Hearts Afire - By J. D. Rawden Page 0,56
open, and we were in a second inside the box office. With the strength of despair we burst the door open against the struggling throng, and in an instant were in their midst. We had yet some distance to go; the fire followed us fast, and there was still a crowd of excited people to pass through. We got into the crowd and dashed along, heedless that now and again we felt that we had trod upon a human being. Once I looked down and saw a human face, horribly distorted and burned. Oh, my God! It was a fearful sight. I shall never forget it. Afterward I saw the injured man taken out. He was horribly injured, and I think, must be dead. As soon as we got into the street we dashed into the police station. There a gentleman loaned me his overcoat, and after a short stay in the station we walked around home.”
Mr. Studley escaped by other by other means, but Mr. Murdoch, seeking his dressing room to save some valuables, perished. The large majority of those on the stage waiting for their entrances made rapid exits by the rear doors, except two or three scene shifters who heroically remained behind to aid others, and suffered burns that would prove fatal.
The ushers for the most part preserved their presence of mind and endeavored to enforce order among the rushing crowd, as did also the police in attendance. Mr. Rochfert, the head usher, broke open a small door at the farther end of the vestibule and increased the facilities of exit into the open air, which regularly consisted of two doors five feet wide, opening upon Washington Street. Mr. Rochfert also entered the auditorium and endeavored to quell the excitement, but without effect.
The gallery was filled mostly by young men and boys. The only means of escape, was by a separate, angular stairway. Here the panic was the worst. A few got out in the first rush. A jam occurred at the second landing above the lobby, and the staircase was blocked by a massive human wall. Some jumped over the stair rail, others dropped into the parquet. Eventually the stairs gave way and all fell into the lobby, the crushed and bleeding men and women and boys bound and wound into a solid mass, were suffocated by the weight and the smoke. Those who escaped this awful death, bruised and maimed, and with clothing torn, scarcely knowing how they came forth from the falling stairway.
A fire alarm had been immediately sent from the First Precinct Station-House, which is located next the theater, and a minute or two after a general alarm and also a call for the reserved force of all the precincts. But by the time the engines were in position and at work the fire was beyond control. The occupants of the orchestra chairs and parquet had had but little difficulty in making good their escape, but at least two-thirds and perhaps even a larger fraction of the audience were still in the dress-circle and gallery. The lowest estimate of the number in the gallery is that five or six hundred people were in that portion of the house, and from among these were most of the three hundred deaths. The exit from the first balcony was down a single flight of stairs in the rear of the vestibule. Down these stairs the people came in scores, leaping and jumping in wild confusion. The way out from the upper gallery was down a short flight of stairs starting from the south wall of the building, thence by a short turn down a long flight against the same wall to the level of the balcony, and from this floor down a cased flight into Washington Street. The main floor and first balcony were soon emptied through their respective exits, but for the five or six hundred panic-stricken gallery spectators to pass safely through the tortuous passage described was next to an impossibility. Every indication points to the belief that, suffocated by the smoke forced down like a wall from the roof, the mass of those in the upper gallery thronged about the entrance to the stairs and were either blocked there so as to make exit impossible, or were unable even to make the attempt to escape, and sank down, one upon the other, to fall in a mass into the horrible pit under the vestibule when the supports of the gallery were burned away.