The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
His eyes stared at the ceiling. And suddenly they closed. Comrade
Ossipon slept in the sunlight.
CHAPTER XIII
The enormous iron padlock on the doors of the wall cupboard was the only
object in the room on which the eye could rest without becoming afflicted
by the miserable unloveliness of forms and the poverty of material.
Unsaleable in the ordinary course of business on account of its noble
proportions, it had been ceded to the Professor for a few pence by a
marine dealer in the east of London. The room was large, clean,
respectable, and poor with that poverty suggesting the starvation of
every human need except mere bread. There was nothing on the walls but
the paper, an expanse of arsenical green, soiled with indelible smudges
here and there, and with stains resembling faded maps of uninhabited
continents.
At a deal table near a window sat Comrade Ossipon, holding his head
between his fists. The Professor, dressed in his only suit of shoddy
tweeds, but flapping to and fro on the bare boards a pair of incredibly
dilapidated slippers, had thrust his hands deep into the overstrained
pockets of his jacket. He was relating to his robust guest a visit he
had lately been paying to the Apostle Michaelis. The Perfect Anarchist
had even been unbending a little.
“The fellow didn’t know anything of Verloc’s death. Of course! He never
looks at the newspapers. They make him too sad, he says. But never
mind. I walked into his cottage. Not a soul anywhere. I had to shout
half-a-dozen times before he answered me. I thought he was fast asleep
yet, in bed. But not at all. He had been writing his book for four
hours already. He sat in that tiny cage in a litter of manuscript.
There was a half-eaten raw carrot on the table near him. His breakfast.
He lives on a diet of raw carrots and a little milk now.”
“How does he look on it?” asked Comrade Ossipon listlessly.
“Angelic. . . . I picked up a handful of his pages from the floor. The
poverty of reasoning is astonishing. He has no logic. He can’t think
consecutively. But that’s nothing. He has divided his biography into
three parts, entitled—‘Faith, Hope, Charity.’ He is elaborating now the
idea of a world planned out like an immense and nice hospital, with
gardens and flowers, in which the strong are to devote themselves to the
nursing of the weak.”
The Professor paused.
“Conceive you this folly, Ossipon? The weak! The source of all evil on
this earth!” he continued with his grim assurance. “I told him that I
dreamt of a world like shambles, where the weak would be taken in hand
for utter extermination.”
“Do you understand, Ossipon? The source of all evil! They are our
sinister masters—the weak, the flabby, the silly, the cowardly, the faint
of heart, and the slavish of mind. They have power. They are the
multitude. Theirs is the kingdom of the earth. Exterminate,
exterminate! That is the only way of progress. It is! Follow me,
Ossipon. First the great multitude of the weak must go, then the only
relatively strong. You see? First the blind, then the deaf and the
dumb, then the halt and the lame—and so on. Every taint, every vice,
every prejudice, every convention must meet its doom.”
“And what remains?” asked Ossipon in a stifled voice.
“I remain—if I am strong enough,” asserted the sallow little Professor,
whose large ears, thin like membranes, and standing far out from the
sides of his frail skull, took on suddenly a deep red tint.
“Haven’t I suffered enough from this oppression of the weak?” he
continued forcibly. Then tapping the breast-pocket of his jacket: “And
yet _I am_ the force,” he went on. “But the time! The time! Give me
time! Ah! that multitude, too stupid to feel either pity or fear.
Sometimes I think they have everything on their side. Everything—even
death—my own weapon.”
“Come and drink some beer with me at the Silenus,” said the robust
Ossipon after an interval of silence pervaded by the rapid flap, flap of
the slippers on the feet of the Perfect Anarchist. This last accepted.
He was jovial that day in his own peculiar way. He slapped Ossipon’s
shoulder.
“Beer! So be it! Let us drink and be merry, for we are strong, and
to-morrow we die.”
He busied himself with putting on his boots, and talked meanwhile in his
curt, resolute tones.
“What’s the matter with you, Ossipon? You look glum and seek even my
company. I hear that you are seen constantly in places where men utter
foolish things over glasses of liquor. Why? Have you abandoned your
collection of women? They are the weak who feed the strong—eh?”
He stamped one foot, and picked up his other laced boot, heavy,
thick-soled, unblacked, mended many times. He smiled to himself grimly.
“Tell me, Ossipon, terrible man, has ever one of your victims killed
herself for you—or are your triumphs so far incomplete—for blood alone
puts a seal on greatness? Blood. Death. Look at history.”
“You be damned,” said Ossipon, without turning his head.
“Why? Let that be the hope of the weak, whose theology has invented hell
for the strong. Ossipon, my feeling for you is amicable contempt. You
couldn’t kill a fly.”
But rolling to the feast on the top of the omnibus the Professor lost his
high spirits. The contemplation of the multitudes thronging the
pavements extinguished his assurance under a load of doubt and uneasiness
which he could only shake off after a period of seclusion in the room
with the large cupboard closed by an enormous padlock.
“And so,” said over his shoulder Comrade Ossipon, who sat on the seat
behind. “And so Michaelis dreams of a world like a beautiful and cheery
hospital.”
“Just so. An immense charity for the healing of the weak,” assented the
Professor sardonically.
“That’s silly,” admitted Ossipon. “You can’t heal weakness. But after
all Michaelis may not be so far wrong. In two hundred years doctors will
rule the world. Science reigns already. It reigns in the shade
maybe—but it reigns. And all science must culminate at last in the
science of healing—not the weak, but the strong. Mankind wants to
live—to live.”
“Mankind,” asserted the Professor with a self-confident glitter of his
iron-rimmed spectacles, “does not know what it wants.”
“But you do,” growled Ossipon. “Just now you’ve been crying for
time—time. Well. The doctors will serve you out your time—if you are
good. You profess yourself to be one of the strong—because you carry in
your pocket enough stuff to send yourself and, say, twenty other people
into eternity. But eternity is a damned hole. It’s time that you need.
You—if you met a man who could give you for certain ten years of time,
you would call him your master.”
“My device is: No God! No Master,” said the Professor sententiously as
he rose to get off the ’bus.
Ossipon followed. “Wait till you are lying flat on your back at the end
of your time,” he retorted, jumping off the footboard after the other.
“Your scurvy, shabby, mangy little bit of time,” he continued across the
street, and hopping on to the curbstone.
“Ossipon, I think that you are a humbug,” the Professor said, opening
masterfully the doors of the renowned Silenus. And when they had
established themselves at a little table he developed further this
gracious thought. “You are not even a doctor. But you are funny. Your
notion of a humanity universally putting out the tongue and taking the
pill from pole to pole at the bidding of a few solemn jokers is worthy of
the prophet. Prophecy! What’s the good of thinking of what will be!”
He raised his glass. “To the destruction of what is,” he said calmly.
He drank and relapsed into his peculiarly close manner of silence. The
thought of a mankind as numerous as the sands of the sea-shore, as
indestructible, as difficult to handle, oppressed him. The sound of
exploding bombs was lost in their immensity of passive grains without an
echo. For instance, this Verloc affair. Who thought of it now?
Ossipon, as if suddenly compelled by some mysterious force, pulled a
much-folded newspaper out of his pocket. The Professor raised his head at
the rustle.
“What’s that paper? Anything in it?” he asked.
Ossipon started like a scared somnambulist.
“Nothing. Nothing whatever. The thing’s ten days old. I forgot it in
my pocket, I suppose.”
But he did not throw the old thing away. Before returning it to his
pocket he stole a glance at the last lines of a paragraph. They ran
thus: “_An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this
act of madness or despair_.”
Such were the end words of an item of news headed: “Suicide of Lady
Passenger from a cross-Channel Boat.” Comrade Ossipon was familiar with
the beauties of its journalistic style. “_An impenetrable mystery seems
destined to hang for ever_. . . . ” He knew every word by heart. “_An
impenetrable mystery_. . . . ”
And the robust anarchist, hanging his head on his breast, fell into a
long reverie.
He was menaced by this thing in the very sources of his existence. He
could not issue forth to meet his various conquests, those that he
courted on benches in Kensington Gardens, and those he met near area
railings, without the dread of beginning to talk to them of an
impenetrable mystery destined. . . . He was becoming scientifically
afraid of insanity lying in wait for him amongst these lines. “_To hang
for ever over_.” It was an obsession, a torture. He had lately failed
to keep several of these appointments, whose note used to be an unbounded
trustfulness in the language of sentiment and manly tenderness. The
confiding disposition of various classes of women satisfied the needs of
his self-love, and put some material means into his hand. He needed it
to live. It was there. But if he could no longer make use of it, he ran
the risk of starving his ideals and his body . . . “_This act of madness
or despair_.”
“An impenetrable mystery” was sure “to hang for ever” as far as all
mankind was concerned. But what of that if he alone of all men could
never get rid of the cursed knowledge? And Comrade Ossipon’s knowledge
was as precise as the newspaper man could make it—up to the very
threshold of the “_mystery destined to hang for ever_. . . .”
Comrade Ossipon was well informed. He knew what the gangway man of the
steamer had seen: “A lady in a black dress and a black veil, wandering at
midnight alongside, on the quay. ‘Are you going by the boat, ma’am,’ he
had asked her encouragingly. ‘This way.’ She seemed not to know what to
do. He helped her on board. She seemed weak.”
And he knew also what the stewardess had seen: A lady in black with a
white face standing in the middle of the empty ladies’ cabin. The
stewardess induced her to lie down there. The lady seemed quite
unwilling to speak, and as if she were in some awful trouble. The next
the stewardess knew she was gone from the ladies’ cabin. The stewardess
then went on deck to look for her, and Comrade Ossipon was informed that
the good woman found the unhappy lady lying down in one of the hooded
seats. Her eyes were open, but she would not answer anything that was
said to her. She seemed very ill. The stewardess fetched the chief
steward, and those two people stood by the side of the hooded seat
consulting over their extraordinary and tragic passenger. They talked in
audible whispers (for she seemed past hearing) of St Malo and the Consul
there, of communicating with her people in England. Then they went away
to arrange for her removal down below, for indeed by what they could see
of her face she seemed to them to be dying. But Comrade Ossipon knew
that behind that white mask of despair there was struggling against