The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

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,

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