Stacey glanced up and down the street, but it lay quiet and empty in the
brightness of its regularly spaced arc-lights. The noise came from the
direction of the centre of town, and as this was also the direction of
his hotel he sighed and set off toward it. He sighed because he felt
himself stepping back into the old shadow from the rare brightness of
his recent mood. It occurred to him that life was like that, some one
had said,—a handful of peaceful islands scattered stingily over a
tumultuous sea. Which figure reveals how little he knew himself—what he
was and what he wanted. For at heart he did not crave repose.
He turned a corner, the rumble of sound became a roar, and he was on the
edge of the crowd. Some distance down the street into which he had
emerged, on the left at its intersection by another wider thoroughfare,
he could make out a corner of the white marble court-house that had left
him unimpressed. And one side of this building—the east, it must
be—stretched along flush with the street that Stacey followed. But all
about and obscuring such part of the structure as lay within his vision
there was now a black howling throng, while, over all, smoke hung. And
even here, where Stacey stood, the crowd was dense. Traffic had ceased.
Motor cars stood motionless. Men had scrambled up the sides of them and
clung there, all staring in one direction; and from the windows of the
houses flanking the street more people leaned and gazed.
Here the crowd was not yet a mass—groups only; but as Stacey went
forward toward the court-house, which was perhaps an eighth of a mile
away, it thickened, so that to traverse it became increasingly
difficult. And as it thickened its temper grew manifestly warmer. A
confusion of cries agitated it. Sometimes they burst into a
refrain—“Nigger! Nigger! We want that nigger!” Arms were thrown up,
gesticulating wildly. And there were little centres of local interest—a
man suddenly hauling himself up to the shoulders of another for a view
and thrown down again fiercely, snarling contests over invaded personal
rights, animal-like squeals of women at the crushing pressure upon them.
The sweating faces had a bestial look beneath the arc-lights, and a
sourish human odor tainted the warm air. Noise! Noise!
Stacey was not feeling anger—only a deep disgust, disgust of crowds,
sick disgust of all humanity. His emotion was the more acute for its
contrast with the mood he had felt in Burnham’s house. He was like a man
who has made a longer jump by taking a running start. So this was the
kind of thing on which perpetual peace and leagues of nations were to be
founded, was it? he thought coldly. He would have gone back out of its
contamination, having certainly no desire to witness the spectacle it
clamored for, save that he had some desperate idea of perhaps being able
to assist the few who must somewhere be standing off the multitude. So
he fought his way forward, inch by inch, helped perhaps a very little by
the fact that he was in uniform, using his shoulders and elbows
mercilessly in cold contempt of his victims, shrieked at, cursed at,
struck at even, but making progress, until at last he came, panting, to
the corner of his own street and that other wider avenue. He could get
no farther, either ahead or to the left. The crowd was a solid wall. And
to return was equally impossible. He could only stay where he was and
hope that something might happen, some movement in the mob, that would
make it possible for him to push through suddenly and reach the
court-house.
He stood on tip-toe and looked about him. He was almost at the corner,
close to the right hand edge of the street, and he perceived that here
the latter was flanked by the side wall of what he took to be a theatre.
In the wall, some two or three feet above the ground, were embrasures,
vantage points held with difficulty by tightly wedged groups. As Stacey
looked, a sudden backward surge of the crowd swept down and away two
such members of one group, and Stacey, diving desperately in, himself
struggled up to the place and held it against all contestants.
All events were submerged beneath a roar of voices, a sea of noise that
broke in echoing waves against the sides of the buildings. It was an
emotion in itself, irrespective of its cause. It hypnotized the crowd,
produced a singular wild stare in men’s eyes, made their movements
jerky, their own involuntary addition to the noise raucous. It did not
hypnotize Stacey, because he was aloof, remote, and also because he was
too familiar with noise. Yet, he, too, had undergone its terrible
spell—early in the war, before he had grown hard enough to bear the
unbearable. He knew bitterly well what Siegfried Sassoon meant by: “I’m
going stark, staring mad because of the guns.”
Stacey threw one last contemptuous glance at the mob beneath him, then
gazed off over their heads at the court-house.
The first thing he noted was that it was on fire, smoke creeping dully
from its ground-floor windows; the second, that fighting was going on
inside it, since the south door, that opening on the wide cross-street,
was shattered, while through it rushed in or were driven back mad
struggling clusters of men.
“Good for the police!” thought Stacey. “Oh, by God! I wish I were
there!”
Two firemen appeared at a third-floor window, and from the nozzle of the
hose they held a stream shot down upon the crowd. There was a wild
surging movement that swept to the crowd even here, pushing it back upon
itself tumultuously. Snarls of anger rose. There were struggles,
shrieks, fists striking out, mad efforts of individuals to keep from
being crushed. And up ahead on the left the lighted air was shadowed by
the bricks and stones hurled through it against the court-house. The
court-house windows shattered in fragments. Stacey could not hear them
crash—the noise of voices submerged all other sounds, as it was
submerging thought—but he could see the jagged black gaps appear and
the shining rain of glass. He held his place in the embrasure with
difficulty, clinging to an iron ring in the wall and to his nearest
companion.
Then suddenly a vast exultant roar shook the crowd. The stream of water
had ceased.
“Cut it! We’ve cut their damned hose! Cut! Cut it!”
The crowd was wilder now, frenzied. Stacey, looking down, saw faces
convulsed, venomous, filthy with ugliness. He felt a shudder of loathing
and recollected with passionate assent what Anatole France had called
life—“a sickness, a leprosy, a mold on the face of the earth.”
“Nigger! Give us that nigger!”
Time passed. Stacey, knowing mobs, thought that perhaps eventually this
one would wear itself out on its own emotion, begin to break up into
individuals sick with fatigue, and little by little disperse. But he
soon perceived that it had too varied a spectacle to witness, an immense
vicious vaudeville, something new every few minutes,—a ladder thrown
against the court-house wall, half scaled by eight or ten youths, pushed
slowly back by the defenders, and crashing over at last to earth, the
scalers leaping off wildly as it fell; a rush through the door;
fighting; shots.
Even so, the mob had sullen moments when its roar sank to a rumble, but
again it occurred to Stacey that it was being lashed up afresh by
leaders. There was a young man on a white horse there in the street
before the besieged building. Twice he wheeled his horse about and
harangued the crowd. His voice was inaudible here, but the emotion he
created immediately around him swept on, like something tangible, beyond
the reach of his words, and his gestures stirred men to renewed frenzy.
Also it struck Stacey that, while here at the corner the crowd was
jammed beyond hope of penetration, there on the left, just before the
south side of the court-house, where the fight was sharpest, was room to
move. There were rushes, assaults. The fighting part of the mob was
relatively small. Oh, they all wanted the negro, damn them! They wanted
blood and torture. But as spectators. If only he could get there!
And at this thought, that there were deliberate leaders, anger began to
rise in Stacey, who till now had felt only disgust and scorn.
But a sudden whirling streamer of red light curved into a broken window
of the court-house and a dull explosion made the air throb. A red glare
flamed up inside the building, and a great “Ah-h-h!” came from the
crowd.
“By God! look at it!”—“A bomb! Oh, _Christ_! a bomb!”—“Oh, _look_ at
her burn!”—“Nigger, we’ll get him now!”—“Oh, _nigger_!”—“A-e-e-e!”
Shouts, leaps, struggles, madness.
The crowd could afford to wait now, thought Stacey, looking on grimly,
as black smoke poured from windows and rose in clouds, begriming the
marble walls.
It was late. How long had he been here in this filth? Two hours? Three?
Stacey looked at his watch. Ten-thirty. He gazed back wearily down the
street, in a sullen despair beneath which anger smoldered. An outrage to
be born into such a world! And he could not take refuge in himself. He
hated himself as he hated this mob. Oh, he did not, of course, feel with
them now! What was a black man’s life or a white man’s—any man’s—his
own—Philip Blair’s, even—to deserve such clamor? He was hard, crusted
over with bitterness. But there had been times in France when . . .
A sudden frenzied shriek from the mob made him start and turn his eyes
back to the court-house. On the steps at its entrance, that opening on
the street which Stacey had followed, alone in the lurid smoky light
stood a man—rather stout, not tall, but impressive in his solitude.
“The mayor!”—“It’s the mayor!”—“Smith!”—“Mayor!” came in a shattered
volley of cries from all about.
Then in one fierce burst of sound: “Nigger! Give us that nigger! Nigger!
Nigger!”
And, after this, dwindling sound, save from the storm centre at the
south entrance where the news could not be known; finally a semblance of
silence. Stacey could not hear the man’s voice when he spoke—“I can’t
do that, boys!” he learned later the words had been—but he could see
him shake his head and could see the firm negative gesture he made with
both extended hands.
An immense insane howl of anger burst out. A crowd surged up the east
steps, and the solitary figure disappeared among them, dragged down in a
chaotic black mass of assailants.
A thrill of exultation and anger ran through Stacey. By God! he’d stood
them off! One living man with a soul of his own against the mob! And he
was to be dragged down like that? killed for it? Beside himself, Stacey
leaped to the ground and fought madly to break through to the one man on
the scene. Impossible! Far from pushing forward, he was caught in a
sudden retreating surge of the throng and swept back, back, raging, down
the street, to the edge of a narrow roofed-in alley that led out of it
behind the theatre building. Here he held his own once more.
Mad cries of wrath against the mayor came from all about him. “Nigger
lover!”—“_Get_ the nigger lover!”—“Lynch him!”
Close to Stacey a heavy red-faced man was shaking his clenched fists
high in the air. “Oh, _lynch_ him! The God-damn _son_ of a bitch! Oh,
nigger lover! Oh, _kill_ him! _Lynch_ him!” he shrieked, his voice
hoarse, his face purple, convulsed, incredibly bestial.
And suddenly a white ungovernable rage flared up in Stacey. There was
nothing left of his personality but rage. He seized the man about the
waist, and, helped by a new surge of the crowd, half flung him, half was
swept with him, back into the narrow dark entrance of the alley and down
it.
The momentum gathered from the crowd hurled both forward, staggering,
and separated them. But Stacey was upon his man again instantly. They
were perhaps thirty yards down the alley in a semi-obscurity.
“Here! You! What d’you—?”
Stacey merely dived, in hot silence, for the man’s throat, and fastened
his hands upon it tensely.
The victim struck out wildly, gasped, kicked, but Stacey bent him back
and leaned over, sinking his thumbs deeper and deeper with every ounce
of his great strength into the fleshy throat. And, as he pressed, he had
the delirious exultant delusion that he was strangling all humanity. His
teeth were set. His eyes were terrible with hatred.
The man’s face grew violet, his eyes protruded loathsomely, his gurgling
mouth opened to press out a swollen tongue. Then all at once he relaxed
weakly, his whole body limp. Stacey flung him off, and he fell in a
sprawled motionless heap to the ground.
Stacey looked down for a moment and pushed the body with the toe of his
shoe, then turned away, wiping his hands on his handkerchief. He was
quite calm again, fierce, but with no further impulse to kill.
He did not go back and fight his way into the crowd once more. Where was
the use? He could not break through. Instead, he followed the alley in,
leaving the roar of the crowd behind him, and came out eventually into
another street, parallel with the one he had left. It, too, was crowded,
but not densely like the first. Stacey made his way off from it swiftly,
and before long reached still another street, empty, silent.
But from back over there behind the intervening house-walls came yet
wilder noise and crackling volleys of shots. They had got the negro,
Stacey supposed.
He strode on for a long, long time—half an hour? an hour?—heedless of
direction, turning corners aimlessly, until at last he was walking up a
street down which, toward him, people were flowing in groups, talking
loudly. The show was over, no doubt, the audience dispersing.
He heard excited comments. “The nigger got his, all right!”—“Damn shame
about the mayor!”—“Oh, I dunno! Too damn fresh!”
Stacey whirled about and caught the man who had said it was a shame.
“Did they kill the mayor?” he demanded.
The man addressed stared, open-mouthed, with frightened eyes at Stacey’s
stern face. “N-no!” he stammered. “They hung him up tw-twice, but he
was—was cut down. He’s all right, I guess. Th-they got him away. I said
it was a damned shame,” he added weakly, trying to release himself from
Stacey’s grasp.
Stacey did not reply, but withdrew his hand and strode on, his teeth
set.
Again he walked aimlessly for a long while, but at last, making a wide
curve, he turned back toward the noise that still came in broken waves
from the riot centre.
Finally, led by the glow of the fire, he approached the court-house once
more, but now from the north. On this side it was not flush with the
street but set in some fifty yards behind an ornamental grass-plot.
Street, grass-plot and curving walks were covered with a howling throng,
not so thick as to prevent passage, but rushing wildly this way and that
under the red light from the burning building.
The centre of the confusion Stacey presently made out to be a motor car
careering about through the crowd, that shouted exultantly and stumbled
back out of its path.
All at once it bore down on Stacey. He sprang aside to avoid it, then,
looking back, saw that after it, at the end of a rope, trailed a
shapeless bumping object.
The rope that towed this curious object caught for a moment on an
electric light pole, the car came to a temporary halt, and Stacey,
bending over to look at the thing more closely, perceived that it was
the charred, naked and limbless torso of a man.
Three hysterical girls, their hats awry, their arms linked, pushed him
out of the way and kicked, squealing, at the dead flesh.
Stacey left the scene.
He found a small lunch-room open in a neighboring street. It was crowded
with genial exulting ex-rioters. But Stacey pressed up to the counter,
ordered sandwiches and coffee, and gulped them down ravenously. He was
frankly famished. This did not shock him. He was too familiar with the
physical effects of emotion even to give it a thought. And, indeed, so
far as emotion went, he had, despite his almost impassive bearing, gone
through more of it than the mob itself. For the mob had hated the negro
and the mayor; Stacey had been consumed with hatred of the colossal mob
itself—and of all men, all human life.
He left the lunch-room and went to his hotel. As he reached its doorway
there was an echoing tramp of steady feet, and he turned to see a
company of infantry march past. He saluted, and the officer marching
beside the men saluted in return, gravely.
“It’s time!” thought Stacey bitterly. “If I’d had two men and a
machine-gun I could have cleared the street.”
He had thought he was done with all sympathy for armies. Error! He would
have given his right hand to-night to be in command of his battalion.
Not because he cared for law and order. He didn’t give _that_ for law
and order! But because he could have saved the mayor—one brave man, a
living individual—from the collective beast. And because he could have
saved the negro. But mostly because he could have killed! killed!
He entered the hotel. Here, too, though the hour was late, were excited
groups. Stacey pushed through them and up to the desk.
“The key to four hundred and twelve,” he demanded peremptorily.
But the clerk, his elbows on the desk, was listening to the voluble
conversation of a group of commercial travellers and paid no attention.
Stacey seized a paper-weight, lifted it, and flung it down with a crash.
“Damn you! The key to four-twelve, I said! And be quick about it!”
The clerk jumped. “Y-yes, sir,” he stammered, and reached a trembling
hand for the key.
Probably at a normal moment he would have asserted his right to respect
as a free American citizen. To-night things were rather strange.