Chapter Chapter 13 · Chapter XIII

. 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

terror and despair a vigour of vitality, a love of life that could resist

the furious anguish which drives to murder and the fear, the blind, mad

fear of the gallows. He knew. But the stewardess and the chief steward

knew nothing, except that when they came back for her in less than five

minutes the lady in black was no longer in the hooded seat. She was

nowhere. She was gone. It was then five o’clock in the morning, and it

was no accident either. An hour afterwards one of the steamer’s hands

found a wedding ring left lying on the seat. It had stuck to the wood in

a bit of wet, and its glitter caught the man’s eye. There was a date,

24th June 1879, engraved inside. “_An impenetrable mystery is destined

to hang for ever_. . . . ”

And Comrade Ossipon raised his bowed head, beloved of various humble

women of these isles, Apollo-like in the sunniness of its bush of hair.

The Professor had grown restless meantime. He rose.

“Stay,” said Ossipon hurriedly. “Here, what do you know of madness and

despair?”

The Professor passed the tip of his tongue on his dry, thin lips, and

said doctorally:

“There are no such things. All passion is lost now. The world is

mediocre, limp, without force. And madness and despair are a force. And

force is a crime in the eyes of the fools, the weak and the silly who

rule the roost. You are mediocre. Verloc, whose affair the police has

managed to smother so nicely, was mediocre. And the police murdered him.

He was mediocre. Everybody is mediocre. Madness and despair! Give me

that for a lever, and I’ll move the world. Ossipon, you have my cordial

scorn. You are incapable of conceiving even what the fat-fed citizen

would call a crime. You have no force.” He paused, smiling sardonically

under the fierce glitter of his thick glasses.

“And let me tell you that this little legacy they say you’ve come into

has not improved your intelligence. You sit at your beer like a dummy.

Good-bye.”

“Will you have it?” said Ossipon, looking up with an idiotic grin.

“Have what?”

“The legacy. All of it.”

The incorruptible Professor only smiled. His clothes were all but

falling off him, his boots, shapeless with repairs, heavy like lead, let

water in at every step. He said:

“I will send you by-and-by a small bill for certain chemicals which I

shall order to-morrow. I need them badly. Understood—eh?”

Ossipon lowered his head slowly. He was alone. “_An impenetrable

mystery_. . . . ” It seemed to him that suspended in the air before him

he saw his own brain pulsating to the rhythm of an impenetrable mystery.

It was diseased clearly. . . . “_This act of madness or despair_.”

The mechanical piano near the door played through a valse cheekily, then

fell silent all at once, as if gone grumpy.

Comrade Ossipon, nicknamed the Doctor, went out of the Silenus beer-hall.

At the door he hesitated, blinking at a not too splendid sunlight—and the

paper with the report of the suicide of a lady was in his pocket. His

heart was beating against it. The suicide of a lady—_this act of madness

or despair_.

He walked along the street without looking where he put his feet; and he

walked in a direction which would not bring him to the place of

appointment with another lady (an elderly nursery governess putting her

trust in an Apollo-like ambrosial head). He was walking away from it.

He could face no woman. It was ruin. He could neither think, work,

sleep, nor eat. But he was beginning to drink with pleasure, with

anticipation, with hope. It was ruin. His revolutionary career,

sustained by the sentiment and trustfulness of many women, was menaced by

an impenetrable mystery—the mystery of a human brain pulsating wrongfully

to the rhythm of journalistic phrases. “ . . . _Will hang for ever over

this act_. . . . It was inclining towards the gutter . . . _of madness or

despair_.”

“I am seriously ill,” he muttered to himself with scientific insight.

Already his robust form, with an Embassy’s secret-service money

(inherited from Mr Verloc) in his pockets, was marching in the gutter as

if in training for the task of an inevitable future. Already he bowed

his broad shoulders, his head of ambrosial locks, as if ready to receive

the leather yoke of the sandwich board. As on that night, more than a

week ago, Comrade Ossipon walked without looking where he put his feet,

feeling no fatigue, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, hearing not a sound.

“_An impenetrable mystery_. . . .” He walked disregarded. . . . “_This

act of madness or despair_.”

And the incorruptible Professor walked too, averting his eyes from the

odious multitude of mankind. He had no future. He disdained it. He was

a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He

walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable—and terrible in the

simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of

the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly,

like a pest in the street full of men.