An old friend of mine, named Luigi, who once kept a tiny wine-shop, lives in a little dirty room in Rosoman Street, and I sometimes spend an evening with him. But not in summer. I adjure you—do not visit an impoverished Italian who lives in one room in Clerkenwell, in the summer; unless, of course, you are a sanitary inspector. He is an entertaining old fellow, and speaks a delicious Italian-Cocknese, which no amount of trickery could render on the printed page. When I go, I usually take him a flask of Chianti and some Italian cigars, for which he very nearly kisses me.
But Luigi has a story. You will see that at once if you scan his face. There is something behind him—something he would like to forget. It happened about ten years ago, and I witnessed it. Ten years ago, Luigi did something—an act at once heroic, tragic, and idiotic. This was the way of it.
It was an April night, and we were lounging at that corner which was once called Poverty Point; the corner where Leather Lane crashes into Clerkenwell Road, and where, of a summer night, gather the splendid sons of Italy to discuss, to grin, to fight, and to invent new oaths. On this corner, moreover, they pivot in times of danger, and, once they can make the mazy circle of which it is the edge, safety from the pursuer is theirs. The place was alive with evening gladness. In the half-darkness, indolent groups lounged or strolled, filling their lungs with the heavily garlicked air of the place.
Then an organ pulled up at the public-house which smiles goldenly upon Mount Pleasant, and music broke upon us. Instantly, with the precision of a harlequinade, a stream of giggling girls poured from Eyre Street Hill and Back Hill. With the commencement of a rag-tag dance, the Point was whipped to frivolous life. The loungers grunted, and moved up to see. Clusters of children, little angels with dark eyes and language sufficiently seasoned to melt a glacier, slipped up from nowhere, and, one by one, the girls among them slid into the dance. One of them had a beribboned tambourine. Two others wanted it, and would snatch it away. Its owner said they were—something they could not possibly have been.
Stabs of light from the tenements pierced the dusk high and low. The night shone with recent rain, and in a shifting haze of grey and rose the dancers sank and glided, until the public-house lamp was turned on and a cornet joined the organ. In the warm yellow light, the revels broke bounds, and, to the hysterical appeal of "Hiawatha," the Point became a Babel.... When most of the dancers had danced themselves to exhaustion, two of the smaller maidens stood out and essayed a kind of can-can.
The crowd swooped in. It crowded with appreciation as they introduced all the piquant possibilities of the dance. It babbled its merriment at seeing little faces, which should show only the revel of April, bearing all the ravage of Autumn.
Comments and exhortations, spiced to taste, flew about the Point, ricochetted, and returned in boomerang fashion to their authors, who repolished them and shot them forth again. Heads bobbed back, forth, and up in the effort to see. In a prestissimo fire of joy, the novel exercise reached its finale, when ...
"Hi-hi! Hè. Eeeee!" As though by signal, the whole Point was suddenly aspurt with spears of flame, leaping, meeting, and crossing. We looked round. The dance stopped, the organ gurgled away to rubbish, the crowd took open order, and stared at the narrow alley of Back Hill. Blankets of smoke moved from its mouth, pushing their suffocating way up the street. Twenty people hurt themselves in shrieking orders. Women screamed and ran. From an open window a tongue of flame was thrust derisively; it tickled a man's neck, and he swore. Then a lone woman had the sense to scream something intelligible.
We all ran. English, Italian, and profane clashed together. Three small boys strangled each other in a race for the fire-bell. In Back Hill, men, women, and children were hustling themselves through the ground-floor window of the doomed house. Thick, languid flames blocked the doorway, swaying idly, ready to fasten their fangs in anything that approached. Furniture crashed and bounded to the pavement. Mattresses were flung out to receive the indecent figures of their owners. The crowd swelled feverishly. Women screamed.
Gradually the crackle of burning wood and the ripple of falling glass gained voice above the outcry of the crowd. A shout of fear and admiration surged up, as a spout of flame darted through the roof, and quivered proudly to the sky. Luigi threw back his sweeping felt hat, loosened his yellow neckcloth, tightened his scarlet waistband. "It is bad," he said. "It is a fire."