THE EAST EIGHTY-FIRST STREET FIRE

They emerged in all the magic wildness of an autumn night and walked east on Eighty-first Street. The loft building was near the corner of Second Avenue. They passed under the elevated structure, cutting through a hurrying throng of people.

“Take my arm,” cried Joe.

She took it, trembling. They made an odd couple passing along between the squalid red-brick tenements, now in shadow, now in the glow of some little shop window, now under a sparkling lamp. At Avenue A they went south to Seventy-ninth Street, and again turned east, passing a row of bright model tenements, emerging at last at the strange riverside.

Down to the very edge of the unpaved waste they walked, or rather floated, so strange and uplifted and glorious they felt, blown and carried bodily with the exultant west wind, and they only stopped when they reached the wooden margin, where an old scow, half laden with brick, was moored fast with ropes. This scow heaved up and down with the motion of the rolling waters; the tight ropes grated; the water swashed melodiously.

The man and woman seemed alone there, a black little lump in the vast spaces, for behind them the city receded beyond empty little hill-sides and there was nothing some distance north and south.

“Look,” said Joe, “look at the tide!”

It was running north, a wide expanse of rolling waters from their feet to Blackwells Island in the east, all hurling swiftly like a billowing floor of gray. Here and there whitecaps spouted. On Blackwells Island loomed the gray hospitals and workhouses, and at intervals on the shore sparkled a friendly light.

“But see the bridge,” exclaimed Myra.

She pointed far south, where across the last of the day ran a slightly arched string of lights, binding shore with shore. On the New York side, and nearer, rose the high chimneys of mills, and from these a purplish smoke swirled thickly, melting into the gray weather.

And it seemed to Joe at that wild moment that nothing was as beautiful as smoking chimneys. They meant so much labor, human beings, fire, warmth.

And over all river, bridge, chimneys, Blackwells Island, and the throbbing city behind them rose the immense gray-clouded heavens. A keen smell of the far ocean came to their nostrils and the air was clear and exhilarant. Then, as they watched, suddenly a tug lashed between enormous flat boats on which were red freight-cars, swept north with the tide. A thin glaze of heat breathed up from the tug’s pipe; it was moving without its engines, and the sight was unbelievable. The whole huge mass simply shot the river, racing by them.

And then the very magic of life was theirs. The world fell from them, the dusty scales of facts, the complex intricacies of existence melted away. They were very close, and the keen, yelling wind was wrapping them closer. Vision filled the gray air, trembled up from the river to the heavens. They rose from all the chaos like two white flames blown by the wind together they were two gigantic powers of the earth preparing like gods for new creation. In that throbbing moment each became the world to the other, and love, death-strong, shot their hearts.

He turned, gazing strangely at her pale, eager, breathless face.

“I want ...” he began.

“Yes,” she breathed.

He opened his lips, and the sound that escaped seemed like a sob.

“Myra!”

And then at the sound of her name she was all woman, all love. She cried out:

“Joe!”

And they flung their arms round each other. She sobbed there, overcome with the yearning, the glory, the beatitude of that moment.

“Oh,” he cried, “how I love you!... Myra ...”

“Joe, Joe I couldn’t have stood it longer!”

All of life, all of the past, all of the million years of earth melted into that moment, that moment when a man and a woman, mingled into one, stood in the heart of the wonder, the love, the purpose of nature a mad, wild, incoherent half-hour, a secret ecstasy in the passing of the twilight, in the swing of the wind and the breath of the sea.

“Come home to my mother,” cried Joe. “Come home with me!”

They turned ... and Myra was a strange new woman, tender, grave, and wrought of all lovely power, her face, in the last of the light, mellow and softly glowing with a heightened woman-power.

“Yes,” she said, “I want to see Joe’s mother.”

It was Joe’s last step to success. Now he had all his work, his love. He felt powerfully masculine, triumphant, glorious.

Night had fallen, and on the darkness broke and sparkled a thousand lights in tenement windows and up the shadowy streets everywhere homes, families; men, women, and children busily living together; everywhere love. Joe glanced, his eyes filling. Then he paused.

“Look at that,” he said in a changed voice.

Over against the west, a little to the north, the gray heavens were visible a lightning seemed to run over them a ghastly red lightning sharply silhouetting the chimneyed housetops.

“What is it?” said Myra.

He gazed at it, transfixed.

“That’s a fire ... a big fire.” Then suddenly his face, in the pale light of a street-lamp, became chalky white and knotted. He could barely speak. “It must be on Eighty-first or Eighty-second Street.”

She spoke shrilly, clutching his arm.

“Not ... the loft?”

“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 breasts. 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 hoarsely.

“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 hoarse 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, God, why wasn’t I killed there!”