“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.