THE FIRE

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THE OUTPOURING OF THE HONEYCOMB

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The electric lights in the service hallways were still burning dimly. But the smell of smoke had noticeably increased. The smoke, in fact, had now become quite dense and filled the air with floating filaments and shifting plumes that made breathing acrid and uncomfortable.

And the service stairs from top to bottom was providing an astounding spectacle. Doors were opening now on every floor and other tenants of the building, and their servants and their guests, were coming out to swell the tide of refugees which now marched steadily downstairs.

It was an extraordinary and bizarre conglomeration—a parade of such fantastic quality as had never been witnessed in the world before. And it was a composite of classes, types, and characters that could have been found no where else in the world at the time save in such a building as this. It is probable that most of these people had never seen their neighbors before now. But now, because excitement and their need for communication had broken through the walls of their reserve, they all showed a spirit of fellowship, of friendliness, and of help which that enormous honeycomb of life had never seen before.

It was an astounding aggregation. There were people fully attired for the evening in splendid evening dress, and beautiful women blazing with jewels and wearing costly wraps. There were other people who had apparently gone to bed when the fire alarm had sounded, and who were now attired in pajamas, slippers, dressing gowns, kimonos, or whatever easy and convenient garment they could snatch up in the stress and excitement of the moment. There were young people and there were old people. There were people of every kind and quality and age and physical variation.

And in addition to these there was a babel of strange tongues, the excited jargons of a dozen races. There were German cooks and there were French maids. There were English chauffeurs and there were Irish serving girls. There were Swedes and Danes and Italians and Norwegians, with a sprinkling of white Russians. There were Poles and Czechs and Austrians, Negroes, and Hungarians; and all of these poured out on the landing stages of the service stairway helter-skelter, were poured out in a noisy, chattering gesticulating tide to join in with their lords and masters, united now in seeking refuge, their interests all united now in their common pursuit of safety.

As the refugees neared the ground floor, helmeted and coated firemen began to come up the stairs. A few policemen came up after them and these men tried in various ways to allay any panic or alarm that anyone may have felt.

“It’s all right, folks! Everything’s okay!” one glib policeman cried cheerfully as he came up past the members of Mrs. Jack’s party. “The fire’s over now.”

These words, spoken really for the sake of quieting confusion and alarm and of expediting the orderly progress of the tenants in the building, had an opposite effect from the one which the big policeman wanted to produce. One of the male members of Mrs. Jack’s party, the young man, who was bringing up the end of the procession, paused upon hearing the policeman’s reassuring words, spoke to the others and turned, about to retrace his way upstairs again.

As he did so, he saw that the effect upon the policeman had been alarming. The man was stationed half a flight above him on the landing, and as he started to mount the stairs again, he saw the policeman was making frantic gestures to him and looking at him with an agonized face, the whole effect of which was silently and desperately to entreat him not to come back any further or to encourage any of the others to come back, but to leave the building as quickly as possible.

So warned and so exhorted, the refugee turned again and hastened down the stairs. As he did so, he could hear some tapping and hammering noises from the service elevator shaft. He paused and listened for a moment: the tapping began, then stopped—began again—and stopped again.

The space outside the great apartment building, or rather between it—for the tremendous building was constructed in the shape of a hollow square—was now a wonderful spectacle. No more imposing stage for the amazing scene could have been provided. This great central court or hollow was covered for the most part with loose gravel and there was also two or three terraces or earthy beds of flowers and plants built up above the general level, and surrounded by low walls.

The sides of the tremendous building the whole way around were flanked by a broad brick pavement on which opened at evenly spaced intervals the entrances into the big apartment house and by arches which also ran the whole way around and flanked the walk. The effect of this arrangement was to give the whole place, court and all, something of the appearance of an enormous cloister—a cloister different, vaster, and more modern than any other one which had been seen, a cloister whose mighty walls soared fourteen flights into the air, and whose beetling sides were still blazing with all the thrilling evocation of night lights, one thousand radiant squares of warmth, of wealth, of passion, beauty, and of love, one thousand cells still burning with all the huge deposit of their still-recent, just-departed life, with a whole universe of flesh, and blood, a world incarnate with all the ecstasy, anguish, hatred, joy, and vexed intrigue that life could know, or that the heat and hunger of man’s high enfamished soul could ever compass—with all the magic, all the loveliness and grace, the whole sky-flung faery of the marvelous, the nocturnal, the unceasing everlasting city.

And this great cloistered space was now filled surely with one of the strangest companies of the devout which any cloister had ever seen—a company of all sizes, kinds, and ages, dressed variously in costumes that went all the way from full evening dress to simply pajamas, from the bare back and sleeveless arms of a lady’s splendid gown to the modest uniform of a maid, and from white ties and full tails to a chauffeur’s livery. Here, around the four sides of their great cloister, pouring out of two dozen entry ways in a milling and gesticulating stream, adding constantly to the shuffling, bewildered, motley crowd that packed the gravel court, the babel of their own tumultuous tongues, a horde of people were now constantly flooding out of the huge honeycomb and adding their numbers to the assembled crowd.

Seen so, the tremendous pageantry of the scene was overwhelming in the range, the power, the variety, and the miraculous compression of its reality and beauty, and, like every high and ultimate reality, the scene had in it something of the nearness, the intensity of a vision, a nearness and intensity that was so wonderful, so real, that it attained an almost supernatural, unbelievable quality. Anyone looking at that scene would feel instantly, and with a still wonder in the heart, that he would never see such a thing again—that here, miraculously compressed, was assembled before him the whole theatre of human life—a universe such as few people ever see in a whole life time, and which can be brought before them only by the tremendous vision, the combining genius of a Shakespeare or a Brueghel.

It was really like the scene of an appalling shipwreck—one of those great shipwrecks of modern times, where a great liner, still ablaze with lights along the whole stern’s sweep of her superhuman length, her life gored out upon an iceberg, keeling slowly to the racing slant of her proud funnels with her whole great company of people—the crew, the passengers, the rich, the poor, the mighty and the lowly—all the huge honeycomb of life that goes down to the bottom of a great ship’s hollowed depths—assembled now, at this last hour of peril, in a living fellowship—the whole family of earth, and all its classes, at length united on these slanting decks.

This scene here now in this great cloister was like this—except that the ship was this enfabled rock beneath their feet, the ship’s company the whole company of life, of earth, and of the swarming and unceasing city.

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 the 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 true,” 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.

Poor child! For it would have been now instantly apparent to anyone who knew her and with half an idle look that, as were so many of the “lost” people that we know, she was not lost at all—if only there can be a fire all the time. The girl could not accept getting up in the morning or going to bed at night, or doing accustomed things in their accustomed order. But she could and did accept the fire. It did not seem to her at all strange. It seemed to her to be wonderful, the most natural thing in the world, instantly to be accepted and understood when it occurred. She was delighted with everything that happened: the movements of the firemen with the hose, the action of the police, the conduct of the crowd—all fascinated her, all aroused at once her eager and excited interest, her perfect understanding. She threw herself into the whole thing not as a spectator but as a vital and inspired participant. It was apparent at once that she knew people everywhere—she could be seen moving about from group to group, her gold head bobbing through the crowd, her voice eager, hoarse, short, abrupt, elated, infusing everyone somehow, wherever she went, with the energy and exuberance of her own ebullient spirit.

She returned to her own group: “I mean!—You know!—These firemen here!—” she gestured hurriedly. “When you think of what they have to know!—Of what they have to do!—I went to a big fire once!—” she shot out quickly in explanatory fashion “—a guy in the department was a friend of mine!—I mean.”—She laughed hoarsely, elatedly, gesturing toward a group of helmeted men who dashed into a smoke-filled corridor with a tube of chemicals—“When you think of what they have to—” At this point there was a splintering crash within: Amy laughed hoarsely, jubilantly and made a quick and sudden little gesture as if this answered all: “After all, I mean!” she cried.

While this was going on, a young girl, fashionably attired in evening dress, and wearing a cloak had wandered casually up to the group and with that free democracy of speech which the collision of the fire seemed in some amazing way to have induced among all these people, now addressed herself, without a word of preliminary introduction, in the somewhat flat, nasal and almost toneless accents of the middle west, to Stephen Hook: “You don’t think it’s very bad, do you?” she said, looking up at the billowing puffs of oily smoke and flame that now really were belching formidably from one of the windows of the top floor. “I mean,” she went on, before anyone had a chance to answer, “I hope it’s not bad—”

Hook, who was simply terrified at her raw and unexpected intrusion, had turned three-quarters away from her and was looking at her side-ways with eyes that were almost closed and with a face of such mandarin-like aloofness and haughty contempt that it seemed it would have abashed a monkey. But it didn’t phase the young girl a bit. Getting no answer from him, she turned in an explanatory fashion to Mrs. Jack: “I mean,” she said again, “It will be just too bad if anything was wrong up there, wouldn’t it?-”

Mrs. Jack answered quickly, her face full of friendly and earnest reassurance, in a gentle, quiet and comforting voice: “No, dear,” she said. “I don’t think it’s bad at all.” At the same moment, instinctively, she looked up quickly with trouble in her eyes at the billowing mass of smoke and flame which now, to tell the truth, not only looked “bad” but distinctly threatening. Then lowering her perturbed gaze quickly, she turned to the girl again and said encouragingly: “I’m sure everything is going to be all right.”

“Well,” said the girl, “I hope you’re right—Because,” she added, apparently as a kind of after-thought as she turned away. “That’s Mama’s room, and she’s up there, it will be just too bad, won’t it?—I mean, if it is too bad,” she remarked casually in a flat and nasal tone that betrayed no more emotion than if she were asking for a glass of ice-water.

There was dead silence for a moment. Then Mrs. Jack turned to Hook with an earnest and even alarmed face as if she were not certain she had heard aright. Hook returned her glance with a sideways look of bored indifference. “But did you hear—” Mrs. Jack began in a bewildered and protesting tone.

“But I mean!” cried Amy at this moment, with a short, hoarse, even exultant laugh. “There you are! What I mean to say is—the whole thing’s there!” she cried exultantly.

Mrs. Jack continued to look at Hook for a moment with her alarmed, questioning and deeply concerned face.

“Hah?” she cried eagerly and demanding, and getting no answer, suddenly her shoulders began to shake hysterically: “God!” she screamed faintly, “Isn’t it the most—in all your life, did you ever hear—?”

“Um,” he murmured noncommittally, as he turned completely away from her. For a moment she was shaken with wild laughter, and Hook, so sick, so frightened, so full of terror and of fear as he was, was yet pierced instantly with strong, incredible humor. His lips twitched slightly, just for the fraction of a second his plump shoulders quivered.