CHAPTER IX
THE WHEEL
IN neither a day nor yet in a week did Varge find himself. Battling, battling, battling incessantly—at night in his cell, by day in the carpenter shop where he had been put to work—the fight went on within him. And it was an uneven combat; for, fine-grained, keenly sensitive, delicately strung, even his mental faculties revolted at every detail of the life about him, and joined issue with the full-veined, red blood within him that would not know restraint.
Men talked around him, men moved around him—and they were all alike. At first, he did not differentiate one from another—each was as the others were—a black-and-grey striped form that shuffled in heavy boots, whose hair was close-cropped and whose faces were like white parchment in colour.
These were his associates; and in outward appearance each one of the hundreds was himself. It was as though on every hand, at every turn he faced a mirror that was thrust suddenly before him with inhuman jest, that mocked and taunted him and aroused within him a terrible, crushing sense of the annihilation of all personality, goading him to some wild act that would at once vindicate his individuality—and end it all.
These were his companions—and none but these, in his and their narrowed world, could have any community of interest with him. Amongst themselves they
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