"Bulldogs!" sounded a voice in Olva's ear, and turning round he beheld a breathless, dishevelled Bunning. "I've been pulling wood off the palings. Ha! hoch! he! (such noises to recover his breath). Such a rag!"—and then more apprehensively, "Bulldogs! There they are, with Metcher!" They stood, two big men in top-hats, plainly to be seen behind a Don in cap and gown, upon a little hill to the right of the bonfire. The flames lit their figures. Metcher, the Don, was reading something from a paper, and, round the hill, derisively dancing, were many undergraduates. Apparently the Proctor found the situation too difficult for him and presently he disappeared. Bunning watched him, apprehension and a sense of order struggling' with a desire for adventure. "They've gone to fetch the police. There'll be an awful row."
There probably would be because that moment had at last been reached when authority was flung absolutely to the winds of heaven. The world seemed, in a moment, to have gone mad. Take Bunning, his cheeks flushed, his body shaking, his eyes flaming, for an example. Olva, dark, motionless in his shadow, watched it all and waited for his moment. He knew that it was coming. Grimly he addressed the Shadow, now close to his very heart. "I know you. You are urging me on. This night is your business. . . . But I am fighting you still! I am fighting you still!"
The moment came. Bunning, clutching on to Olva's sleeve, whispered, "The police! Even at that crisis of intensest excitement he could be seen, nervously, pushing his spectacles up his nose. A surging crowd of men, and Olva again fancied that he caught sight of Craven, swept towards the row of timid twinkling lights with their neat little gardens like trembling protests laid out before them. More wood! more wood! to appease that great flaming monster that shot tongues of fire now to the very heavens. More wood! more wood!"
"Look out, the police!"
They came, with their truncheons, in a line down the Common. Olva was flung into the heart of a heaving mass of legs and arms. He caught a glimpse of Bunning behind and he thought that he saw Craven a little to his right. He did not know—he did not care. His blood was up at last. He was shouting he knew not what, he was hitting out with his fists. Men's voices about him—"Let go, you beast." "My God, I'll finish you." "There goes a bobby." "Stamp on him!"
A disgraceful scene. The policemen were hopelessly outnumbered. The crowd broke on to the line of orderly little gardens, water was poured from windows, the palings were flung to the ground—glass broken—screams of women somewhere in the distance.
But even now Olva knew that his moment had not come. Then some one shouted in his ear—"Town cads! They're murdering a bobby!" He was caught with several other men (of their number was Bunning) off the Common up a side street.
A blazing lamp showed him an angry, shouting, jeering crowd; figures closed round something on the ground. Four men had joined arms with him, and now the five of them, shouting "'Varsity!" hitting right and left, rushed into the circle. The circle broke and Olva saw lying his length on the ground, half-stunned, clothed only in a torn shirt of bright blue, a stout heavy figure—once obviously, from the clothes flung to one side, a policeman, now with his large red face in a muddy puddle, his fat naked legs bent beneath him, his fingers clutching dirt, nothing very human at all. Town cads of the worst! Some brute now was raising his foot and kicking the bare flesh!
Instantly the world was on flame for Olva. Now again, as once in Sannet Wood, he must hit and hit with all his soul. He broke, like a madman, into the heart of the crowd, sending it flying. There were cries and screams.
He was conscious of three faces. There was Bunning there, white, staring. There was Craven, with his back to a house-door, staring also—and directly before him was a purple face with muddy hair fringing it and little beady eyes. The face of the brute who had been kicking! He must hit. He struck and his fist broke the flesh! He was exultant . . . at last he had, after these weeks of intangibility, found something solid. The face broke away from him. The circle scattered back and the fat, naked body was lying in the mud alone. There was a sudden silence. Olva, conscious of a great power surging through his body, raised his hand again.