Inside the office, the clerks worked with their customary deliberation, tallying the accounts for the receiver. No tentative statement of assets and liability had been announced by the court's representative. He could have prepared a fairly accurate statement and posted it on the door. But he was a charitable man and wished to spare the depositors further anguish. Give them time to recover from the first great shock before inflicting a greater one, he argued. So he postponed the evil moment when he must reveal the wretched condition of the institution.
Each time the door opened and a messenger left, the crowd set on him beseeching information of the financial condition of the private bank. But the messengers had nothing to reveal.
As invariably happens with crowds, the dullness and depression wears off after a while, exhausts itself, so to speak, and is succeeded gradually by a blind resentment directed against the first object which offers itself as a handy target. A sort of mob intoxication sets in, as unreasoning as it frequently is destructive.
And so the crowd now began to hurl maledictions on the innocent head of the receiver. As if he had brought on the catastrophe!
"Why don't he tell us where we stand?" demanded one obstreperous creditor. "Smash in the door! Let's find out what's become of our money!"
"He's in cohoots with thieves!" exclaimed another. "They're all a lot of crooks! What one has left behind the other'll take."
Britz and Greig, mingling with the crowd, neither encouraged nor discouraged the destructive fury which they saw gathering. They knew the psychology of mobs. It is brave with collective courage, but timorous, hesitant, individually. In the absence of a leader its anger would pass like a storm overhead. If a leader should appear, it would be time to interfere; and then it would be necessary to do so before the crowd got into action.
A half hour passed with nothing more exciting than the frantic appeals of the janitor of the building for police protection. Failing to obtain it he implored the depositors to leave. He might as well have appealed to the ocean tide to change its course.
Britz consulted his watch.
"I wonder whether I've miscalculated this time?" he remarked.