The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
would be utter bosh, but he has a turn of talk that makes it go down all
the same.”
“Like treacle,” interjected the Professor, rather low, keeping an
impassive expression.
The perplexed Ossipon went on communing with himself half audibly, after
the manner of a man reflecting in perfect solitude.
“Confounded ass! To leave such an imbecile business on my hands. And I
don’t even know if—”
He sat with compressed lips. The idea of going for news straight to the
shop lacked charm. His notion was that Verloc’s shop might have been
turned already into a police trap. They will be bound to make some
arrests, he thought, with something resembling virtuous indignation, for
the even tenor of his revolutionary life was menaced by no fault of his.
And yet unless he went there he ran the risk of remaining in ignorance of
what perhaps it would be very material for him to know. Then he
reflected that, if the man in the park had been so very much blown to
pieces as the evening papers said, he could not have been identified.
And if so, the police could have no special reason for watching Verloc’s
shop more closely than any other place known to be frequented by marked
anarchists—no more reason, in fact, than for watching the doors of the
Silenus. There would be a lot of watching all round, no matter where he
went. Still—
“I wonder what I had better do now?” he muttered, taking counsel with
himself.
A rasping voice at his elbow said, with sedate scorn:
“Fasten yourself upon the woman for all she’s worth.”
After uttering these words the Professor walked away from the table.
Ossipon, whom that piece of insight had taken unawares, gave one
ineffectual start, and remained still, with a helpless gaze, as though
nailed fast to the seat of his chair. The lonely piano, without as much
as a music stool to help it, struck a few chords courageously, and
beginning a selection of national airs, played him out at last to the
tune of “Blue Bells of Scotland.” The painfully detached notes grew
faint behind his back while he went slowly upstairs, across the hall, and
into the street.
In front of the great doorway a dismal row of newspaper sellers standing
clear of the pavement dealt out their wares from the gutter. It was a
raw, gloomy day of the early spring; and the grimy sky, the mud of the
streets, the rags of the dirty men, harmonised excellently with the
eruption of the damp, rubbishy sheets of paper soiled with printers’ ink.
The posters, maculated with filth, garnished like tapestry the sweep of
the curbstone. The trade in afternoon papers was brisk, yet, in
comparison with the swift, constant march of foot traffic, the effect was
of indifference, of a disregarded distribution. Ossipon looked hurriedly
both ways before stepping out into the cross-currents, but the Professor
was already out of sight.
CHAPTER V
The Professor had turned into a street to the left, and walked along,
with his head carried rigidly erect, in a crowd whose every individual
almost overtopped his stunted stature. It was vain to pretend to himself
that he was not disappointed. But that was mere feeling; the stoicism of
his thought could not be disturbed by this or any other failure. Next
time, or the time after next, a telling stroke would be
delivered—something really startling—a blow fit to open the first crack
in the imposing front of the great edifice of legal conceptions
sheltering the atrocious injustice of society. Of humble origin, and
with an appearance really so mean as to stand in the way of his
considerable natural abilities, his imagination had been fired early by
the tales of men rising from the depths of poverty to positions of
authority and affluence. The extreme, almost ascetic purity of his
thought, combined with an astounding ignorance of worldly conditions, had
set before him a goal of power and prestige to be attained without the
medium of arts, graces, tact, wealth—by sheer weight of merit alone. On
that view he considered himself entitled to undisputed success. His
father, a delicate dark enthusiast with a sloping forehead, had been an
itinerant and rousing preacher of some obscure but rigid Christian sect—a
man supremely confident in the privileges of his righteousness. In the
son, individualist by temperament, once the science of colleges had
replaced thoroughly the faith of conventicles, this moral attitude
translated itself into a frenzied puritanism of ambition. He nursed it
as something secularly holy. To see it thwarted opened his eyes to the
true nature of the world, whose morality was artificial, corrupt, and
blasphemous. The way of even the most justifiable revolutions is
prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds. The Professor’s
indignation found in itself a final cause that absolved him from the sin
of turning to destruction as the agent of his ambition. To destroy
public faith in legality was the imperfect formula of his pedantic
fanaticism; but the subconscious conviction that the framework of an
established social order cannot be effectually shattered except by some
form of collective or individual violence was precise and correct. He
was a moral agent—that was settled in his mind. By exercising his agency
with ruthless defiance he procured for himself the appearances of power
and personal prestige. That was undeniable to his vengeful bitterness.
It pacified its unrest; and in their own way the most ardent of
revolutionaries are perhaps doing no more but seeking for peace in common
with the rest of mankind—the peace of soothed vanity, of satisfied
appetites, or perhaps of appeased conscience.
Lost in the crowd, miserable and undersized, he meditated confidently on
his power, keeping his hand in the left pocket of his trousers, grasping
lightly the india-rubber ball, the supreme guarantee of his sinister
freedom; but after a while he became disagreeably affected by the sight
of the roadway thronged with vehicles and of the pavement crowded with
men and women. He was in a long, straight street, peopled by a mere
fraction of an immense multitude; but all round him, on and on, even to
the limits of the horizon hidden by the enormous piles of bricks, he felt
the mass of mankind mighty in its numbers. They swarmed numerous like
locusts, industrious like ants, thoughtless like a natural force, pushing
on blind and orderly and absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic, to
terror too perhaps.
That was the form of doubt he feared most. Impervious to fear! Often
while walking abroad, when he happened also to come out of himself, he
had such moments of dreadful and sane mistrust of mankind. What if
nothing could move them? Such moments come to all men whose ambition
aims at a direct grasp upon humanity—to artists, politicians, thinkers,
reformers, or saints. A despicable emotional state this, against which
solitude fortifies a superior character; and with severe exultation the
Professor thought of the refuge of his room, with its padlocked cupboard,
lost in a wilderness of poor houses, the hermitage of the perfect
anarchist. In order to reach sooner the point where he could take his
omnibus, he turned brusquely out of the populous street into a narrow and
dusky alley paved with flagstones. On one side the low brick houses had
in their dusty windows the sightless, moribund look of incurable
decay—empty shells awaiting demolition. From the other side life had not
departed wholly as yet. Facing the only gas-lamp yawned the cavern of a
second-hand furniture dealer, where, deep in the gloom of a sort of
narrow avenue winding through a bizarre forest of wardrobes, with an
undergrowth tangle of table legs, a tall pier-glass glimmered like a pool
of water in a wood. An unhappy, homeless couch, accompanied by two
unrelated chairs, stood in the open. The only human being making use of
the alley besides the Professor, coming stalwart and erect from the
opposite direction, checked his swinging pace suddenly.
“Hallo!” he said, and stood a little on one side watchfully.
The Professor had already stopped, with a ready half turn which brought
his shoulders very near the other wall. His right hand fell lightly on
the back of the outcast couch, the left remained purposefully plunged
deep in the trousers pocket, and the roundness of the heavy rimmed
spectacles imparted an owlish character to his moody, unperturbed face.
It was like a meeting in a side corridor of a mansion full of life. The
stalwart man was buttoned up in a dark overcoat, and carried an umbrella.
His hat, tilted back, uncovered a good deal of forehead, which appeared
very white in the dusk. In the dark patches of the orbits the eyeballs
glimmered piercingly. Long, drooping moustaches, the colour of ripe
corn, framed with their points the square block of his shaved chin.
“I am not looking for you,” he said curtly.
The Professor did not stir an inch. The blended noises of the enormous
town sank down to an inarticulate low murmur. Chief Inspector Heat of
the Special Crimes Department changed his tone.
“Not in a hurry to get home?” he asked, with mocking simplicity.
The unwholesome-looking little moral agent of destruction exulted
silently in the possession of personal prestige, keeping in check this
man armed with the defensive mandate of a menaced society. More
fortunate than Caligula, who wished that the Roman Senate had only one
head for the better satisfaction of his cruel lust, he beheld in that one
man all the forces he had set at defiance: the force of law, property,
oppression, and injustice. He beheld all his enemies, and fearlessly
confronted them all in a supreme satisfaction of his vanity. They stood
perplexed before him as if before a dreadful portent. He gloated
inwardly over the chance of this meeting affirming his superiority over
all the multitude of mankind.
It was in reality a chance meeting. Chief Inspector Heat had had a
disagreeably busy day since his department received the first telegram
from Greenwich a little before eleven in the morning. First of all, the
fact of the outrage being attempted less than a week after he had assured
a high official that no outbreak of anarchist activity was to be
apprehended was sufficiently annoying. If he ever thought himself safe
in making a statement, it was then. He had made that statement with
infinite satisfaction to himself, because it was clear that the high
official desired greatly to hear that very thing. He had affirmed that
nothing of the sort could even be thought of without the department being
aware of it within twenty-four hours; and he had spoken thus in his
consciousness of being the great expert of his department. He had gone
even so far as to utter words which true wisdom would have kept back.
But Chief Inspector Heat was not very wise—at least not truly so. True
wisdom, which is not certain of anything in this world of contradictions,
would have prevented him from attaining his present position. It would
have alarmed his superiors, and done away with his chances of promotion.
His promotion had been very rapid.
“There isn’t one of them, sir, that we couldn’t lay our hands on at any
time of night and day. We know what each of them is doing hour by hour,”
he had declared. And the high official had deigned to smile. This was
so obviously the right thing to say for an officer of Chief Inspector
Heat’s reputation that it was perfectly delightful. The high official
believed the declaration, which chimed in with his idea of the fitness of
things. His wisdom was of an official kind, or else he might have
reflected upon a matter not of theory but of experience that in the
close-woven stuff of relations between conspirator and police there occur