The Nine-Tenths Part 2

"Oh, it can't be!" he cried, in an agony. "But come ... hurry ..."

They started toward Eighty-first Street up Avenue A. They walked fast; and it seemed suddenly to Joe that he had been dancing on a thin crust, and that the crust had broken and he was falling through. He turned and spoke harshly:

"You must run!"

Fear made their feet heavy as they sped, and their hearts seemed to be exploding in their b.r.e.a.s.t.s. They felt as if that fire were consuming them; as if its tongues of flame licked them up. And so they came to the corner of Eighty-first Street and turned it, and looked, and stopped.

Joe spoke hoa.r.s.ely.

"It's burning;... it's the loft.... The printery's on fire...."

Beyond the elevated structure at Second Avenue the loft building rose like a grotesque gigantic torch in the night. Swirls of flame rolled from the upper three stories upward in a mane of red, tossing volumes of smoke, and the wild wind, combing the fire from the west, rained down cinders and burned papers on Joe and Myra as they rushed up the street.

Every window was blankly visible in the extreme light, streams of water played on the walls, and the night throbbed with the palpitating, pounding fire-engines.

And it seemed to Joe as if life were torn to bits, as if the world's end had come. It was unbelievable, impossible--his eyes belied his brain.

That all those years of labor and dream and effort were going up in flame and smoke seemed preposterous. And only a few moments before he and Myra had stood on the heights of the world; had their mad moment; and even then his life was being burned away from him. He felt the hoa.r.s.e sobs lifting up through his throat.

They reached Second Avenue, and were stopped by the vast swaying crowd of people, a density that could not be cloven. They went around about it frantically; they bore along the edge of the crowd, beside the houses; they wedged past one stoop; they were about to get past the next, when, in the light of the lamp, Joe saw a strange sight. Crouched on that stoop, with clothes torn, with hair loosed down her back, her face white, her lips gasping, sat one of the hat factory girls. It was Fannie Lemick. Joe knew her. And no one seemed to notice her. The crowd was absorbed in other things.

And even at that moment Joe heard the dire clanging of ambulances, and an awful horror dizzied his brain. No, no, not that! He clutched the stoop-post, leaned, cried weirdly:

"Fannie! Fannie!"

She gazed up at him. Then she recognized him and gave a terrible sob.

"Mr. Joe! Oh, how did you get out?"

"I wasn't there," he breathed. "Fannie! what's happened?... None of the girls ..."

"You didn't know?" she gasped.

He felt the life leaving his body; it seemed impossible.

"No ..." he heard himself saying. "Tell me...."

She looked at him with dreadful eyes and spoke in a low, deadly, monotonous voice:

"The fire-escape was no good; it broke under some of the girls;... they fell;... we jammed the hall;... some of the girls jumped down the elevator shaft;... they couldn't get out ... and Miss Marks, the forelady, was trying to keep us in order.... She stayed there ... and I ran down the stairs, and dropped in the smoke, and crawled ... but when I got to the street ... I looked back ... Mr. Joe ... the girls were jumping from the windows...."

Joe seized the stoop-post. His body seemed torn in two; he began to reel.

"From the ninth floor," he muttered, "and couldn't get out.... And I wasn't there! Oh, G.o.d, why wasn't I killed there!"

III

THE GOOD PEOPLE

Joe broke through the fire line. He stepped like a calcium-lit figure over the wet, gleaming pavement, over the snaky hose, and among the rubber-sheathed, glistening firemen, gave one look at the ghastly heap on the sidewalk, and then became, like the host of raving relatives and friends and lovers, a man insane. It was as if the common surfaces of life--the busy days, the labor, the tools, the houses--had been drawn aside like a curtain and revealed the terrific powers that engulf humanity.

In his ears sounded the hoa.r.s.e cries of the firemen, the shout of the sprayed water, the crash of axes, the shatter of gla.s.s. It was too magnificent a spectacle, nature, like a Nero, using humanity to make a sublime torch in the night. And through his head pulsed and pulsed the defiant throb of the engines. Cinders fell, sticks, papers, and Joe saw fitfully the wide ring of hypnotized faces. It was as if the world had fallen into a pit, and human beings looked on each other aghast.

"Get back there!" cried a burly policeman.

Joe resisted his shouldering.

"I'm Mr. Blaine;... it's my loft burning. I'm looking for my men...."

"Go to the morgue then," snapped the policeman. "A fire line's a fire line."

Joe was pushed back, and as the crowd closed about him, a soft pressure of clothing, men and women, he became aware of the fact that he had lost his head. He pulled himself together; he told himself that he, a human being, was greater than anything that could happen; that he must set his jaw and fight and brave his way through the facts. He must get to work.

Myra clutched his sleeve. He turned to her a face of death, but she brought her wide eyes close to him.

"Joe! Joe!"

"Myra," he said, in a whisper, suddenly in that moment getting a sharp revelation of his changed life. "I may never see you again. I belong to those dead girls." He paused. "Go home ... do that for me, anyway."

He had pa.s.sed beyond her; there was no opposing him.

"I'll go," she murmured.

Then, dizzily, she reeled back, and was lost in the crowd.

And then he set to work. He was strangely calm now, numb, unfeeling.

There was nothing more to experience, and the overwrought brain refused any new emotions. So stupendous was the catastrophe that it left him finally calm, ready, and eagerly awake. He stepped gently through the crowd, searching, and found John Rann, the pressman. John wept like a little boy when they met.

"Marty got out ... yes ... most of us did ... but Eddie Baker, Morty, and Sam Bender.... It was the cotton waste, Mr. Joe, and the cigarettes...."

Joe put his arm about the rough man.

"Never mind, Johnny ... Go home to the kiddies...."

There was so little he could do. He went to a few homes he knew, he went to the hospital to ask after the injured, he went to the morgue. At midnight the fire, like an evil thing, drew him back, and he encountered only a steamy blackness lit by the search-light of the engine. There was still the insistent throbbing. And then he thought of his mother and her fears, and sped swiftly up the street, over deserted Lexington Avenue, and up the lamp-lit block. Already newsboys were hoa.r.s.ely shouting in the night, as they waved their papers--a cry of the underworld palpitating through the hushed city: "Wuxtra! Wuxtra!

Great--fire--horror! Sixty--killed! Wuxtra!"

The house was still open, lighted, awake. People came into the hall as he entered, but he shunned them and started up the stairs. One called after him.

"Your mother's out, Mr. Joe."

He turned.

"Out? How long?"

"Since the fire started ... She's been back and forth several times ..."