by Thomas Wolfe
As yet few people seemed fully to have comprehended the full significance of the event which had thus unceremoniously dumped them out of their sleek nest into the open weather. The only people, indeed, who did now seem to be aware of peril or an immediacy of danger which touched their own lives and fortunes were isolated individuals here and there whose own welfare and interest had in some way been touched.
At this moment, in fact, a window on the first floor on the opposite side of the building flew up and a man with a bald head and a pink, excited face appeared at the window. It was instantly apparent from his tone and manner that under the pressure of these events the man was on the verge of emotional collapse. He immediately cried out loudly in a high, rather fat tone that already was being shaken by incipient hysteria: “Mary!—Mary!—” his voice rose almost to a scream as he sought for her below and a woman in the crowd coming forward below the window looked up and said quietly, “Yes, Charles.”
“I can’t find the key!” he cried in a trembling voice. “… and the door’s locked! I can’t get out!” he almost screamed.
“Oh, Charles,” the woman said in a quieter tone in which perhaps some sorrow was evident, “don’t get so excited, dear. You’re in no danger—and the key is bound to be there somewhere. I’m sure you’ll find it if you look.”
“But I tell you it isn’t here,” he babbled in a high trembling tone. “I’ve looked, and it’s not here. I can’t find it!—Here, you fellows!” he shouted at a group of firemen who were dragging a heavy hose across the gravel court, “I’m locked in here!—I want out of here!—”
Most of the firemen paid no attention to him at all, but one of them raised his head for a moment, looked at him, and then saying briefly: “Okay, chief!” resumed his work and paid no further attention to the man.
“Do you hear me?—” the man screamed, “You fireman you!—I tell you—”
“Dad. Dad—” a young man beside the woman on the ground now spoke quietly to the flushed, excited man in the open window above. “Don’t get excited—You’re in no danger there. All the fire is on the other side—They’ll let you out in a moment when they can get to you.”
Elsewhere—from the very entrance, indeed, from which the Jacks had issued, a man in evening clothes had been staggering in and out accompanied by two other men, one of whom was a chauffeur and one his butler, with great loads of ponderous ledgers. He had already accumulated a staggering pile of them, which he was stacking up on the gravel and leaving in the guardianship of the butler. This man’s activities from the beginning had been as furiously self-absorbed, as completely buried in his own work, as if he was completely unconscious of every one around him and cared nothing for anyone’s activity except his own. Now, as he again prepared to rush into the smoke-filled corridor with his chauffeur, he was stopped by the police.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the policeman said, “but you can’t go in there again. We’ve got orders not to let anyone else in.”
“But I tell you!” the man shouted, “I’ve got to. I’m Henry J. Baer!”—he mentioned the name of a man who was at that time famous in the motion picture industry, and whose accounts and earnings had only recently been called into investigation by a board of Governmental inquiry. “There are seventy-five million dollars worth of records in my apartment,” the man shouted, “and I’ve got to get them out! They’ve got to be saved!” He tried to thrust by again but the policeman blocked the way, barred his entrance, and thrust him back.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Baer,” he said obdurately, “but we have our orders. You can’t come in.”
The effect of this refusal upon the man was instantaneous and shocking. If he had been King Croesus, forced to stand by idly while he saw all of his huge treasures go up in flame and smoke, he could not have been more maddened. He became like a wild animal, he lost any vestige of dignity or self-respect which he might heretofore have had. The whole principle of his life, which was that money is the only thing in life that counts and that people will do anything for money—the naked philosophy of tooth and claw which, in moments of security and in comfort, was veiled beneath a velvet sheath—now became ragingly insistent to the exclusion of every other value.
A tall, dark man, with a rapacious beak-nosed face, he became now like a beast of prey. He went charging in among the people, offering everyone, any stranger that he saw, fabulous sums of money if they would go with him to help in the salvation of his cherished records. He saw a group of firemen dragging a great hose into position and he rushed up to them, seizing one of them by the arm in his frantic eagerness and shaking him, crying: “I’m Henry J. Baer—I live in there! You’ve got to help me! I’ll give any man here ten thousand dollars if he’ll help me get my records out!”
The man whom he had thus addressed and interrupted, a burly fireman with a weathered face, turned now and spoke: “On your way, Mac!” he said.
“But I tell you!” the man shouted, “You don’t know who I am. I’m—”
“I don’t care who you are!” the fireman said. “On your way now! We’ve got work to do!” and roughly, he pushed the Croesus back.
Most of the crowd, however, was quieter, more bewildered. For some time the people shifted and moved about, taking curious side looks at one another out of the corners of their eyes. For most of them it was undoubtedly an illuminating experience—for all of them, certainly, the first time that they had had the opportunity of appraising at first hand and, so to speak, unprepared, the full personnel of the great building.
People who would never, under any ordinary circumstances, mingle with one another were now seen laughing and talking together with the familiarity of long acquaintanceship. A famous courtesan, wearing a chinchilla coat which her aged but fabulously wealthy lover had given her, and which must have cost a king’s ransom, now took off this magnificent garment and, walking over to an elderly woman with a delicate and patrician face, she threw the coat over this woman’s thinly covered shoulders, at the same time, saying in a tough but somehow kindly little voice:
“You wear this, darling. You look cold.”
And the woman, after a startled expression had for a moment crossed her proud and sensitive face, smiled graciously and thanked her tarnished sister in a sweet tone; then the two women stood talking together like old friends.
Elsewhere, a group of eager idol-worshipping girls had gathered around a famous comedienne of the revue and musical comedy stage. And this woman, an Englishwoman with a beautiful small head, and the instinctive elegance, the fine features and the figure of an aristocrat was delighting these adoring children by spontaneously carrying on for them in the comic vein for which she was famous.
“Tell me, my lambs,” she was saying in her cool clipped tones, “Do you like me with—or without—my face?”—As she uttered these words, she threw her lovely features out of shape in a rubbery grimace that was irresistibly comical, and instantly was herself again, cool, clipped, poised, and elegant, going from one hilarity to another with a comic inventiveness that was wonderful, and that gained in effectiveness because its essentially bawdy quality was always conveyed with the imperturbable elegance, the exquisite refinement of a great lady.
Meanwhile, her companion, another tall and beautiful Englishwoman with a lovely voice, who was also a famous actress of the comic stage, was listening to the fervent adorations of an earnest little woman who looked as if she might have been a school teacher, as if she were enchanted with these banal platitudes and had never listened to such understanding and delightful comment on her act in her whole life.
Elsewhere, a haughty old Bourbon of the Knickerbocker type was seen engaged in earnest conversation with a Tammany politician whose corrupt plunderings were notorious, and whose companionship, in any social sense, the Bourbon would have spurned indignantly an hour before.
Proud aristocrats of patrician lineage, whose names appeared but rarely in the most exclusive gatherings of the aristocracy could be seen chatting familiarly with th
e plebeian parvenus of the new rich who had got their name and money both together, only yesterday.
And so it went, everywhere one looked:—one saw haughty gentiles with rich Jews; stately ladies with musical comedy actresses; a woman famous for her charities with a celebrated whore.
Curiously, the appraisal was an increasingly friendly one. It was as if the stress of danger, the shock of surprise, the informality of their attire had created the feeling of mutual interest and affection which no amount of formal meeting could have brought about. People who had never seen one another before, people who had never spoken to one another, now began to move about, to greet one another with friendly smiles and to engage familiarly with other people who up to that time had been complete strangers to them.
Even the servants—the French chauffeurs, the Irish maids, the German cooks, and so on—under these informal circumstances, were now beginning to fraternize and to talk to one another as they had never done before.
In one place a group of liveried chauffeurs had gathered together and were furiously discussing politics and the problem of international economy, the chief disputants being a plump Frenchman with a waxed moustache, whose sentiments were decidedly revolutionary, and an American, a little man with corky legs, a tough seamed face, a birdy eye, and the quick impatient movements of the city.
The scene, the situation, and the contrast between these two men was absurdly funny. The plump Frenchman, his cheeks pink with excitement, was talking and gesticulating volubly: he would get so excited that he would lean forward with the fingers of one plump hand closed daintily in a descriptive circle that meant—everything! The air about him fairly screeched with objurgations, expletives, impassioned cries of “Mais oui!—Mais oui! Absolument!—C’est le vérité!”—or with laughs of maddened exasperation as if the knowledge that such stupidity could exist was more than he could endure:
“—Mais non!—Mais non!—Vous avez tort—Mais c’est stupide!” he would cry, throwing his plump arms up in a gesture of defeat, and turning away with an exasperated laugh as if he could endure it no longer, and was departing—only to return immediately, talking and gesticulating more furiously than ever.
Meanwhile, the target of this deluge, the little American with the corky legs and the birdy eye was listening with a look of cynical impassivity, leaning against the wall of a terrace, taking an occasional puff at a cigarette, and with an air that seemed to say: “O.K.—O.K.—Frenchy—When you get through spouting, maybe I’ll have something to say.”
“Seulement un mot!” the Frenchman finally declared, when he had exhausted his vocabulary and his breath. “One vord!” he cried impressively, drawing himself up to his full five feet three, and holding one plump finger in the air, as if he were about to deliver Holy Writ—“I’ave to say one vord more!”
“O.K.! O.K.!” said the corky little American with an air of cynical weariness—“Only don’t take more than an hour and a half to say it! … The trouble with you guys,” he went on in a moment, after a preliminary puff upon his cigarette, “is that you have been over there all your life where you ain’t been used to nothing—and the moment you get over here where you can live like a human being you want to tear it all down—”
“Mais non!” the Frenchman cried in a tone of impassioned protest. “… Mais cest stupide!” he turned to the whole company in a gesture of exasperated appeal—“C’est—”
“Noos! I got noos for you!”—another chauffeur, obviously of Germanic origin, with bright blue eyes, and a nut-cracker face somewhat reminiscent of a vulture’s, at this moment rejoined the group with an air of elated discovery—“I haf been mit a drifer who has liffed in Rooshia and he says that conditions there far worser are—”
“Non! Non!” the Frenchman shouted, red in the face with anger and protest “Ce n’est pas—”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” the American said, tossing his cigarette away, with a gesture of impatience and disgust—“Why don’t you guys wake up? This ain’t Russia! You’re in America!”—And the heated and confused dialog would become more spirited than ever.
Meanwhile, the crowd continued to watch curiously the labors of the firemen. The firemen had dragged in across the court from all directions a network of great white hose. Squadrons of helmeted men would dash into the smoky corridors from time to time, some would go upstairs, others would emerge from the lower regions of the basements and confer intimately with their chiefs and leaders.
As for the crowd itself, save for the unmistakable presence of smoke in the halls and corridors, it was in ignorance concerning the cause and extent of the fire. There was, indeed, at first, save for this mist of acrid smoke in the hallways, little evidence of fire.
But now the indications became much plainer. For some time now upon the very top floor of the south wing—just three floors indeed above Mrs. Jack’s apartment and in the vicinity of her husband’s bedroom, infrequent wisps of smoke had been curling through the open window of a room in which a light now somewhat somberly had been left burning.
Now the amount of smoke began to increase in volume and in density and suddenly a great billowing puff of oily black smoke accompanied by a dancing fire of sparks burst through the open window. And, as it did, the whole crowd drew in its single and collected breath in a sharp intake of excitement in which a curious and disturbing eagerness—the strange wild joy that people feel when they see fire, even if fire means ruin or peril to them or their neighbors—was evident.
Steadily the amount of smoke increased in density and volume. Nothing apparently was as yet affected except that single room on top, but the black and oily looking smoke was now billowing out in belching folds and the smoke itself in the room within was colored luridly by the sinister and unmistakable glow of fire.
Mrs. Jack gazed upward with a rapt, a fascinated gaze. “How terrible!” she thought, “How terrible!—but God! How beautiful it is.”
Mrs. Jack turned to Hook with one hand raised and lightly clenched against her breast, and whispered slowly: “Steve—isn’t it the strangest—I mean isn’t it the most—” She did not finish, but with her face deeply flushed, her eyes quietly, deeply concerned with the sense of wonder that she felt and that she was trying to convey, she just stood there with her hand loosely clenched and looked at him.
He understood her perfectly—too, too well. His heart was sick with fear, with hunger and with fascinated wonder. For him it was too hard, too strong, too full of terror, of wonder, awe, and overwhelming beauty to be endured. He was sick with terror, fainting with it, he wanted to be borne away, to be sealed hermetically somewhere, in some dead and easeful air where free for ever more of violence and terror, of this consuming and heart-sickening fear that wracked his flesh, he could live in everlasting peace and security, could live a life in death, if such it was—but at least could live, live, live. And yet he could not leave it. He looked at it with sick but fascinated eyes like some man mad with thirst who drinks the waters of the sea and sickens with each drop he drinks, yet cannot leave the wetness and the coolness, the unsated hungers of his unslaked thirst. He looked at it and loved it with all the desperate ardour of his sick hate. The wonder of it, the strangeness of it, the beauty and the magic and the nearness of it, the richness of its overwhelming reality—a reality so near, so close, so overpowering in its impact that it had, as all moments of supreme reality have, the quality of a vision or a dream, the concentrated omnipresence of a ship-wreck when the sloping decks of a tremendous liner, or of a gigantic catastrophe when a fabulous city such as this—a reality that is all the more overwhelming and unbelievable because one knows that it is so, one knows he has always foreseen it, has always imagined it, and now that it is here in its sheer texture, in its complex substance, now that it is here not a hand’s breadth away, to be seen, felt, smelled, touched, visioned and experienced in a design that is if anything more overpowering than anything mind or imagination could contrive, becomes therefore more incredible. “It can’t be t
rue,” thought Hook, “but here it is. It is not true—it’s just a dream—it’s unbelievable—but, here it is!”
And there it was. He didn’t miss a thing. And yet he stood there, ridiculously, a derby hat upon his head, his pale, plump hands thrust into the pockets of his overcoat, the velvet collar turned up around his pale, plump neck, his butty figure turned as usual three-quarters away from the whole world, his heart simply sick with fear, and his haughty, pursey face, his heavy-lidded, wearily indifferent eyes, surveying the scene with a glance of mandarin contempt, as if to say: “Really, what is this curious assembly? Who are these extraordinary creatures that go milling about me? And why is everyone so frightfully eager, so terribly earnest about everything?”
A group of firemen thrust past him coarsely, dripping the powerful brass-nozzled end of a great hose. The hose slid coarsely through the gravel like the heavy tough-scaled hide of a giant boa-constrictor, and as the firemen passed him, Hook heard their booted and unconscious feet strike gravel and he saw the crude strength, the simple driving purpose of their coarse strong faces. And his life shrank back within him as he looked at them with butty heavy-eyed indifference. But his heart was sick. Sick with fear, with wonder, with hunger and with love of the unconscious strength, the joy, the energy and the violence of life itself.
A coarse voice, drunken, boisterous and too-near, cut the air about him. It jarred his ears, angered him, and made him timorously hope it would not come closer, invade him with its brutal and insensitive intrusion. Turning slightly toward Mrs. Jack, in answer to her whispered question, he murmured in a bored tone: “Um—yes. An interesting revelation of the native moeurs.”
Amy Van Leer seemed really happy. It was not that her manner had changed. It was really as if, for the first time that evening, she had achieved, had found something that she was looking for. Really, it was now as if, for her, the party had just begun. Nothing had changed really very much in her manner or appearance. The quick impetuous speech—the broken interrupted semi-coherent phrases—the hoarse short laugh—the exuberant expletives—the lovely, golden, crisp-curled head, snub nose and freckled face were just the same. But it was as if all these explosive fragments had now been gathered into a kind of harmony. It was as if she had, so to speak, now been able to articulate herself. It was as if all the dissonance had been brought together to a congruent whole. It was as if all the splintered elements of her personality had now, under the strong and marvelous chemistry of the fire, been brought together into crystalline union. She was, in short, as she had been before except the torment was left out and wholeness was let in.