Time and Again

It was dark when I woke up from a hunger so intense it made me dizzy. I had no idea what time it was; it might have been very late. But Maud Torrence and Felix Grier were in the parlor reading when I came downstairs. They glanced up and nodded to me casually, and I understood that they didn't know I'd seen the fire. Just as casually I asked if Jake Pickering were home, and Felix, already turning back to his book, just shook his head.

I walked on through the darkened dining room to the kitchen; I could see a light under the crack of the door. Julia sat at the kitchen table with her aunt, eating — cold sliced roast, from di

When I finished my supper Julia was still at the table, hands folded in her lap, waiting. I looked at her, and she said, "I want to go back, Si," and I just nodded: I didn't know why, but I had to go back, too. Outside it was snowing again and there was still a wind. The snow on the walks was too deep for walking now but there were wheel marks in the street, and we walked in those to the El station on Twenty-third Street. And by ten o'clock we were standing against the east wall of the post office, sheltered from the wind, and:

…the snow in Park-row in front of the Times office and in front of what remained of the old World building [says The New York Times of February 1, 1882] was disturbed only by the feet of the firemen and Police officers. Lines of hose across the car tracks were buried out of sight in the snow, and the streams of water that played from the nozzles were seemingly wasted. The flames continued as bright as though a great flood could have no effect upon them. The gas supply pipes created much of the glare. Men and women and children huddled close to the walls of the Post Office on the Park-row side….The wind increased to a gale, and the snow beat about with such effect that the crowds were driven to seek refuge elsewhere, and by 10 o'clock the streets in the neighborhood were almost deserted. A few staid persons, who appeared like statues of snow, seemed to think they were in duty bound to be on hand. They rubbed their backs against the sides of the Post Office and kept their eyes fixed upon the ragged Park-row wall of the burned building. The winds howled through Beekman-street, and Park-row, and whipped up Spruce-street into Nassau and Park-row with such fury that those who ventured to turn those corners were fairly lifted from then-feet. The City Hall clock appeared as though in a mist…. By 11 o'clock the snow had almost ceased to fall, the shrieks of the winds had died away, and the atmosphere was clear and cheerful, but the crowds did not return.

We were among the last to leave, hypnotized by the black hulk across the street. The streetlamps before it were smashed and unlit, and the face of the wall was dark and without detail. But the lower window openings were sharply defined by the steady glare of the flaming gas pipes on the other side, and we could see the new snow mounded on their sills. The wreckage looked centuries old, an ancient ruin, and the dark shapes of the firemen were motionless, the only movement the play of the water arching through the empty windows. Higher up, the walls were touched by the diffused sourceless light that so often accompanies a nighttime snowfall; and we stared up at the smoke-blackened OBSERVER sign along which we'd crawled, and just beyond it on the face of the Times Building the sign of J. WALTER THOMPSON, ADVERTISING AGENT, onto which we had stepped and saved our lives. Finally we left; as we crossed Park Row into Beekman Street, the City Hall clock said ten to eleven.

The Beekman Street sidewalk had been trampled clear of snow all day and into the evening; now with only an inch of untouched new snow it was easily passable. We looked across the street; here the wall had fallen, and we looked into the emptiness of what had been the inside of the building. The flames of the broken gas pipes roared softly, steadily, white arches of water wetting down everything near them. But the fire itself was over, "the Destruction of the World" complete, and it was already passing into — not even history, but oblivion. At this moment a swarm of artists would be hard at work under gaslight, over at Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper a couple of blocks to the west at Park and College Place, and at Harper's, carving out the woodcuts of the fire that would appear in a week or so. The girl beside me, and most of the city, would look at their work for a few moments, recreating the sensation. But I understood as they could not how quickly the men now carving those wooden blocks would be gone, together with the entire population that would look at them, incredibly including this girl. Here and there a last few copies would yellow in files, turning into something quaint and faintly amusing; and this vanished building and awful fire would be gone from all human memory. For a few moments, walking along Beekman Street across from the wreckage already being covered over with snow in places, I was overwhelmed in melancholy; human life was so short it seemed meaningless. It's the kind of thought you have, usually, only in the deep middle of the night waking up alone in the world. But I knew a time when this building and fire were as though they'd never been, and so I had the feeling now.

We turned the corner into Nassau Street and — without speaking, each sensing it in the other — we began to hurry, suddenly anxious to leave this place forever. Ahead, just across the street from the Nassau Street entrance to the Times Building, the streetlamp was unbroken, and its circle of yellow light lay sparkling and softly beautiful on the snow of our walk. Here, too, on this walk, the snow was almost untouched, but not quite; a single line of footsteps marked it, disappearing into the darkness beyond the lamp. They began as though someone peering into a window opening of the destroyed World Building had crossed Nassau Street, stepped up onto the curb, and walked on.

We reached the footprints, our own begi

I looked up at Julia, and she nodded, mystified. "Yes, of course; men often have that done when their boots are made, a personal design of some sort." She shrugged. "It's just a good-luck sign."

I nodded; I understood. This was Carmody's sign; he had escaped the fire. And only a few moments ago he was here — to look once more upon what he had done. For a moment longer I stood staring at that strange little print in the new snow. He'd be buried under that sign. Years from now his widow would wash and dress his newly dead body, then bury him under this identical sign. Why? Why? The question still remained.

We walked all the way home. The wind gone, the snow stopped, it was no longer cold; and this late and so soon after the storm, the streets were deserted and we had the world to ourselves. At least the streets we walked on were empty; half lost most of the time, we traveled back and forth east and west, but working always to the north along the old old streets of the old old city of lower Manhattan. The walks were occasionally shoveled clear but generally not, so we walked in packed-down carriage and wagon ruts. As the storm clouds broke up, a half-moon began to appear and disappear, so that sometimes, a block or more from a streetlamp, we moved through darkness. At others we walked in moonlight that, doubled by reflection from the snow, was like day.