第 20 页

Well, if you want it in plainer words, my engagement to you."

"Oh, that's your small game, is it?" said she, smiling sweetly. " Then I'd better see the captain and two or three of the other gentlemen here at once, and get their evidence put down in writing."

Gilchrist whistled.

"You'll look after my things, won't you, till I come back? There's the purser. I'll go and catch him before he's off ashore."

"Wait a minute," said Gilchrist. What are you after?"

"Isn't it obvious? Am I going to have my feelings tossed about in this way?"

"That means ' breach of promise.' But you won't get it, you know."

"I shall have a very good try," said madame, dryly. " You will look after those things, won't you, till I go and see the purser?"

No, wait another minute, please. Law's expensive, and I should think you've had enough airing in the papers lately."

"On the contrary, so much, that a little more will make no difference. In fact, it will turn the laugh my side. But as for you, my dear boy, you're different. It will come as a refreshing novelty."

"As I say, law's uncertain, and it's ten to one you'd lose your case. But look here, I've got a couple of hundred pounds in notes. Will you take that and call it quits?"

"My excellent sir, the ' feelings ' are going to cost you a cool thousand if you pay for them now."

"Don't you wish you may get it?"

"I don't very much mind, because I shall ask for ten thousand if we fight, and I should very much prefer to finger ten."

Gilchrist didn't swear, first because it is rude to swear before a lady, and secondly because he didn't know words enough to do justice to the occasion. Instead he went into the saloon and wrote out a cheque, for which he received a very satisfactory document in return. Afterwards he went ashore.

He met Mrs. White-Whitehead frequently during the ensuing month in Las Palmas, and they always bowed to one another most cordially, but they never spoke. She was always with another man, and once, when he went into the hotel where they were staying, he found out the other man's name. Then he whistled again, most thoughtfully. The name was not new to him. He had read it several times before, in the very same newspaper paragraphs where he had read so much about Mrs. Whitehead.

XIV

THE FIRE

THE first-class carriage we were in was heated by steam, we had each abundance of coats and rugs, our feet were on a fresh foot-warmer, but the draught of the hurricane crept in by a score of chinks, and the vehemence of the cold made us ache. At Doncaster we moved across to the dining-car, and found that a trifle more endur able; but still I noted that Gerard's moustache continued to glisten with icicles.

At Grantham we had still further evidence (if such a thing were needed) of the lowness of the temperature. The express, which is timed to stop there only three minutes at the outside, made a wait that seemed interminable. The conductor, I saw, was getting uneasy. At length he buttoned his coat and went out into the freezing gale on the platform. In a minute he returned, purple-cheeked and blowing his fingers. He came to us with the tidings. Both driver and stoker of our engine were, it seemed, half perished with the exposure to that bitter cold; it was with difficulty they had brought the express to a standstill in the station; and they were utterly unfit to proceed farther. It was doubtful, the conductor said, whether one of them, but I forget which it was, would recover; and meanwhile the railway authorities were seeking substitutes to take us on to London. He said, too, that news had been brought down of a colossal fire in Hammersmith, but could add no details.

"Nice weather this for getting married in," said I; "if we'd had warning of this blizzard beforehand, I should either have shirked being your best man, or suggested having the affair postponed."

"If to-morrow's like this," said Gerard, " the wedding can't take place till the weather changes. It would be brutal to drag any woman out into such a nipping cold."

We saw men filling the engine with buckets from a well outside the station, because the ordinary water supply was frozen solid; and then the train began to move again, and slid out of Grantham into the open country. The south westerly hurricane beat upon it till the flanges of the lee wheels grated upon the rails with a roar of sound; and in some of the heavier squalls I thought we should have been upset. A queer, lurid light hung in the sky. But with dogged slowness we crawled on, and drew up under the shelter of King's Cross station.

It was four o'clock, and we were three hours late. There was a bellow of life from the departure side of the station. I don't think I ever heard such a noise of trains and passengers; but where we were, the place seemed deserted. Half the roof was off, and there was not a porter to be seen. The platform was littered with dirty, trodden snow.

We got out, and I noticed that there were only two other passengers in the train. The conductor of the diner put out our luggage, and Gerard told him to order a hansom. There was only one on the rank a thing that had never been known before since King's Cross station was built.

We got into that lonely cab, and told the muffled driver to take us to Queen's Gate, in Kensington. As the glass door was clattering down, a boy came out of some sheltered corner, and thrust in a paper.

"Evening paper, sir?" he cried. " There's half Chelsea on fire."

"Give him a penny, Methuen," said Gerard.

"No, sir," said the boy. " Five bob or nothing. I've only two papers left, and there's ten fire men killed. They say half London will be burnt."

I fumbled out two half-crowns, and the win dow closed down with a clash, and the cab drove off. Then I bent my head over the fluttering sheet and scanned the headlines: " Disastrous fire." "Fanned by the furious gale" "All hydrants frozen" " Every drop of water in London solid ice." " Nothing to check the flames" "Metropolis in terrible danger" "Suicide of the Chief of the Fire Brigade"

The sky about us was full of driving blackness, but a strange yellow glare hung beneath it, and the print stood out clearly:

"The fire in Hammersmith, which we reported in our last edition," I read, " has since assumed gigantic proportions. The united fire brigades of London are helpless to cope with it. The unprecedented severity of the frost, and the fury of the hurricane, which is now upon us, have set at derision all our vaunted precautions.

"It is with water alone that our fire-extinguishing services have been hitherto armed to fight devouring flames; and now in this moment of our desperate need even a trickle of water is denied them. They are as helpless as the lay citizens.

"The fire in its awful majesty has beat down all resistance. Hammersmith is a burnt-out rubbish heap. West Kensington is a furnace. Amongst the dwellers in South Kensington and Chelsea there is more panic than an invading army could produce. So far as human eye can see, nothing but a change of wind or an act of God can save the greatest city ever built by man from being in the next few hours changed to twisted, smoking ruins."

Gerard dropped the paper with a cry of horror, and thrust up the hatch. " A fiver if you keep your horse at a gallop," he shouted to the cab man. " My God, Methuen," he said to me, "what an awful thing this is!"

"The newspaper has made the worst of it for the sake of the sensation," I answered. " London is not built of wood; it is an impossible thing for the whole of it to burn."

"I'm thinking of Queen's Gate, and my little girl there. She'll have expected me three hours ago, and I'm here now."

The cab stopped with a jar against the curb. I scraped the frost rime from a window, and peered out. Five great dray-loads of household goods were coming thundering past us, with the horses at a gallop. We got beyond them, and entered Piccadilly. The street was one solid block of every imaginable kind of vehicle, bearing salvage and fugitives eastwards. With infi nite trouble, our cabman wormed his way across the struggling mass, and tried to take us on our road by the smaller streets to southward; but these were one and all brim-filled by the traffic, or blocked by broken-down vehicles.

Gerard's impatience grew too great to be held in check any longer. He sprang from the cab, gave the man a ten-pound note, with orders to follow as best he could, and started off through the hurrying crowds on foot.

Then for the first time we began fully to realise the fright which had bitten into five millions of people. The most orderly city on earth had turned into a seething nest of anarchy. Even the police made no effort to quell the terror or curb its lashings: they had their own houses and their own lives to think about. And as we went on, with the gale beating in our faces, we ourselves became smitten with the prevailing spirit.

We jostled and thrust at every one that came in our way; we climbed over broken-down loads of rarities which lay in the roadways as though they had been so much coal. Three times I saw bodies lying motionless in my path, and the passers-by cursed as they stumbled against them, but no one stopped to help.

And once I saw a woman of elegant dress, who was driving a landau filled with trunks and boxes, drop the reins when a heavy dray cut off one of her wheels, and pull out a pistol and kill herself before a thousand lookers-on. But no one gave her more than a cursory glance. Each one looked ahead on his own path, and hurried away about his business, wrestling and thrusting amongst the others. And every minute the crush thickened, and every by-street vomited people.

The air grew warmer as we pressed on west wards. There was no glimpse of flame apparent yet; nothing but fat, black rolls of smoke could be seen overhead, with an underlining of yellow reflected from the distant blaze. And everywhere hung icicles, and the lines of the bursted watermains glistened in the roadways. We were in an Arctic city more like St. Petersburg than the London we had known before.

There was the taint of burning in every breath we drew, and from the inky sky above fell a constant patter of charred embers. As we drew on, these embers grew bright, and by the time we were through Brompton (and seven had clanged out from some clock in the neighbourhood), live sparks were falling on the seething mobs in the streets, and the air grew sour with the smell of singeing cloth.

But by the time we got abreast of the South Kensington Museum, the glow of the flames was beginning to smear more lurid yellows against the amorphous black of the driving smoke clouds; and soon the thunder of the blaze and the crash of the trundling masonry came to us in a dim roar above the booming and swishing of the gale. The great warren of dwelling-houses to westward of us yielded up its thousand emigrants every minute. The fugitives had started out of home hugging their dearest possessions; but the din of that awful enemy which was sacking the city at their heels thrust terror into their hearts; and they had it taught them that to each one naked life is dearer than all else the world contains. So the streets were paved with the cream of the household goods, and we smashed with our feet a Jew's ransom with every mile we went.

The fire was advancing whole streets by the hour. Earl's Court was already half burnt out; the houses in a line with Cornwall Gardens and Emperor's Gate were beginning to yield up trickles of fire through their windows. The bright scoriae from the volcano of fire fell around and on us more thickly as we pressed on. The mob thinned as we drew towards the seat of the blaze, and when we turned up Queen's Gate, the street, though half filled by furniture and d&ris, was almost deserted by human beings. The population had fled already. The gale was sending the flames horizontally, like the jet from a blow-pipe, across the house-tops.

Gerard by this time was nearly beside himself with anxiety and foreboding. But at last we reached the house, and Gerard dashed up the steps. The girl whom that morning he had thought to make his bride within the next thirty hours stood waiting for him in the doorway.

"Oh, my love," I heard her say, as she leant on his shoulder, " I am here alone. They have all gone. But you said you would come for me; and I knew you would if you were alive; and if you were not, I did not wish to live either."

But meanwhile the heat was growing upon us, and whilst I stood and watched, I saw flames beginning to spout from the upper windows of a house near the Cromwell Road.

A swirl of smoke came up and stung my eyes like nettles. " Look," I said, " we must go. This house will be burning in another ten minutes; " and at the word Miss Vivian picked up a jewelcase from a table in the hall, and came with Gerard down the steps. We were walking quickly northwards, and as we were passing Queen's Gate Terrace a man joined us whom I knew. His name is an old and honoured one, but I omit it here for the sake of others who have borne the title.

"Oh!" he cried, I am beggared! Fifty-five and beggared! What is that you have?" said he. " Jewels?" He snatched the morocco box from Miss Vivian's hands. " I must have some thing!" he cried. " I refuse to starve." And he ran off howling.

A van stood in the roadway, with horses trembling and snorting. " The law is dead," I said. " Every man takes what he wants now. Jump in."

My friend and his promised wife got under the tilt of the van, away from the fiery shower which was raining on us, and I mounted the box. The horses sprang away at a gallop. At the end of the road was a tangled block. The furniture of two houses had been pitched out helter-skelter, and lay there in wild confusion. A hansom had tried to cross it, and the horse had broken a leg, and lay deserted, and moving feebly. But it was no time for hesitation. I charged my team at the barrier, and with a crash and a bang and a rattle we were over.

We crossed the Knightsbridge Road, and entered Kensington Gardens by the Queen's Gate. A water main had burst in the middle of the roadway, and thrust up an ice-fountain twenty feet in height. I headed across . for the Marble Arch, intending to get to one of the railway stations, where we could run away north out of this horrible city of fire and terror.