Suddenly
he stood blinking, all about him men halted dazzled, and the world was
incandescent. The light found him already upon the outskirts of the
excited crowds that choked the ways near the wind-vane offices, and the
sense of visibility and exposure that came with it turned his colourless
intention of joining Ostrog to a keen anxiety.
For a time he was jostled, obstructed, and endangered by men hoarse and
weary with cheering his name, some of them bandaged and bloody in his
cause. The frontage of the wind-vane offices was illuminated by some
moving picture, but what it was he could not see, because in spite of his
strenuous attempts the density of the crowd prevented his approaching it.
From the fragments of speech he caught, he judged it conveyed news of the
fighting about the Council House. Ignorance and indecision made him slow
and ineffective in his movements. For a time he could not conceive how he
was to get within the unbroken facade of this place. He made his way
slowly into the midst of this mass of people, until he realised that the
descending staircase of the central way led to the interior of the
buildings. This gave him a goal, but the crowding in the central path
was so dense that it was long before he could reach it. And even then he
encountered intricate obstruction, and had an hour of vivid argument
first in this guard room and then in that before he could get a note
taken to the one man of all men who was most eager to see him.
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