If there was water, something could be done. Without water, stuck across
the river from the fire (which nobody for the moment was looking at)
we could do nothing but watch this side of Shuteley, such as it was,
burn with the rest.
It was no use thinking of what had happened and was still happening
across the river. Apparently these firemen knew little more than I did
about that.
Our wives, children, parents, friends and lovers were over there, dead
or alive. Either they'd escaped when the fire started (whenever that was)
or they were still there, forever, unrecognizable.
I suppose I was the luckiest of all those people there. Sheila was
with me, and Sheila, despite everything, was the human being I cared
most about. Sheila and I were going to live. If necessary we could run
from the holocaust and save ourselves.
We had no children, and at that moment I had never been more glad of
anything. Sheila's parents were dead, and the remaining parent I had
was far from Shuteley.
There was only Dina to worry about. And Gil, perhaps.
As for others . . . Well, through being faithful to Sheila and her
alone, I had become unconcerned with most of the people in Shuteley. In
the office, I was concerned chiefly about Sally Henrey, and she was on
holiday, out of this altogether. Of course I'd be sorry about many others,
but they weren't close, apart from Gil. And was he close any more?
Somebody screamed, and I turned. As if thrown by an ancient catapult,
a blazing mass of timber was flying in a leisurely parabola across the
dry river, straight for us.
I grabbed Sheila and pulled her to the left. But we bumped into two very
solid firemen and bounced the other way. The timber crashed on the ground
twenty yards from us.
Nobody was near it. Everybody had had plenty of time to get clear. But
when it hit the ground it flew asunder into a thousand blazing sparks
which exploded in all directions, and the curses and screams of those
hit by the sparks temporarily drowned the noises from across the river.
A couple of brands dug into my clothes, and obstinately stuck. I was trying
to brush them off when a scream from Sheila made me look at her and see
that a spark was clinging like a leech to the front of her dress. I tore
off my jacket, still with a smoldering patch in it, and plucked away
the spark and some of her dress, whereupon Sheila. promptly fainted.
I could have sworn she had her fur wrap on, but either it had slipped off
unnoticed or she had thrown it away in the broiling heat. Picking her up,
I carried her behind the shelter of one of the sheds. The spark on my
leg had fallen off, though not before burning through to the skin. The
pain was sharp and more like a stab wound than a burn.
I put Sheila down. She'd been lucky. There was no sign of a burn.
I pulled up a leg of my pants and saw to my astonishment that the
considerable pain in my leg was caused by a tiny burn no larger than
a pinprick.
Sheila opened her eyes. She didn't move. "Val," she said, "am I badly
burned?"
"You aren't burned at all," I said bluntly. Reassured, she jumped up, and
wailed when she saw that the left top half of her dress was torn away.
"Where's your wrap?" I demanded.
"I can't wear it in this heat. It's -- "
"Find it, put it on and keep it on."
"Sparks stick in it."
"I know, but . . . "
I was beginning to realize that though it was reassuring to have your wife
with you in such a situation, and many men who found themselves alone
at this moment would have given their right arms to be as fortunate as
I was, a fully feminine girl like Sheila kept your hands full and you'd
scarcely time even to see what was going on.
So I said: "Look, Sheila, the best thing you can do is gather all the kids
and old folk together and take them back over the hill, where it's safe,
and just stay there. A lot of people were burned and injured unnecessarily
just now. They needn't have been here."
"And what are you going to do?" she demanded.
I shrugged. I didn't know. If the firemen were helpless, it wasn't likely
I'd be able to do anything useful. But I had to try. I had to be there. If
I could do nothing else, I had to stand and watch.
"What will this mean to your job?" Sheila said.
Trust a woman to be practical. The thought seemed to come from a thousand
miles away.
But I was responsible for practically all the insurance in Shuteley --
and the San Francisco disaster that wrecked insurance companies among
other things was a minor affair compared with this. True, Shuteley wasn't
a big town. But never in history, save by act of war, had any town been so
completely destroyed as Shuteley obviously would be before this was over.
Behind us there was a shout. And we ran back, for at such a time the
last thing we expected to hear was a shout of excitement and delight.
When we saw the firemen talking to Sayell and gesticulating, we didn't
have to hear what they were saying. There was water in the Winshell brook,
and plenty of it.
It was remarkable how merely having something they could do transformed
the firemen from a dispirited, cursing, demoralized mob no more useful
than the children and old people who still stood around into an efficient
well-drilled team.
A squad raced up the hill with their equipment, and Sayell turned to me;
his face alight. "Thanks, Mr. Mathers," he said. "If it hadn't been for
you, we might never have looked at the brook. I never guessed it would
be . . . anyway, we're in business again."
Significantly he turned to look at the fire on the other side of the
river, which for some time he had been ignoring. Then he turned back,
shouting orders.
I sent Sheila to do as I'd suggested, and saw that she too became
efficient once she had something useful to do. She waved to me as she
shepherded the children and old people over the hill . . . and that was
the last I saw of her while the Great Fire raged.
Soon the firemen had a water supply again. Wisely they first doused our
own side of the river. The powerful jets of the two engines could reach
practically every building on this side without having to move.
For the first time I had a good look at the blocked New Bridge. It was
badly damaged and twisted, yet after the fire it might remain serviceable
as a bridge, once the debris on it had been cleared. It was all too
clear, however, that there was no chance of clearing it while the fire
still raged. Some of the stones were still glowing red, and there was
smoldering wood in the pile. In any case, I estimated that without
bulldozers it would take a hundred men two days to clear the bridge.
Without bulldozers . . . We were in farming country, and although all
the resources of Shuteley itself were on the other side of the river,
there ware plenty of farms this side.
I raced to a callbox. There was one among the sheds not a hundred yards
away. I picked up the receiver . . .
As I might have guessed, it was dead. The exchange was in Shuteley. In
any case, water, debris and heat must have put the overhead wires to
the box out of service long since.
There was a callbox about a mile back, and it might be working. Sayell
should know about communications. Probably, I realized, he was in constant
radio contact with his headquarters.
I ran back and tried to talk to him, But he was busy and waved me away.
My suggestion about the brook had enabled him to be busy; he was quite
certain, however, that I could not repeat the triumph.
The jets had been turned across the river, and rather unexpectedly they
had made some impression. On the other side a fairly large semicircular
area was free of fire, partly because nearly everything that would burn
was already consumed, certainly everything highly inflammable, and partly
because, being next to the river, its mean temperature was not as high
as areas in the center of the holocaust. The water as it fell still rose
in clouds of steam in places, but as the cooling jets played everywhere,
the glow of heat was fading and the redness of everything visible was
now a reflection of the flames still leaping farther back.
Indeed, the eye had now become used to the overall redness and canceled
it out, just as, when one wears dark glasses, it is possible after a
while to see colors as they really are. Everything was red. But blue-red
didn't look the same as green-red.
There was less smoke than I'd have imagined. Although my eyes stung
and watered all the time, that too could be ignored, like the various
smells, and for a long time I had not choked, coughed, or been out of
breath. I suspected that there must, after all, be a slight breath of
air away from us. Perhaps it was a breeze created only by the fire,
sucking air from our side.
The firemen were now attempting a desperate enterprise. Now that there
was an apparent toehold across in the blazing town, one of the engines
was going to attempt to cross the dry river bed.
Personally I thought the attempt was several kinds of a mistake. The last
few minutes had shown that the two engines, given an adequate supply of
water, could accomplish something from this side of the river. They had
won back a little from the fire. And even if it was scorched earth that
they gained, an area that the fire had finished with and no longer wanted,
even if the area represented only a fraction of one per cent of the total
area of Shuteley, the process could be repeated. Unfortunately there was
no road along this side of the bank, but the engines could travel along
the lanes and reach the bank from other vantage points, the one from which
we had first seen the fire, for example, and do what they had done here.
The ladders could be used to enable water to be sprayed over a wide area
on the other side. Of course it would turn to steam, but that was all
right: it took about six times as much heat to convert water to steam
as it did to raise it to boiling point.
Also I thought, that it was too soon to attempt to cross to an area
which had so recently been red with inner heat. Water falling on hot
stone or metal draws off surface heat, but the glow wells up again to the
surface. I doubted that even the firemen in their asbestos boots could
stand anywhere across the river yet, and I was quite certain that the
rubber tires of the machines would be burned off them in seconds. And
although the heat here was just bearable (because we had to bear it),
we had been insulated all along by the breadth of the river, which,
though dry, had never burned. Across the river the firemen would be on
ground which had only recently been surrendered by the flames, and that
much nearer the heart of the blaze and its fierce, searing heat.
Besides, I didn't think the vehicles had one chance in a hundred of
making the crossing. They were ordinary fire tenders, designed rather for
getting to the scene of an outbreak at top speed than crossing impossible
terrain. They might cross grass or rough country, but they weren't tanks
or tractors. They had four rubber-shod wheels (intact, true, because
someone had had the sense to shield the vehicles with wet tarpaulins)
and they were heavy.
The bed of the river was a U -- not a deep U, for the Shute was never
deep, not even where it ran into the much larger river that flowed on
to the sea. Yet the Shute was no brook. It had flowed steadily along
the same course for thousands of years, millions for all anyone knew,
and the bed had gradually deepened, silted in the middle, perhaps,
but with ever-steepening outer walls.
Even if a tender could drive down one side of the bank and cross the
swampy bed, could it ever get up the incline on the other side?
I was certain it couldn't.
Sayell, however, was determined. He wasn't going to wait, either. A dozen
men were stamping along the bank, grassy here, trying to establish where
best to make the attempt.
A fleeting thought occurred to me. Sayell was probably no fool, even if
his brother was. He was probably reasonably well trained in fire-fighting
techniques. But he was no genius, and the situation which faced him had
never faced anybody before.
Fires don't wait for the experts, the bosses, the generals, politicians
and scientists to turn up. In an hour or two this area wonid be swarming
with people -- all of whom could have handled the situation better
than any of us, between cups of tea. I remembered, irreverently but
not irrelevantly, how Gulliver put out the Lilliputians' fire. Some
man-mountain could have done the same for us, if only he happened to
be there.
Unfortunately, we were right out of man-mountains at the present time.
Chance had elected poor honest not-too-bright John Sayell as the man
in charge. And I knew already, he'd be pilloried. Whatever he did, he
should have done better. If Shuteley was annihilated -- and anyone from
this side of the river could see it already was -- well, he couldn't
have done worse.
But he still didn't have to commit the criminal irresponsibility of
staking all on the impossible, thus abandoning the small, yet important,
things which were possible.
I strode through his crew. "Sayell . . . " I said.
The look he turned on me was that of a tortured man. "Mr. Mathers," he
said, being civil with an enormous effort, "you've done two good things
tonight. You found a water supply, and you got your wife to clear the
bystanders out of our way. But now we have to -- "
"Now you have to do the right thing," I said, "because there's nobody
else to do anything. Have you checked the foot-bridges?"
He said a coarse, derisive word. "They're wooden," he said. "What chance
. . . for God's sake, man, get out of my way."
"For God's sake, man," I said, "remember that you didn't think it worth
while looking at the Winshell brook."
That didn't reach him: Debating points don't register when you're in
the glare of disaster, when you only have to turn your head to see it.
"There's the fire," he said. His voice, I noticed for the first time,
was raw. He had been shouting. "We're going to put it out. Please let
me get on with it, Mathers."
As he dropped the "Mr." for the first time, his self-control broke again
and he added: "Out of my way, man, or by God I'll knock you senseless
with my axe."