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.