HURRY, HURRY
the sky. "He treats us all the same, rich and poor alike! Here's to
Padre!" and she raised her empty hand still higher in a toast. "The
best friend this community has ever had!"
In the meantime the disintegration of the house was becoming
more and more apparent. From the upstairs bedrooms, and even in
the pantry and dining-room, beams could be heard falling, and al-
ready a wide crack was beginning to open diagonally across the front
living-room wall, exposing the dust-covered leaves of books, first the
historical works and later the vellum-bound editions of Dante, Bau-
delaire a~d Racine. It was this, I think, that first awoke my mother
to a real awareness of what was happening. It was not only that the
books were threatened with destruction: it was also obvious to every-
one that their pages had not been cut. Even the town servants noticed
it, even Myrtle who was hired for the lowest and heaviest form of
cleaning, but Myrtle was a poor half-deformed creature and she
would not have dared to smile behind her fingers as the others did.
One by one the books fell among the barberry bushes, raising
a cloud of greyish powder so stifling that the people nearest were
forced to stumble back over the flowerbeds, holding handkerchiefs
to their mouths. "Oh good Lord! the books! the books!" my mother
gasped. She ran up under the crack in the wall, and holding her
white hat with one hand, with the other attempted to catch the
volumes as they toppled from their shelves. But they were coming
too fast. Many of them, too, fell apart immediately against the outer
air, leaving only something like silica dust midway to the ground,
so that my mother was soon taken with a violent fit of coughing. At
last, reeling and choking under the rain of classics that were now strik-
ing her head and breasts and shoulders, she was obliged to stagger
back toward the road. "A wonderful woman," the ladies said, and
they began to scamper to and fro, picking little bunches of sweet
william, wild roses and delphinium for my mother's hair. Gratefully
she closed her eyes and was nestling her grey curls more warmly
against the Padre's ample lap, when the cobblestone chimney tore
itself loose from the main beams of the house and crashed through
the lower branches of the elms and across the lawn.
Immediately my mother sprang up.
"George! Burt! Albert!" she called. "Somebody's got to save
my things! Where's the Fire Department? Fire Department!" The
Fire Department was not really a department at all, but a group of
farmers who no longer farmed, so they had nothing better to do than
to jump on the fire engine as it went by. They were now lying on the
grasspassing around a bottle of beer and laughing at some story or
joke. "George!" my mother wheedled. "Albert! Burt!" and she ran
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