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