The crowd swooped in. It crowded with appreciation as they introduced all the piquant possibilities of the dance. It babbled its merriment at seeing little faces, which should show only the revel of April, bearing all the ravage of Autumn.
Comments and exhortations, spiced to taste, flew about the Point, ricochetted, and returned in boomerang fashion to their authors, who repolished them and shot them forth again. Heads bobbed back, forth, and up in the effort to see. In a prestissimo fire of joy, the novel exercise reached its finale, when ...
"Hi-hi! _Hè._ _Eeeee!_" As though by signal, the whole Point was suddenly aspurt with spears of flame, leaping, meeting, and crossing. We looked round. The dance stopped, the organ gurgled away to rubbish, the crowd took open order, and stared at the narrow alley of Back Hill. Blankets of smoke moved from its mouth, pushing their suffocating way up the street. Twenty people hurt themselves in shrieking orders. Women screamed and ran. From an open window a tongue of flame was thrust derisively; it tickled a man's neck, and he swore. Then a lone woman had the sense to scream something intelligible.
We all ran. English, Italian, and profane clashed together. Three small boys strangled each other in a race for the fire-bell. In Back Hill, men, women, and children were hustling themselves through the ground-floor window of the doomed house. Thick, languid flames blocked the doorway, swaying idly, ready to fasten their fangs in anything that approached. Furniture crashed and bounded to the pavement. Mattresses were flung out to receive the indecent figures of their owners. The crowd swelled feverishly. Women screamed.
Gradually the crackle of burning wood and the ripple of falling glass gained voice above the outcry of the crowd. A shout of fear and admiration surged up, as a spout of flame darted through the roof, and quivered proudly to the sky. Luigi threw back his sweeping felt hat, loosened his yellow neckcloth, tightened his scarlet waistband. "It is bad," he said. "It is a fire."
I said "Yes," having nothing else to say. A few Cockneys inquired resentfully why somebody didn't do something. Then the word went round that all were out but one. A woman was left at the top. A sick hush fell. Away in the upper regions a voice was wailing. The women turned pale, and one or two edged away. The men whistled silently, and looked serious. They had the air of waiting for something. It came. Luigi moved swiftly away from me, fought a way through the crowd, and stood by the door, his melodious head lashed by the fringe of the flames.