The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

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

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