Almost unconsciously it was his instinct to examine outlets, and he found himself paying particular attention to the row of holes which let in the air into his last house of life.  He soon discovered that these air-holes were all the ends and mouths of long leaden tubes which doubtless carried air from some remote watering-place near Margate.  One evening while he was engaged in the fifth investigation he noticed something like twilight in one of these dumb mouths, as compared with the darkness of the others.  Thrusting his finger in as far as it would go, he found a hole and flapping edge in the tube.  This he rent open and instantly saw a light behind; it was at least certain that he had struck some other cell.

It is a characteristic of all things now called “efficient”, which means mechanical and calculated, that if they go wrong at all they go entirely wrong.  There is no power of retrieving a defeat, as in simpler and more living organisms.  A strong gun can conquer a strong elephant, but a wounded elephant can easily conquer a broken gun.  Thus the Prussian monarchy in the eighteenth century, or now, can make a strong army merely by making the men afraid.  But it does it with the permanent possibility that the men may some day be more afraid of their enemies than of their officers.  Thus the drainage in our cities so long as it is quite solid means a general safety, but if there is one leak it means concentrated poison—­an explosion of deathly germs like dynamite, a spirit of stink.  Thus, indeed, all that excellent machinery which is the swiftest thing on earth in saving human labour is also the slowest thing on earth in resisting human interference.  It may be easier to get chocolate for nothing out of a shopkeeper than out of an automatic machine.  But if you did manage to steal the chocolate, the automatic machine would be much less likely to run after you.

Turnbull was not long in discovering this truth in connexion with the cold and colossal machinery of this great asylum.  He had been shaken by many spiritual states since the instant when he was pitched head foremost into that private cell which was to be his private room till death.  He had felt a high fit of pride and poetry, which had ebbed away and left him deadly cold.  He had known a period of mere scientific curiosity, in the course of which he examined all the tiles of his cell, with the gratifying conclusion that they were all the same shape and size; but was greatly puzzled about the angle in the wall at the end, and also about an iron peg or spike that stood out from the wall, the object of which he does not know to this day.  Then he had a period of mere madness not to be written of by decent men, but only by those few dirty novelists hallooed on by the infernal huntsman to hunt down and humiliate human nature.  This also passed, but left behind it a feverish distaste for many of the mere objects around him.  Long after he had returned to sanity and such hopeless cheerfulness as a man might have on a desert island, he disliked the regular squares of the pattern of wall and floor and the triangle that terminated his corridor.  Above all, he had a hatred, deep as the hell he did not believe in, for the objectless iron peg in the wall.