The Secret Agent

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"That's silly," admitted Ossipon. "You can't heal weakness. But after
all Michaelis may not be so far wrong. In two hundred years doctors will
rule the world. Science reigns already. It reigns in the shade
maybe--but it reigns. And all science must culminate at last in the
science of healing--not the weak, but the strong. Mankind wants to
live--to live."

"Mankind," asserted the Professor with a self-confident glitter of his
iron-rimmed spectacles, "does not know what it wants."

"But you do," growled Ossipon. "Just now you've been crying for
time--time. Well. The doctors will serve you out your time--if you are
good. You profess yourself to be one of the strong--because you carry in
your pocket enough stuff to send yourself and, say, twenty other people
into eternity. But eternity is a damned hole. It's time that you need.
You--if you met a man who could give you for certain ten years of time,
you would call him your master."

"My device is: No God! No Master," said the Professor sententiously as
he rose to get off the 'bus.

Ossipon followed. "Wait till you are lying flat on your back at the end
of your time," he retorted, jumping off the footboard after the other.
"Your scurvy, shabby, mangy little bit of time," he continued across the
street, and hopping on to the curbstone.

"Ossipon, I think that you are a humbug," the Professor said, opening
masterfully the doors of the renowned Silenus. And when they had
established themselves at a little table he developed further this
gracious thought. "You are not even a doctor. But you are funny. Your
notion of a humanity universally putting out the tongue and taking the
pill from pole to pole at the bidding of a few solemn jokers is worthy of
the prophet. Prophecy! What's the good of thinking of what will be!" He
raised his glass. "To the destruction of what is," he said calmly.

He drank and relapsed into his peculiarly close manner of silence. The
thought of a mankind as numerous as the sands of the sea-shore, as
indestructible, as difficult to handle, oppressed him. The sound of
exploding bombs was lost in their immensity of passive grains without an
echo. For instance, this Verloc affair. Who thought of it now?

Ossipon, as if suddenly compelled by some mysterious force, pulled a much-
folded newspaper out of is pocket. The Professor raised his head at the
rustle.

"What's that paper? Anything in it?" he asked.

Ossipon started like a scared somnambulist.

"Nothing. Nothing whatever. The thing's ten days old. I forgot it in
my pocket, I suppose."

But he did not throw the old thing away. Before returning it to his
pocket he stole a glance at the last lines of a paragraph. They ran
thus: "_An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this
act of madness or despair_."

Such were the end words of an item of news headed: "Suicide of Lady
Passenger from a cross-Channel Boat." Comrade Ossipon was familiar with
the beauties of its journalistic style. "_An impenetrable mystery seems
destined to hang for ever_. . . " He knew every word by heart. "_An
impenetrable mystery_. . . . "

And the robust anarchist, hanging his head on his breast, fell into a
long reverie.

He was menaced by this thing in the very sources of his existence. He
could not issue forth to meet his various conquests, those that he
courted on benches in Kensington Gardens, and those he met near area
railings, without the dread of beginning to talk to them of an
impenetrable mystery destined. . . . He was becoming scientifically
afraid of insanity lying in wait for him amongst these lines. "_To hang
for ever over_." It was an obsession, a torture. He had lately failed
to keep several of these appointments, whose note used to be an unbounded
trustfulness in the language of sentiment and manly tenderness. The
confiding disposition of various classes of women satisfied the needs of
his self-love, and put some material means into his hand. He needed it
to live. It was there. But if he could no longer make use of it, he ran
the risk of starving his ideals and his body . . . "_This act of madness
or despair_."

"An impenetrable mystery" was sure "to hang for ever" as far as all
mankind was concerned. But what of that if he alone of all men could
never get rid of the cursed knowledge? And Comrade Ossipon's knowledge
was as precise as the newspaper man could make it--up to the very
threshold of the "_mystery destined to hang for ever_. . . ."

Comrade Ossipon was well informed. He knew what the gangway man of the
steamer had seen: "A lady in a black dress and a black veil, wandering at
midnight alongside, on the quay. 'Are you going by the boat, ma'am,' he
had asked her encouragingly. 'This way.' She seemed not to know what to
do. He helped her on board. She seemed weak."

And he knew also what the stewardess had seen: A lady in black with a
white face standing in the middle of the empty ladies' cabin. The
stewardess induced her to lie down there. The lady seemed quite
unwilling to speak, and as if she were in some awful trouble. The next
the stewardess knew she was gone from the ladies' cabin. The stewardess
then went on deck to look for her, and Comrade Ossipon was informed that
the good woman found the unhappy lady lying down in one of the hooded
seats. Her eyes were open, but she would not answer anything that was
said to her. She seemed very ill. The stewardess fetched the chief
steward, and those two people stood by the side of the hooded seat
consulting over their extraordinary and tragic passenger. They talked in
audible whispers (for she seemed past hearing) of St Malo and the Consul
there, of communicating with her people in England. Then they went away
to arrange for her removal down below, for indeed by what they could see
of her face she seemed to them to be dying. But Comrade Ossipon knew
that behind that white mask of despair there was struggling against
terror and despair a vigour of vitality, a love of life that could resist
the furious anguish which drives to murder and the fear, the blind, mad
fear of the gallows. He knew. But the stewardess and the chief steward
knew nothing, except that when they came back for her in less than five
minutes the lady in black was no longer in the hooded seat. She was
nowhere. She was gone. It was then five o'clock in the morning, and it
was no accident either. An hour afterwards one of the steamer's hands
found a wedding ring left lying on the seat. It had stuck to the wood in
a bit of wet, and its glitter caught the man's eye. There was a date,
24th June 1879, engraved inside. "_An impenetrable mystery is destined
to hang for ever_. . . . "

And Comrade Ossipon raised his bowed head, beloved of various humble
women of these isles, Apollo-like in the sunniness of its bush of hair.

The Professor had grown restless meantime. He rose.

"Stay," said Ossipon hurriedly. "Here, what do you know of madness and
despair?"

The Professor passed the tip of his tongue on his dry, thin lips, and
said doctorally:

"There are no such things. All passion is lost now. The world is
mediocre, limp, without force. And madness and despair are a force. And
force is a crime in the eyes of the fools, the weak and the silly who
rule the roost. You are mediocre. Verloc, whose affair the police has
managed to smother so nicely, was mediocre. And the police murdered him.
He was mediocre. Everybody is mediocre. Madness and despair! Give me
that for a lever, and I'll move the world. Ossipon, you have my cordial
scorn. You are incapable of conceiving even what the fat-fed citizen
would call a crime. You have no force." He paused, smiling sardonically
under the fierce glitter of his thick glasses.

"And let me tell you that this little legacy they say you've come into
has not improved your intelligence. You sit at your beer like a dummy.
Good-bye."

"Will you have it?" said Ossipon, looking up with an idiotic grin.

"Have what?"

"The legacy. All of it."

The incorruptible Professor only smiled. His clothes were all but
falling off him, his boots, shapeless with repairs, heavy like lead, let
water in at every step. He said:

"I will send you by-and-by a small bill for certain chemicals which I
shall order to-morrow. I need them badly. Understood--eh?"

Ossipon lowered his head slowly. He was alone. "_An impenetrable
mystery_. . . . " It seemed to him that suspended in the air before him
he saw his own brain pulsating to the rhythm of an impenetrable mystery.
It was diseased clearly. . . . "_This act of madness or despair_."

The mechanical piano near the door played through a valse cheekily, then
fell silent all at once, as if gone grumpy.

Comrade Ossipon, nicknamed the Doctor, went out of the Silenus beer-hall.
At the door he hesitated, blinking at a not too splendid sunlight--and
the paper with the report of the suicide of a lady was in his pocket. His
heart was beating against it. The suicide of a lady--_this act of
madness or despair_.

He walked along the street without looking where he put his feet; and he
walked in a direction which would not bring him to the place of
appointment with another lady (an elderly nursery governess putting her
trust in an Apollo-like ambrosial head). He was walking away from it. He
could face no woman. It was ruin. He could neither think, work, sleep,
nor eat. But he was beginning to drink with pleasure, with anticipation,
with hope. It was ruin. His revolutionary career, sustained by the
sentiment and trustfulness of many women, was menaced by an impenetrable
mystery--the mystery of a human brain pulsating wrongfully to the rhythm
of journalistic phrases. " . . . _Will hang for ever over this act_. . . .
It was inclining towards the gutter . . . _of madness or despair_."

"I am seriously ill," he muttered to himself with scientific insight.
Already his robust form, with an Embassy's secret-service money
(inherited from Mr Verloc) in his pockets, was marching in the gutter as
if in training for the task of an inevitable future. Already he bowed
his broad shoulders, his head of ambrosial locks, as if ready to receive
the leather yoke of the sandwich board. As on that night, more than a
week ago, Comrade Ossipon walked without looking where he put his feet,
feeling no fatigue, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, hearing not a sound.
"_An impenetrable mystery_. . . ." He walked disregarded. . . . "_This
act of madness or despair_."

And the incorruptible Professor walked too, averting his eyes from the
odious multitude of mankind. He had no future. He disdained it. He was
a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He
walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable--and terrible in the
simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of
the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly,
like a pest in the street full of men.