Suddenly all the lights in the building went out, plunging the court in darkness save for the fearful illumination provided by the bursts of flame from the top-floor apartment. There was a deep murmur and a restless stir in the crowd. Several young smart alecks in evening clothes took this opportunity to go about among the dark mass of people, arrogantly throwing the beams of their flashlights into the faces of those they passed.
The police now began to move upon the crowd, and, good-naturedly but firmly, with outstretched arms, started to herd everybody back, out of the court, through the arches, and across the surrounding streets. The streets were laced and criss-crossed everywhere with bewildering skeins of hose, and all normal sounds were lost in the powerful throbbing of the fire-engines. Unceremoniously, like driven cattle, the residents of the great building were forced back to the opposite pavements, where they had to take their places among the humbler following of the general public.
Some of the ladies, finding themselves too thinly clad in the cold night air, sought refuge in the apartments of friends who lived in the neighbourhood. Others, tired of standing round, went to hotels to wait or to spend the night. But most of the people hung on, curious and eager to what the outcome might be. Mr. Jack took Edith, Alma, Amy, and two or three young people of Amy’s acquaintance to a near-by hotel for drinks. The others stayed and looked on curiously for a while. But presently Mrs. Jack, George Webber, Miss Mandell, and Stephen Hook repaired to a drug-store that was close at hand. They sat at the counter, ordered coffee and sandwiches, and engaged in eager chatter with other refugees who now filled the store.
The conversation of all these people was friendly and casual. Some were even gay. But in their talk there was also now a note of perturbation—of something troubled, puzzled, and uncertain. Men of wealth and power had been suddenly dispossessed from their snug nests with their wives, families, and dependents, and now there was nothing they could do but wait, herded homelessly into drug-stores and hotel lobbies, or huddled together in their wraps on street corners like shipwrecked voyagers, looking at one another with helpless eyes. Some of them felt, dimly, that they had been caught up by some mysterious and relentless force, and that they were being borne onwards as unwitting of the power that ruled them as blind flies fastened to a revolving wheel. To others came the image of a tremendous web in which they felt they had become enmeshed—a web whose ramifications were so vast and complicated that they had not the faintest notion where it began or what its pattern was.
For in the well-ordered world in which these people lived, something had gone suddenly wrong. Things had got out of control. They were the lords and masters of the earth, vested with authority and accustomed to command, but now the control had been taken from them. So they felt strangely helpless, no longer able to command the situation, no longer able even to find out what was happening.
But, in ways remote from their blind and troubled kenning, events had been moving to their inexorable conclusion.
*
In one of the smoky corridors of that enormous hive, two men in boots and helmets had met in earnest communion.
“Did you find it?”
“Yes.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s in the basement, chief. It’s not on the roof at all—a draught is taking it up a vent. But it’s down there.” He pointed with his thumb.
“Well, then, go get it. You know what to do.”
“It looks bad, chief. It’s going to be hard to get.”
“What’s the trouble?”
“If we flood the basement, we’ll also flood two levels of railroad tracks. You know what that means.”
For a moment their eyes held each other steadily. Then the older man jerked his head and started for the stairs.
“Come on,” he said. “We’re going down.”
Down in the bowels of the earth there was a room where lights were burning and it was always night.
There, now, a telephone rang, and a man with a green eyeshade seated at a desk answered it.
“Hello…Oh, hello, Mike.”
He listened carefully for a moment, suddenly jerked forward taut with interest, and pulled the cigarette out of his mouth.
“The hell you say!...Where? Over track thirty-two?...They’re going to flood it!...Hell!”
Deep in the honeycombs of the rock the lights burned green and red and yellow, silent in the eternal dark, lovely, poignant as remembered grief. Suddenly, all up and down the faintly gleaming rails, the green and yellow eyes winked out and flashed to warning red.
A few blocks away, just where the network of that amazing underworld of railroad yards begins its mighty flare of burnished steel, the Limited halted swiftly, but so smoothly that the passengers, already standing to debark, felt only a slight jar and were unaware that anything unusual had happened.
Ahead, however, in the cab of the electric locomotive which had pulled the great train the last miles of its span along the Hudson River, the engineer peered out and read the signs. He saw the shifting patterns of hard light against the dark, and swore: