eless out of the stream of life. He walked. And suddenly turning
into a strip of a front garden with a mangy grass plot, he let himself
into a small grimy house with a latch-key he took out of his pocket.

He threw himself down on his bed all dressed, and lay still for a whole
quarter of an hour. Then he sat up suddenly, drawing up his knees, and
clasping his legs. The first dawn found him open-eyed, in that same
posture. This man who could walk so long, so far, so aimlessly, without
showing a sign of fatigue, could also remain sitting still for hours
without stirring a limb or an eyelid. But when the late sun sent its
rays into the room he unclasped his hands, and fell back on the pillow.
His eyes stared at the ceiling. And suddenly they closed. Comrade
Ossipon slept in the sunlight.

CHAPTER XIII

The enormous iron padlock on the doors of the wall cupboard was the only
object in the room on which the eye could rest without becoming afflicted
by the miserable unloveliness of forms and the poverty of material.
Unsaleable in the ordinary course of business on account of its noble
proportions, it had been ceded to the Professor for a few pence by a
marine dealer in the east of London. The room was large, clean,
respectable, and poor with that poverty suggesting the starvation of
every human need except mere bread. There was nothing on the walls but
the paper, an expanse of arsenical green, soiled with indelible smudges
here and there, and with stains resembling faded maps of uninhabited
continents.

At a deal table near a window sat Comrade Ossipon, holding his head
between his fists. The Professor, dressed in his only suit of shoddy
tweeds, but flapping to and fro on the bare boards a pair of incredibly
dilapidated slippers, had thrust his hands deep into the overstrained
pockets of his jacket. He was relating to his robust guest a visit he
had lately been paying to the Apostle Michaelis. The Perfect Anarchist
had even been unbending a little.

"The fellow didn't know anything of Verloc's death. Of course! He never
looks at the newspapers. They make him too sad, he says. But never
mind. I walked into his cottage. Not a soul anywhere. I had to shout
half-a-dozen times before he answered me. I thought he was fast asleep
yet, in bed. But not at all. He had been writing his book for four
hours already. He sat in that tiny cage in a litter of manuscript.
There was a half-eaten raw carrot o