Then, as they watched, suddenly a tug lashed between enormous flat boats on which were red freight-cars, swept north with the tide. A thin glaze of heat breathed up from the tug's pipe; it was moving without its engines, and the sight was unbelievable. The whole huge mass simply shot the river, racing by them.
And then the very magic of life was theirs. The world fell from them, the dusty scales of facts, the complex intricacies of existence melted away. They were very close, and the keen, yelling wind was wrapping them closer. Vision filled the gray air, trembled up from the river to the heavens. They rose from all the chaos like two white flames blown by the wind together--they were two gigantic powers of the earth preparing like gods for new creation. In that throbbing moment each became the world to the other, and love, death-strong, shot their hearts.
He turned, gazing strangely at her pale, eager, breathless face.
"I want ..." he began.
"Yes," she breathed.
He opened his lips, and the sound that escaped seemed like a sob.
"Myra!"
And then at the sound of her name she was all woman, all love. She cried out:
"Joe!"
And they flung their arms round each other. She sobbed there, overcome with the yearning, the glory, the beatitude of that moment.
"Oh," he cried, "how I love you!... Myra ..."
"Joe, Joe--I couldn't have stood it longer!"
All of life, all of the past, all of the million years of earth melted into that moment, that moment when a man and a woman, mingled into one, stood in the heart of the wonder, the love, the purpose of nature--a mad, wild, incoherent half-hour, a secret ecstasy in the passing of the twilight, in the swing of the wind and the breath of the sea.
"Come home to my mother," cried Joe. "Come home with me!"
They turned ... and Myra was a strange new woman, tender, grave, and wrought of all lovely power, her face, in the last of the light, mellow and softly glowing with a heightened woman-power.
"Yes," she said, "I want to see Joe's mother."
It was Joe's last step to success. Now he had all--his work, his love. He felt powerfully masculine, triumphant, glorious.
Night had fallen, and on the darkness broke and sparkled a thousand lights in tenement windows and up the shadowy streets--everywhere homes, families; men, women, and children busily living together; everywhere love. Joe glanced, his eyes filling. Then he paused.
"Look at that," he said in a changed voice.
Over against the west, a little to the north, the gray heavens were visible--a lightning seemed to run over them--a ghastly red lightning--sharply silhouetting the chimneyed housetops.
"What is it?" said Myra.
He gazed at it, transfixed.
"That's a fire ... a big fire." Then suddenly his face, in the pale light of a street-lamp, became chalky white and knotted. He could barely speak. "It must be on Eighty-first or Eighty-second Street."
She spoke shrilly, clutching his arm.
"Not ... the loft?"
"Oh, it can't be!" he cried, in an agony. "But come ... hurry ..."
They started toward Eighty-first Street up Avenue A. They walked fast; and it seemed suddenly to Joe that he had been dancing on a thin crust, and that the crust had broken and he was falling through. He turned and spoke harshly:
"You must run!"
Fear made their feet heavy as they sped, and their hearts seemed to be exploding in their breasts. They felt as if that fire were consuming them; as if its tongues of flame licked them up. And so they came to the corner of Eighty-first Street and turned it, and looked, and stopped.
Joe spoke hoarsely.
"It's burning;... it's the loft.... The printery's on fire...."
Beyond the elevated structure at Second Avenue the loft building rose like a grotesque gigantic torch in the night. Swirls of flame rolled from the upper three stories upward in a mane of red, tossing volumes of smoke, and the wild wind, combing the fire from the west, rained down cinders and burned papers on Joe and Myra as they rushed up the street. Every window was blankly visible in the extreme light, streams of water played on the walls, and the night throbbed with the palpitating, pounding fire-engines.
And it seemed to Joe as if life were torn to bits, as if the world's end had come. It was unbelievable, impossible--his eyes belied his brain. That all those years of labor and dream and effort were going up in flame and smoke seemed preposterous. And only a few moments before he and Myra had stood on the heights of the world; had their mad moment; and even then his life was being burned away from him. He felt the hoarse sobs lifting up through his throat.
They reached Second Avenue, and were stopped by the vast swaying crowd of people, a density that could not be
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