Secret Agent

by Joseph Conrad

  “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 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 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 on 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 Ossipon 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 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 c
ould 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.

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  The principal text of this Modern Library edition was set in a digitized version of Janson, a typeface that dates from about 1690 and was cut by Nicholas Kis, a Hungarian working in Amsterdam. The original matrices have survived and are held by the Stempel foundry in Germany. Hermann Zapf redesigned some of the weights and sizes for Stempel, basing his revisions on the original design.

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; JOSEPH CONRAD

  Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Russian-occupied Poland on December 3, 1857. His parents were aristocrats and intensely nationalistic political activists who were exiled to Vologda, northeast of Moscow, for their opposition to tsarist rule. Józef’s mother, Ewa, died in 1865 of tuberculosis, and his father, Apollo, succumbed to the same disease four years later. Józef was cared for by his uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, until the young man acted on a long-expressed desire to go to sea. In 1874 he left for Marseilles, where he began sailing for the French merchant service.

  In 1878, in money difficulties and no longer able to sail on French vessels because he had not secured an exemption from military service in Russia, Conrad attempted suicide. After his recovery, he left Marseilles on a British ship and went to England, where he worked the route between Lowestoft and Newcastle. He arrived in England virtually without qualifications and with very little English, but he was able in a few years to earn his master’s certificate in the British merchant marine and became a British national. Conrad traveled to Mauritius and Constantinople, worked on wool clippers from London to Australia, and sailed the waters of the Far East. These voyages were punctuated by long periods when he could not find suitable positions because of the decline in sail-powered transport in the age of the steamship.

  Conrad began writing in English, which became his language of choice after his native Polish and French, although he complained of difficulties with English grammar and syntax. His voyages provided the background for much of his fiction. “Youth” and “Typhoon” draw on Conrad’s personal experience with disasters at sea. In 1881, he became second mate on the Palestine, a ship that was rammed, caught in tempestuous gales in the English Channel, had its cargo of coal catch fire, and sank off Sumatra. His captaincy of the Otago from Bangkok in 1888 informs The Shadow-Line (1917) and the stories “Falk” and “The Secret Sharer.” “Heart of Darkness” (1899) is drawn from an expedition to the Belgian Congo in 1890. He was already working on a novel when he traveled to the Congo, where he expected to take command of a river steamer. The assignment failed to materialize and Conrad fell dangerously ill. On his return to England, he was forced to find work as a ship’s mate. He was able during this period of intermittent employment to devote more time to his writing, and in 1894 he submitted the novel Almayer’s Folly to the publisher Fisher Unwin. Unwin published it in 1895 under the anglicized version of Conrad’s Polish name.