The noise outside continued.
CHAPTER X
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.