Then he jumped down from the ledge where he had taken refuge and once
more joined the human stream. The latter, as if animated by a common
purpose, was moving downtown, and if Robertson's neighbors were properly
posted, it was headed for the Chinese quarter. It was evident that they
intended to vent their fury for the present on these allies of the
Japanese. This longing for revenge, this elementary hatred of the yellow
race kept the crowd in Union Square in motion and shoved everyone
without discrimination towards Broadway and Fourth Avenue. The square
resembled a huge machine, which by means of some hidden automatic power
forced tens of thousands of unresisting bodies into the narrow channels.
The crowd rolled on unceasingly. Here and there a hat flew off into the
air, came down again, bobbed up and down once or twice, and then
continued its journey somewhere else on the surface. It was fortunate
that those who had become insensible from the dreadful noise and the
foul, dusty air were unable to fall down; they were simply held up by
the close pressure of their neighbors and were carried along until a few
blocks farther on they regained consciousness. Nevertheless a few fell
and disappeared in the stream without leaving a trace behind them. No
pen could describe their terrible fate; they must have been relentlessly
ground to pieces like stones on the rocky bed of a glacier.
Above this roaring stream of human beings there swept unceasingly, in
short blasts like a tearing whirlwind, the hoarse cry of a people's
passion: "Down with the yellow race! Down with the Japanese! Three
cheers for the Stars and Stripes!" The passionate cry of a crowd
thirsting for revenge rose again and again, as if from a giant's lungs,
until the cheers and yells of "down" turned into a wild, deafening,
inarticulate howl which was echoed and re-echoed a thousand times by the
tall buildings on both sides of the avenue. Now and then an electric
street-car, to which clung hundreds of people, towered like a stranded
vessel above the waving mass of heads and hats.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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