It was an extremely uninteresting ceiling to look at except for a streak of yellowish stains, but it was better to look at the ceiling for a time than to look too much at these distressing people around him. They were distressing and distracting, and Sargon knew that it was urgently necessary not to be distracted, but to think over his position very carefully before anything further happened to him. All this rush of consequences had been so unexpected, preposterous and violent since—a few hours ago—he had surveyed London from the dome of Saint Paul’s and decided that the moment had come to take hold of his Lordship of the World, that he perceived he might very conceivably be overwhelmed. How serene and distant now was that spectacle of London spread out under the amber sunshine between its far blue hills and its shining river, with its dense clusters of shipping and the black ant-currents of folk below. From that he had come swiftly, inevitably, to this echoing prison. For prison he saw it was. He knew quite well that these men around him were demented men and that he had been seized upon as a lunatic, but he thought that the Workhouse Observation Ward in which he was, was a lunatic asylum already. In his wildest imaginations he had never imagined the Power over all things could treat him thus. The possibility of a brief interlude in prison, of a severe but very public and triumphant trial, had entered his mind; but not that he might be hustled away out of the possibility of any such appeal. He had to think his position out anew, to discover what all this monstrous experience was intended to show and to teach him, and what he had to do to meet this strange occasion.
And it was very difficult to do this with a raucous voice down the room uttering foul threats about the ward attendant and a great fist beating the table in sudden storms and with that smooth, fluctuating, unending recitation nearer at hand, that cosmic poem, now almost inaudible—so that one strained to catch the words—and now in high-pitched delight. For long stretches it was just incoherent jumble and Sargon would hold it almost completely out of his attention while he pursued his own perplexities, and then it would rush together into something that challenged its way to mingle with his inmost thoughts.
“Filthy old Nature, she drives us amain;
One goad is lust and the other goad pain.
And so we get back to old nowhere again.
Nowhere to start from and nowhere again.
Want and be hurt, want and be hurt,
Out of the dirt you came, back to the dirt.
Hunger for dirt and dirty regretting
Dirty our feeding and dirty begetting