Part 2 (1/2)
”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.