White Ashes Part 47

There was a stray puff of wind to westward; there was a sudden cry of men mortally hurt, of horses suddenly tortured. Out from the windows of the Phipps Building a flood of flame sprang west; expelled from the tottering structure by some inward impulse, perhaps by an explosion of smothered air, this sheet of heat and flame, of unburned and burning gases, leaped Tremont Street as a rabbit leaps a ditch. Simultaneously the Tremont Street face of the old Park Street Church burst into flame, and along the rear of the buildings which fringed the ancient burial ground the fire crept. Under the eaves of these buildings it ran, and a moment later the line of brick structures on Park Street was briskly ablaze, and once more the fire fighters' flank had been turned.

Quickly this westward adventure proceeded. So unexpected had been this attack that it was some time before the department could adjust its front. Tremont Street, moreover, which was now untenable, held much apparatus, and most of this was burned where it stood. Straight up the slope toward Beacon Street and toward the gold dome of the State House the fire errantly went. Blank walls between buildings seemed to make little difference to it; what it could not pierce it ran around. Only at the extreme end of the burial ground did it pause. Here a seven-story fireproof building confronted it, and proved equal to the task. Against the solid walls of this barrier the impetuous visitor beat in vain, and then, just as suddenly as he had begun his foray, he subsided. The final sputter of his dying, under the hose streams of his foes, sounded for all the world like a chuckle. It was as if this wandering creature had signified that he had accomplished his purpose in giving the department a good scare, and that he might as well stop.

The firemen stood for a moment to catch breath, gazing on the havoc wrought by this wild half hour; then, coiling up their hose, they went to await new orders.

It was now almost two o'clock. The fire had been burning for four hours; it had completely destroyed two entire city squares and part of a third, and its course was manifestly just begun. To the north and west it had strayed as far as it was to go, for the north wind made it impossible for it to spread farther in that direction, and its westward swing, as has just been seen, had been checked. The unrestrained main line of the conflagration was therefore almost due south, following the direction of the wind's impulsion, but also it tended toward the east, since all great fires strive, fanlike, to open out. This tendency on the west the Common effectually vitiated, and the firemen's plan of campaign was proportionately simplified.

The obvious course now to be pursued was to ma.s.s 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 the _Transcript_ down, 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 princ.i.p.ally 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 pa.s.sed 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.

CHAPTER XXII

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 st.u.r.dy strength of brick and steel, the compelling magnitude and silent, ma.s.sive 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 s.p.a.ce 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 Ess.e.x 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 modic.u.m 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 t.i.tanic 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 sc.r.a.ping 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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.sed 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 pa.s.senger 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 pa.s.sing 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.