The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

noise and foam of a great enthusiasm. With a more subtle

intention, he took the part of an insolent and venomous evoker of

sinister impulses which lurk in the blind envy and exasperated

vanity of ignorance, in the suffering and misery of poverty, in all

the hopeful and noble illusions of righteous anger, pity, and

revolt. The shadow of his evil gift clung to him yet like the

smell of a deadly drug in an old vial of poison, emptied now,

useless, ready to be thrown away upon the rubbish-heap of things

that had served their time.

Michaelis, the ticket-of-leave apostle, smiled vaguely with his

glued lips; his pasty moon face drooped under the weight of

melancholy assent. He had been a prisoner himself. His own skin

had sizzled under the red-hot brand, he murmured softly. But

Comrade Ossipon, nicknamed the Doctor, had got over the shock by

that time.

“You don’t understand,” he began disdainfully, but stopped short,

intimidated by the dead blackness of the cavernous eyes in the face

turned slowly towards him with a blind stare, as if guided only by

the sound. He gave the discussion up, with a slight shrug of the

shoulders.

Stevie, accustomed to move about disregarded, had got up from the

kitchen table, carrying off his drawing to bed with him. He had

reached the parlour door in time to receive in full the shock of

Karl Yundt’s eloquent imagery. The sheet of paper covered with

circles dropped out of his fingers, and he remained staring at the

old terrorist, as if rooted suddenly to the spot by his morbid

horror and dread of physical pain. Stevie knew very well that hot

iron applied to one’s skin hurt very much. His scared eyes blazed

with indignation: it would hurt terribly. His mouth dropped open.

Michaelis by staring unwinkingly at the fire had regained that

sentiment of isolation necessary for the continuity of his thought.

His optimism had begun to flow from his lips. He saw Capitalism

doomed in its cradle, born with the poison of the principle of

competition in its system. The great capitalists devouring the

little capitalists, concentrating the power and the tools of

production in great masses, perfecting industrial processes, and in

the madness of self-aggrandisement only preparing, organising,

enriching, making ready the lawful inheritance of the suffering

proletariat. Michaelis pronounced the great word “Patience” – and

his clear blue glance, raised to the low ceiling of Mr Verloc’s

parlour, had a character of seraphic trustfulness. In the doorway

Stevie, calmed, seemed sunk in hebetude.

Comrade Ossipon’s face twitched with exasperation.

“Then it’s no use doing anything – no use whatever.”

“I don’t say that,” protested Michaelis gently. His vision of

truth had grown so intense that the sound of a strange voice failed

to rout it this time. He continued to look down at the red coals.

Preparation for the future was necessary, and he was willing to

admit that the great change would perhaps come in the upheaval of a

revolution. But he argued that revolutionary propaganda was a

delicate work of high conscience. It was the education of the

masters of the world. It should be as careful as the education

given to kings. He would have it advance its tenets cautiously,

even timidly, in our ignorance of the effect that may be produced

by any given economic change upon the happiness, the morals, the

intellect, the history of mankind. For history is made with tools,

not with ideas; and everything is changed by economic conditions –

art, philosophy, love, virtue – truth itself!

The coals in the grate settled down with a slight crash; and

Michaelis, the hermit of visions in the desert of a penitentiary,

got up impetuously. Round like a distended balloon, he opened his

short, thick arms, as if in a pathetically hopeless attempt to

embrace and hug to his breast a self-regenerated universe. He

gasped with ardour.

“The future is as certain as the past – slavery, feudalism,

individualism, collectivism. This is the statement of a law, not

an empty prophecy.”

The disdainful pout of Comrade Ossipon’s thick lips accentuated the

negro type of his face.

“Nonsense,” he said calmly enough. “There is no law and no

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