第34章

THE enormous iron padlock on the doors of the wall cupboard was the only object in the room on which the eye could rest without becoming afflicted by the miserable unloveliness of forms and the poverty of material.Unsaleable in the ordinary course of business on account of its noble proportions, it had been ceded to the Professor for a few pence by a marine dealer in the east of London.The room was large, clean, respectable, and poor with that poverty suggesting the starvation of every human need except mere bread.There was nothing on the walls but the paper, an expanse of arsenical green, soiled with indelible smudges here and there, and with stains resembling faded maps of uninhabited continents.

At a deal table near a window sat Comrade Ossipon, holding his head between his fists.The Professor, dressed in only his suit of shoddy tweeds, but flapping to and fro on the bare boards a pair of incredibly dilapidated slippers, had thrust his hands deep into the over-strained pockets of his jacket.He was relating to his robust guest a visit he had lately been paying Co the Apostle Michaelis.The Perfect Anarchist had even been unbending a little.

`The fellow didn't know anything of Verloc's death.Of course! He never looks at the newspapers.They make him too sad, he says.But never mind.

I walked into his cottage.Not a soul anywhere.1 had to shout half a dozen times before he answered me.I thought he was fast asleep yet, in bed.

But not at all.He had been writing his book for four hours already.He sat in that tiny cage in a litter of manuscript.There was a half-eaten raw carrot on the table near him.His breakfast.He lives on a diet of raw carrots and a little milk now.'

`How does he look on it?' asked Comrade Ossipon, listlessly.

`Angelic...I picked up a handful of his pages from the floor.The poverty of reasoning is astonishing.He has no logic.He can't think consecutively.

But that's nothing.He has divided his biography into three parts, entitled `Faith, Hope, Charity'.He is elaborating now the idea of a world planned out like an immense and nice hospital, with gardens and flowers, in which the strong are to devote them+selves to the nursing of the weak.'

The Professor paused.

`Conceive you this folly, Ossipon? The weak! The source of all evil on this earth!' he continued with his grim assurance.`I told him that I dreamt of a world like shambles, where the weak would be taken in hand for utter extermination.

`Do you understand, Ossipon? The source of all evil! They are our sinister masters - the weak, the flabby, the silly, the cowardly, the faint of heart, and the slavish of mind.They have power.They are the multitude.Theirs is the kingdom of the earth.Exterminate, exterminate! That is the only way of progress.It is! Follow me, Ossipon.First the great multitude of the weak must go, then the only relatively strong.You see? First the blind, then the deaf and the dumb, then the halt and the lame - and so on.Every taint, every vice, every prejudice, every convention must meet its doom.'

`And what remains?' asked Ossipon in a stifled voice.

`I remain - if I am strong enough,' asserted the sallow little Professor, whose large ears, thin like membranes, and standing far out from the sides of his frail skull, took on suddenly a deep red tint.

`Haven't I suffered enough from this oppression of the weak?' he continued forcibly.Then tapping the breast-pocket of his jacket: `And yet I am the force,' he went on.`But the time! The time! Give me time! Ah! that multitude, too stupid to feel either pity or fear.Sometimes I think they have everything on their side.Everything - even death - my own weapon.

`Come and drink some beer with me at the Silenus,' said the robust Ossipon after an interval of silence pervaded by the rapid flap, flap of the slippers on the feet of the Perfect Anarchist.This last accepted.He was jovial that day in his own peculiar way.He slapped Ossipon's shoulder.

`Beer! So be it! Let us drink and be merry, for we are strong, and tomorrow we die.'

He busied himself with putting on his boots, and talked meanwhile in his curt, resolute tones.

`What's the matter with you, Ossipon? You look glum and seek even my company.I hear that you are seen constantly in places where men utter foolish things over glasses of liquor.Why? Have you abandoned your collection of women? They are the weak who feed the strong - eh?'

He stamped one foot, and picked up his other laced boot, heavy, thick-soled, unblacked, mended many times.He smiled to himself grimly.

`Tell me, Ossipon, terrible man, has ever one of your victims killed herself for you - or are your triumphs so far incomplete - for blood alone puts a seal on greatness? Blood.Death.Look at history.'

`You be damned,' said Ossipon, without turning his head.

`Why? Let that be the hope of the weak, whose theology has invented hell for the strong.Ossipon, my feeling for you is amicable contempt.

You couldn't kill a fly.'

But rolling to the feast on the top of the omnibus the Professor lost his high spirits.The contemplation of the multitudes thronging the pavements extinguished his assurance under a load of doubt and uneasiness which he could shake off after a period of seclusion in the room with the large cupboard closed by an enormous padlock.

`And so,' said over his shoulder Comrade Ossipon, who sat on the seat behind.`And so Michaelis dreams of a world like a beautiful and cheery hospital.'

`Just so.An immense charity for the healing of the weak,' assented the Professor, sardonically.

`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.'