Piteously I looked at the table in front of me; at the croupiers, with their cropped black heads and emotionless faces; at the chef sitting above them, his bored, round back towards me; at the delicately pretty, demure Italian, olive-skinned and colorless, leaning her arm, in its long white glove, over the back of his chair; at the young Frenchman staking his thousand-franc notes, his forehead and eyes twitching with excitement, or some nervous complaint; at the gaunt English girl—
Bang! from the terrace outside. Bang! bang!
I gave a jump like a terrified horse. It was the “Devil among the Tailors,” set off a minute or two too soon by our friend and accomplice, the sailor.
The confusion and alarm it caused was nothing compared to what followed. I had just time to see the Italian lady’s frightened profile, as she turned and put her white glove up to her smooth cheek, when the bold Brentin gave a hoarse shout—“Levez les mains!”—and produced the revolver. Then, indeed, a panic set in! comparable, I imagine, to nothing but the sudden striking of a ship.
At first a dead pause, and then immediately a rushing to and fro, as of rats in a pit, the haggard looking in each other’s fallen, discomposed faces. And then the noise! the overthrow of chairs and the dragging of them along the parquet floor, caught in screaming women’s dresses as they scudded away like sea-shore birds, bent low, with their hands up to their ears, while the shouting, swearing, groaning men clutched at their money, and tried to thrust it in their pockets, as they leaped and huddled themselves away, the louis falling and tinkling on the floor.
I saw before me a hideous, moving frieze of terror, of distorted faces—Russian, French, German, Italian, English, American, Greek—all reduced to the same monotony of look under the overmastering influence of the same passion—abject fear. The English were no better than the rest; they were a little quicker in getting away, perhaps, and that was all. The confusion of tongues was as complete as though, on the Tower of Babel, some one had screamed the foundations were giving way, and all must save themselves as best they could.
As in a battle the soldier knows only incidents, the faces he sees as frightened or determined as his own, the eyes peering into his through smoke he mostly himself seems to make; so, out of this action—so famous and yet so little known—can I only report the events that met me in my narrow section of the struggle, a section drawn almost in parallel straight lines from the point I started at to the point of exit at the farther end of the rooms.
First it was the chef, on his high chair facing me, who fell over backwards, ridiculous enough at such a time of tragic import. One of the croupiers, in jumping horrified to his feet, gave him a tilt and over he went. He was a youngish man, with round, fat, clean-shaven cheeks, and a small, bristling, black mustache. His arms and legs waved and kicked like an impaled insect; his mouth opened with a stupendous screaming oath, and as he fell—strange how at all times one notices details!—I saw he wore half-shoes and blue socks.
In another minute we were at the vacant table, the chef crawling away under a sofa-seat against the wall, and two of our gallant sailors were stuffing the notes and coins into their linen bags. The second table was equally deserted, and there the not-quite-sober sailor, Barker, with empty, delighted laughter, was already scratching the notes out of the metal stand they are always kept in. Suddenly I saw he nearly fell; some one under the table had him by the leg. He clutched the chef’s empty high chair, and, with a mighty oath and mighty random kick, released himself.
“Hurry up, men! hurry up!” chanted Brentin, as we moved forward irresistibly over the bare floor.