CHAPTER VI
Itwas 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 beforethis 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 burdensfelt 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 thatsmoldered, 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 spewedflame in a giant’s vomit upon a store that had been called fireproof. Its somber dignity was now a rabidcarmagnole. 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 sheturned 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!”