The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

depend upon emotional excitement to keep up his belief, no

declamations, no anger, no visions of blood-red flags waving, or

metaphorical lurid suns of vengeance rising above the horizon of a

doomed society. Not he! Cold reason, he boasted, was the basis of

his optimism. Yes, optimism –

His laborious wheezing stopped, then, after a gasp or two, he

added:

“Don’t you think that, if I had not been the optimist I am, I could

not have found in fifteen years some means to cut my throat? And,

in the last instance, there were always the walls of my cell to

dash my head against.”

The shortness of breath took all fire, all animation out of his

voice; his great, pale cheeks hung like filled pouches, motionless,

without a quiver; but in his blue eyes, narrowed as if peering,

there was the same look of confident shrewdness, a little crazy in

its fixity, they must have had while the indomitable optimist sat

thinking at night in his cell. Before him, Karl Yundt remained

standing, one wing of his faded greenish havelock thrown back

cavalierly over his shoulder. Seated in front of the fireplace,

Comrade Ossipon, ex-medical student, the principal writer of the F.

P. leaflets, stretched out his robust legs, keeping the soles of

his boots turned up to the glow in the grate. A bush of crinkly

yellow hair topped his red, freckled face, with a flattened nose

and prominent mouth cast in the rough mould of the negro type. His

almond-shaped eyes leered languidly over the high cheek-bones. He

wore a grey flannel shirt, the loose ends of a black silk tie hung

down the buttoned breast of his serge coat; and his head resting on

the back of his chair, his throat largely exposed, he raised to his

lips a cigarette in a long wooden tube, puffing jets of smoke

straight up at the ceiling.

Michaelis pursued his idea – THE idea of his solitary reclusion –

the thought vouchsafed to his captivity and growing like a faith

revealed in visions. He talked to himself, indifferent to the

sympathy or hostility of his hearers, indifferent indeed to their

presence, from the habit he had acquired of thinking aloud

hopefully in the solitude of the four whitewashed walls of his

cell, in the sepulchral silence of the great blind pile of bricks

near a river, sinister and ugly like a colossal mortuary for the

socially drowned.

He was no good in discussion, not because any amount of argument

could shake his faith, but because the mere fact of hearing another

voice disconcerted him painfully, confusing his thoughts at once –

these thoughts that for so many years, in a mental solitude more

barren than a waterless desert, no living voice had ever combatted,

commented, or approved.

No one interrupted him now, and he made again the confession of his

faith, mastering him irresistible and complete like an act of

grace: the secret of fate discovered in the material side of life;

the economic condition of the world responsible for the past and

shaping the future; the source of all history, of all ideas,

guiding the mental development of mankind and the very impulses of

their passion –

A harsh laugh from Comrade Ossipon cut the tirade dead short in a

sudden faltering of the tongue and a bewildered unsteadiness of the

apostle’s mildly exalted eyes. He closed them slowly for a moment,

as if to collect his routed thoughts. A silence fell; but what

with the two gas-jets over the table and the glowing grate the

little parlour behind Mr Verloc’s shop had become frightfully hot.

Mr Verloc, getting off the sofa with ponderous reluctance, opened

the door leading into the kitchen to get more air, and thus

disclosed the innocent Stevie, seated very good and quiet at a deal

table, drawing circles, circles, circles; innumerable circles,

concentric, eccentric; a coruscating whirl of circles that by their

tangled multitude of repeated curves, uniformity of form, and

confusion of intersecting lines suggested a rendering of cosmic

chaos, the symbolism of a mad art attempting the inconceivable.

The artist never turned his head; and in all his soul’s application

to the task his back quivered, his thin neck, sunk into a deep

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