“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. Goodbye.”
“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 tomorrow. 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 forever 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.
Colophon
The Secret Agent
was published in 1907 by
Joseph Conrad.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Alex Cabal,
and is based on a transcription produced in 1997 by
David Price
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at
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The cover page is adapted from
The Houses of Parliament (Effect of Fog),
a painting completed in 1904 by
Claude Monet.
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Uncopyright
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