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