slapped Ossipon’s shoulder.
“Beer! So be it! Let us drink and he 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 is pocket. The Professor raised his