The Wood Fire in No. 3

Excerpt

In which Certain Details regarding a Lost Opal are Set Forth.

Sandy MacWhirter would have an open fire. He had been brought up on blazing logs and warm hearths, and could not be happy without them. In his own boyhood's home the fireplace was the shrine, and half the orchard and two big elms had been offered up on its altar.

There was no chimney in No. 3 when he moved in—no place really to put one, unless he knocked a hole in the roof, started a fire on the bare floor, and sat around it wigwam fashion; nor was there any way of supporting the necessary brickwork, unless a start was made from the basement up through every room to No. 3 and so on to the roof. But trifling obstacles like these never daunted MacWhirter. Lonnegan, a Beaux Arts man, who built the big Opera House, and who also hungered for blazing logs, solved the difficulty. It was only a matter of fifteen feet from where Mac's easel stood to the roof of the building that sheltered him, and it was not many days before Lonnegan's foreman had a hole in the roof and a wide and spacious chimney breast rising from Mac's floor, which filled the opening in the ceiling and rose some ten feet above it, the whole resting on an iron plate bolted to four upright iron rods which were in turn bolted to two heavy timbers laid flat on the roof. Lonnegan's men did the work, and Lonnegan settled with the landlord and forgot ever afterward to send Mac the bill, and hasn't to this day.

No one else inside the four walls of the Old Building had any such comfort. All the other denizens had heaters; or choked-up, shivering, contracted grates; or a half-strangled flue from the basement below. Poor Pitkin relied on a rubber tube fastened to his gas light, which was connected with a sort of Chinese tea-caddy of a stove propped up on four legs, and which was shifted about so as to thaw out the coldest spots in his studio.

It was a great day when Mac's fireplace was completed. Everybody crowded in to see it—not only the men from below and on the same floor, but half a dozen and more cronies from the outside. No one believed Lonnegan's yarn about the bolts, so natural and old-timey did the fireplace seem, until the great architect picked the plaster away with his knife and showed them the irons, and even then one doubting Thomas had to mount the scuttle stairs and peer out through the trap-door before he was convinced that modern science had lent a helping hand to recall a boyhood memory.

And the friends that this old fire had; and the way the men loved it despite the liberties they tried to take with it! And they did, at first, take liberties, and of the most exasperating kind to any well-intentioned, law-abiding, and knowledgeable wood fire. Boggs, the animal painter, whose studio lay immediately beneath MacWhirter's, was never, at first, satisfied until he had punched it black in the face; Wharton, who occupied No. 4, across the hall, would insist that each log should be stood on its head and the kindling grouped about it; while Pitkin, the sculptor, who occupied the basement because of his dirty clay and big chunks of marble, was miserable until he had jammed the back-log so tight against the besmoked chimney that not a breath of air could get between it and the blackened bricks....