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