The music stopped. In a moment the atmosphere had become suffocating. As though turned to stone, they all stared at the doors. Their blood seemed to congeal under the terrible blows of the hammers. Loud and mingled voices came to them from without. The older people there raised their protesting voices. The voices grew loud and wild, and then rose to desperate shrieks and howls. Then it began to crackle and hiss. The blows of the hammers had shaken down a lamp. The petroleum had caught on fire, and the dry boarding of the floor flared like tinder that could no longer be extinguished.
All reason and all human restraints fled. In the twinkling of an eye the three hundred became like wild beasts. With the violence of mania the youths hurled themselves against the locked doors; but these had been built of heavy oak, and resisted all exertions. The girls shrieked madly; and since the smoke and the fumes did not all float out through the cracks in the walls and through the small, star-shaped window-holes, the girls drew up their skirts about their heads. Others threw themselves moaning to the floor; and when they were trodden on by the others, who surged so madly to and fro, they writhed convulsively, and stretched out their arms. Soon the dry woodwork had become a mass of flame. The heat was intolerable. Many tore off their garments, both youths and maidens, and in the terror and the torment of death, united in the wild embraces of a sombre ecstasy, and wrung from their doomed lives an ultimate sting of delight.
These embracing couples Franz Lothar saw later with his own eyes as lumps of cinders amid the smoking ruins. He arrived with his cousin, when the whole horror had already taken place. They had seen the reflection of the flames in the sky from afar, and whipped up their horses. From the neighbouring villages streamed masses of people. But they came too late to help. The barn had been burned down within five minutes, and all within, except five or six, had found their death.
Among the victims was also the Countess Irene, her sister and brother. Terrible as this was, it added but little to the unspeakable horror of the whole catastrophe. The image of that place of ruins; the sight of the smouldering corpses; their odour and the odour of blood and burned hair and garments; the pied, short-haired village dogs, who crept with greedy growls about this vast hearth of cooked flesh; the distorted faces of the suffocated, whose bodies lay untouched amid the other burned and blackened ones; the loud or silent grief of mothers, fathers, brothers; the Syrmian night, fume-filled to the starry sky,--these things rained blow on blow upon the spirit of Franz Lothar, and caused a black despair to creep into the inmost convolutions of his brain.