Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Then recurred to him the question which had come to him so often since the young man passed him with the sick child,-”Where are the Greyford girls?” Where, indeed? and how was one to go in search of them? I have had just such a question put itself to me in a dream, when, all of a sudden, it appeared that some one who should have been there was not there. Was it a little strange, that Jeff’s question did not first frame itself into, “Where is Nettie?” though he had a provoking letter from Nettie lying next his heart, and had been wondering how he and she were to meet each other, and whether he were jealous of the Mr. Marsh or the Mr. Denison she had been writing about? No: the spontaneous question was distinctly, not of one, but of all: “Where are the Greyford girls?” Jane Burgess, whom all Greyford had voted to be his; Nettie, who had said that by all that was holy she was his; and “poor Rachel,” as Jeff always called Rachel Holley. Jeff felt that if he could see them, or help them, that was what he was dumped down in Chicago at this moment for; not to be serving ejectment warrants on rascals, or dragging steamers out of the way of the flames.

  Where were the Greyford girls? Asking himself this question, he rushed into the throng again; hoping against hope that some fatality would answer.

  Where were the Greyford girls? They were not together.

  At that moment of time, if a somewhat defective chronology can be relied upon, Jane Burgess was startled from an uneasy dream, which need not be described in a story which has to do with realities more terrible than visions. Ned Bardles was pounding at her door. “Jane! Jane! there’s a great fire! Sophy is nervous, and you had better get up and dress yourself; it will comfort her.” By such weak devices does the less confident sex attempt, in times of peril, to give courage to the stronger. Not that Ned Bardles’s courage or confidence gave way all that day, or till this time. To this hour, he thinks that if a particular Irishman had thrown a particular bucket of water where he, Ned Bardles, directed, half Chicago would have been saved that day; and his own house, with the rest, would have stood sure. Jane started up. Sure enough, the light was flaring through her window, and she could see every picture in her room. Sensible Jane! She had the wit at that moment to know which frock would be best to work in, and that if her getting up were for any good, it was for work. Sensible Jane! Frock, shoes, hair, every thing, was in order for work, when Ned Bardles next dashed up the stairway. She flung open her door, and asked what she was to do.

  Still Ned prophesied smooth things. His wife was packing some trunks. Perhaps Jane would feel more easy if she were ready for a sudden removal. For himself, he was at that moment fastening the step-ladder which led to the roof. If Jane would come up in a minute, the roof was flat at the very top, he knew her head was steady, she would like to see the show.

  “See the show, indeed?” Jane’s packing was finished right soon; and, with her own hands, she dragged her heavy trunks into the passage, and down the stairway, to the front hall. Then she ran up and joined Ned on his lookout.

  Beauty and terror! Such beauty and such terror! The howl of the flames, the rush of the tempest by her, which made Jane fear to step outside upon the roof, and made her beg Ned not to step so recklessly from side to side; the leaps from point to point, now of burning brands, as one called them, for want of a better name, now of columns of flame, which seemed to move wholly without law, or defied law; and above all, the heavy canopy of smoke and flame, white below, night-black above; and with its whirls between, lighted or shaded with every conceivable glare or cloud of white, of yellow, of orange, of scarlet, of crimson, of purple; the gamut of fire, here harmonized, there raging in discord; the voice of power and the spectacle of power hushed Jane at first, she did not know whether in terror or wonder. Then she cried, “Ned! come down, come down! You can do nothing here; come down for the children. Take them somewhere where they will be safe!”

  But Ned declared, as he supposed with great calmness, though Jane could detect the quickness of his speech, that it was idle to run away from a fire which was a quarter of a mile away. If she would notice the way the wind was blowing, she would see that it had already passed them. Unless the wind changed its direction, they must be safe. Still, if Jane chose, she might have the children up and dressed, if she thought Sophy would feel easier. As if the children hadn’t been all dressed, to their India-rubbers, long before! Ned showed her the buckets which he and his neighbors had been arranging on the roof. He had already wetted every spout; and indeed, even in the heat in which they stood, that whole range of roof-tops looked as if it had been drenched with a sudden shower. But even Ned’s voluble eloquence was checked when Michael’s voice, from the foot of the attic stairs, announced that the water had stopped running. This was a call that did summon Ned from his commanding station, and sent him downstairs, to find what faucet had been turned wrong. Alas! it was a faucet that Ned even could not set right. In one fatal zig-zag from the spot where it was born, the conflagration had dashed across the city to the roof of the great water-works, which seemed so far away. That roof had fallen upon those engines which the moment before represented the maximum of human power, as they also, like Jeff and Jane, were working their willing utmost in their great duty. And so they were still.

  But the indomitable Ned Bardles would not quail. “It isn’t as if we hadn’t got the reservoir.” Again he conferred with his neighbors, laid off his working parties for the stairways, draped his out-houses with carpets and bockings, rolled a hogshead here, and another there, invoking all the traditions of early New-England life, and, as the night waned, filled them, to be in readiness for the crisis. No one within the range of Ned’s line of battle could escape the contagion of his energy.

  But, for once at least, the doubtful wife was the better prophet. She was preparing for retreat, while Ned was preparing for fight. Does such a union, perhaps, make the true general? She compelled Michael to harness the horses into the light wagon which stood in the stable, and bring it round to the door. What did not she and the children pile into that wagon! Her father’s portrait, and Ned’s mother’s; the basket of silver-plate, which had been carried upstairs when they went to bed; two or three of those trunks of hasty packing; nay, on the floor of the little cart, in the midst of all these accumulations, stood sublime the easy-chair into which Ned had always liked to fling himself, when he came home tired, at night, from the office. The wagon stood there, hour after hour; and from child to grandmother, when any one lighted on any thing in the house which seemed particularly precious, it would be carried down, and by some mystery crowded into this wagon. And still Ned said it was nonsense; that the fire had passed them, and there need be no fear.

  None the less did the last come. From a little reconnoitring tour, he came rushing back; with his own hands flung little Carl upon the seat in the wagon, called his wife and the others out, bade Michael mount and take the reins, lifted Retty upon Michael’s knees, and bade him drive slowly to the base-ball ground. Sophy and Jane and the little procession followed, arms filled with little household gods. Ned Bardles himself went back into his library, swung round his neck his little travelling-bag, looked his last upon his happy home, locked the front door, put the key in his pocket, and followed the retreat.

  He overtook Sophy in a moment. “Wilmarth’s house is gone. They were not out of it two minutes before it was gutted. All that square is gone. I tell you, Sophy, it isn’t like flame: it is a wall of fire, sweeping down, and nothing stands against it.”

  “Thank God, the children are all safe!” said Sophy. And brave children they were. They hugged their little treasures tightly, and stamped along in firm order, at their aunt’s or their mother’s side.

  A short relief at the lake-side. Michael unloaded his wagon, and they made there their little bivouac. “At least, we are safe here, where there is nothing that can burn.” Retty and Carl grow used to the situation, stop asking questions, and begin to see which can throw stones farthest into the lake. And then, in one instant, with one more change in the eddy of the win
d, there is a column of black smoke down upon us, from some pile of pitchy lumber, and Ned has Carl in his arms, and Sophy has clutched up Retty, and Jane is dragging John, as Michael leads the way; thick, pitchy darkness in this smoke, though we know the sun has risen. Michael leads us through by-paths well known to him. “This way, Miss Jane! Jump down here, Mrs. Bardles! I have the boy, ma’am.” Turning this way, turning that way; a mud-scow here, a raft of floating lumber there; now a fight with a drunken boatman, now running across a tottering plank bridge, which has been left for us, by some one fleeing just before us, and we are safe again.

  Arrived on the deck of a crowded steamer, Ned Bardles eagerly calls his roll,-”Retty, John, Carl, grandmamma. Thank God, we are all here!”

  And then the captain of the boat called to them, to say that he must put off into the lake; that any who preferred to stay on land must go on shore. A tempest on the lake, and this storm of fire on the land! There were but few who did not prefer the chances of going to the bottom, to enduring longer trial of the battle on the shore.

  Ned Bardles determined to stay, with his children. He gave Mike his choice, whether to stay or to go; and Mike said,-the faithful fellow,-”As ye ‘re all safe here, there may be some one else that needs me. I think I’ll go and see.”

  There is the answer to Jeff Fleming’s question, so far as one of the Greyford girls was concerned; and she, be it said in passing, the one whom the public opinion of Greyford had assigned to him as his own property, until Nettie Sylva had turned his susceptible heart in another direction. No great likelihood that Jeff Fleming will find Jane Burgess on that storm-tossed steamer in the offing. Perhaps he will,-stranger things have happened in this story. But we will see.

  It was indeed one of the peculiar horrors of the great fire, that, in the flights and rescues, there were so many different tides of human life, sweeping in different directions at the same moment of terror, and each parted from the others. The fugitives who fled to the lake were parted from those who had escaped southward, and, yet again, beyond that first line of fire, which swept across the North Side, there was a third army of the houseless, whose flight was northward; an army enlarged as every new block gave way. In a thousand instances, the fathers of families had, in the night, left their homes, apparently secure, and gone down town to work for the safety of their property; so that, when the crisis of flight came for wives and children, they were parted from those who were used to care for them, and on whom they were used to rely. For after the tunnel was rendered useless, and the bridges gave away, the North and South Sides were completely parted from each other. It happened, as in a thousand other cases of those who were closely tied in life, that the little party of our friends was so broken, that their history must be followed, not on one only of the lines of retreat, but upon each in turn.

  Where were the Greyford girls?

  As for Rachel Holley, at the moment when Jane and Sophy and the children fled from the house in Erie Street, after a night of anxiety, Rachel Holley was comfortably asleep in bed, wholly ignorant, of course, that half the town was in flames. After a day at the Sherman House, Mr. Holley had brought Rachel down to Mrs. Worboise’s, well out of town on the South Side; and that good woman was only too glad to welcome so dear a friend as Rachel in her new quarters. Horace was there too; and, in the sight-seeing of the Greyford party, they had had many a merry rendezvous and jolly tea-drinking at these hospitable quarters. The alarm of fire Sunday night had kept Horace out; and when Rachel went to bed, he had not returned. The family at home had looked at the fire from the window before going to bed, but they were quite too far from the scene of it to be disturbed by the noise of the alarm. Good Mrs. Worboise slept too soundly to be careful whether her “boarders” returned at one hour of the night or another. Indeed, when she woke, with her maids, to start things in the morning, it was some little time, as she said afterwards, before she looked out of the window. She looked then toward the south; and she had been stirring “nigh half an hour, zif’t was any other day,” before she knew that there was not a man in her house, and that, a mile away, half the city was in ruins. So was it that Rachel slept on. It need hardly be said, that, as soon as Mrs. Worboise got any information, she communicated it to Rachel, and the other ladies of the family.

  Horace had walked home with Mark Hinsdale on Sunday evening from the Sherman House, where Nettie Sylva and her father still remained. Mark’s home was well out on the West Side, as has been said. The young men were talking together of Horace’s plans, when an alarm of fire was given, and, not long after, they could distinctly see the light; of which both of them spoke with some anxiety, so critical had been the fire of the night before, of which they had, just then, been examining the ruins, and so tremendous was this tempest which they had both been facing as they crossed the town. Neither of these young men had that divine instinct for running to “a fire” which is a characteristic of most young Americans. But in a tempest like this, after such an experience as last night’s, an alarm of fire in De Koven Street was no trifle; and, without pause, each of them arrayed himself for work, and Mark gave notice to his landlady that he had his key, and she need not sit up for him. Far to windward as they were, he had of course no fear for her house; and he was right. But, as a little hose-carriage rattled along and passed the young men, both of them spoke with anxiety of the means of fighting the enemy; and Horace recalled with a shudder his words of the morning,-”as if we all were on the edge of a common calamity.”

  They came to work, and they had enough of it before they were done. Not with the engines. There was little that they could do there. Till midnight, and after midnight indeed, the plucky little steam fire-engines were thumping away with precision and power; the water-works were delivering deluges of water; and for the hauling the machines to and fro, the volunteer crowd that runs with the machine gave all the help that the firemen themselves required, “dead-beat” though many of them were by the work of the night before. But there was plenty of work for two intelligent young fellows with heads on their shoulders. They ran first to find Fay, at the counting-room of his lumber-yard. Fay was not there,-no one was yet there. But it was so clear that that whole yard would be in the range of flame within ten minutes, that Horace did not hesitate to enter the counting-room through a window, open the outer door with a crowbar, and then pile into an express-wagon, which Mark had brought to the spot, the desks of the two partners; indeed, every thing movable they could find. The safe they would have taken too, but it was clearly too much for the cart. This was in the early hours, when to hire an express-wagon was still a possibility. Mark sent the whole in triumph up to his own lodgings, just as Mr. Vanderlacken, the senior clerk, appeared. Fortunately, he had the keys to the safe; and he and the young men made short work in emptying that, and carrying the contents to places supposed to be places of security. That sort of sudden work, of new exigency and new provision, rapid determination and action as rapid, made the history of the night. It all changed, of course, as well in range as in the feeling with which they worked, after the fire leaped across the river, when all men who were awake knew that there was now a question as to the existence of the town.

  The Chicago River is a sluggish little stream, formed by the union of two streams about half a mile back from the lake. After the union, the one river flows eastward into the lake, or did, till the canal changed its current. The two streams, before they meet, flow, one north, one south, to the point of union. The West Side, so called, is west of them. Several bridges and a tunnel unite it with the North Side and the South Side. These, in turn, are separated from each other by the river, and united with each other again by bridges and a tunnel. The rivers, or river, make the harbor of the city. To one who rattles over the bridges in a carriage, they seem narrow as ditches. But when you see two steamers pass each other, or when you see a steamer turned round in the stream, you see that there is more width than you supposed. The fire having begun on the West Side, our friends had supposed that its
havoc would at the least be checked by the river; bad enough, indeed, that it should only be checked there. No little part of their service of that night had been on board vessels, which seemed to be in the line of fire as the terrible tempest drove it on. It was, Mark thought, a little after midnight, when, as they were recrossing the bridge, from one of many expeditions to what then seemed a region of safety, they paused a moment to look northward, and first felt that their confidence in the river also was a delusion. They could see then how the storm, which seemed higher than ever, was flinging fire-brands upon the poor lumber-sloops in the river; nay, once and again a burning brand would soar, as if devils were carrying it, quite across the stream. With the thought of what might, nay, must happen, if the fire got lodgement on the other side, Mark and Horace at the same moment began to think of other duty than carrying account books to a place of safety. “Do you believe they know of this in Erie Street?” said Horace, thinking of Jane. And Mark confessed that he had been anxious to go and see if they were not frightened. While they questioned, a sharp flash sprang up, a very column of flame, on the leeward shore of the river. A moment more, and a hose-carriage came rushing across the bridge, and they heard the firemen clearing the way for the steamer. “Run up to Bardles’s,” said Mark. “I will go round by the library, and, if all is safe there, I will join you.”

  So Horace crossed back, and found his way to the Lasalle-street tunnel; but he was not to come to Erie Street so easily. First a loyal effort to help on her way an Irish woman and three children; then an adventure with some terrified horses, who were led out from one of the North-side stables, delayed him longer than he knew. He promised to take-and did take-one of these wild horses to a private stable as far up as North Avenue, where it was thought he would be safe; he mounted the terrified creature bareback, as he had done more good-natured beasts in old Greyford days. But when he returned from this knight-errantry he found the line of fire had crossed to the lake, and that he was cut off by it from Erie Street. If, as was perhaps possible, he could have crossed there, he did not rightly find his way. He chose in preference the Indiana-street bridge; and, though more anxious than ever about Jane and her friends, he thought his best way to reach them was to return to the West Side, and so pass round the west of the fire. He had not any fear, even then, of the Sherman House and Nettie Sylva. But he had thus undertaken a long journey; and it was, as any one will see who knows the ground, journey long enough to account for his failing to arrive at Erie Street before Jane and her party fled.