“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!”