Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (387 page)

It was very light and full of smoke. There was no one there. The fire below could be plainly seen through the cracks in the boarding. It seemed to extend about half way across the lower room. Mr Bransdon clutched at a coat and a dress that lay over a chair. The two small bedrooms at the back were darker and he struck each bed with his hand to make certain that no one was in it. He plunged heavily down the staircase again. As in the scullery he opened the back door, a sea of flame shot through the air in front of him across the garden outside. The wind had carried an immense scroll of fire from the burning stack and swept it licking round the house. It disappeared. For a moment, rigorously carrying out his own orders, Mr Bransdon opened the door of the living room. The floor boards were alight, burning right up to the middle of the deal table which was in the middle of the room. There was neither cat nor dog there, but Mr Bransdon ran in and caught from the table a bundle of manuscripts. The house was that of the poet with the red-haired wife. Mr Bransdon thought rather well of his work. He darted out from the door and slammed it behind him. In the scullery he muffled his head completely in the woman’s dress that he had slung over his shoulder. He was afraid of breathing in the flame. He rushed stumbling down the garden path, blundering against the gooseberry bushes and with an improbable speed, so that he resembled a charging buffalo. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with his bare forearm and tore a long strip from the man’s shirt that he had rescued. Afterwards he flung the clothes over a gorse bush. An immense, sinister tongue of flame swept round the lower part of the first cottage; a great banner seemed to lay itself down upon the peaked roof. When once more it retired the roof was bursting into flame.

Mr Bransdon perceived the red-haired -woman, resembling an angel in a long, straight, white nightgown, with the hair, the face, the shoulders all ht up and dancing with the flames.

“Here!” he said, “your dress is there on the bush. Put it on and start with some of the other women to drag the best furniture out of the cottages that aren’t alight.”

“My own’s all afire,” the woman said.

“There’s no yours or mine now,” Bransdon called over his shoulder. “Set in to work.”

He perceived Gubb and the chauffeur coming at the same moment, each from one of the next two gardens. The chauffeur had quite a number of garments slung over him. Mr Gubb had fewer, for the third cottage was alight and he had had to beat a hasty retreat because of the smoke from burning chemicals, employed in metalworking.

“You take five and six,” he said rapidly to them.
“
I’ll take four. You’ll find water buckets at most of the scullery doors. Dip any rags you can get in them and cover your mouths. Bring the buckets when you come out.”

A woman ran screaming up to them to say that Phillimore, the husband of the red-haired woman, was shot in the shoulder. He had been running with a bucket to the bathing shed. One bullet went through the pail, another had grazed his cheek, the third had got him on the edge of the shoulder blade. It went through Mr Bransdon’s mind that Brandetski’s revolver carried to the right. The chauffeur suddenly pulled off his oilskin coat and wrapped it round the woman.

“Try to get them to get water from the villagers, Mrs Johnson,” Bransdon said. “Stick the first piece of clean linen, you can find into the bullet hole. Go into a cottage and get some, if you’ve the courage — or I’ll bring some out from the next I go into.”

He saw her run to her own garden gate which was four doors off. Then he plunged into the first cottage that he came to. There was no fire there and no living being. It was dark except for the reflection of the flames outside, but he gathered together all the textile stuffs that he could lay hands on and all the clothes. When he came out of the gate, he found Hamnet Gubb, fully dressed and asking for directions.

“I saw the light and ran down,” Hamnet said. “What’s to be done?”

“If you can get a gun,” Bransdon answered, “shoot Brandetski through the front window of the inn. The great thing is to get at the water. Anything you can to stop him or kill him.”

In spite of his furious physical activity Mr Bransdon’s mind remained perfectly calm. As he ran from cottage to cottage he thought of various directions to be given to anyone that came to ask him. He remembered that someone ought to be sent in a motor-car for the fire engines. Then he remembered that the great blaze must be visible to all the counties round. Guildford would be sure to send a steamer before very long.

The night settled down into one of long strenuous toil. He saw faces here and there, from time to time. In the ninth cottage he found a man in bed, asleep or dazed by the smoke. He hauled him from the bed by the wrist and dragged him bumping down the stairs. He dragged him in the same way for a sufficient distance along the garden path and dropped him near some beehives. A number of rescued dogs were running about the Common, barking with unrestrained glee. Pigeons flew from the cots and circled round, high in the air. From time to time he heard a shot. Men with buckets of water began to string out from the distant cottages of the villagers.

“It’s not much good,” Bransdon grunted to them. “Try and get out the furniture. When you’ve got a good lot of water, wet the sides of the cottages that aren’t burning. Get on to the roofs if you can stand it and put out any flying wood.”

Miss Egmont’s cottage, which was the last but three, was burning so fiercely that he could not get into it at all. But Mr Gubb managed to save some of his accounts from the safe which stood in his scullery. The Lifers and some of the villagers were standing in a long chain which reached perhaps half way to the other cottages. They passed buckets as well as they could. Mr Bransdon told Miss Egmont, who was wearing a black petticoat over her nightgown, that when she had taken some clothes from the heap at the back gates, she had better take all the children she could find into the villagers’ houses. Then he stopped to consider...

Suddenly from a distance, beyond the burning stacks, he heard the loud clamour of an approaching bell. He had no idea of what time it was. A faint smirch of light was in the distant east, above the firtops. Mr Bransdon ran as fast as he could, making a circuit around the conflagration. Far down the Guildford road he perceived the brass helmets, the brass funnel and the train of smoke of a galloping fire engine. On the road he perceived Gerald Luscombe, hurrying with a brace of shot guns, across his shoulders.

Bransdon awaited his approach. “Keep cool,” he said. “We’ve got to consider how to get at him.”

“From the inn?” Luscombe asked.

“It’s on fire,” Bransdon answered. “We can’t get Mm from the front, it’s got to be the back.”

“Well, we must kick the door in,” Gerald answered.

“He’ll get the man who does it.”

“The other’ll get Mm.”

They were trotting over the turf behind the Communal buildings.

“I’ll go at the door with my shoulder,” Bransdon said. “The lock’ll give. I’m the heavier of the two.”

“Nonsense!” Luscombe answered. “We’ll go at it together.”

Bransdon stopped. “Damn you!” he exclaimed. “Do as you’re told. I’ve been in this sort of thing before. You haven’t. If we can get Mm dead by the time the engine’s here, they may save something. But I can’t talk and run. Understand? Do what you’re told! I burst the door in and drop right away. You pot Mm over me, if you can see Mm. There’s less danger than you think for me. A man can’t make much of a shot with a revolver when you’re flying. Understand?”

“All right!” Luscombe said.

“Then trot,” Bransdon answered.

They went as fast as Bransdon could manage, behind the diving shed, the school, the garage.

“By God!” Bransdon exclaimed. “There’s voices in the shed!”

He stood for a moment to draw Ms breath.

“Now stand back. Be ready!”

The sweat poured from all over Ms black face. His night-shirt stuck to Mm. His beard was burned right off upon one side. He breathed in enormous gulps of air and crouched like an athlete running. They heard a voice again and then the disastrous crack of a shot.

“Oh, hell!” Bransdon said. He seemed to crouch along the earth, his shoulder coming with a heavy impact on the thin hoards of the shed door. He went right through with an immense crash and pitched headlong into the water of the bath. Gerald Luscombe had his gun half-way to his shoulder. The shed was nearly all dark. He could see nothing at which to aim. And to his incredulous ears there came the sound of a rather drawling voice: “I say, don’t you shoot me! Brandetski’s shot himself!”

In the dim half light of the shed, illuminated by reflections of the fire and the images of the fire on the disturbed, dark waters of the swimming bath, Luscombe perceived Hamnet Gubb. He was standing in the far comer, his hands in his pockets. Bransdon, up to his waist in water, was wading through the shallow end.

“What’s all this tomfoolery?” he called out. “Where’s Brandetski?”

“He’s shot himself,” Hamnet answered cheerfully.

“What did he do that for?” Bransdon answered.

“Oh, I persuaded him to,” Hamnet explained. “I couldn’t shoot him as you asked me, there wasn’t any gun in the inn, so I walked across the road. He didn’t shoot at me because he thought, of course, I was mad. You’d told me to get rid of him somehow. Those were the means I — adopted.”

Bransdon had climbed out of the bath. He stood on the edge, plastering the wet hair out of his eyes and breathing heavily.

“Web, we’ve got to have the engines here,” he grunted, and he ran out along the front of the houses. He thought that the heat of the fire would dry him. Gerald Luscombe stood looking at Hamnet, his gun beneath his crooked arm. They both lounged as if they had all the time of the world on their hands. Hamnet was gazing down into the dark waters that still swayed.

“Brandetski’s somewhere in there,” he said pleasantly. “He’ll get stuck in the hose if the firemen don’t look out.”

Luscombe regarded him with a smile. “You persuaded him to shoot himself?” he asked. “I’m hanged if it wasn’t you really that persuaded me to let your father start this confounded show. You’d persuade the hind leg off a donkey.”

Hamnet regarded him, half amiably, half ironically. “I shouldn’t wonder,” he answered.

By the time that the pale light made all things visible, six of the nineteen cottages and the inn were saved. The others were all level with the ground, since they had all been built of wood with the tiles laid on them. But four engines were still at work throwing water on to the ashes. And sure enough one of the hoses fouled. The firemen hauled it up and one of them, reaching down into the water caught the body of Brandetski by the hair. They dragged him out, carried him from the shed and dropped him on the sward, whilst one of them went to fetch the policemen who had gone off to the labourers’ cottages to see if there were any casualties among the children.

The body lay extended on its back, the eyes smiling with a contented vanity up to Heaven, a hole drilled in the centre of the forehead. Bransdon and Gubb, Hamnet and Ophelia and Luscombe walked in a little group to look at him. They found nothing to say and Luscombe and the two young people moved to some distance off. Bransdon had his coat on now and Gubb wore a complete suit of labourer’s corduroys. The faces of both were blistered and their eyes had rims of black dirt.

“Well,” Bransdon said, “that’s an end of it all! I’ve said things against you; I think I’ll take them all back and let the blessed fire wash out the whole thing.”

Mr Gubb looked at him with cold anger.

“I’ve had nothing but ingratitude,” he said.

“And from whom?” Bransdon asked.

“From you, from Luscombe, from the Colony, from everybody. But most of all from you.”

Bransdon looked at him coolly. The eyes of the corpse below them stared at Heaven where a skylark sang. The streams of water from the hoses fell crystal upon the ashes of the vanished houses and dispersed in great clouds of steam. The flowers of the gorse and broom showed a gay and virginal brightness.

“Ah, well, let it go at that,” Mr Bransdon said.