The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

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