White Ashes Part 50

The bridge was elevated sufficiently so that they could see a considerable distance northward, and for some moments they stood and looked in silence at the sight which lay beyond them.

It was something which is only to be seen once in the course of an ordinary lifetime--the complete ruin of the integral part of a great city. With something too remote yet too bitterly real for any words gripping at her heart, Helen stood looking out over a scene such as she never could have imagined. Here was ruin incarnate, desolation supreme; this was the bitter tragedy of that which once was great turned suddenly into pitiful nothingness before her very eyes.

In the foreground, at their feet, lay the heaped debris of the bricks, timbers, and contents of a whole row of dynamited buildings--the sacrificed buildings which by their own destruction had checked the conflagration at the last. There they lay, still smoldering or blazing in some places, utterly still and lifeless in others, with stray beams and bits of cornice or of tin roofing, twisted into weird shapes, sticking out at odd angles. Here and there unconsumed and hardly damaged articles that had been contained in these buildings lay unheeded; for here where the flames had died, they had not destroyed everything combustible, as they had seemed to do almost everywhere else. On the west side of Shawmut Avenue, where the houses still stood intact, a few men were to be seen; these were the state militiamen in their fatigue uniforms, patrolling the ruins. Smith called Helen's attention to them.

"Why are they there?" she asked.

"To watch the vultures gathering for the feast. See! There goes one of them now--over there to the left."

Helen looked; skulking along in the shadow of a ruined wall was a shabby, rough-looking man who stole swiftly out of sight behind a pile of rubbish.

"One of the scavengers. They come almost automatically after every great disaster--fire, flood, battle, or pestilence. Ghouls, you understand, from heaven knows where. That man's great-grandfather probably robbed the dead grenadiers of the Legion of Honor at Waterloo."

"Thieves?" said the girl, in horror.

"Worse than thieves. Vandals, body-s.n.a.t.c.hers, murderers, if it came to that. The kind of man who'd cut the finger off a dying woman to get her wedding ring. Unpleasant, isn't it? Well, the militia are under orders to shoot them on sight, if caught in the act. But let's go a little farther on; I think we can get a better view from farther north."

"Wait," said his companion. "I am not ready to go--yet."

Smith heeded her voice, and for another unnoted interval they stood agaze upon their little eminence.

Far to the northward the scene of ruin stretched away. Almost as far as the eye could reach was only the shadow, the terrible and disfigured skeleton of what had been the city. Everywhere were smoldering piles with occasional tongues of sullen, orange flame and their myriad threads of smoke trailing upward in the still air like Indians' signal fires. Here was a brick building, apparently hardly touched or harmed, lifting its lonely height over its prostrate neighbors. Here a partly burned structure, gutted but still erect, stood like a grim, articulated skeleton, a gaunt scarecrow against the skyline.

Everywhere were mounds and hollows, hills and valleys, so that the natural contour of the earth, unseen now these hundred years, once more appeared. And over it all, everywhere that the fire had wholly burned out, lay the heart-breaking beauty and whiteness of the snow, and of the ashes under the snow.

"How terribly white it is!" said Helen, in a low voice.

Smith only nodded. Feeling her mood, he left her to speak when she was ready, and presently she did so.

"Shall we go now?" she asked.

"Suppose we do. I want to show you, if I can--and to see myself--what is left of the shopping and hotel and theater district. There can't be much left."

They turned back in the way they had come, for Tremont Street above this point was no thoroughfare. By a somewhat circuitous route at last they reached the corner of the Common; and here, at the edge of the great throng of curious onlookers, they paused.

"There's where I didn't sleep last night," said Smith.

The Hotel Aquitaine, such as it was, stood gauntly staring at them from its dozens of empty windows. The building itself was intact, but every piece of inflammable material in its contents seemed to have been wiped out of existence as utterly as though made of tissue paper. With a little shudder Helen turned away, and they moved onward.

For all Smith's fire-line badge, they were not permitted to enter the patrolled district, and they could only join the throng which was circling about the outskirts. This was not a very inspiring nor even a very interesting thing, although the people for the most part were oddly silent, seeming to have been numbed by the extent of the disaster. Helen found before very long that she had seen enough.

"What a fearful crowd! I think I'd rather go where there aren't quite so many people," she told Smith.

"All right--wait until I see what happened to Jordan's store; then we'll go."

Five minutes later they were heading back southward in the direction of their bridge.

"It is beyond words, isn't it?" observed Smith. "There is nothing at all adequate that a man can say when he is confronted by such a thing as this, and almost nothing that he can do."

"Isn't there something, though?" the girl asked. "There must be hundreds of people homeless, without food or money or anything! Cannot we do anything to help them?"

"No doubt," said the man. "Individually we could scarcely be of much a.s.sistance; but I fancy that the local charity organizations or the Red Cross would see that any contribution went where it would do the most good."

Only a few minutes later they found where one of these inst.i.tutions had opened temporary headquarters in an old church.

"Let us go in," said Miss Maitland.

As they entered they saw that the church was filled with refugees, come in to escape the cold. They were most of them sitting in groups, talking eagerly to one another. Some were lying asleep, stretched out full length on the pews. A woman was going about, serving hot coffee and soup and bread. The refugees ate hungrily, but on the faces of almost all of them rested the same dispirited look of dazed wonder.

Apparently they were chiefly foreigners, the majority Italians, and it was evident that they had lost everything they had possessed. Helen stood watching them with a sad heart from the back of the church, and Smith, looking at her, saw that her eyes were full of tears. He laid his hand gently on her arm. "Please don't," he said gravely. But he understood.

"But it seems so unfair for them to have lost everything," the girl said. "They had so little to lose."

She turned her face to his.

"There is no answer to that," he said; "but we can help them a little."

To the woman in charge they gave what they could afford to give, and turned toward home. It was nearly four o'clock, and Mrs. Maitland might be growing anxious about their safety. They walked forward in a silence which neither wished to break.

It was soon broken, however, by a chance occurrence. They were pa.s.sing by an open street on the edge of the burned district. Across the street, under a none too steady wall, a woman whose distress had evidently touched the good nature of the militiaman patrolling the other end of the block was hunting about among heaps of debris, searching for things which might perhaps have been spared by the flames. On top of the house wall was a battered stone coping, which, as Smith and Helen paused, gave a sudden lurch and seemed about to fall. The woman, her head bent, saw nothing; but Smith, with a startled exclamation, started quickly forward.

"Look out there!" he called sharply. "Come away from that wall!"

The woman, with her back turned, paid no attention to the warning--probably did not even hear him. The coping, poised on the wall's edge, swayed perilously. If it fell, there would be one less of the indigent and helpless for the relief committees to support. With a half angry exclamation Smith sprang forward.

On his sleeve he felt the quick pressure of a hand. At the same moment the crouching woman, having finished her search, or perhaps moved by an instinct of danger, walked slowly on, and out from under the wall. The coping did not fall.

Smith turned to find the girl's fingers closed tight upon his arm, and in her eyes something he had never seen before. She stood still a moment, and when at last she withdrew her hand, she spoke in a voice so low that he could barely catch the words.

"Why did you do that?"

"She didn't see the coping," he said, as naturally as he could.

"It might have fallen--on you!"

"Yes," he said; "I suppose it might. But you see, it didn't."

"It might have killed you," she said, still in a low voice.

Smith turned abruptly, and looked at her.

"How much would you have cared, Helen?" he asked.

Even at this moment the trammels of her ancestry were on her; she made no answer.

"How much would you have cared, dear?" he asked again, gently.

Then at last she raised her eyes, and met his fairly.

"More than anything--more than everything in the world," she said.