The town was built on a hill with a square at the top where the church and the official buildings lay. The church was a fat square box like a toy with imitation doors and windows and a removable steeple. Steep cobbled streets led down from the square on two sides towards the harbour. On the other sides there was the one motor-road and for the rest just rock. The cobbled streets were so steep that it was sometimes necessary to hold on to a doorway to prevent oneself from sliding. Before the meeting began the police had cut off the motor-road so that the crowd had to climb up the cobbles, and we could see them sweating jerkily through the greasy heat like raindrops running strangely in reverse. Some were carrying banners, and every now and then the bearers slipped and the banners went down in the dust like a sheet falling into an enormous ashtray.
We could not see Marius when we arrived. There was an old negro on the platform and the crowd was making too much noise for him to be heard. Individuals seemed to be shouting quite indiscriminately and yet there was a peculiar solidity about the gathering as if each separate movement was a tentacle spread from the body of the whole. The jerking of a head as it spoke or the clenched raising of a fist seemed to shiver the limbs around it almost physically, and yet one did not know what caused the solitary impulse at the beginning. It was like watching a shoal of fish hanging massed in clear water, the impulse and the effect of the sudden switches of tension were indistinguishable. The crowd was tight, and yet moving, the whole square seemed to crawl. I could see a one-legged beggar beating his crutch ceaselessly against a lamp-post, and the people around him nodding in rhythm to him as if they were dancing. When Marius appeared the bodies switched to him as if he had magnetized them, and he was both the cause and the effect of the impulse. The voices closed into a steady harmony and there was a whistling in the air as if the dusty wind was blowing through the trees. Marius spoke and they listened to him and I do not know if they understood. His voice came clearly through the heavy air and he was saying that there must be no violence, that there was work for many on his estate, and that there was food for all. He said that they would win their fight for better conditions if they stayed together quietly and were patient. He spoke with no rhetoric and with a simplicity that held them. They became calm, and solid, and he had power over them. I did not think it mattered if they did not understand. For a moment, in an emotion of peace, I thought that Marius might be the saviour of the world.
A group of white men, or half-castes, had formed in one corner of the square slightly behind the platform. They wore white shirts and grey trousers and belts of a precisely similar pattern. At a sign from their leader they began to chant, and I remembered the day when I had first seen Marius in London. There the singing had been a thin tuneless wailing in despair against graves: the crowd had not been solid and the air was cold. Now, in the heat, beneath the ash of the volcano, the crowd turned instinctively as if it had been stung. The white men were leaning forwards chanting with a queer artificial jerking of their arms. I had the impression that they were dolls attempting to be sick. They were singing that Marius was a nigger.
Marius heard them and turned to them and I suppose it would not have been right for him to ignore them. He shouted in a voice which carried over the rising hum, “Listen to them and see if they have anything to say worth listening to,” and the chant went on with a thousand black heads turned craning towards it: “A dirty nigger, a dirty nigger,” and a thousand pairs of yellow eyes coming round in hate. “If I am,” Marius shouted, “then what does it matter and is that worth listening to?” One of the white men stretched out a finger and shouted something that was inaudible but which from its gesture was evidently an obscenity. I was reminded of the old woman in Paris dancing with her carrot.
The point of magnetism to which was drawn the direction of the dusty-headed filings of the crowd had now switched from Marius to the group in the corner where the mechanical dolls leaning forwards were vomiting. But Marius still held them back with his voice that charmed and placated, sinking them back into quietude against the spray of hate, and letting the hate wear itself out on the heat of dustiness. The flow of yellow eyes was no more than a murmur, after all the heads were static. He would have held them like this and saved them if the bells of the church had not started ringing.
No one knew why they started or who was ringing them, but when they began there was nothing that could be heard, nothing that could hold them — the direction and the magnetism of the afternoon were scattered and chaos came like the roll of lava through the ashes. It happened quickly — after the first numb intrusion — the crowd breaking up with a strange silent sibilance and the group of white men disappearing and Marius standing alone and important while the mechanical sound rolled on without tune and without order. Fighting began instinctively, immediately, not directed specifically against the white men but just arising spontaneously like the quivering of springs when the tension is broken. It began in groups, like whirlpools, spreading slowly through the square. Then there were soldiers coming up the road carrying rifles and they spread out in a line in front of the church and there was a rush up the steps as the bells beat on and on and the rush went back as it hit the breaker of bayonets. Marius stood with this arms raised to quell them but there was no power any more, no force to stop them, in the sea of black ashes there was no tide and no direction just the boiling of the surface as the spray blew wildly and the line of soldiers came down the steps to clear the square. It was then that the group of white men appeared again, they had got round the back of the crowd and were close to the platform and they were fighting in a wedge getting nearer to it. The line of soldiers went past them and left them driving deeper and deeper in towards Marius, and I went out in the square to see what could be done. I left Annabelle in a doorway, and as I walked I could see her father in front of me punching his way through the crowd with his cigarette-holder jutting up from his mouth and an unlighted cigarette in it, a small dapper man in a panama hat fighting and fighting and making no headway against the arms and legs and fists that surrounded him. I walked through as Marius had done once before, and I saw the white shirts and grey trousers getting up to the platform and pushing at it so as to overturn it and arms stretching upwards to tear at the banners and Marius swaying as if he were walking on water. Then the crowd gathered itself for the last time screaming and broke through the line of soldiers and reached the platform which now seemed to rise up bodily into the air above the black and white heads and the heads were going down beneath the wind of arms and Marius was rising. Then a second line of soldiers spread out by the church and there was an officer giving an order while the white shirts went down and down and the white heads were sinking beneath the black stabs of spray and then the soldiers raised their rifles and fired into the air. For a moment everyone was quiet, they were all kneeling, and as I looked for Annabelle I could see her walking above their bodies like a nurse. She reached the steps of the church as the crowd rose yelling and there was suddenly a crush that seemed to squeeze the last breath out of the daylight and then the soldiers fired again. There was a woman screaming and screaming repeatedly very close to my ear and I could not move my arms and then it seemed that I and those around me were lifted off our feet and carried, unresisting, by the panic of the waves. We were moved in an effortless limp block like flotsam towards the steep cobbled streets that led to the harbour, and as the first people began to go down the screaming rose in a crescendo that fought against the bells and the noise became enormous like a furnace. We went down hill backwards and there were fingers tearing at the woodwork of doors and a sound of cracking as when trees are felled, and always some people coming on top of us like the weight of a glacier. I got my hand round a pillar which supported the front of a house and I clung there with my feet off the ground and bodies moving beneath me and a line of faces jerking close to my own, smooth dirty sweating faces snarling with gold teeth and twisted mouths and breaths like something solid. There was a man beside me clinging to the pillar who had a gold chain round his neck and the chain had been seized by a woman behind him and the metal was cutting into his throat as if he were being hung. His head went back inch by inch and there was a small gold crucifix on the chain which stuck out straight from his Adam’s apple like the point of a sword. Then the chain broke and he let go his hold on the pillar and clutched at his throat gurgling and he fell backwards against the woman and they went down on the ground with the crowd going over them. There were bodies on the cobbles crawling and being kicked and then the wave seemed to break and they were all facing downwards and they gave up struggling and were flung forwards wildly like surf. At the bottom they scattered sideways or were pushed or ebbed into the sea. As the last rush came past me the pillar of the house broke and I fell against the woodwork. It seemed that the sky came down in a dust of fire and darkness and then it was quiet. When I picked myself up I saw the house wrecked with a hole in the wall as if a tank had been through it, and at the bottom of the hill by the harbour the muddy water writhing like a vision of hell. But from the square there was silence.