第48章

Comrade Ossipon met the shock of this blasphemy by an awful, vacant stare.And the other, his extinguished eyes without gleams blackening the deep shadows under the great, bony forehead, mumbled, catching the tip of his tongue between his lips at every second word as though he were chewing it angrily:

`Did you ever see such an idiot? For him the criminal is the prisoner.

Simple, is it not? What about those who shut him up there - forced him in there? Exactly.Forced him in there.And what is crime? Does he know that, this imbecile who has made his way in this world of gorged fools by looking at the ears and teeth of a lot of poor, luckless devils? Teeth and ears mark the criminal? Do they? And what about the law that marks him still better - the pretty branding instrument invented by the overfed to protect themselves against the hungry? Red-hot applications on their vile skins - hey? Can't you smell and hear from here the thick hide of the people burn and sizzle? That's how criminals are made for your Lombrosos to write their silly stuff about.'

The knob of his stick and his legs shook together with passion, whilst the trunk, draped in the wings of the havelock, preserved his historic attitude of defiance.He seemed to sniff the tainted air of social cruelty, to strain his ear for its atrocious sounds.There was an extraordinary force of suggestion in this posturing.The all but moribund veteran of dynamite wars had been a great actor in his time - actor on platforms, in secret assemblies, in private interviews.The famous terrorist had never in his life raised personally as much as his little finger against the social edifice.He was no man of action; he was not even an orator of torrential eloquence, sweeping the masses along in the rushing noise and foam of a great enthusiasm.With a more subtle intention, he took the part of an insolent and venomous evoker of sinister impulses which lurk in the blind envy and exasperated vanity of ignorance, in the suffering and misery of poverty, in all the hopeful and noble illusions of righteous anger, pity, and revolt.The shadow of his evil gift clung to him yet like the smell of a deadly drug in an old vial of poison, emptied now, useless, ready to be thrown away upon the rubbish-heap of things that had served their time.

Michaelis, the ticket-of-leave apostle, smiled vaguely with his glued lips; his pasty moon face drooped under the weight of melancholy assent.

He had been a prisoner himself.His own skin had sizzled under the red-hot brand, he murmured softly.But Comrade Ossipon, nicknamed the Doctor, had got over the shock by that time.

`You don't understand,' he began, disdainfully, but stopped short, intimidated by the dead blackness of the cavernous eyes in the face turned slowly towards him with a blind stare, as if guided only by the sound.He gave the discussion up, with a slight shrug of the shoulders.

Stevie, accustomed to move about disregarded, had got up from the kitchen table, carrying off his drawing to bed with him.He had reached the parlour door in time to receive in full the shock of Karl Yundt's eloquent imagery.

The sheet of paper covered with circles dropped out of his fingers, and he remained staring at the old terrorist, as if rooted suddenly to the spot by his morbid horror and dread of physical pain.Stevie knew very well that hot iron applied to one's skin hurt very much.His scared eyes blazed with indignation: it would hurt terribly.His mouth dropped open.

Michaelis by staring unwinkingly at the fire had regained that sentiment of isolation necessary for the continuity of his thought.His optimism had begun to flow from his lips.He saw Capitalism doomed in its cradle, born with the poison of the principle of competition in its system.The great capitalists devouring the little capitalists, concentrating the power and the tools of production in great masses, perfecting industrial processes, and in the madness of self-aggrandizement only preparing, organizing, enriching, making ready the lawful inheritance of the suffering proletariat.Michaelis pronounced the great word `Patience' - and his clear blue glance, raised to the low ceiling of Mr Verloc's parlour, had a character of seraphic trustfulness.In the doorway Stevie, calmed, seemed sunk in hebetude.

Comrade Ossipon's face twitched with exasperation.`Then it's no use doing anything - no use whatever.'

`I don't say that,' protested Michaelis, gently.His vision of truth had grown so intense that the sound of a strange voice failed to rout it this time.He continued to look down at the red coals.Preparation for the future was necessary, and he was willing to admit that the great change would perhaps come in the upheaval of a revolution.But he argued that revolutionary propaganda was a delicate work of high conscience.It was the education of the masters of the world.It should be as careful as the education given to kings.He would have it advance its tenets cautiously, even timidly, in our ignorance of the effect that may be produced by any given economic change upon the happiness, the morals, the intellect, the history of mankind.For history is made with tools, not with ideas; and everything is changed by economic conditions - art, philosophy, love, virtue - truth itself!

The coals in the grate settled down with a slight crash; and Michaelis, the hermit of visions in the desert of a penitentiary, got up impetuously.

Round like a distended balloon, he opened his short, thick arms, as if in a pathetically hopeless attempt to embrace and hug to his breast a self-regenerated universe.He gasped with ardour.

`The future is as certain as the past - slavery, feudalism, individualism, collectivism.This is the statement of a law, not an empty prophecy.'

The disdainful pout of Comrade Ossipon's thick lips accentuated the Negro type of his face.

`Nonsense,' he said, calmly enough.`There is no law and no certainty.