One night he awakened to hear a light rain whispering on the slates and splashing softly in the garden.
“Are you awake, Willa?” he asked quietly.
“Of course.”
“It’s the first rain. I wanted you to hear it.”
“I was awake when it started,” she said complacently. “You missed the best part of it, the gusty part. You were snoring.”
“Well, it won’t last long. It’s just a little first rain to wash off the dust.”
In the morning, the sun shone through an atmosphere glistening with water. There was a crystalline quality in the sunlight. Breakfast was just over when Bert Munroe and his son Jimmie tramped up the back steps and into the kitchen.
“’Morning, Mrs. Whiteside! ’Morning, John! I thought it was a good time to burn off that brush today. It was a nice little rain we had last night.”
“That’s a good idea. Sit down and have a cup of coffee.”
“We just got up from breakfast, John. Couldn’t swallow another thing.”
“You, Jimmie? Cup of coffee?”
“Couldn’t swallow another thing,” said Jimmie.
“Well, then, let’s get started before the grass dries out.” John went into the large basement which opened its sloping door beside the kitchen steps. In a moment he brought out a can of kerosene. When the two hired men had come in from the orchard, John provided all the men with wet gunny sacks.
“No wind,” said Bert. “This is a good time for it. Start it right here, John! We’ll stay between the fire and the house until we get a big strip burned oil. It don’t pay to take chances.”
John plunged the kerosene torch into the thick brush and drew a line of fire along its edge. The brush crackled and snapped fiercely. The flame ran along the ground among the resinous stems, Slowly the men worked along behind the fire, up the sharp little hill.
“That’s about enough here,” Bert called, “There’s plenty of distance from the house now. I think two of us better fire it from the upper side now.” He started walking up around the brush patch, followed by Jimmie. At that moment the little autumn whirlwind danced down the hill, twisting and careening as it came. It made a coquettish dash into the fire, picked up sparks and embers and flung them against the white house. Then, as though tired of the game, the little column of air collapsed. Bert and Jimmie were running back. The five men searched the ground and stamped out every spark. “It’s lucky we saw that,” said John. “Silly little thing like that might burn the house down.”
Bert and Jimmie circled the patch and fired it from the upper side. John and his two men worked up the hill, keeping between the flames and the house. The air was dense and blue with smoke. In a quarter of an hour the brush patch was nearly burned off.
Suddenly they heard a scream from the direction of the house. The house itself was barely visible through the smoke from the burning brush. All five of the men turned about and broke into a run. As the smoke grew thinner, they could see a thick grey eddy, gushing from one of the upper windows.
Willa was running distractedly toward them over the burned ground. John stopped when he came to her.
“I heard a noise in the basement,” she cried. “I opened the door in the kitchen that leads to the basement, and the thing just swooped past me. It’s all over the house now.”
Bert and Jimmie charged up to them. “Are the hoses by the tank house?” Bert shouted.
John tore his gaze from the burning house. “I don’t know,” he said uncertainly.
Bert took him by the arm. “Come on! What are you waiting for? We can save some of it. We can get some of the furniture out anyway.”
John disengaged his arm and started to saunter down the hill toward the houses. “I don’t think I want to save any of it,” he said.
“You’re crazy,” Bert cried. He ran on and plunged about the tank house, looking for the hoses.
Now the smoke and flame were pouring from the window. From inside the house came a noise of furious commotion; the old building was fighting for its life.
One of the hired men walked up beside John. “If only that window was closed, we’d have a chance,” he said in a tone of apology. “It’s so dry, that house. And it’s got a draft like a chimbley.”
John walked to the wood pile and sat in the sawbuck. Willa looked at his face for a moment and then stood quietly beside him. The outside walls were smoking now, and the house roared with the noise of a great wind.
Then a very strange and a very cruel thing happened. The side wall fell outward like a stage set, and there, twelve feet above the ground was the sitting room untouched as yet by the fire. As they watched the long tongues lashed into the room. The leather chairs shivered and shrank like live things from the heat. The glass on the pictures shattered and the steel engravings shriveled to black rags. They could see the big black meerschaum pipe hanging over the mantel. Then the flame covered the square of the room and blotted it out. The heavy slate roof crashed down, crushing walls and floor under its weight, and the house became a huge bonfire without shape.
Bert had come back and was standing helplessly beside John. “It must of been that whirlwind,” he explained. “A spark must of gone down the cellar and got into the coal oil. Yes, sir, it must of been that coal oil.”
John looked up at him and smiled with a kind of horrified amusement. “Yes, sir, it must have been that coal oil,” he echoed.
The fire burned smoothly now that its victory was gained; a field of growing flame rose high up in the air. It no longer resembled a house at all. John Whiteside stood up from the sawbuck and straightened his shoulders and sighed. His eyes rested for a moment on a place in the flame fifteen feet from the ground where the sitting room had been. “Well, that’s over,” he said. “And I think I know how a soul feels when it sees its body buried in the ground and lost. Let’s go to your house, Bert. I want to telephone Bill. He will probably have a room for us.”
“Why don’t you stay with us? We have plenty of room.”
“No, we’ll go to Bill” John looked around once more at the burning pile. Willa put out her hand to take his arm, but withdrew it before she had touched him. He saw the gesture and smiled at her. “I wish I could have saved my pipe,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” Bert broke in effusively. “That was the best colored meerschaum I ever saw. They have pipes in museums that aren’t colored any better than that. That pipe must have been smoked a long time.”
“It was,” John agreed. “A very long time. And you know, it had a good taste, too.”
Twelve
AT TWO O’CLOCK in the afternoon the sight-seeing bus left its station in Monterey for a tour of the peninsula. As it moved along over the roads of the publicized Seventeen Mile Drive, the travelers peered out at the spectacular houses of very rich people. The sightseers felt a little shy as they looked out of the dusty windows, a little like eaves-droppers, but privileged, too. The bus crawled through the town of Carmel and over a hill to the brown Mission Carmelo with its crooked dome, and there the young driver pulled to the side of the road and put his feet on the dashboard while his passengers were led through the dark old church.
When they returned to their seats some of the barriers traveling people build about themselves were down.
“Did you hear?” said the prosperous man. “The guide said the church is built like a ship with a stone keel and hull deep in the ground under it? That’s for the earthquakes—like a ship in a storm, you see. But it wouldn’t work.”
A young priest with a clean rosy face and a pride in his new serge cassock answered from two seats behind: “But it has worked. There have been earthquakes, and the mission still stands; built of mud and it still stands.”
An old man broke in, an old and healthy man with eager eyes. “Funny things happen,” he said. “I lost my wife last year. Been married over fifty years.” He looked smilingly about for some comment, and forgot the funny things that happen.
A honeymooning couple sat arm in arm. The girl squeezed tightly. “Ask the driver where we’re going now.”
The bus moved slowly on, up the Carmel Valley—past orchards and past fields of artichokes, and past a red cliff, veined with green creepers. The afternoon was waning now, and the sun sank toward the seaward mouth of the Valley. The road left the Carmel River and climbed up a hillside until it ran along the top of a narrow ridge. Here the driver cut his bus sharply to the roadside and backed and pulled ahead four times before he had faced around. Then he shut off the motor and turned to his passengers. “This is as far as we go, folks. I always like to stretch my legs before we start back. Maybe some of you folks would like to get out and walk around.”