Chapter: 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 his only 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 overstrained
pockets of his jacket.  He was relating to his robust guest a visit he
had lately been paying to 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.  I 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 themselves 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 he merry, for we are strong, and
to-morrow 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 only 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."

"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 his 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.

 The chapter opens on Comrade Ossipon, who is hanging out at the apartment of the weird little maniac named The Professor. The room is shabby and gross, just like the Professors clothing and general appearance. The Professor is talking about a visit he recently made to Michaelis, who apparently knew nothing of Verloc's death. Apparently, Michaelis spends all his days sitting around in a nest of manuscripts, writing thought after thought without making any sense, since he has completely lost his ability to form logical connections. The Professor sneers at Michaelis' idealistic belief that all the strong people in future society will dedicate themselves to caring for the weak. The Professor thinks that the strong should devote themselves to exterminating the weak. He hates the "multitude" of mediocre people in the world, who for some reason seem to hold all the power: "First the great multitude of the weak must go, then the only relatively strong" . Ossipon then asks what will remain after all this exterminating, and the Professor tells him, "I remain--if I am strong enough" . Again, this is typical psychopathy coming from the Professor: the belief that everyone in the world except him is mediocre, and the belief that his poverty is just a symptom of how stupid the world is, since all the mediocre people have so much more social power than him. The Professor believes that he suffers from the oppression of people who aren't as great as himself: he sees the world as a bunch of leeches always trying to drain him. And yet he has no evidence at all to back up his deranged belief in his own greatness. Ossipon asks the Professor to come drink with him, since he seems to be pretty desperate for company. The Professor is happy about the offer for free drinks, and he starts teasing Ossipon about all the women he's been with. He even asks melodramatically if a woman has ever killed herself for Ossipon. Ossipon gets really angry at this. As soon as they're on a bus heading for the bar, the Professor loses his confidence while looking at the masses of people on the streets. He realizes that to regain his confidence, hell have to go sit in his room later in the day. Just as we saw in Chapter Four, the Professor has a very difficult time believing in his own greatness when he recognizes just how many people are swarming over the planet Earth, and just how many of these people have no clue who he is. They sit down in the bar, where Ossipon says that Michaelis might not be so far off in his judgment, since humanity wants to live, and caring for the weak might be part of this. The Professor insists that, "Mankind does not know what it wants" . Ossipon counters by saying that no matter how great the Professor thinks he is, he's still going to die someday, and the world will forget him as if he never existed. The Professor simply retorts that Ossipon is a "humbug" or grouch . Nonetheless, Ossipon's words have had an effect on him. "The thought of a mankind as numerous as the sands of the seashore, as indestructible, as difficult to handle, oppresse him" . The Professor thinks of Verloc blowing himself up. This happened only a week earlier, and already people have stopped talking about it. Ossipon, without thinking, pulls a folded newspaper out of his pocket. He glances at the final lines of a story, which read: "An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this act of madness or despair" . Then he reads the headline, which mentions the "Suicide of Lady Passenger from a cross-Channel Boat" . Ossipon thinks about all the appointments he has with the various women in London who support him financially. But he can't go see any of them, because he can't stop thinking about Winnie, who is obviously the woman who has killed herself in the article. This explains why Ossipon was so rattled when the Professor asked him if a woman had ever killed herself for him. Ossipon thinks over the story in the paper, which speaks about a woman in black who was seen wandering around the boat from England to France as though she were very sick. A few crew members made her lie down on the deck while they left for five minutes. When they came back, she was gone. An hour later, "one of the steamers hands found a wedding ring left lying on the seat" . The date of her wedding was on it, which was June 24th, 1879. Knowing that she was married for seven years, we can deduce that this story has taken place in 1886. The Professor has gotten restless at Ossipon's silence, so he gets up to leave. Ossipon tells him to stay, and asks him if he knows anything about madness and despair. The Professor replies that there is no such thing as madness or despair in the world anymore, since these are strong emotions, and the world is governed completely by limp, flavorless emotions. He goes on to tell Ossipon that he is mediocre, and that Verloc was mediocre, too. "Everybody is mediocre" . He also says that he's heard about the bit of money Ossipon has come into, and says that it hasn't made him any more intelligent. The Professor is obviously referring to Winnie's money, which Ossipon has been spending on booze. Ossipon offers the Professor all the money he has. The Professor answers by saying that he's got a shipment of chemicals coming in that he can't pay for, so he'll send Ossipon a bill. After the Professor leaves, Ossipon gets up to go, too. He feels completely alone in the world. He cannot face another woman ever again. "His revolutionary career, sustained by the sentiment and trustfulness of many women, menaced by an impenetrable mystery" , which is the madness and despair that Winnie Verloc felt in her final moments. Ossipon feels that he's become mentally ill, and walks with almost no feeling in his entire body. Meanwhile, "the incorruptible Professor walk, too, averting his eyes from the odious multitude of mankind" . His fantasy of being a superior, talented human being can no longer sustain itself in the face of humanity's sheer numbers. It's impossible to be as important as he thinks he is, because there are simply too many people for any individual to stand out in the world. The final lines of the book read: "Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men" . In other words, the book doesn't deny that the Professor is still deadly. Rather, the fact that he's deadly doesn't make him superhuman. At the end of the day, he's just a little pipsqueak who's going to die like everyone else. The End. That's Conrad for you: good to the last drop.

