第 21 页

But before we were half-way across the parks the scent of fire came to us anew, and the horses began to snort with fresh terror. Bayswater was blazing, Paddington was on fire, and soon the fingers of the flames would be seizing Oxford Street in their awful grip. There seemed no chance of a respite. The gale raged more furiously than ever. I turned and made for Hyde Park Corner, and as we drove I saw no fewer than ten huge trees crash down before the straining of the wind.

But past Hyde Park Corner I could get the van no farther. The roadways were piled up to the doors of the houses on either side with a mass of vehicles, and alive with madly plunging horses. Never was known such a scene since the world began. And there they were doomed to wait, in .that inextricable tangle, till the flames swept up and ground them into smoke.

We deserted our van, and hand-in-hand we skirted that awful block. We rounded Bucking ham Palace Gardens, and got down to Victoria Street; but that was impassable, and we were forced to make our way through unconsidered by-paths where the crowds were less densely wedged.

Only once was our slow struggle onward interrupted. Of a sudden the air was split by a terrific roar; another followed; and another.

The pavement beneath us shook, and the tall houses on either side shed dust. The gale for a moment stopped; then hit us with a fresh blast which there was no standing against; and then a tornado of dust and fragments swept down so thick that we could barely catch a breath. They were blowing up a line of houses along the fore front of the fire, in the desperate hope that the flames would not leap the gap.

The crowd realised what had happened, and began to surge onward again. We fought our way along in its eddies. The exertion was some thing fearful, and for long enough I struggled on like a man in a dream, with one hand dragging at Miss Vivian, and the other wrestling with the people who thronged us. By a sort of dull instinct I was heading for the eastward. Hours must have passed though they seemed like years and when my weariness had grown so great that it seemed I could not drag myself a yard farther, I became dimly conscious that we were in Northumberland Avenue.

By a sort of natural impulse, and without a word being said, we turned into the Metropole. The hall of the hotel was filled with a rabble which would have done credit to the Ratcliffe Highway, and I dully wondered what they were doing there. But then I caught a glimpse of my own self in a mirror. My clothes were burnt full of holes; with the smoke and the falling soot I was black as a man who had worked a week in coal; I looked a greater outcast than any of them.

It seemed useless to ask for a room; in fact, there were no officials visible; each bedroom was overflowing, and in the corridors the grimy tenants made a human carpet. At length, up in the attics (where fewer of the crowd had dared to go through dread of the fire) we found a tiny room with only half a dozen occupants. Miss Vivian shared the bed with two other women, and Gerard and I threw ourselves on the floor and huddled against the others for warmth.

Sour-mouthed from want of sleep, I woke to the tune of splintering glass. Once more the fire was upon us. The gap of blown-up houses had done nothing to check its march. We roused the sleepers, and rushed to the stairways. Gleaming ice lay everywhere in the track of the bursted water-pipes. The wind shook the great building as we ran towards the entrance, and the roar of the advancing fire re-echoed in the passages. A torrent of humanity was pouring out into North umberland Avenue.

But I had no wish that we should be driven farther eastward in that frightened sheep-pack before the wolves of flame. Retreat to the north was barred; we must get to the Surrey side; we must run somehow from this horrible city, where each in his blind terror was trampling down his neighbour.

We thrust our way through the crowds into Charing Cross Station, but the press was so great that the lines were blocked with writhing humanity, and no train could get in across the bridge. Then a thought occurred to me: The river was frozen, and we could make passage across the ice. We struggled back again, getting to the Embankment by Villiers Street, and feeling the breath of the advancing flames hot upon our faces. We went down the steps by Cleopatra's Needle, and got on the frozen surface without so much as a shoe wet. Under that intense frost even the tide of the Thames could not keep a patch of open water.

There were thousands of other people with us on the ice, and with them we made our way across to the southern bank. The buildings there had escaped the conflagration, and stood out in cold black silhouette against the windy sky. Men were standing on the white roofs to keep any flying embers from finding a lodgment. But of the other side, which we had left, who could put in mere words the grandeur and awfulness of the sight which it presented then? It seemed as though the great city had been first gripped by a polar winter, and was now being snatched back again by the powers of hell. And against that raid, human resistance was a puny derision.

Chelsea yielded now only a thin smoke; the Houses of Parliament and Westminster were skeletons outlined in flame. The Clock Tower was a great torch, lighting heaven. Whitehall was a furnace, where yellows and reds struggled for the mastery, and no trace of building could be seen. The great hotels of Northumberland Avenue, and the National Gallery beyond, were oozing reek and fire. And the drift of burning fragments drove over the icy roofs in front of the fire, and lit two score new streets every hour.

We watched on as the blaze drove eastwards, and saw it bite the end of the Strand, and then from the great shelter of Charing Cross Station there came a stream of shrieks which made us shudder. That, too, had been ravished by the flames, and of the thousands within it, all who could not escape were being baked alive, or crushed by the falling roof.

But meanwhile the freezing gale sweeping down the reaches of the river was nipping us with a more real kind of chill, and I saw that Miss Vivian was almost fainting with the exposure. Gerard said we must try and find some shelter, so we got ashore through a merchant's yard, and made our way to the Waterloo Road. This, too, was crammed with fugitives, but the terrifying scent of the fire was farther away, and the retreat was more orderly. We found a cab, and had nearly chartered it when two other men came up and bid against us. But we had the more gold, and the ride was ours. We were driven away to Dulwich, where Gerard had friends.

And that is the last I saw of the actual burning of London. We were bruised, all three of us, from face to foot; we were badly scorched in many places; we were bone- weary; and once a hospitable door closed behind us, our limbs stiffened, and we were incapable of further struggle. For five awful days the fire strode on and gutted the whole of the City and almost all North London; and the glare of it was seen on the Cheviot Hills.

It turned into crumbling ruins the Bank of England and the Tower; it blasted out of existence the slums which lie between Wapping High Street and the Mile End Road. It burnt the shipping and the warehouses, the shops, and the offices, the private dwellings, and the wooden pavement of the streets; and by one means and another it had caused the death of five hundred thousand of the population.

Yes; half a million human beings perished in that awful tornado of flame, or died of the subsequent exposure and want; three thousand thousand were changed from householders into homeless outcasts; but figures will give no idea of the vast amount of property that was blotted out of existence. Not only was solid, visible wealth wafted away in smoke, but that mysterious asset, paper money, shrank from milliards into nothingness. The national credit was blasted, and the bourses of the outside world were smitten to their foundations. Civilisation has received no such shock since old Atlantis sank beneath the ocean waves.

And now we are face to face with the result. The awe-struck outer world has recovered its self-possession; we are still paralysed. The starving hordes of London have spread over the whole face of the fair land, and our towns bristle with riot. The other nations, forgetting their momentary pity, remember only their old hate. Shameful treaties are thrust upon us. Our colonies are being invaded. Trade has been reft from us. We are a nation with a glorious history, but no future.

New Chicago arose like a phoenix from the ashes of the old. But our London was no flimsy place of wooden joists and weather-boarding. It was a monument of centuries, and the nation is too heart-sick to begin again to build it on the old scale. The Government sits at Manchester, and the world mocks at it.

In the hour of our pride we boasted that no nation on earth could lay us low. But the elements were set to war against our might, and they have humbled the British Empire even unto the ground.

XV

THE KID

THE birth of the Kid into our world took place when she had already run through eight years of existence elsewhere. The method of her arrival was curious, being free from the usual formalities. The date was coincident with young Fairbairn's twenty-first birthday.

At that period young Fairbairn was, during term-time, gracing Cambridge with his presence, and occupied the official position of cox in the Hall second boat. He was rather a bumptious youth, and to make memorable the day on which he could legally commence to ruin himself financially without let or hindrance, he decided on a small, but very select, stag dinner party. The time being Long Vac., and his own bachelor mSnage sketchy, the feed took place at the Midland Hotel down at home, where they do things very well if you only know how to give an order. But this is long ago.

Trains from Ilkley being awkward, Carnegie and I happened to land in half an hour before we were due, and as no one was about, we strolled to the smoke-room bar and chatted over sherry and bitters.

From this occupation we were summoned by a waiter, who informed us that young Fairbairn was in a private sitting-room and desired audience of us. The waiter's manner was constrained, and we judged that he had been having things said to him, because he found occasion to remark quite irrelevantly that young Fairbairn was a "most remarkable fancy gentleman."

We found him fuming and profane. He spoke of taking legal proceedings against a large railway company, which is always an insane thing to do, even for a grown man. He held that the railway company kept a hotel, and under the Publicans Act were bound to supply shelter and victual to any one soever from whom due payment was forthcoming. At that period of his career, young Fairbairn looked forward to taking up the Law Special after he had passed his General, and consequently spoke upon matters legal with all the confidence of a vast and sweeping ignorance.

"... And so I had the manager up," said he, at the end of the indictment, "and told him straight what I thought, and that, confound it, if she couldn't go into the restaurant, I'd have another private room and feed her there. 'By gum,' I said to him, ' what's the use of a an's coming of age unless he can do as he likes? ' And now, what do you men think of her? There she is."

He waved his hand towards a small girl who sat in the farther angle of the room, and we grouped ourselves round the fireplace, and lit cigarettes and examined her.

Her age we were vague about then, but after wards it was estimated at eight years. She wore one visible garment, like a potato sack with the largest hole down the hill; and because she sat well back in the chair, her feet and shins projected out of it like pink sledge runners. Her features were coyly veiled by an ample grime of dirt, and her hair was ratty and tangled, but we could guess at it as dark brown. Her eyes were dark brown also; there was no doubt about them; they were large, dog-like eyes with scare in them and some pitifulness. I believe it was those eyes which caught young Fairbairn's notice in the first instance.

The man of the evening waved his hand again.

"I've bought that Kid," said he.

His manner was comically solemn, and our grin was a little constrained. Carnegie asked if his purchase was a freak, or if there was a solid reason for it.

"There was reason, sir--lumps of it. I was slumming down Swinegate this afternoon, because there are china shops there and I'd got some money I wanted to spend. That Kid begged of me, and I told her to get out of my way and go to the devil. Afterwards, when I was flattening my nose against a shop window, I saw a man hitting her over the head with his shut fist. Now perhaps you chaps will think I was a fool, but I suddenly hankered to lick that man. The only drawback was that I obviously couldn't. He was mostly size and brawn a navvy when he chose to work, I guess and I'm well, you see I was coxing our Two last Mays, and I had to train down. Diplomacy was the only ticket, so I offered him sixpence to dry up.

"He took it like a missionary box, and the Kid stood on one side and rubbed her head. She didn't howl, didn't even snivel; which was plucky. She only, as I said, rubbed the places where she was bumped.

"The man fobbed the sixpence, laughed, and looked like going. Then he changed his mind and asked why I'd tipped him. I told him candidly enough that I did it as an alternative to thrashing him. I did want very much to hurt that man. If I'd had a pistol, I should probably have shot him in the leg, say. You know, you men, I never could bear to see dogs and cats and animals smashed about, and I suppose it must be the same when one looks on at a kid getting battered. But I didn't know that before.

"'Look here, guv'nor,' says the man, 'what's that 'ere Kid to you? Just you tell me that?' He didn't mean to be truculent. He was apparently asking a question out of mild curiosity. I replied by sketching out the dog theory.

"'And supposing guv'nor,' says the chap, 'as you saw a bloke a-haggling off the 'ind-leg of a dawg with a meat-saw just for a bit of sport, what 'ud you do? '

"'Kill him,' said I, promptly, 'if I could.'

"'You dam' little spitfire,' says the man. 'And supposin' 'e wasn't a shrimp like some folks is, and 'e said 'e'd see you blowed, and went on with 'is bit o' sport, what'd you do then?'

"'Buy the dog.'

"'Buy the dawg! Phew! That's yer little game, is it? Well, I wonder if you'd like to spend your money on other live stock. That 'ere gal 'as to be corrected for the good of her manners. When she don't arn me coppers, she arns a whackin' for herself. And if she stays on being my gal, I'm going to treat her to another whackin' just about now. But I'm open to a bid.'