第35章

`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 kerbstone.

`Ossipon, I think 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 seashore, 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 forever...'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 need 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 forever...'.

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.'