Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (308 page)

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 hollow at the base of the skull, seemed ready to snap.

Mr Verloc, after a grunt of disapproving surprise, returned to the sofa.  Alexander Ossipon got up, tall in his threadbare blue serge suit under the low ceiling, shook off the stiffness of long immobility, and strolled away into the kitchen (down two steps) to look over Stevie’s shoulder.  He came back, pronouncing oracularly: “Very good.  Very characteristic, perfectly typical.”

“What’s very good?” grunted inquiringly Mr Verloc, settled again in the corner of the sofa.  The other explained his meaning negligently, with a shade of condescension and a toss of his head towards the kitchen:

“Typical of this form of degeneracy — these drawings, I mean.”

“You would call that lad a degenerate, would you?” mumbled Mr Verloc.

Comrade Alexander Ossipon — nicknamed the Doctor, ex-medical student without a degree; afterwards wandering lecturer to working-men’s associations upon the socialistic aspects of hygiene; author of a popular quasi-medical study (in the form of a cheap pamphlet seized promptly by the police) entitled “The Corroding Vices of the Middle Classes”; special delegate of the more or less mysterious Red Committee, together with Karl Yundt and Michaelis for the work of literary propaganda — turned upon the obscure familiar of at least two Embassies that glance of insufferable, hopelessly dense sufficiency which nothing but the frequentation of science can give to the dulness of common mortals.

“That’s what he may be called scientifically.  Very good type too, altogether, of that sort of degenerate.  It’s enough to glance at the lobes of his ears.  If you read Lombroso — ”

Mr Verloc, moody and spread largely on the sofa, continued to look down the row of his waistcoat buttons; but his cheeks became tinged by a faint blush.  Of late even the merest derivative of the word science (a term in itself inoffensive and of indefinite meaning) had the curious power of evoking a definitely offensive mental vision of Mr Vladimir, in his body as he lived, with an almost supernatural clearness.  And this phenomenon, deserving justly to be classed amongst the marvels of science, induced in Mr Verloc an emotional state of dread and exasperation tending to express itself in violent swearing.  But he said nothing.  It was Karl Yundt who was heard, implacable to his last breath.

“Lombroso is an ass.”

Comrade Ossipon met the shock of this blasphemy by an awful, vacant stare.  And the other, his extinguished eyes without gleams blackening the deep shadows under the great, bony forehead, mumbled, catching the tip of his tongue between his lips at every second word as though he were chewing it angrily:

“Did you ever see such an idiot?  For him the criminal is the prisoner.  Simple, is it not?  What about those who shut him up there — forced him in there?  Exactly.  Forced him in there.  And what is crime?  Does he know that, this imbecile who has made his way in this world of gorged fools by looking at the ears and teeth of a lot of poor, luckless devils?  Teeth and ears mark the criminal?  Do they?  And what about the law that marks him still better — the pretty branding instrument invented by the overfed to protect themselves against the hungry?  Red-hot applications on their vile skins — hey?  Can’t you smell and hear from here the thick hide of the people burn and sizzle?  That’s how criminals are made for your Lombrosos to write their silly stuff about.”

The knob of his stick and his legs shook together with passion, whilst the trunk, draped in the wings of the havelock, preserved his historic attitude of defiance.  He seemed to sniff the tainted air of social cruelty, to strain his ear for its atrocious sounds.  There was an extraordinary force of suggestion in this posturing.  The all but moribund veteran of dynamite wars had been a great actor in his time — actor on platforms, in secret assemblies, in private interviews.  The famous terrorist had never in his life raised personally as much as his little finger against the social edifice.  He was no man of action; he was not even an orator of torrential eloquence, sweeping the masses along in the rushing 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 certainty.  The teaching propaganda be hanged.  What the people knows does not matter, were its knowledge ever so accurate.  The only thing that matters to us is the emotional state of the masses.  Without emotion there is no action.”

He paused, then added with modest firmness:

“I am speaking now to you scientifically — scientifically — Eh?  What did you say, Verloc?”

“Nothing,” growled from the sofa Mr Verloc, who, provoked by the abhorrent sound, had merely muttered a “Damn.”

The venomous spluttering of the old terrorist without teeth was heard.

“Do you know how I would call the nature of the present economic conditions?  I would call it cannibalistic.  That’s what it is!  They are nourishing their greed on the quivering flesh and the warm blood of the people — nothing else.”

Stevie swallowed the terrifying statement with an audible gulp, and at once, as though it had been swift poison, sank limply in a sitting posture on the steps of the kitchen door.

Michaelis gave no sign of having heard anything.  His lips seemed glued together for good; not a quiver passed over his heavy cheeks.  With troubled eyes he looked for his round, hard hat, and put it on his round head.  His round and obese body seemed to float low between the chairs under the sharp elbow of Karl Yundt.  The old terrorist, raising an uncertain and clawlike hand, gave a swaggering tilt to a black felt sombrero shading the hollows and ridges of his wasted face.  He got in motion slowly, striking the floor with his stick at every step.  It was rather an affair to get him out of the house because, now and then, he would stop, as if to think, and did not offer to move again till impelled forward by Michaelis.  The gentle apostle grasped his arm with brotherly care; and behind them, his hands in his pockets, the robust Ossipon yawned vaguely.  A blue cap with a patent leather peak set well at the back of his yellow bush of hair gave him the aspect of a Norwegian sailor bored with the world after a thundering spree.  Mr Verloc saw his guests off the premises, attending them bareheaded, his heavy overcoat hanging open, his eyes on the ground.

He closed the door behind their backs with restrained violence, turned the key, shot the bolt.  He was not satisfied with his friends.  In the light of Mr Vladimir’s philosophy of bomb throwing they appeared hopelessly futile.  The part of Mr Verloc in revolutionary politics having been to observe, he could not all at once, either in his own home or in larger assemblies, take the initiative of action.  He had to be cautious.  Moved by the just indignation of a man well over forty, menaced in what is dearest to him — his repose and his security — he asked himself scornfully what else could have been expected from such a lot, this Karl Yundt, this Michaelis — this Ossipon.

Pausing in his intention to turn off the gas burning in the middle of the shop, Mr Verloc descended into the abyss of moral reflections.  With the insight of a kindred temperament he pronounced his verdict.  A lazy lot — this Karl Yundt, nursed by a blear-eyed old woman, a woman he had years ago enticed away from a friend, and afterwards had tried more than once to shake off into the gutter.  Jolly lucky for Yundt that she had persisted in coming up time after time, or else there would have been no one now to help him out of the ‘bus by the Green Park railings, where that spectre took its constitutional crawl every fine morning.  When that indomitable snarling old witch died the swaggering spectre would have to vanish too — there would be an end to fiery Karl Yundt.  And Mr Verloc’s morality was offended also by the optimism of Michaelis, annexed by his wealthy old lady, who had taken lately to sending him to a cottage she had in the country.  The ex-prisoner could moon about the shady lanes for days together in a delicious and humanitarian idleness.  As to Ossipon, that beggar was sure to want for nothing as long as there were silly girls with savings-bank books in the world.  And Mr Verloc, temperamentally identical with his associates, drew fine distinctions in his mind on the strength of insignificant differences.  He drew them with a certain complacency, because the instinct of conventional respectability was strong within him, being only overcome by his dislike of all kinds of recognised labour — a temperamental defect which he shared with a large proportion of revolutionary reformers of a given social state.  For obviously one does not revolt against the advantages and opportunities of that state, but against the price which must be paid for the same in the coin of accepted morality, self-restraint, and toil.  The majority of revolutionists are the enemies of discipline and fatigue mostly.  There are natures too, to whose sense of justice the price exacted looms up monstrously enormous, odious, oppressive, worrying, humiliating, extortionate, intolerable.  Those are the fanatics.  The remaining portion of social rebels is accounted for by vanity, the mother of all noble and vile illusions, the companion of poets, reformers, charlatans, prophets, and incendiaries.

Lost for a whole minute in the abyss of meditation, Mr Verloc did not reach the depth of these abstract considerations.  Perhaps he was not able.  In any case he had not the time.  He was pulled up painfully by the sudden recollection of Mr Vladimir, another of his associates, whom in virtue of subtle moral affinities he was capable of judging correctly.  He considered him as dangerous.  A shade of envy crept into his thoughts.  Loafing was all very well for these fellows, who knew not Mr Vladimir, and had women to fall back upon; whereas he had a woman to provide for —