Helen paused, gave a sudden lurch and seemed about to fall. The woman, her head bent, saw nothing; but Smith, with a startled exclamation, started quickly forward.
"Look out there!" he called sharply. "Come away from that wall!"
The woman, with her back turned, paid no attention to the warning—probably did not even hear him. The coping, poised on the wall's edge, swayed perilously. If it fell, there would be one less of the indigent and helpless for the relief committees to support. With a half angry exclamation Smith sprang forward.
On his sleeve he felt the quick pressure of a hand. At the same moment the crouching woman, having finished her search, or perhaps moved by an instinct of danger, walked slowly on, and out from under the wall. The coping did not fall.
Smith turned to find the girl's fingers closed tight upon his arm, and in her eyes something he had never seen before. She stood still a moment, and when at last she withdrew her hand, she spoke in a voice so low that he could barely catch the words.
"Why did you do that?"
"She didn't see the coping," he said, as naturally as he could.
"It might have fallen—on you!"
"Yes," he said; "I suppose it might. But you see, it didn't."
"It might have killed you," she said, still in a low voice.
Smith turned abruptly, and looked at her.
"How much would you have cared, Helen?" he asked.
Even at this moment the trammels of her ancestry were on her; she made no answer.
"How much would you have cared, dear?" he asked again, gently.
Then at last she raised her eyes, and met his fairly.
"More than anything—more than everything in the world," she said.
The early gray February twilight was closing in upon them when they left the lifted bridge. They had been there long, yet as they turned to go, Helen gave one backward look. There, spread away across the stricken plain, she saw for the last time the prostrate thing which yesterday had been the living city; and over it, like the winding linen of a shroud, lay the white ashes in the snow.
On the top floor of the Salamander office in William Street a man stood silent before a map desk on which was laid an open map of the city of Boston. It was late in the afternoon, and the level rays of the declining sun came in redly at the window. The man standing at the desk did not notice them; he was looking stolidly from map to newspaper, from newspaper to map, as from the hysterical and conflicting accounts of the conflagration he tried to measure the extent of the calamity.
The morning papers had told but little, since they had gone to press when the fire was only a few hours old; and as the day was Sunday, and a holiday, there had been available only a few of the usual flock of evening sheets which begin to appear in New York shortly after breakfast. With one of these by his elbow, in the fading light of the late February day, F. Mills O'Connor stood, stonily and with hard eyes, gazing at ruin.
He was alone in the office, since the one other person who had been with him had, under instructions, departed. This was George McGee, the Salamander's map clerk for New England. There was no reason whatever why George should have visited William Street on a Sunday; nevertheless Mr. O'Connor, on arriving, had found him standing aimlessly and undecided in front of the door.
"What do you want here?" he had said to George, coldly.
"Nothing. That is, I came over from Brooklyn to see if any one wanted anything. I thought maybe somebody would be down, and they'd need some one to help take off the lines, sir."
"Well, I don't need any help. You can go," said the other.
"I didn't know. We've got a lot of business in that part of Boston, sir. I know where all the dailies are filed. You'll need me if you're going to go over the lines, sir."
O'Connor considered.
"Well, come up, then," he said ungraciously. "We'll have to walk up; there's no steam on."
It was then three o'clock. At not later than a quarter to four Mr. O'Connor had definitely determined that unless the report of the conflagration's extent had been exaggerated beyond all human connection with the facts, the Salamander had sustained a loss in Boston which was considerably greater than its resources would permit it to pay. In other words, if the printed account were even remotely true, the Salamander was, as the phrase has it, insolvent. To put it even more shortly, the company was ruined. Facing this fact and its string of entailed consequences, the man most directly interested was silent so long that his youthful assistant became nervous.
"Pretty bad loss, ain't it?" he asked sympathetically.
O'Connor looked at him unseeingly. In his busy mind he was running through an imaginary calculation. It was somewhat as follows: Salamander's net liability in the section of Boston presumably destroyed, $600,000—Salamander's net surplus available for payment of losses, $400,000. Inevitably the problem ended: Salamander's impairment of capital, $200,000. And the fire was still burning. Boston could be rebuilt, but could the Salamander?
He turned on the clerk beside him with the savage and melodramatic gesture of an irritated musical comedy star, and the boy recoiled before him.
"That's all. You can go home," he said curtly.
Two minutes later he was left alone in the silent office.
At the best of times there was in the nature of Mr. Edward Eggleston Murch not overmuch genuine urbanity. Urbanity of the surface he had, of course; he called on it at need in very much the same way that he called on his stenographer. But of true courtesy or consideration Mr. Murch's makeup was singularly and flawlessly free. On the contrary he could, on occasion, summon to his face a congealment and to his eye a steely gleam which nobody admired but which all respected. Ordinarily this was either for his inferiors, or for those unfortunates who had come to cross purposes with him, or for those who had made blunders costly to him that his most glacial manner was reserved; but every one about the Salamander office knew of it, either by hearsay or by actual experience. Mr. O'Connor was removed from all danger of running counter to the Salamander's leading stockholder, so long as the company continued to make money. But what might now happen, Mr. O'Connor did not care to consider—and yet the topic engrossed his attention so deeply that darkness surprised him still adrift on the waters of this sea of doubt.
Not until the swift winter nightfall recalled him to himself did he remember the world around him; and when at last he groped his way down the long flights of dusky stairs to the street, his was the slow and inelastic step of a beaten man.
Mr. Murch had spent the holiday and the week-end at the country place of a fellow financier. To this retired spot news penetrated with decorum and conservatism. One was in no danger, at Holmdale, of acting on premature information, for all information which reached this sequestered Westchester chateau did so in the most leisurely and placid manner. For this very reason Mr. Murch shunned Holmdale and resorted to many a subterfuge to avoid the acceptance of divers invitations to sojourn beneath the medieval roof of its host, who happened to be a man whom even Mr. Murch hesitated to offend. In the present case, when on returning to New York early Monday morning he learned that one of the most terrible losses in fire insurance annals had occurred without his knowledge, it did not tend to sweeten his temper.
He did not go to his own office, but with a grim face started directly for the building of the Salamander. Once within its portals he immediately entered Mr. O'Connor's room. Mr. O'Connor was seated at his desk, with a pile of daily reports before him.
"How much do we lose in Boston?" the visitor demanded.
The President of the Salamander had been in the building during most of the past twenty-four hours, taking off the lines in the burned district on a special bordereau. Neither the Osgood office nor his special agent could be reached on the long distance telephone; and the newspaper accounts, even thus long after the fire, were still painfully vague and somewhat rhetorically hysterical. They talked much of the "devouring element," and the word "lurid" frequently occurred; but no reporter had been sufficiently practical to bound the burned district or to state specifically what buildings had or had not been spared. Still, they told enough. To the meanest intelligence it was patent that a tremendous catastrophe had taken place, that most of the section from School Street south to the railroad was leveled, and virtually everything therein was totally destroyed—except the fireproof buildings, which were still standing, scorched and shaken, stripped clean of combustible contents, but not fatally damaged.
O'Connor had the list in his hand. In his heart now was the calm absence of feeling which marks the man who has abandoned hope.
"I should estimate our net liability in the burned district at about $700,000," he said unemotionally.
Mr. Murch leaned forward in his chair.
"And the net surplus of the company is—?" he asked menacingly.
"You know what it is. It's half a million, roughly."
"Well, will you tell me what in the devil you mean by putting this company in a position to lose more money than it has clear?"
O'Connor, beyond caring now, actually smiled.
"Fortunes of war, Mr. Murch. You wanted a leading position in Boston, if you'll remember. I gave it to you."
"I didn't want any such position as my present one," rejoined Mr.Murch, in frigid tones.
"I didn't either, if you come to that," retorted O'Connor, promptly.
The financier's irritation was increased by this unexpectedly reckless attitude on the part of the man who should, he felt, be abased in sackcloth before him. He regarded the other with surprise, through his indignation.
"You take this remarkably coolly, I should say," he remarked.
"There's no use in getting excited—the eggs are smashed now. But just the same," returned O'Connor, with a flash of spirit, "I'm just as sore about this as if I owned every dollar of Salamander stock there is on the books."
The mention of the unit of currency reminded his companion of something else.
"What do you suppose the market is doing?" he said.
"I haven't the slightest idea," replied the other.
Murch lifted the receiver from the telephone at his elbow.
"Hello: give me Broad nine nine seven six. Is this Atwater andJenkins? Give me Mr. Atwater—this is Mr. Murch speaking. That you,Billy? How's the market?"
He replaced the receiver with a snap.
"Everything off at the opening. Bad slump in Maryland Traction and P.N. T."
"It ought to go off some more when the fire companies in general start liquidating. There will have to be a big unloading to raise the amount of cash necessary to pay those Boston losses. I suppose, though, the British companies will send the money across—they usually do, and that'll help a little. That's the worst of these fires—they hit you going and coming. Suppose we lose seven hundred thousand; well, before we get through we'll have to sell eight or nine hundred thousand dollars' worth of securities, at present prices, to pay it."
"How much cash have we on deposit?" Mr. Murch inquired.
O'Connor handed him the last weekly statement in silence. The fact that the other man had expressed no definite intention was to him encouraging. It might be that all was not over yet.
"Roughly, our surplus," commented the financier. "Now, how about our other assets? Stocks and miscellaneous securities, $1,500,000. Only it won't be a million and a half by the time we get rid of them. Probably a couple of hundred thousand less. Encouraging, isn't it? In other words, this fire is going to cost us $900,000 before we're through. And the present question is, how are we to get through?"
O'Connor looked him over with an appraising glance.
"Well, the Salamander has paid good dividends for years," he said. "Probably more than most companies would have thought it prudent to pay—they'd have put a larger amount into surplus to take care of such a smash as this. And I've made the company a better money-maker on the underwriting side than it's ever been before—you'll admit that, I think. There's no reason why we shouldn't go on. My suggestion would be to assess the stock."
He awaited the answer nervously, toying with a penholder, not daring to glance at the other man. He did not have to wait long.
"Not much!" said Mr. Murch, coldly. "I'm going to get out of this as fast as I can, and I'm going to stay out, you understand. No more fire insurance business for me. It's the only business I ever made a complete mess of. The Salamander would have done better if they had never issued a policy—if they had merely let me invest their money for them. Now the next question is, how to get out. You are an insurance man and supposed to be a competent one—possibly you can tell me how to set about it."
"Do you mean to liquidate the Salamander—close up the company?"
"Whatever one does to extricate himself from this kind of a hole.What's the usual method?"
"The usual method," replied O'Connor, his face somewhat flushed at the other man's tone, "is for the stockholders to authorize an assessment on their stock, and continue. That apparently does not appeal to you; and if I understand you correctly, you wish to terminate operations and wind up the company."
"Exactly so. You catch my meaning perfectly."
"There are two ways, then," the other said. "One is to let the risks in force expire, paying the losses as they occur; that will take about five years. The other, which is the usual way, is to pay some other company to assume the liability on all our outstanding policies—to reinsure us. We pay a lump sum, and the other company pays the losses as the risks expire, instead of our doing so."
"I see the idea. But what company would do that? And wouldn't it cost a small fortune to get any one to? And isn't this a bad time to approach any company with such a proposition?"
"No, I don't think so. Some company might be glad to get hold of a large amount of cash which it could use to pay its own Boston losses, and then it could pay the losses on our outstanding business, which would come along gradually for several years, out of its own normal profits in that time."