Ainslee's Magazine/The Woman With a Past/At the Front
XV.—AT THE FRONT.
...You never will escape
Luigi. Escape! To even wish that would spoil all
The dying is best part of it. Pippa Passes
THE alarm of fire came at about one o’clock, when most of the people in the hotel had gone to bed and to sleep. Mrs. Carpenter, whose nights were often apt to be white ones, was awake when her telephone rang, and an agitated voice from the office gave her the word that is perhaps the most terrifying of all words in the dead of night—Fire!”
She was quickly out of bed and into a warm, voluminous kimono, and had her door open in half a minute. There was a general dim hubbub and confusion everywhere, and a perceptible smell of smoke swept down the corridor. A woman, crying hysterically, was being led toward the stairs by a man dressed in the incongruous clothes usual at night fires—pajamas, short dinner coat, and hat. He turned with a nervous start as Pippa called to him calmly enough: “Where is the fire, please?”
“The other side, I think,” he said jerkily. “But they say it's spreading rapidly.”
He stared at her vaguely. Her hair was hanging in two burnished, dark-red braids to her waist, Above the soft, dull-blue folds of the kimono, her face was colorless and tranquil. In the midst of the danger and confusion she looked ethereal and childlike and strangely quiet. The man lingered, still gazing at her stupidly.
“I wish I could help you, too” he began stupidly. But the woman with him caught at his arm with a cry: “Oh, hurry! hurry!'
“I'm all right, thanks,” said Philippa, and the couple went on. Some hotel servants came hurrying past; other doors opened; the smell, and a faint, blue dimness of smoke were alike increasing. Pippa turned back into her room and unlocked her jewels. As she did so, she wondered why she bothered. Fire and the peril of it; life and death so close together for a space; and yet, acting on traditional instinct she could think about jewels! She was hunting for her thick coat when a succession of screams that were like one big shriek dragged her back to the door again, Two housemaids were crying and clinging together. Farther down the hallway, she could hear men's voices loud and excited; then another sound. What was it? It seemed like the crashing fall of heavy woodwork and masonry.
“It's gone!” sobbed one of the girls “Oh, I knew they were lying when they told everybody it was only the other side. It was just to save a panic!”
“It's gone!” repeated Pippa. “What has gone?”
“The staircase at this end, ma'am!” whimpered the second girl. “We're cut off!”
The corridor was noticeably hotter. The shouts of the men grew louder and more broken. Some one cried: “Get to the roof!”
The two girls ran screaming toward the little staircase that led up to the top of the big hotel.
“Don't be fools!” called Philippa after them sharply. “If you get to the roof, you can't get down! It's three stories higher than any other building around here!”
“Ladder! Firemen!” panted one of them as she ran. She turned her head to cry over her shoulder: “Better come, too, ma'am!”
The next moment a great volume of smoke blotted out their figures. The fire was evidently spreading both ways, and was now coming down the other corridor. Like many hotels, this was built in a square, with a courtyard and three elevator shafts to create the sort of draft that fire feeds upon. Pippa did feel a sick throb of fear for a moment, for it looked just then as if she must be really cut off. Then she steadied her nerves once more, and forced herself to think clearly and quickly.
There was, she knew, a sort of ell or extension of the building just beyond that ominous curl of blue-gray smoke. Unless she was very much mistaken, the windows of the farthest room in the ell overlooked a row of shops—shops that were rather higher than the average. There was just a chance that she could get from that room onto one of the lower roofs and so escape. As for the wall of smoke that must be gone through, well, life should be worth a risk, and, anyway, one could not stand still and die like a rat in a trap. One must at least make an effort. She hesitated for an instant, and then walked quickly down the hall into the smoke.
It seemed to her that she was being drugged with the heavy, aromatic volume of it, There was less of a choking sensation than of anæsthesia, unconsciousness. The heat was hideous, and, somewhere at her left, through the dense smoke, she could see a dreadful red glow that waxed and waned.
The smoke made it hard to tell just where she was going, but she found the wall, and then the turning, and felt her way forward, as fast as she could for that creeping numbness that was coming over her brain and her body alike. Suddenly she was conscious of a sound other than the distant hiss of flame and the still more distant cries of panic-stricken human creatures. It was a groaning, gasping sound as of one in mortal stress, and it came almost from beneath her feet. The next moment she stumbled over a man who was dragging himself along the floor by his hands, In moments like these, nothing surprises one. Pippa merely bent down, a little dizzily, and gasped:
“Do you think it would do any good if you took my hand and I helped pull?”
“No, I can make it,” he croaked. “We're almost there.”
Almost immediately her fingers closed on the handle of the door that crossed the end of the extension. She flung it open, and dragged deep breaths of air into her lungs—it was strange how the pure atmosphere hurt them!—while the man crawled slowly, and with occasional hard, rasping groans, in from the thickening smoke outside.
“Close it!” he ordered, when he was in the room. “I can't do anything; my leg's smashed.”
Pippa closed the door and opened the window; her heart was pumping less violently now, her eyes were less blind. The electric light was fully on, and by it she could see the man, now huddled near the door, motionless. As she looked, he raised his head, He was an angular, heavy man, with haggard eyes and a shock of rough hair, beginning to turn gray. There was something vital and vigorous about him even in his suffering; and his eyes, for all the haggardness, were full of keen light.
They looked at each other in the direct way of people who are facing great moments together.
“How did you get hurt?” she asked simply
“On the other side; it's—hell over there. The alarm wasn't given in time. One end fell in. I stayed till something fell on me and smashed me—part of the wall, I guess.”
“Why did you stay?” asked Pippa
“First, because I'm a newspaper man, and wanted the story, and, second, because—I tell you, it's hell over there! There's work for fifty men to do trying to get some of those poor devils out!”
“How did you think of this way out?” she asked.
“It happens to be my room. It'll be one of the last parts to go, I guess, and—you've thought of the other roof, of course, or you wouldn't be here?”
She nodded.
“We ought to have a breathing space here anyway,” he went on. “And I've got the story to write, if I don't keel over first. Fireproof buildings! Fireproof!” His mouth twisted bitterly “Every rotten inch of this place ought to have been condemned! One of those vile contracting jobs that they are always putting over on public buildings, and that ought to send a few 'men higher up' straight to” He broke off with a gesture of impatience. “I'm wasting time! I tell you I can write a story about this that will put special leaders in every daily in the country!”
Pippa went over to him, and, stooping, put her hand firmly on his shoulder.
“You can't,” she said. “You haven't time. Don't you realize? There's only the one way to get out. We must not lose time”
“We?” interrupted the man with a crooked smile. “With—that?” And he pointed to the crushed leg
Pippa's flesh crisped.
“But—you will be burned!”
The man threw up his big head with a defiance that was almost savage. “What difference does that make?' he said fiercely. “I don't care how I die; I'd rather have it this way than by pneumonia, or old age! I've lived. Any chap who's lived can die. It's only the ones that haven't known life that are afraid of death. Are you afraid?”
“No,” said Pippa.
He nodded approval.
“We're at the front,” he said. “That's all. We're going into action. And you've got a good chance, anyway. If I can hold out, I'll write the story. There are pencils and so on on the table over there—and"
Pippa caught up a pencil and a pad of paper and brought them to him as he crouched huddled on the floor. He seized them without a word, and started to write.
Far beneath was the noise of the street—shouts from the crowd, and quick calls and commands from the firemen. But the room was very high up, and all sounds came faintly. Outside they could hear a rush of feet and a hoarse cry.
“Another rat trying to get out!” said the man, with a grin that his suffering made horrible. “They've nothing to stay for. I'm the only one with anything left to do!” Suddenly the pencil dropped from his tense fingers and he looked at her. “I guess I'm going off my head,” he said dully. “I can't even do that! When—it—gets me, it'll get this, too!” He looked at the writing pad, already half scribbled over. Then he laughed. “Not even that!” was all he said.
Then he turned and stared at Pippa for a moment. She was standing, quiet and steady, with the light on her dark red hair.
“You clear out of here!” he commanded sharply. “What are you staying for, anyway? Afraid of the jump to the roof? That”—he pointed significantly in the direction of the fire—“is something to be a darned sight more afraid of than any jump, I can tell you!”
Philippa caught her breath in the quick way that she had when greatly stirred,
“I'm waiting for your story,” she said coolly. “There's no one else to—take it in.”
For a heartbeat the man looked at her fixedly; then he gave a harsh roar that sounded almost exultant.
“By the living God, there's a woman left on earth!” he cried, and, catching up the pencil, he fell to writing once more. After a single sentence, however, he began to sway from side to side, dizzy with pain and weakness. She bent beside him, helpless and silent. A dim glow was now visible under the door. The fire was creeping nearer. There was still the roof—but how much longer would even that chance hold out?
“Brandy!” gasped the man, “Closet!”
After she had forced a mouthful between his lips, he began to write again. As he wrote, he muttered incoherently, commenting. on, sometimes repeating, what he was writing. Pippa shuddered as she heard. A child flung madly from a window by a frantic and half-crazed mother; an old woman, bedridden, and vainly praying her daughter to leave her; a little boy, hardly more than a child, going steadfastly back and forth with valuables for those too panic-stricken to do it for themselves; one man with a revolver at his head
The man with the crushed leg paused.
“I guess I'm all in,” he muttered huskily. “I—isn't it getting pretty—hot—in here?”
She nodded silently.
He tried to move, and the action sent a smothered scream from between his teeth.
“Top drawer,” he jerked out. “Medicine case. Morphia.”
He swallowed some of the little tablets she brought him, and went on writing, with the sweat pouring down his white face.
Once he looked up.
“Not afraid yet?” he asked, in a hoarse croak.
She shook her head.
She felt, in fact, strangely calm, uplifted above the actuality of living, facing big and curious things. Death seemed quite near, and not nearly so terrible as she had thought to find him.
“You'll do,” said the man, looking at her. “Now, see here! Watch me; drive me! Understand? I've got to do this. And when the door goes, grab this stuff I'm doing and go for the window. I think you'll make it.”
“And you?”
He did not even hear her. He was scratching feverishly upon the pad. It seemed to Pippa Carpenter that she had been in that room of horror for years and years—as if nothing had ever happened before she entered it, as if nothing could ever happen again. Soon there would be the swift crash and the roar of bellying flame, and—then she would know what it had all been for.
“Don't forget the name of the paper,” said the man without looking up. “The Dawn. What time is it?”
“Close to two.”
“You'll make it if you get clear of—this. They'll hold all the presses until two-thirty or three to-night. And—Lord, the boys down there in the crowd think they've a story to turn in! Watch the door—we can't have much time now and get ready for a rush!”
She bent to give him more brandy, and he looked up straight into her eyes.
“You're a brave woman,” he said more quietly than he had spoken yet. “And a beautiful one. If I had lived, I should have—loved you! Quick! The story! Take it! And leave the morphia handy.” He smiled that twisted smile. “It may shorten things The door'll go in a moment! Wait!” Again he steadied his voice, and spoke to her sharply and clearly: “Put on that overcoat of mine. Wet a towel, and fasten it over your head. Look out of the window. Is there any fire below you there yet?”
She leaned over the sill. There were tongues of flame creeping around the cornice just beneath. She would have to cross them, The sight sickened her slightly, but she answered, without apparent effort:
“No fire. I can make it easily. Yes; I have the story.”
She had determined to hold it, rather than intrust it to the overcoat pocket. She turned and tossed her jewel case onto the table. She could not carry both.
“Go!” gasped the man with the crushed leg; his voice grated and cracked like broken machinery.
There was a sudden roar; a sudden blaze, and crash. For a moment Pippa looked into the mouth of hell; she could not breathe or see. There seemed nothing in all the universe but fire and smoke, and that terrible, living glare of red,
“Go!” croaked the man again, in a tone of agony.
Grasping the story, blind and staggering with the heat and smoke, she bent and kissed him on the lips.
“Good-by,” she said.
“Until—another—country!” he returned, and sank back.
She found herself at the window, struggling madly toward freedom and air. The night was bright with fire, and it was easy enough to see the ledge of the roof that she must reach. A tongue of flame from the room behind her scorched her cheek. She flung herself forward desperately. She felt the shock and jar of landing, and looked giddily back at the blazing window from which she had come. Stumbling and trembling, she fled across the roof to one still farther on, where people were gathered to watch the awfulness of the great fire.
Her brain was numb and drowsy; she felt herself sinking into a blessed swoon, from which she tore herself. People were questioning her, soothing her. She still held the roll of paper clenched in her hand. The feel of it restored her senses fully and sharply.
“Get me down to the street!” she muttered through cracked lips. “And find me a cab, or something”
The roof of the burning building crashed thunderously in. It was all over.
Pippa began to sob hard, dry sobs.
“Take me down!” she cried. “Quick! Quick! I have to be at the office of the Dawn in fifteen minutes!”