by Jack Finney
All this in moments, seconds, after we'd ducked under the police lines; then Julia was shaking my arm. "Jake! Jake!" she was yelling in my ear. "Maybe he's at a window! On the Nassau Street side!" I'd actually forgotten Jake and Carmody; they'd been pushed right out of my mind. But Julia turned, and I followed her, struggling straight back through the crowd. We got clear, then ran along the ragged back edge of the crowd through the park and across Mail Street to the post office. There we worked our way to the front of the crowd again, people muttering, turning to glare as we edged past, a few cursing me. We got to the front, at the very edge of the curb, but the rope police-lines were up, and we couldn't cross. Here we saw not only the western Park Row face of the blazing building, but we looked down Beekman Street, too, and saw the entire southern face of the building.
A fifth-floor window facing Park Row and near the Beekman Street corner suddenly broke out, the glass flying. Behind it something was moving, then a woman climbed heavily up onto the ledge. Her face was black—from the fire, I thought for a moment—then I saw the spot of red above the dark face and realized it was a bandanna around her head. This was Ellen Bull, the Negro cleaning woman who had told me days before where to find the janitor. Standing far up there on the ledge now, she began waving her arms wildly about her head; it may have been in panic but I think maybe she was trying to dissipate a terrible heat pouring out from behind her. Because in almost the next moment the flames broke out and seemed to be actually touching her long gray dress. She dropped to her knees, turned, slid off the ledge, and now she was hanging by her hands, her body swaying in the air beneath it. There were no flames from the fourth-floor window just below her yet, the glass there unbroken, but there was no foothold here either. Off to our left two men had ducked under the rope and were running hard toward a wagon just across Mail Street. It had been trapped at the curb by the fire apparatus, an elderly woman next to us said, its team led off across the park by the owner. At the wagon the men were untying, and now yanked off, a gray tarpaulin covering, and they ran across Park Row dragging it with them. Under Ellen Bull's dangling feet five stories above them, they began spreading the tarp, and maybe a dozen men behind the police lines at the corner of Beekman ducked under and ran to them. But no one was in charge. We could see though not hear them shouting at each other, gesturing, yanking the tarp. They got it spread, waving each other to positions, but no one was looking up as Ellen Bull's hands opened, and she dropped.
There was a terrible moan from the crowd, and the men at the tarp looked up, tried to run into position, but she flashed past them and clear over here we heard the awful sound as she struck the pavement. There was a sigh of absolute despair from the crowd, and a woman near us covered her face with her gloved hands, bending double, elbows jamming into the pit of her stomach, and she fainted, toppling sideways but held partly upright by the press of people around her. Ellen Bull was being lifted onto the tarpaulin by the men who'd tried to save her; then four of them carried her the length of the building, and on into the Times Building. The Times said next morning that she'd been taken to the Chambers Street hospital, and died half an hour later.
On Beekman-street an aged man was hanging from a fourth-story window [says my copy of The New York Times for Wednesday, February 1, 1882—and now Julia and I stood in the silent crowd watching him] and the ready hands of the firemen were hoisting a ladder to reach and save him. He clung with a death-like grip, but the flames were stronger than he. They were seen to burst from the window by the lintel of which he was hanging. The firemen were almost within reach of him, when suddenly a deep groan escaped from a thousand throats, the old man's hand was seen to relax, and his body came tumbling to the hard pavement below. The man was Richard S. Davey, a compositor on the Scottish American. The unconscious body was taken to the Chambers-street hospital, where death relieved the man from further suffering in a short time.
From the corner of my eye I saw Julia turn to me, and when I looked at her fully her face was literally the whiteness of paper, and her eyes were enormous. Almost thoughtfully she murmured, "We could have stopped it," then she grabbed my arm in both her hands and shook me so violently I stumbled. "We could have!" she cried out at me in a rage. For a moment longer she looked at me, then turned away murmuring, "I can never forgive myself."
I had no answer; I wished I were dead. I had to move, had to do something, had to take some action against what was happening. In the line of cops holding the police-line ropes, the one nearest us stood like the others facing the crowd in his knee-length blue coat and tall felt helmet. But also like the others, he turned often to stare back over his shoulder at the fire across the street. This time when he did it I lifted the rope, shoving Julia under and ducking after her. Then we ran hard through the snow and the freezing streams from hose joints and hydrants. On the other side we were cursed by the cops, but we ducked under the ropes, pushing into the crowd, working our way toward the Beekman Street corner just ahead. We could smell the smoke here and hear the crackle and roar of the flames, and—during gusts of wind—feel the heat carried across to us. We reached the corner beside the New York Evening Mail Building, then started to work our way along Beekman Street toward Nassau Street, a short block to the east; I knew Julia hoped to find Jake there. And then I had my chance to do something.
In the next morning's Times account there is a paragraph reading:
While the excitement was at fever heat, Charles Wright, a young bootblack, who is well-known to people doing business around Printing House-square, looked up to the burning building and saw three men wildly gesticulating at the windows of the fifth or upper story. From one of these windows a wire rope was stretched to a telegraph pole on the opposite corner of Beekman-street. It had held a banner during the last campaign. A means of escape for the three men shot across Wright's mind in an instant, and in another instant he was engaged in putting it into execution. The telegraph pole was slippery with snow and ice but a dozen strong arms raised the boy and pushed him up until he reached the slight projections which serve as a foothold for the line-men.
The Times didn't have it quite right. The boy—a Negro, by the way—turned to the pole, shinnied up a couple of feet, but a sheeting of ice stopped him, and he yelled, "Help me git up!" All of us around the pole saw what he had in mind, and I stooped way down, my back to the pole, got my shoulders under his feet, then stood, boosting him higher. Two men, one on each side of me, each worked a hand between my shoulders and his feet, and shoved him up a yard or so more, and now he could reach the first of the wooden footholds.
Up the pole the young lad "shinnied," as he expressed it, until he reached the wire rope. It was the work of a moment [It took more than a "moment"; it was a good minute or more] to sever its connection with the pole, and the wire then fell to the side of the burning building. The three men on the fifth story seized this rope and slid down it, one after the other, in safety to the ground, although their hands were seriously injured by friction in the descent. Young Wright was received with cheers as he reached the ground, and he became the hero of the day. But for his timely action there is little doubt that the men thus saved would have been consumed before other aid could have reached them.
That part of the account is entirely right. It was beautiful to see that cable smack the side of the building when the boy let go of it; to see it hanging, then, to within a few feet of the walk; and to see the first man swing out onto it, and to see it hold. Each of the next two men kept his head, waiting till the man before him was on the ground. But they all slid too fast, burning their hands. And we did cheer Wright when he got down from the pole. I got a ten-dollar yellowback from my wallet, gave it to him, and half a dozen others gave him money; one man gave him a gold piece. The three rescued men came over, found the boy, shook his hand, and led him away with them, and I'm sure they must have done something for him, too, which he damn well deserved.
Following is a page, greatly reduced in size, of Frank Leslie's Illustrate
d Newspaper of February 11, 1882, showing Charles Wright up on the pole unfastening the wire to save the three men.
Julia and I were working our way through the crowd along Beekman Street, when all around us heads turned to look east. Just ahead, on the other side of a narrow alley, the wooden scaffolding of a big, new, still-unfinished stone building suddenly broke into flame; the fire had jumped clear across the street. The front of the building rose into two towers, higher than anything else around, and now the flames shot up the scaffolding to reach the towers. There it caught the window frames, in which glass hadn't yet been set, and ran up and along the eaves, gabled roof-lines, and the ornate railings of the tower rooftops. It was a sudden weird strange spectacle of burning rings, squares, triangles, and the parallel lines of the railings, like an enormous Fourth of July set piece seen high in the air through a snowstorm, and I think the crowd turned to it, as we did, in relief from the things we'd been seeing.
View of the Scene at the Height of the Fire.
A Fatal Leap.
Escape By Means of a Telegraph Wire.
Rescue of Three Men by Charles Wright.
The Ruins After The Fire.
New York City.—Incidents of the Great Fire on Park Row, January 31st.
But while we were watching, a young woman had crept out onto a fourth-story window ledge of the burning building, and when I turned and saw her I wondered if she'd been inside all this time; maybe running from one side of the building to another till she found this one not yet on fire. Just above her, fire roared out of the fifth-story window as though it were fed by forced draft, the tongues and billows of orange flame shooting halfway out over the street like a kind of squirming canopy over her head. She wasn't panicked, though; she closed the window behind her, careful to pull it all the way down. Then she stood, raised her arms above her head, and put a hand on the window opening on each side, supporting and steadying herself. It was an astonishingly calm posture. There she stood, not shouting, not screaming, but simply looking down at us, waiting. She must have known there was no going back: that this window was her last chance, and that there wasn't much time before the fire burst through it behind her.
And nothing was happening, no fireman coming with a ladder below. I suppose they thought, and they couldn't be blamed, that no one else would appear at a window along here at this stage of the fire. The girl stood waiting, in her long black dress, arms outstretched, hands on the sides of the window opening which framed her; she wore a white scarf tied around her neck. Suddenly the glass broke behind her, and a tremendous gout of black smoke filled the entire window, rolling on out and hiding her completely. Near us a woman cried out, anguished, and the crowd stirred, muttering. Down the line somewhere a man was shouting angrily for a ladder. Out on Beekman Street a cop ran past us fast as he could go.
There was no flame in the black smoke pouring out over the ledge up there, and we all—every last soul in that crowd, I'm certain—held our breaths: Would she be gone when we saw the ledge again? Julia didn't know it but she had both hands on my forearm, squeezing, squeezing.
The wind pulled the smoke away fast and she was still there, one hand on the window frame, the other cupped tightly over her mouth; now she struck her chest hard and we could see she was coughing. Then again she stood, arms outstretched between the stone sides of the opening, looking down at us and waiting, and the crowd was murmuring at her calmness and bravery. Minutes passed; a man near us stood staring up at the girl and cursing steadily; he may not have known he was doing it. Then, finally, two firemen came running around the corner from Nassau Street carrying an extension ladder. But at the building wall they stood, still holding the ladder, and talking, one man shaking his head violently. The cop at the police line had run over to them, and now he ran back: "Ladder's too short!" he yelled to us. One fireman began running back the way he'd come, then stopped—I never knew why—and came running back. And now they lifted the ladder up against the building and rattled the extension up fast, the ladder tops bouncing against the wall as it rose.
It was too short. There was newspaper criticism, in days that followed, of the shortness of fire-department ladders in a time when many buildings were four, five, and six stories tall, and newer ones ten. This ladder, raised to its highest now, touched the wall a good four feet below the girl's ledge; and now again a great slow billow of soot-black smoke rolled across the window-sill behind the girl, and covered her completely. She'd have died, I'm certain, lost consciousness and fallen back into the building or out and down onto the street, except for the wind. It snatched the slow roll of smoke and sent it flying in thinning fragments along the face of the building, and we could see the white scarf and the black skirt fluttering.
I want to explain. Since we'd stepped out of the Times Building doorway onto the street and seen the burning building, I'd been silently talking to myself. I didn't really blame myself for failing to burst through into Jake Pickering's office and stamping out the tiny new fire when I could have; no one could have anticipated what so suddenly happened. What ate at me now was this: that by our hidden presence at that old event Julia and I might have changed its course in just the way Dr. Danziger had always been afraid of. Perhaps we'd made a tiny sound, for example, barely heard and hardly noticed by Carmody as he searched through the files. Yet even a tiny, hardly noticed sound might very slightly have affected his subsequent actions. So that he'd dropped his burning match an inch to one side, say, landing it on the paper it set alight. Otherwise, if we hadn't been there to make even the least sound, who could say but what his match would have fallen onto bare wood? And that he might simply have stood, then, and watched it burn out?
I knew Julia must be agonizing through her thoughts, too: these were real people we'd just seen die. And now this incredible girl stood high over the street above us, waiting in silent courage to either die or somehow be saved in what now had to be only a matter of seconds.
I couldn't take one more death; I couldn't have stood it if she'd fallen back into the building or down onto the street before me. I had to do something, and—it wasn't bravery, it was simple necessity—I was shoving my way forward, then I'd ducked under the lines and was running across the street. I didn't climb, I just sprang up onto the face of that ladder, then I was racing up toward the top. I hate heights; they make me uneasy and I can feel panic stirring inside me. But now there was no room for it. I was in a kind of exaltation, my head tilted back to stare up those rungs, hands and feet flying, the ledge rushing toward me. I didn't know what I was going to do up there, but when my hand closed on the topmost rung I did know, as though I always had known. Both hands rose, cupped over the rounded tops of the ladder, my feet continuing to climb until I was crouched in a ball, my left foot on the very top rung, right foot on the rung just below. For a moment I hung motionless, getting the feel of my balance. Then in precisely the right moment I lifted my hands free of the ladder and shoved upward with both legs, hard. For an instant I was balanced in the air, then I toppled, forward, and my clawed hands smacked down onto the window ledge, a hand on each side of the toes of the girl's shoes projecting over the ledge; I was looking up, and could see the buttons running down the side of one shoe.
I only had to tell her once: She turned quickly, and half climbed and half slid down my back toward the ladder. Looking down between my feet, I saw a fireman's head and shoulders appear. His hands rose, gripped her ankles, guided them down, and she slid from my back onto the ladder below me. And then—this wonderful girl had already worked out in her mind what to do about me. The fireman holding her, she reached up and set her hands on my waist, pressing in hard, and with that support steadying me I was able to let go the ledge, stoop quickly, and find the ladder tops again with my hands. We moved fast then, climbing down in a row, and we weren't even halfway to the ground when the black smoke from the window she'd stood in changed instantaneously to roaring orange flame.
I stepped down onto the street, the girl threw her arms ar
ound my neck and kissed me on the cheek. I asked her name; it was Ida Small, and I took her hand for just a moment and felt happy and redeemed.
I won't forget Julia's eyes ever, as I ducked under the line and she stood waiting. Hands were clapping me on the back, people congratulating me, someone yelling something right in my ear; an old man in a top hat, wearing his white hair in an antique length down to his coat collar, tried to give me his gold watch. I thanked him, refusing, then took Julia's arm, getting us out of there, toward Nassau Street ahead.
I could see that, in these moments at least, Julia was in love with me; her eyes were filled with it and all I could do was grin and keep feeling my head, wondering how I'd lost my hat. I felt like a fake because bravery hadn't been involved; I was looking for absolution. And found it: Ida Small, who really was brave, still had a life ahead of her.
The Times, next morning, said she was "employed as an amanuensis in the office of D.P. Lindsley, author of a work on Takigraphy." She was working alone, which was why she hadn't known about the fire till long after most others.
In the February 11th Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper on the next page, the entire cover was given to a woodcut illustration showing Ida Small up on the ledge and "her anonymous rescuer" on the ladder. And while I know I shouldn't, I'm including that cover here, although the face of the man doesn't really look too much like me, and I wasn't wearing a vest either.
