McTeague stared as if he were just recovering from a trance, shook himself clumsily, and muttered through the “Marseillaise”: “Strange, isn’t it, how artistic these Belgians are? Now if you and I were arranging a dance——”
The loud howls of the Germans beneath us interrupted McTeague’s moralizings. Swift feet were upon the stair, the proprietor of the café and his wife burst in upon us, weeping, gesticulating, talking all at once. Guilbert lay quietly in the middle of the floor, still acting his part; the poet at the piano pounded lustily. Yvette, more practical than they, ran to a window at the back of the hall and looked out, then ran back to us and grasped us. “Come quickly,” she exclaimed. “We can escape before the Germans come.”
“But your husband, and Guilbert?” I asked.
“Drag them behind us, then,” she replied, shrugging her naked shoulders. “Come at once. The Germans are on the stair!”
Directly beneath our feet we heard a tumult of rough voices, a clatter of dishes and pans, and then tramping boots coming up the winding stair. Panic seized on McTeague and me simultaneously. We leaped at the performers and hustled them across the floor behind the twinkling feet of the dancing-girl. Before we reached the window she had already scrambled through it and dropped to a roof five or six feet below. We leaped after her and ran across a space sloping like a deck. Guilbert and the poet had not yet spoken a word. I had begun to laugh—a wild, hysterical laugh which irritated McTeague, so that while we ran he remonstrated with me: “Germans—’ll hear—come after us,” he panted. “What—’s matter—now?”
Yvette stopped abruptly before a whitewashed wall and gazed up at an open window three feet above the level of her head.
“Lift me up, messieurs,” she whispered, catching her breath.
“Why?” I demanded.
“Quick! We must escape this way.”
“Jamais de la vie!” I stuttered. “It’s right to escape, but I won’t be caught breaking and entering somebody’s house.”