The shortness of breath took all fire, all animation out of his voice;his great, pale cheeks hung like filled pouches, motionless, without a quiver; but in his blue eyes, narrowed as if peering, there was the same look of confident shrewdness, a little crazy in its fixity, they must have had while the indomitable optimist sat thinking at night in his cell.Before him, Karl Yundt remained standing, one wing of his faded greenish havelock thrown back cavalierly over his shoulder.Seated in front of the fireplace, Comrade Ossipon, ex-medical student, the principal writer of the F.P.leaflets, stretched out his robust legs, keeping the soles of his boots turned up to the glow in the grate.A bush of crinkly yellow hair topped his red, freckled face, with a flattened nose and prominent mouth cast in the rough mould of the Negro type.His almond-shaped eyes leered languidly over the high cheek-bones.He wore a grey flannel shirt, the loose ends of a black silk tie hung down the buttoned breast of his serge coat; and his head resting on the back of his chair, his throat largely exposed, he raised to his lips a cigarette in a long wooden tube, puffing jets of smoke straight up at the ceiling.
Michaelis pursued his idea - the idea of his solitary reclusion - the thought vouchsafed to his captivity and growing like a faith revealed in visions.He talked to himself, indifferent to the sympathy or hostility of his hearers, indifferent indeed to their presence, from the habit he had acquired of thinking aloud hopefully in the solitude of the four whitewashed walls of his cell, in the sepulchral silence of the great blind pile of bricks near a river, sinister and ugly like a colossal mortuary for the socially drowned.
He was no good in discussion, not because any amount of argument could shake his faith, but because the mere fact of hearing another voice disconcerted him painfully, confusing his thoughts at once - these thoughts that for so many years, in a mental solitude more barren than a waterless desert, no living voice had ever combated, commented, or approved.
No one interrupted him now, and he made again the confession of his faith, mastering him irresistible and complete like an act of grace: the secret of fate discovered in the material side of life; the economic condition of the world responsible for the past and shaping the future; the source of all ideas, guiding the mental development of mankind and the very impulses of their passion--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; 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 dullness of common mortals.
`That's what he may be called scientifically.Very good type, too, altogether, of that sort of degenerate.It's good 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.'
