“It’ll look like a May party in the morning, Chief.”
THE FIRE
It is two o’clock of a sultry summer afternoon in one of those amazingly crowded blocks on the East Side south of Fourteenth Street, which is drowsing out its commonplace existence through the long and wearisome summer. The men of the community, for it may as well be called a community since it involves all that makes a community, and that in a very small space, are away at work or in their small stores, which take up all of the ground floors everywhere. The housewives are doing their shopping in these same stores—groceries, bakeries, meat and fish markets. From the streets which bound this region people are pouring through, a busy host, coming from what sections of the city and the world and going to what sections of the city and the world no one may divine. Wagons rattle, trucks rumble by with great, creaking loads, a slot conduit trolley puts a clattering car past every fifteen or twenty seconds. The riffraff of life fills it as full as though it were the center of the world. Children, since there is no school now, are playing here. The streets are fairly alive with a noisy company of urchins who play at London Bridge and My Love’s Lover, and are constantly getting in the way of one another and of every one else who chances to pass this way.
Suddenly, in the midst of an almost wearisome peace, comes the cry of fire. It comes from the cleanly depths of Number 358, in the middle of this block, where one Frederick Halsmann, paint-dealer and purveyor of useful oils to the inhabitants of this neighborhood, has apparently been busy measuring out a gallon of gasoline. He has been doing a fairly thriving business here for years, the rejuvenation of a certain apartment district nearby having brought him quite a demand for explosive and combustible oils, such as naphtha, gasoline and benzine, to say nothing of turpentine and some other less dangerous products, all of which he has stored in his basement. There is a law against keeping more than twenty gallons of any kind of explosive oil in a store or the basement of a store, but this law, like so many others of the great city, enjoys its evasions. What is the law between friends?
All the same, and at last, a fire has broken out—no one ever knows quite how. A passing stranger notes smoke issuing from a grating in front of the store. He calls the attention of Mr. Halsmann to it, but even before that the latter has seen it. He starts to descend an outside stairway leading to his particular basement but is halted by a terrific explosion which knocks him and some strangers down, shatters the windows in his own and other stores four or five numbers away, and tears a hole in the floor of his store through which his paints, a counter, a cash register and some other things begin to tumble. He is too astounded to quite grasp it all but recovering his feet he begins to shout: “Maria! Maria! Come quick! And the children! Come out! Come down!”
But his cries come too late. He has scarcely got the words out of his mouth when a second explosion, far more violent than the first, tears up the floor and the stairs leading to his home and throws the lurid fire into the rooms above. It smashes the glass in the front windows of stores across the street and blows a perfect hurricane of fire in the same direction. People run, yelling and screaming, a hundred voices raising the cry of “Fire!”
“My God! My God!” cries an old Jewish butcher over the way. He is standing in front of his store wringing his hands. “It is Halsmann’s store! Run quick!” This to a child near him. Then he also runs. An idle policeman breaks for the nearest fire alarm box, and the crowds of the neighboring thoroughfares surge in here until the walks and the paving stones are black with people. A hundred heads pop out of neighboring windows. A thousand voices take up the cry of “Fire!”
From the houses adjoining, and even in this one, for the upper floors have not yet been completely shattered, people are hurrying. A woman with a child on the third floor is screaming and waving her free hand frantically. A score of families in the adjoining buildings are gathering their tawdry valuables together and hastening into the street. Some policemen from neighboring beats, several from the back rooms of saloons, come running, and the fight to obtain a little order in anticipation of the fire engines begins.
