§ 3
When Sargon entered the Observation Ward of the Gifford Street Infirmary his sense of having left life, ordinary current life, far away behind him, beyond these grey passages and corridors and staircases and glass offices and high walls and little doors, was enormously reinforced. Never had he seen anything so emptily bleak and cheerless as this place. A heartless great dingy room it was, with green-grey distempered walls discoloured in patches, lit by a few bare lights that gave neither high-lights nor shadows. Black night and a greasily lit brick wall stared in through uncurtained windows. Half-way down the length of the place projecting pieces of wall suggested that two former rooms had been thrown into one. The floor was of polished bare boards. Far off was a table set against the wall with two or three torn and crumpled magazines thereon, and at the end an empty fire-place. In the near half, on either side, there were iron bedsteads in rows, twenty or thirty perhaps altogether. There was a foul smell in the air, faint and yet indescribably offensive, a fæcal smell mixed with a heavy soapy odour.
Even had it been unoccupied, this cold, large, evil-smelling room would have seemed a strange inhospitable place to Sargon. For it had always been the lot of Mr. Preemby, even in the days of his early poverty, to live snug, to have carpets, even if they were shabby carpets, under his feet, and an encumbrance of furniture and silly human pictures and brackets and things about him on the walls. Here in this harsh plainness it was as though the fussy, accumulative, home-making imagination of man had never been.
But the strange soulless atmosphere of the place was but the first instant impression of Sargon. It was followed by a far more vivid and terrible realization, that this place was inhabited by beings who were only at the first glance men. Then as one looked again it became clear that they were not exactly men, they did not look up at his entry as men should, or they showed their awareness of him by queer unnatural movements. Several were in bed; others were dressed in shabby and untidy clothes and either sat on their beds or were seated in chairs about the lower part of the room. One individual only was in motion; a grave-faced young man who was walking with an appearance of concentrated method to and fro in a restricted circle in the far corner of the ward. Another sat and seemed to remove a perpetually recurrent cobweb from his face by a perpetually repeated gesture. Two men were jammed behind the table against the wall and one, a fleshy lout with a shining pink skin and curling red hair on his bare chest, was making violent gestures, hammering the table with a freckled fist, talking in a voice that rose and sank and occasionally broke into curses while the other, a sallow-complexioned, cadaverous individual, seemed to be sunken in profound despair. In one of the beds close at hand a young man with a shock of black hair and an expression of fatuous satisfaction, that changed with dramatic suddenness to triumphant fierceness or insinuating lucidity, sat up and gesticulated and composed and recited an interminable poem—something in the manner of Browning. It was running in this fashion:
“God shall smite them
And blight them
They may prevail but God will requite them
Light ’em.
Burn ’em to ashes and burn ’em to atoms
Atoms!
Burning atoms—exactly like stars. See?
Stars in the void and all over the place.
Atoms galore and God can’t show his face.
(Triumphant discovery.)
He hasn’t a face.
That’s it! That’s it, my Boys!
Atheists wrong and theology wrong,
Plainly and simply here’s every one wrong!
And I have to tell ’em!
There’s a God, item one, but he hasn’t a face
So he can’t show his face.
That’s the kink of it.
Naturally every one thinks he’s non est
But he’s there as I know to my cost;
For I’m lost
But I’ve shown how it is all the same.
No face—what a game!
I found God in the void
Unmasked and a little annoyed.
Quod erat demonstrandum X.L....”
“There’s your bed,” said Mr. Higgs at Sargon’s elbow, shoving him slightly.
Sargon moved a little unwillingly, his puzzled eyes still on the talker.
“You’ll hear enough of him before you’re done, Old Chap,” said Mr. Higgs. “Hop into bed now.”
Impelled partly by the arm of Mr. Higgs and partly by his natural disposition to please, Sargon got into bed. Mr. Higgs assisted him in a rough brotherly fashion. But before Sargon could pull up the clothes about him, Mr. Higgs, glancing over his shoulder, became aware of something that was happening down the room—Sargon could not see what.
In an instant the genial authoritativeness of Mr. Higgs gave way to rage. “Yaaps, you dirty old devil!” said Mr. Higgs. “You’re at it again!”
He quitted Sargon and ran down the room very swiftly. Sargon sat up in bed to see what was happening. Three or four of the other patients did the same. A very dirty old man with a face of extreme misery, who was sitting in a chair, was seized upon and bumped up and down and hit several times with great vigour by Mr. Higgs. Then Mr. Higgs departed and returned, still uttering admonitions, with a pail and a rag.
For Mr. Higgs was not only an attendant on the mentally afflicted but also, on account of economy, the floor-scrubber and general cleaner of the ward. He had been trained in the navy to ideals of a speckless brightness and he scrubbed better than he attended.
“Lie down there!” cried Mr. Higgs returning up the ward with his pail. “It ain’t nothing to do with you.”
The Lord of the World lay down.