第59章

The Professor had turned into a street to the left, and walked along, with his head carried rigidly erect, in a crowd whose every individual almost overtopped his stunted stature.It was vain to pretend to himself that he was not disappointed.But that was mere feeling; the stoicism of Ms thought could not be disturbed by this or any other failure.Next time, or the time after next, a telling stroke would be delivered - something really startling - a blow fit to open the first crack in the imposing front of the great edifice of legal conceptions sheltering the atrocious injustice of society.Of humble origin, and with an appearance really so mean as to stand in the way of his considerable natural abilities, his imagination had been fired early by the tales of men rising from the depths of poverty to positions of authority and affluence.The extreme, almost ascetic purity of his thought, combined with an astounding ignorance of worldly conditions, had set before him a goal of power and prestige to be attained without the medium of arts, graces, tact, wealth - by sheer weight of merit alone.

On that view he considered himself entitled to undisputed success.His father, a delicate dark enthusiast with a sloping forehead, had been an itinerant and rousing preacher of some obscure but rigid Christian sect - a man supremely confident in the privileges of his righteousness.In the son, individualist by temperament, once the science of colleges had replaced thoroughly the faith of conventicles, this moral attitude translated itself into a frenzied puritanism of ambition.He nursed it as something secularly holy.To see it thwarted opened his eyes to the true nature of the world, whose morality was artificial, corrupt and blasphemous.The way of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds.The Professor's indignation found in itself a final cause that absolved him from the sin of turning to destruction as the agent of his ambition.To destroy public faith in legality was the imperfect formula of his pedantic fanaticism; but the subconscious conviction that the framework of an established social order cannot be effectually shattered except by some form of collective or individual violence was precise and correct.He was a moral agent - that was settled in his mind.By exercising his agency with ruthless defiance he procured for himself the appearances of power and personal prestige.That was undeniable to his vengeful bitterness.

It pacified its unrest; and in their own way the most ardent of revolutionaries are perhaps doing no more but seeking for peace in common with the rest of mankind - the peace of soothed vanity, of satisfied appetites, or perhaps of appeased conscience.

Lost in the crowd, miserable and undersized, he meditated confidently on his power, keeping his hand in the left pocket of his trousers, grasping lightly the indiarubber ball, the supreme guarantee of his sinister freedom:

but after a while he became disagreeably affected by the sight of the roadway thronged with vehicles and of the pavement crowded with men and women.

He was in a long, straight street, peopled by a mere fraction of an immense multitude; but all round him, on and on, even to the limits of the horizon hidden by the enormous piles of bricks, he felt the mass of mankind mighty in its numbers.They swarmed numerous like locusts, industrious like ants, thoughtless like a natural force, pushing on blind and orderly and absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic, to terror, too, perhaps.

That was the form of doubt he feared most.Impervious to fear! Often while walking abroad, when he happened also to come out of himself, he had such moments of dreadful and sane mistrust of mankind.What if nothing could move them? Such moments come to all men whose ambition aims at a direct grasp upon humanity - to artists, politicians, thinkers, reformers, or saints.A despicable emotional state this, against which solitude fortifies a superior character; and with severe exultation the Professor thought of the refuge of his room, with its padlocked cupboard, lost in a wilderness of poor houses, the hermitage of the perfect anarchist.In order to reach sooner the point where he could take his omnibus, he turned brusquely out of the populous street into a narrow and dusky alley paved with flagstones.

On one side the low brick houses had in their dusty windows the sightless, moribund look of incurable decay - empty shells awaiting demolition.From the other side life had not departed wholly as yet.Facing the only gas-lamp yawned the cavern of a second-hand-furniture dealer, where, deep in the gloom of a sort of narrow avenue winding through a bizarre forest of wardrobes, with an undergrowth tangle of table legs, a tall pier-glass glimmered like a pool of water in a wood.An unhappy, homeless couch, accompanied by two unrelated chairs, stood in the open.The only human being making use of the alley besides the Professor, coming stalwart and erect from the opposite direction, checked his swinging pace suddenly.

`Hallo!' he said, and stood a little on one side watchfully.

The Professor had already stopped, with a ready half turn which brought his shoulders very near the other wall.His right hand fell lightly on the back of the outcast couch, the left remained purposefully plunged deep in the trouser pocket, and the roundness of the heavy rimmed spectacles imparted an owlish character to his moody, unperturbed face.

It was like a meeting in a side corridor of a mansion full of life.

The stalwart man was buttoned up in a dark overcoat, and carried an umbrella.

His hat, tilted back, uncovered a good deal of forehead, which appeared very white in the dusk.In the dark patches of the orbits the eyeballs glimmered piercingly.Long, drooping moustaches, the colour of ripe corn, framed with their points the square block of his shaved chin.

`I am not looking for you,' he said, curtly.