He wondered what was the matter, and since it looked as if the traffic were now completely blocked on the main road, he cut down the quiet street that faces the university buildings and overlooks the paved court in which the statue of Sir Joseph Astill inappropriately dispenses water to a big stone basin. Almost immediately he found himself upon the fringes of an immense crowd over which the waves of threatening sound that he had heard at a distance were moving like catspaws on a sullen sea. The windows of the town-hall itself blazed with light, making the outlines of the Corinthian pillars that surrounded it almost beautiful. He edged his way into the black crowd. It was composed for the most part of workers in iron and brass, and exhaled an odour of stale oil. In a moment of relative silence he asked the man who stood in front of him, a little mechanic who had not troubled to change the oily dungarees in which he worked, what was the matter. “It’s Lloyd George . . . the b—,” he said, and spat fiercely. Edwin was not sure where he had heard the name before. He seemed to remember it as that of a Welsh member of Parliament who had come into notoriety during the debates on the South African War. He inquired what Lloyd George was doing. “Come to speak agen’ Joe,” said the mechanic savagely; and, as a wave of sound that had started somewhere in the middle of the crowd came sweeping towards them, he suddenly began to squeal hoarsely like a carnivorous beast in a cage: a ridiculous noise, that seemed, nevertheless, to express the feelings of the multitude. From scraps of conversation that he heard beneath the crowd’s rumour, Edwin began to understand that this beggarly Welshman, who had spent the last few years in vilifying the workmen of North Bromwich generally, and their political idol in particular, had actually dared to bring his dirty accusations to the political heart of the city: the town-hall in which their favourite had delivered his most important speeches; that, at this very moment, the meeting which popular feeling had proscribed, was beginning behind the Corinthian pillars, and that the just indignation of North Bromwich had determined that he should not escape with his life. It struck Edwin that whatever else the Welshman might be, he was certainly not lacking in courage; but, for all that, he found it difficult to prevent his own feelings in the matter from being swamped and absorbed and swept away by the crowd’s vast, angry consciousness. Almost in spite of himself, his heart palpitated with vehement malice against the intruder. He felt that he would have experienced a brutal satisfaction in seeing him torn limb from limb. A yell of extraordinary savagery, in which he found it difficult not to join, rose from the square.