In the last instance it is character alone that makes for one's safety....I have the means to make myself deadly, but that by itself, you understand, is absolutely nothing in the way of protection. What is effective is the belief those people have in my will to use the means. That's their impression. It is absolute. Therefore I am deadly.
Although the Professor is a diminutive man, especially compared to the tall Ossipon, with whom he is talking, the strength of his maniacal resolve makes him a formidable presence. He is more than happy to make it known to others -- he tells Ossipon in this scene -- that he carries on his person at all times an explosive powerful enough to kill, for example, any policeman with the gumption to try to arrest him (along with many others nearby). He realizes, too, that this kind of personal preparation is only effective insofar as others know about it and fear him for it; external impressions give him his individual power.
To break up the superstition and worship of legality should be our aim. Nothing would please me more than to see Inspector Heat and his likes take to shooting us down in broad daylight with the approval of the public. Half our battle would be won then; the disintegration of the old morality would have set in its very temple. That is what you ought to aim at. But you revolutionists will never understand that. You plan the future, you lose yourselves in reveries of economical systems derived from what is; whereas what's wanted is a clean sweep and a clear start for a new conception of life. That sort of future will take care of itself if you will only make room for it.
The Professor, in conversation with Ossipon, opposes his particular brand of anarchism with that of the latter's Red Committee. Whereas they want to transform society using its own mechanisms, the Professor is much more concerned with the kind of violence that would seem to come from outside any societal norms -- and would shatter them entirely. To this end, he wants to escape the strangely symbiotic relationship between the police and criminals, which is manifested in Inspector Heat's respect for thieves for valuing property as he, along with the bourgeois order behind him as a policeman, does.
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.
Conrad depicts the anarchists as pathetic figures whose actual conditions of existence belie their firebrand rhetoric. For example, Ossipon, Karl Yundt, and Michaelis all depend upon women for material and emotional support. They are all intensely lonely characters who seem to be striking out against the society they feel alienated from -- while not being entirely averse to certain reconciliations, if they make them feel better.
Chief Inspector Heat...gave a thought of regret to the world of thieves--sane, without morbid ideals, working by routine, respectful of constituted authority, free from all taint of hate and despair.
Chief Inspector Heat feels such a strong disdain for the anarchists, as opposed to thieves, because thieves seem at least to work within the same system that he, as a policeman, does. Inspector Heat, perhaps more so than any other character, is a dyed-in-the-wool professional whose main concern is the preservation of the status quo and the efficient functioning of the bureaucracy in which he and others find their places as cogs.
"Well then--speaking privately if you like--how long have you been in private touch with this Embassy spy?"
[...]
"Long before you were ever thought of for your place here."
In this conversation between Chief Inspector Heat and his superior, the Assistant Commissioner, Conrad keeps us informed of all the things that Inspector Heat wants to say but cannot because of his inferior rank. He feels himself the more experienced and effective agent of the government because of the on-the-ground work he carries out, as opposed to the Assistant Commissioner's office labors; however, rather than directly insult the man, he just leaves the implication by answering with the number of years.
Poor! Poor!
Stevie, though never able to articulate more than monosyllables, turns out to be one of the most moving characters of the novel. Besides reporting his verbal outbursts and mutterings, Conrad also accords the young man a great deal of physical description in order to illustrate how he speaks profoundly with his gestures and expressions. In this case, he feels outraged by the plight of the cabman's poor horse and the cabman's family.
Don't you know what the police are for, Stevie? They are there so that them as have nothing shouldn't take anything away from them who have.
Mrs. Verloc, along with her mother and brother, never speaks about politics -- unlike her husband and his associates -- but, on this one occasion, she shows in the simplest, most down-to-earth language how those problems of social inequality and the domination of the middle classes through the accumulation of property are experienced every day. The police, in particular, are exposed as the pawns of the ruling, propertied class.
Come here.
After inadvertently revealing to his wife the fact that he had led Stevie to blow himself up, Mr. Verloc becomes exasperated by her silence. Eventually, with exhaustion overtaking him, he settles down on the couch and calls her over in a conjugal tone. That she, in fact, comes over -- with a knife, and stabs him -- makes apparent the way in which the simple language of marriage and affection can conceal the power relations and material dependencies that would eventually drive Mrs. Verloc to murder.
An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this act of madness and despair.
Ossipon reads this line from a newspaper article on what he knows to be Mrs. Verloc's suicide. The line keeps repeating itself in his head even as he walks into the crowded street, fragmenting and concatenating into different forms to torment him. Although he knows so much of the background of the article's story, to the point of being able to visualize Mrs. Verloc, he finds himself in just the same position as the journalist, unable to understand the inscrutable moral core of the matter.
He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable--and terribly 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.
This description of the Professor in the last sentences of the novel -- just before we have a description of Ossipon as he, too, disappears in the street crowd -- presents an explanation for why Conrad subtitled his extraordinarily complex narrative "A Simple Tale": it is not that the tale is simple, or that the characters are easily understood people, but rather that they are motivated by a certain absoluteness of despair. They are more simple in the sense of the word that is close to "unintelligent."
