standing clear of the pavement dealt out their wares from the
gutter. It was a raw, gloomy day of the early spring; and the
grimy sky, the mud of the streets, the rags of the dirty men,
harmonised excellently with the eruption of the damp, rubbishy
sheets of paper soiled with printers’ ink. The posters, maculated
with filth, garnished like tapestry the sweep of the curbstone.
The trade in afternoon papers was brisk, yet, in comparison with
the swift, constant march of foot traffic, the effect was of
indifference, of a disregarded distribution. Ossipon looked
hurriedly both ways before stepping out into the cross-currents,
but the Professor was already out of sight.
CHAPTER V
The Professor had turned into a street to the left, and walked
along, with his head carried rigidly erect, in a crowd whose every
individual almost overtopped his stunted stature. It was vain to
pretend to himself that he was not disappointed. But that was mere
feeling; the stoicism of his thought could not be disturbed by this
or any other failure. Next time, or the time after next, a telling
stroke would be delivered-something really startling – a blow fit
to open the first crack in the imposing front of the great edifice
of legal conceptions sheltering the atrocious injustice of society.
Of humble origin, and with an appearance really so mean as to stand
in the way of his considerable natural abilities, his imagination
had been fired early by the tales of men rising from the depths of
poverty to positions of authority and affluence. The extreme,
almost ascetic purity of his thought, combined with an astounding
ignorance of worldly conditions, had set before him a goal of power
and prestige to be attained without the medium of arts, graces,
tact, wealth – by sheer weight of merit alone. On that view he
considered himself entitled to undisputed success. His father, a
delicate dark enthusiast with a sloping forehead, had been an
itinerant and rousing preacher of some obscure but rigid Christian
sect – a man supremely confident in the privileges of his
righteousness. In the son, individualist by temperament, once the
science of colleges had replaced thoroughly the faith of
conventicles, this moral attitude translated itself into a frenzied
puritanism of ambition. He nursed it as something secularly holy.
To see it thwarted opened his eyes to the true nature of the world,
whose morality was artificial, corrupt, and blasphemous. The way
of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal
impulses disguised into creeds. The Professor’s indignation found
in itself a final cause that absolved him from the sin of turning
to destruction as the agent of his ambition. To destroy public
faith in legality was the imperfect formula of his pedantic
fanaticism; but the subconscious conviction that the framework of
an established social order cannot be effectually shattered except
by some form of collective or individual violence was precise and
correct. He was a moral agent – that was settled in his mind. By
exercising his agency with ruthless defiance he procured for
himself the appearances of power and personal prestige. That was
undeniable to his vengeful bitterness. It pacified its unrest; and
in their own way the most ardent of revolutionaries are perhaps
doing no more but seeking for peace in common with the rest of
mankind – the peace of soothed vanity, of satisfied appetites, or
perhaps of appeased conscience.
Lost in the crowd, miserable and undersized, he meditated
confidently on his power, keeping his hand in the left pocket of
his trousers, grasping lightly the india-rubber ball, the supreme
guarantee of his sinister freedom; but after a while he became
disagreeably affected by the sight of the roadway thronged with
vehicles and of the pavement crowded with men and women. He was in
a long, straight street, peopled by a mere fraction of an immense
multitude; but all round him, on and on, even to the limits of the
horizon hidden by the enormous piles of bricks, he felt the mass of
mankind mighty in its numbers. They swarmed numerous like locusts,
industrious like ants, thoughtless like a natural force, pushing on
blind and orderly and absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic,