As they neared the ground floor, helmeted firemen began to push their way up the stairs against the tide of downward-moving traffic. Several policemen followed them and tried to allay any feelings of alarm or panic.
“It’s all right, folks! Everything’s O.K.!” one big policeman shouted cheerfully as he went up past the members of the Jack party. “The fire’s over now!”
These words, spoken to quiet the people and to expedite their orderly progress from the building, had an opposite effect from that which the policeman had intended. George Webber, who was bringing up the end of the procession, paused upon hearing these reassuring words, called to the others, and turned to retrace his way upstairs again. As he did so, he saw that the policeman was about to throw a fit. From the landing half a flight above, he was making agonised faces and frantic gestures at George in a silent and desperate entreaty to him not to come back any farther or to encourage the others to come back, but to leave the building as quickly as possible. The others had looked round when George had called, and had witnessed this pantomime—so now, genuinely alarmed for the first time, they turned again and fled down the stairs as fast as they could go.
George himself, seized with the same momentary panic, was hastening after them when he heard some tapping and hammering noises from the shaft of the service elevator. They seemed to come from up above somewhere. For just a moment he hesitated and listened. The tapping began, then stopped…began again…stopped again. It seemed to be a signal of some kind, but he couldn’t make it out. It gave him an eerie feeling. A chill ran up his spine. He broke out in goose flesh. Stumbling blindly, he fled after the others.
As they came out into the great central court-yard of the building, their moment’s terror dropped away from them as quickly as it had come upon them. They filled their lungs with the crisp, cold air, and so immediate was their sense of release and relief that each one of them felt a new surge of life and energy, a preternaturally heightened aliveness. Mr. Logan, his round face streaming with perspiration and his breath coming in loud snorts and wheezes, summoned his last remaining strength and, ignoring the tender shins of those about him, bumped and banged his burdened way through the crowd and disappeared. The others of Mr. Jack’s party remained together, laughing and talking and watching with alert interest everything that was going on round them.
The scene of which they were a part was an amazing one. As if it had been produced by the combining genius of a Shakespeare or a Breughel, the whole theatre of human life was in it, so real and so miraculously compressed that it had the nearness and the intensity of a vision. The great hollow square formed by the towering walls of the building was filled with people in every conceivable variety of dress and undress. And from two dozen entry ways within the arched cloisters that ran round the court on all four sides, new hordes of people were now constantly flooding out of the huge honeycomb to add their own colour and movement and the babel of their own tumultuous tongues to the pageantry and the pandemonium already there. Above this scene, uplifted on the arches of the cloisters, the mighty walls soared fourteen storeys to frame the starry heavens. In the wing where Mr. Jack’s apartment was the lights were out and all was dark, but everywhere else those beetling sides were still blazing with their radiant squares of warmth, their many cells still burning with all the huge deposit of their just-departed life.
Except for the smoke that had been in some of the halls and stairways, there was no sign of fire. As yet, few people seemed to comprehend the significance of the event which had so unceremoniously dumped them out of their sleek nests into the open weather. For the most part they were either bewildered and confused or curious and excited. Only an occasional person here and there betrayed any undue alarm over the danger which had touched their lives and fortunes.
Such a one now appeared at a second-floor window on the side of the court directly opposite the Jacks’ entry. He was a man with a bald head and a pink, excited face, and it was instantly apparent that he was on the verge of emotional collapse. He threw open the window and in a tone shaken by incipient hysteria cried out loudly:
“Mary!...Mary!” His voice rose almost to a scream as he sought for her below.
A woman in the crowd came forward below the window, looked up, and said quietly:
“Yes, Albert.”
“I can’t find the key!” he cried in a trembling voice. “The door’s locked! I can’t get out!”
“Oh, Albert,” said the woman more quietly and with evident embarrassment, “don’t get so excited, dear. You’re in no danger—and the key is bound to be there somewhere. I’m sure you’ll find it if you look.”