"All right, I'm coming." He fastened his police badge, a disk of wood bearing the magic formula which allowed him to pass police cordons, on a string about his neck. Of course, he must see her. After all, it was pathetic, her thinking of him in the midst of all this excitement. He wondered how much she really had to do with it all.
As they approached Hibiya Park the crowds became more dense. He had to display his badge repeatedly to get past lines of police. Excitement was more evident now, and yet the city seemed oddly quiet. He realized that it was the absence of the usual noise of traffic, roar of elevated trains, clatter of street cars. The entire voice of the city had changed; the volume of sound from hundreds of thousands of humans, shuffling along in clacking geta, talking, shouting, making an entirely new sound, live, electric, ominous as contrasted with the usual mechanical rattle.
Just in front of the park the police lines were the most solid, thousands of officers backed by mounted gendarmes. They would not let him pass, shrugged shoulders as he tried to argue with them, showing his pass. He worked his way along the line towards the main entrance, hoping to find some opening. He found a young official, pleasantly courteous, who seemed inclined to listen. Suddenly, as he argued, a dull roar sounded behind him, to his right; a gust of wind, as if a giant had blown a gigantic breath over him and the rest of the crowd. The masses behind him surged forward irresistibly. He noted that the mouth of the young officer had opened, eyes popping, staring as if some astounding, incredible sight had just appeared. As the crowd pushed on, carrying him and the police line before it, he managed to turn and look over the heads of the frantic people milling all about him. As he was borne on, through the entrance into the park, he caught a glimpse of the great central police station to the right behind him. The entire corner was gone, leaving exposed, doll-house rooms in the interior beyond. The usually meticulous bronze figure of some noted police official had been knocked askew by the débris into an absurdly incongruous drunken attitude. Fine dust from the explosion began to settle over them. The crowds, frantically insistent on getting away, had broken through the police lines on all sides, along the broad road between Hibiya Park and the outer moat, and, beyond that, across Babasakimon bridge, into the great space between the inner and outer palace moats, surging towards Sakuradamon. But here in Hibiya Park the police were getting the crowd in hand again, assisted by gendarmes and soldiers who had come from the other side of the square. The mounted men rode their horses right into the crowds; sabers were used freely. The soldiers seemed unenthusiastic, apathetic. Kent noticed that they belonged to some infantry regiment up in the fifties; probably they were country recruits, more in sympathy with the mob than against it. But the others, the police and the gendarmes, were laboring under hysterical excitement. They had always seemed absurd to him, these tiny-looking swords, but quite evidently they were dangerous weapons, viciously sharpened. Some of the superior officers particularly appeared to have become entirely beside themselves, eyes bloodshot, mouths foaming, literally crazed for the moment, maniacs insane with blood lust.
Kent managed to avoid them by taking the smaller paths leading through shrubbery. The police were all busy raging at the mob, and the soldiers, seeing his police emblem, shrugged shoulders and let him pass. As he worked over towards the other side of the park, in the direction of the navy wireless tower, he became aware of a feeling of emptiness, as if the space, the atmosphere rather, had in some strange way changed, as if it were lighter, more spacious. There was a peculiar acrid tang in the air; he sniffed; yes, that was smoke rising there over the trees. He climbed a low knoll, usually a favorite place for lovers, with a summerhouse surrounded by azaleas. Ah, that was it; where the Diet building had stood, a barn-like, wood and stucco structure, was now no building at all; only smoldering heaps of débris. He obtained a moment's amusement by noticing that the cordons of police and soldiers which had been guarding the Diet all these months were still there, on all four sides of the great block, solemnly guarding the smoking ashes.
He swerved to the right, managed to get to the street alongside the outer moat just ahead of the crowd which had broken through the police lines down by the central station. Here, inside the space containing the most important government buildings, were scattered only small detachments of police and soldiers, who did not attempt to face the mob; but beyond, up on the high ground by the War Office and the General Staff headquarters, were sounding bugle calls. Evidently troops were being summoned to form new cordons to take the places of those which had been broken.
By this time he was almost running. He must get as far as possible into this inner area before new lines were formed. Evidently the same thought possessed the mobs racing behind him. They were surprisingly silent; the predominating sound was the vast volume of clatter made by tens of thousands of wooden geta. Just as he was about to pass into the square facing, on its right, the Sakuradamon palace entrance and to the left a great empty lot above which rose the General Staff building, he heard his name being called. "Here, Kent-san. Here I am."
There she was, Sadako-san, with a small group of others, at a vantage point formed by the small space surrounding the pedestal of a statue of a frock-coated gentleman in bronze, set in a corner of the Judiciary building grounds. There were two or three other girls and about a dozen men. He noticed the professor who had been in jail on account of his writings about Kropotkin.
She had been right in picking this point as the center of events. Already they were beginning to concentrate on this spot from all sides, the crowd coming along the Hibiya Park road and that flowing across the space from Babasakimon reinforced by the student contingent from Kanda and the laborers from Asakusa and Uyeno, and even from across the Sumida River, from Honjo and Fukagawa. And apparently they were trying to come on from the other side of the city, too. Up on the higher ground, in the direction of the Sanno-dai Temple grounds, a hilly park often used for demonstrations, came sound of musketry, volley firing. Bugles still sounded about the General Staff headquarters grounds and, behind that, on the hill crowned by the War Office. Bugles also began to sound from across the moat, inside the inner palace grounds. Still, oddly, there was no sight of soldiers or police; the crowds continued to surge on into the square, gradually filling it. On the other side the multitude was evidently being kept in check by some cordon which they could not see, at Toranomon probably. A few small groups, individual figures here and there, evidently Foreign Office officials or men from the Italian or Russian embassies close by, were moving along rapidly, evidently to see the excitement. Presently Kent saw Kikuchi. He shouted to him, managed to attract his attention. As he joined their group, Kent noticed a stir among the others, frowns, whispers, then shoulder shrugs; but no protest was made.
But he wanted to see Sadako-san, to have a few words with her, at least. He managed to draw her aside a little, sheltered against the pedestal of the statue. "Sadako-san, where have you been? That wasn't the right thing to do, to run away from me like that. You know, I've——"
"Oh, Kent-san, you must not think that that was what I asked you to come here for, to talk nonsense, on a day like this—no, not nonsense, forgive me. I didn't mean that. We'll talk about—about these other things some other time—yes, I promise—but to-day; don't you see, this is the day we have all been waiting for so long, the day marking the birth of a new Japan, when the people of Japan shall break down the rule of the tyrants, of the wicked, old anachronists over there," she pointed across the square to the gray, copper-roofed building of the General Staff. "That's why I asked you to come here, to this spot; for this is where history is to be made to-day."