Chapter 3

Retorts, globes, tubes, and phials lie shattered. All his trials oozing across the floor. The life that was his choosing, lonely, urgent, goaded by a hope, all gone. A weary man in a ruined laboratory, that was his story. Boom! Gloom and ignorance, and the jig of drunken brutes. Diseases like snakes crawling over the earth, leaving trails of slime. Wails from people burying their dead. Through the window he can see the rocking steeple. A ball of fire falls on the lead of the roof, and the sky tears apart on a spike of flame. Up the spire, behind the lacings of stone, zig-zagging in and out of the carved tracings, squirms the fire. It spouts like yellow wheat from the gargoyles, coils round the head of Saint John, and aureoles him in light. It leaps into the night and hisses against the rain. The Cathedral is a burning stain on the white, wet night.

Boom! The Cathedral is a torch, and the houses next to it begin to scorch. Boom! The bohemian glass on the _étagère_ is no longer there. Boom! A stalk of flame sways against the red damask curtains. The old lady cannot walk. She watches the creeping stalk and counts. Boom!--Boom!--Boom!

The poet rushes into the street, and the rain wraps him in a sheet of silver. But it is threaded with gold and powdered with scarlet beads. The city burns. Quivering, spearing, thrusting, lapping, streaming, run the flames. Over roofs, and walls, and shops, and stalls. Smearing its gold on the sky the fire dances, lances itself through the doors, and lisps and chuckles along the floors.

The child wakes again and screams at the yellow petalled flower flickering at the window. The little red lips of flame creep along the ceiling beams.

The old man sits among his broken experiments and looks at the burning Cathedral. Now the streets are swarming with people. They seek shelter and crowd into the cellars. They shout and call, and over all, slowly and without force, the rain drops into the city. Boom! And the steeple crashes down among the people. Boom! Boom, again! The water rushes along the gutters. The fire roars and mutters. Boom!

THE END

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

JOHN GOULD FLETCHER _Fire and Wine._ Grant Richards, Ltd., London, 1913. _Fool's Gold._ Max Goschen, London, 1913. _The Dominant City._ Max Goschen, London, 1913. _The Book of Nature._ Constable & Co., London, 1913. _Visions of the Evening._ Erskine McDonald, London, 1913. _Irradiations: Sand and Spray._ Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1914.

F. S. FLINT _The Net of Stars._ Elkin Mathews, London, 1909.

D. H. LAWRENCE _Love Poems and Others._ Duckworth & Co., London, 1913. Prose: _The White Peacock._ William Heinemann, London, 1911. _The Trespasser._ Duckworth & Co., London, 1912. _Sons and Lovers._ Duckworth & Co., London, 1913. Drama: _The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd._ Mitchell Kennerley, New York, 1914.

AMY LOWELL _A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass._ Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1912. The Macmillan Company, New York, 1914. _Sword Blades and Poppy Seed._ The Macmillan Company, New York; and Macmillan & Co., London, 1914.

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