Part 17 (1/2)

Many of the men turned then, and a shout went up. They called to him in all strange keys. They addressed him in every manner, from familiar and cordial greetings to carefully-worded advice concerning changes in his personal appearance. The man presently fled, and the mob chuckled ferociously like ogres who had just devoured something.

They turned then to serious business. Often they addressed the stolid front of the house.

”Oh, let us in fer Gawd's sake!”

”Let us in or we'll all drop dead!”

”Say, what's th' use o' keepin' all us poor Indians out in th' cold?”

And always some one was saying, ”Keep off me feet.”

The crus.h.i.+ng of the crowd grew terrific toward the last. The men, in keen pain from the blasts, began almost to fight. With the pitiless whirl of snow upon them, the battle for shelter was going to the strong. It became known that the bas.e.m.e.nt door at the foot of a little steep flight of stairs was the one to be opened, and they jostled and heaved in this direction like laboring fiends. One could hear them panting and groaning in their fierce exertion.

Usually some one in the front ranks was protesting to those in the rear: ”O-o-ow! Oh, say, now, fellers, let up, will yeh? Do yeh wanta kill somebody?”

A policeman arrived and went into the midst of them, scolding and berating, occasionally threatening, but using no force but that of his hands and shoulders against these men who were only struggling to get in out of the storm. His decisive tones rang out sharply: ”Stop that pus.h.i.+n' back there! Come, boys, don't pus.h.!.+ Stop that! Here, you, quit yer shovin'! Cheese that!”

When the door below was opened, a thick stream of men forced a way down the stairs, which were of an extraordinary narrowness and seemed only wide enough for one at a time. Yet they somehow went down almost three abreast. It was a difficult and painful operation. The crowd was like a turbulent water forcing itself through one tiny outlet. The men in the rear, excited by the success of the others, made frantic exertions, for it seemed that this large band would more than fill the quarters and that many would be left upon the pavements. It would be disastrous to be of the last, and accordingly men with the snow biting their faces, writhed and twisted with their might. One expected that from the tremendous pressure, the narrow pa.s.sage to the bas.e.m.e.nt door would be so choked and clogged with human limbs and bodies that movement would be impossible. Once indeed the crowd was forced to stop, and a cry went along that a man had been injured at the foot of the stairs. But presently the slow movement began again, and the policeman fought at the top of the flight to ease the pressure on those who were going down.

A reddish light from a window fell upon the faces of the men when they, in turn, arrived at the last three steps and were about to enter. One could then note a change of expression that had come over their features. As they thus stood upon the threshold of their hopes, they looked suddenly content and complacent. The fire had pa.s.sed from their eyes and the snarl had vanished from their lips. The very force of the crowd in the rear, which had previously vexed them, was regarded from another point of view, for it now made it inevitable that they should go through the little doors into the place that was cheery and warm with light.

The tossing crowd on the sidewalk grew smaller and smaller. The snow beat with merciless persistence upon the bowed heads of those who waited. The wind drove it up from the pavements in frantic forms of winding white, and it seethed in circles about the huddled forms, pa.s.sing in, one by one, three by three, out of the storm.

WHEN EVERY ONE IS PANIC STRICKEN.

A REALISTIC PEN PICTURE OF A FIRE IN A TENEMENT. THE PHILOSOPHY OF WOMEN. FRIGHT AND FLIGHT-THE MISSING BABY-A COMMONPLACE HERO.

Fire!

We were walking on one of the shadowy side streets, west of Sixth avenue. The midnight silence and darkness was upon it save where at the point of intersection with the great avenue, there was a broad span of yellow light. From there came the steady monotonous jingle of streetcar bells and the weary clatter of hoofs on the cobbles. While the houses in this street turned black and mystically silent with the night, the avenue continued its eternal movement and life, a great vein that never slept nor paused. The gorgeous orange-hued lamps of a saloon flared plainly, and the figures of some loungers could be seen as they stood on the corner. Pa.s.sing to and fro, the tiny black figures of people made an ornamental border on this fabric of yellow light.

The stranger was imparting to me some grim midnight reflections upon existence, and in the heavy shadows and in the great stillness pierced only by the dull thunder of the avenue, they were very impressive.

Suddenly the m.u.f.fled cry of a woman came from one of those dark, impa.s.sive houses near us. There was the sound of the splinter and crash of broken gla.s.s, falling to the pavement. ”What's that,” gasped the stranger. The scream contained that ominous quality, that weird timbre which denotes fear of imminent death.

A policeman, huge and panting, ran past us with glitter of b.u.t.tons and s.h.i.+eld in the darkness. He flung himself upon the fire alarm box at the corner where the lamp shed a flicker of carmine tints upon the pavement. ”Come on,” shouted the stranger. He dragged me excitedly down the street. We came upon an old four story structure, with a long sign of a bakery over the bas.e.m.e.nt windows, and the region about the quaint front door plastered with other signs. It was one of those ancient dwellings which the churning process of the city had changed into a hive of little industries.

At this time some dull gray smoke, faintly luminous in the night, writhed out from the tops of the second story windows, and from the bas.e.m.e.nt there glared a deep and terrible hue of red, the color of satanic wrath, the color of murder. ”Look! Look!” shouted the stranger.

It was extraordinary how the street awakened. It seemed but an instant before the pavements were studded with people. They swarmed from all directions, and from the dark ma.s.s arose countless exclamations, eager and swift.

”Where is it? Where is it?”

”No. 135.”

”It's that old bakery.”

”Is everybody out?”

”Look-gee-say, lookut 'er burn, would yeh?”

The windows of almost every house became crowded with people, clothed and partially clothed, many having rushed from their beds. Here were many women, and as their eyes fastened upon that terrible growing ma.s.s of red light one could hear their little cries, quavering with fear and dread. The smoke oozed in greater clouds from the s.p.a.ces between the sashes of the windows, and urged by the fervor of the heat within, ascended in more rapid streaks and curves.

Upon the sidewalk there had been a woman who was fumbling mechanically with the b.u.t.tons at the neck of her dress. Her features were lined in anguish; she seemed to be frantically searching her memory-her memory, that poor feeble contrivance that had deserted her at the first of the crisis, at the momentous time. She really struggled and tore hideously at some frightful mental wall that upreared between her and her senses, her very instincts. The policeman, running back from the fire alarm box, grabbed her, intending to haul her away from danger of falling things. Then something came to her like a bolt from the sky. The creature turned all grey, like an ape. A loud shriek rang out that made the spectators bend their bodies, twisting as if they were receiving sword thrusts.

”My baby! My baby! My baby!”

The policeman simply turned and plunged into the house. As the woman tossed her arms in maniacal gestures about her head, it could then be seen that she waved in one hand a little bamboo easel, of the kind which people sometimes place in corners of their parlors. It appeared that she had with great difficulty saved it from the flames. Its cost should have been about 30 cents.

A long groaning sigh came from the crowd in the street, and from all the thronged windows. It was full of distress and pity, and a sort of cynical scorn for their impotency. Occasionally the woman screamed again. Another policeman was fending her off from the house, which she wished to enter in the frenzy of her motherhood, regardless of the flames. These people of the neighborhood, aroused from their beds, looked at the spectacle in a half-dazed fas.h.i.+on at times, as if they were contemplating the ravings of a red beast in a cage. The flames grew as if fanned by tempests, a sweeping, inexorable appet.i.te of a thing, s.h.i.+ning, with fierce, pitiless brilliancy, gleaming in the eyes of the crowd that were upturned to it in an ecstasy of awe, fear and, too, half barbaric admiration. They felt the human helplessness that comes when nature breaks forth in pa.s.sion, overturning the obstacles, emerging at a leap from the position of a slave to that of a master, a giant. There became audible a humming noise, the buzzing of curious machinery. It was the voices of the demons of the flame. The house, in manifest heroic indifference to the fury that raged in its entrails, maintained a stolid and imperturbable exterior, looming black and immovable against the turmoil of crimson.

Eager questions were flying to and fro in the street.

”Say, did a copper go in there?”

”Yeh! He come out again, though.”

”He did not! He's in there yet!”

”Well, didn't I see 'im?”

”How long ago was the alarm sent it?”

”'Bout a minute.”

A woman leaned perilously from a window of a nearby apartment house and spoke querulously into the shadowy, jostling crowd beneath her, ”Jack!”

And the voice of an unknown man in an unknown place answered her gruffly and short in the tones of a certain kind of downtrodden husband who revels upon occasion, ”What?”

”Will you come up here?” cried the woman, shrilly irritable. ”Supposin' this house should get afire”-It came to pa.s.s that during the progress of the conflagration these two held a terse and bitter domestic combat, infinitely commonplace in language and mental maneuvers.

The blaze had increased with a frightful vehemence and swiftness. Unconsciously, at times, the crowd dully moaned, their eyes fascinated by this exhibition of the strength of nature, their master after all, that ate them and their devices at will whenever it chose to fling down their little restrictions. The flames changed in color from crimson to lurid orange as gla.s.s was shattered by the heat, and fell crackling to the pavement. The baker, whose shop had been in the bas.e.m.e.nt, was running about, weeping. A policeman had fought interminably to keep the crowd away from the front of the structure.

”Thunderation!” yelled the stranger, clutching my arm in a frenzy of excitement, ”did you ever see anything burn so? Why, it's like an explosion. It's only been a matter of seconds since it started.”

In the street, men had already begun to turn toward each other in that indefinite regret and sorrow, as if they were not quite sure of the reason of their mourning.

”Well, she's a goner!”

”Sure-went up like a box of matches!”

”Great Scott, lookut 'er burn!”