The great horse still pranced. The man on the dray shouted a horrible oath. With flaming eyes and cheeks of death the boy dragged his faint limbs to the kerb. As he came near the great animal, and he beheld its scarlet nostrils and huge and wicked eyes, he knew it for a monster of fable that could turn him to stone with its glance. A chill stole through his veins. He extended his hands towards the great horse. His eyes were filled with a dreadful rushing darkness. He felt himself swaying with a kind of sick impotence; it was as though the hand of fate had maimed him.
“Lay ’old of his head, can’t yer?” the brutal voice of the man on the dray percolated to his ears. “What are yer lookin’ at ’im for?”
The great horse lifted its hoofs; the boy reeled back with the face of a corpse.
“Mind he don’t eat yer,” said a quiet voice at his side.
A second small and ragged urchin, far less in stature than himself and half his years, calmly took hold of the great horse by the near rein, shook it, struck the animal on the neck very boldly, and proceeded to back it just as the other urchin had done.
“Nah then, worrer yer mean by it?” he said, scolding it in a shrill voice like a woman would an infant.
The impassive face upon the cathedral boomed the hour.
In a strange anguish of the spirit, which he had never felt before, the boy staggered away from the warehouse into the ever-gathering shadows of the great city. He did not know where he was. He did not know what he did. He was in the enfolding grasp of an unknown power; he was in the bosom of the gods.
Without apprehension, and without reason, he was borne through the maze of cabs, vans and omnibuses to the other side of the street. He clutched feebly at the chill iron railings that formed a girdle round the cathedral. A bell seemed to be tolling. It filled his heart with voices. An occult force, which had never grasped him till this hour, began to draw this broken wayfarer seeking for sanctuary towards the unknown.
He issued back to a frail sense of entity to find himself on the steps of the cathedral. He saw lights; he smelt warmth; he heard remote and strange music; he heard the hushed clamour of many voices. He was in a vast place echoing yet domeless. He was on his knees pressing his temples against the cold marble flags.