"It is the boss himself! He is setting fire to it!"
"Where is he?"
"Nobody knows."
The fire was breaking out in the spinning and weaving departments.
"Surely it is Adler himself who is setting the mill alight!"
"Why should we save it, when he is destroying it?"
"Who tells you to save it?"
"But what are we going to eat to-morrow?"
The shouts of men and the weeping of women and children rose from the dense crowd of hundreds of human beings, powerless in the face of this calamity. Rescue was, indeed, impossible. The people looked on stupefied while the fire spread rapidly.
The gloomy background of a dark autumn night threw into relief the burning buildings, lit by fierce, red flames, which burst from all the openings like torches and played over the crowd gathered in the courtyard below. Of the main building in the shape of a horseshoe, the left wing was on fire in the fourth story, and the right on the ground floor. The workrooms in the middle part of the building were brightly lighted by gas-lamps, so that the power-looms could be seen moving quickly to and fro. The walls of the warehouses had almost disappeared behind a thick veil of smoke and flames. Now the roof of the left wing was ablaze; on the right the fire had reached the first floor, and the flames were bursting from the windows. A continuous murmur, scarcely human, rose from the crowd below.