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.
It had been nearly thirty hours since he had slept; and he found his eyes hot and dry and heavy in his head. Whether it was the smoke he had breathed, or the steady strain of the long night, or the lack of sleep and sheer fatigue, he did not know; but he found developing in his brain a strange, numb sense of remoteness, a want of coordination and identity between it and his body. In remembering this day, he was always afterwards to associate it with a smell of stale smoke in his nostrils and a vague dimness of sight. Even the thousand vivid incidents of the great conflagration were always to come back to him with this haunting sense of unreality, the feeling that it was not actually he but some one else who had witnessed and shared and lived through them—some one not alien, yet not wholly kin to himself. The gray and ochre smoke haze, and the diffused heat, and the sense of intimate danger long faced and hence grown hardly noted, clouded and filmed the facts, the colors, and the emotions of this day in the dim light of a dream.
They were wild facts, too; great deeds; and glorious colors, which would have been worth a clearer recollection. The color of the midnight sky, its velvet blackness shot with crimson gleams. The waves of smoke, now like densest ink pouring up from some unseen funereal funnel—now blindingly white, flung like the plume of Navarre above the tumult of the fray. The tall, cold buildings standing almost defiantly in the winter air, lifting their immobile fronts to face the onrush—and the same buildings a little later, when the flames had passed, leaving only gnawed skeletons and heaped and smoldering ruins in their wake. The grim and terrible anguish of twisted steel girders that lay writhen like petrified snakes among the ashes, or lifted their tortured length to reach some last hold on sanity at the wall which they had once helped maintain. Great heaps and piles of ashes, and half-consumed beams and crushed and broken brick, lying in smoldering humility, punctuated by stray relics and remnants of an unburned world—pieces of furniture, by some miracle left unharmed, or bric-a-brac of some more than usual inanity. Fireproof buildings through which the flood of destruction had passed, burning all that was burnable, and leaving the gaunt frames naked in the air, their exteriors perhaps scorched and defaced, but with their vast strength unshaken and undismayed. The thousand sounds and odors of the fearful night and of the slow dawn; the fire whistles shrilling through the wintry air, the gongs on truck and cart adding their clangor to the mad mellay, the shouts of men, the bawling of orders, the screams of frightened women, the uncanny sound of the mewing of an imprisoned cat in a window, whose instinct told it what its sense could not. The hammer of horses' hoofs on the stones of the street, with the sparks flung out to left and right beneath the flying feet; the steady chug-chug of the tireless engines with their fireboxes seething white-hot in the effort to hold the steam to its figure on the gauge. The far shock and the dull boom of dynamiting that was like the rumor of a distant heavy cannonade. Then the men, the leagued enemies against this arch conspirator—the thousand heroisms of these men who contended without fear against unbeatable odds; the stark, cold bravery that is a thing outside of human experience save in some sublimated essence such as this—men who spanned impossible gaps, bore impossible weights, scaled unscalable heights, died incredibly heroic and unutterably tragic deaths, and who did these preposterous things as simply and unquestioningly as a child falling to sleep. The bitter humors of this prank of fate—the things shattered which should have been whole, the things preserved which no hand but that of error had ever created. The ruthless mixture of the farcical and the pathetic; the fire horse struck to earth by a falling wall, screaming in anguish—and the coal heaver, carrying hurriedly toward safety a gilt and white ormolu clock. And behind all this the swaying, eddying, swirling, but inexorably onward movement of the Fire, and the muffled drum beat that served it for a pulse; behind all this the Fire's voice, the low, purring, sinister roar which never ceased and which was deeper than the sound of any surges on any shore; behind all this the valley of the shadow, with its grim processional of life and fear and death, a processional spurred and driven to a speed which never slackened, under the wind which for twenty hours had hardly tired, but had blown so steadfastly that to the people of the city it seemed to be what in reality it must have been—the breath of God out of the north.
CHAPTER XXIII
It was nearly nine o'clock in the evening when there came a ring at the Maitlands' doorbell. It had not been the easiest waiting in the world, that of the two women in the half-deserted apartment building through the long night and longer day. Helen would have preferred to go out of doors, feeling that there she could see and follow, at a distance at least, the progress of the conflagration; but Mrs. Maitland in a strange and unlooked-for obstinacy absolutely declined to leave the apartment or to permit her daughter to do so.
"I don't know anything about fires, but if this one starts in this direction I want to be here, and not away somewhere," she repeated to her daughter's urging; nor could she be induced to take any other viewpoint. So in their rooms they remained, and their only news from without was transmitted to them from the servants and visitors to the building. The telephone was out of commission, and Helen felt as though she were marooned in full sight of a civilization with which she could not communicate and which afforded her no benefits.