The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
The short jacket and the low, round hat he assumed in a sort of curtained
alcove containing a washstand, a row of wooden pegs and a shelf, brought
out wonderfully the length of his grave, brown face. He stepped back
into the full light of the room, looking like the vision of a cool,
reflective Don Quixote, with the sunken eyes of a dark enthusiast and a
very deliberate manner. He left the scene of his daily labours quickly
like an unobtrusive shadow. His descent into the street was like the
descent into a slimy aquarium from which the water had been run off. A
murky, gloomy dampness enveloped him. The walls of the houses were wet,
the mud of the roadway glistened with an effect of phosphorescence, and
when he emerged into the Strand out of a narrow street by the side of
Charing Cross Station the genius of the locality assimilated him. He
might have been but one more of the queer foreign fish that can be seen
of an evening about there flitting round the dark corners.
He came to a stand on the very edge of the pavement, and waited. His
exercised eyes had made out in the confused movements of lights and
shadows thronging the roadway the crawling approach of a hansom. He gave
no sign; but when the low step gliding along the curbstone came to his
feet he dodged in skilfully in front of the big turning wheel, and spoke
up through the little trap door almost before the man gazing supinely
ahead from his perch was aware of having been boarded by a fare.
It was not a long drive. It ended by signal abruptly, nowhere in
particular, between two lamp-posts before a large drapery establishment—a
long range of shops already lapped up in sheets of corrugated iron for
the night. Tendering a coin through the trap door the fare slipped out
and away, leaving an effect of uncanny, eccentric ghastliness upon the
driver’s mind. But the size of the coin was satisfactory to his touch,
and his education not being literary, he remained untroubled by the fear
of finding it presently turned to a dead leaf in his pocket. Raised
above the world of fares by the nature of his calling, he contemplated
their actions with a limited interest. The sharp pulling of his horse
right round expressed his philosophy.
Meantime the Assistant Commissioner was already giving his order to a
waiter in a little Italian restaurant round the corner—one of those traps
for the hungry, long and narrow, baited with a perspective of mirrors and
white napery; without air, but with an atmosphere of their own—an
atmosphere of fraudulent cookery mocking an abject mankind in the most
pressing of its miserable necessities. In this immoral atmosphere the
Assistant Commissioner, reflecting upon his enterprise, seemed to lose
some more of his identity. He had a sense of loneliness, of evil
freedom. It was rather pleasant. When, after paying for his short meal,
he stood up and waited for his change, he saw himself in the sheet of
glass, and was struck by his foreign appearance. He contemplated his own
image with a melancholy and inquisitive gaze, then by sudden inspiration
raised the collar of his jacket. This arrangement appeared to him
commendable, and he completed it by giving an upward twist to the ends of
his black moustache. He was satisfied by the subtle modification of his
personal aspect caused by these small changes. “That’ll do very well,”
he thought. “I’ll get a little wet, a little splashed—”
He became aware of the waiter at his elbow and of a small pile of silver
coins on the edge of the table before him. The waiter kept one eye on
it, while his other eye followed the long back of a tall, not very young
girl, who passed up to a distant table looking perfectly sightless and
altogether unapproachable. She seemed to be a habitual customer.
On going out the Assistant Commissioner made to himself the observation
that the patrons of the place had lost in the frequentation of fraudulent
cookery all their national and private characteristics. And this was
strange, since the Italian restaurant is such a peculiarly British
institution. But these people were as denationalised as the dishes set
before them with every circumstance of unstamped respectability. Neither
was their personality stamped in any way, professionally, socially or
racially. They seemed created for the Italian restaurant, unless the
Italian restaurant had been perchance created for them. But that last
hypothesis was unthinkable, since one could not place them anywhere
outside those special establishments. One never met these enigmatical
persons elsewhere. It was impossible to form a precise idea what
occupations they followed by day and where they went to bed at night.
And he himself had become unplaced. It would have been impossible for
anybody to guess his occupation. As to going to bed, there was a doubt
even in his own mind. Not indeed in regard to his domicile itself, but
very much so in respect of the time when he would be able to return
there. A pleasurable feeling of independence possessed him when he heard
the glass doors swing to behind his back with a sort of imperfect baffled
thud. He advanced at once into an immensity of greasy slime and damp
plaster interspersed with lamps, and enveloped, oppressed, penetrated,
choked, and suffocated by the blackness of a wet London night, which is
composed of soot and drops of water.
Brett Street was not very far away. It branched off, narrow, from the
side of an open triangular space surrounded by dark and mysterious
houses, temples of petty commerce emptied of traders for the night. Only
a fruiterer’s stall at the corner made a violent blaze of light and
colour. Beyond all was black, and the few people passing in that
direction vanished at one stride beyond the glowing heaps of oranges and
lemons. No footsteps echoed. They would never be heard of again. The
adventurous head of the Special Crimes Department watched these
disappearances from a distance with an interested eye. He felt
light-hearted, as though he had been ambushed all alone in a jungle many
thousands of miles away from departmental desks and official inkstands.
This joyousness and dispersion of thought before a task of some
importance seems to prove that this world of ours is not such a very
serious affair after all. For the Assistant Commissioner was not
constitutionally inclined to levity.
The policeman on the beat projected his sombre and moving form against
the luminous glory of oranges and lemons, and entered Brett Street
without haste. The Assistant Commissioner, as though he were a member of
the criminal classes, lingered out of sight, awaiting his return. But
this constable seemed to be lost for ever to the force. He never
returned: must have gone out at the other end of Brett Street.
The Assistant Commissioner, reaching this conclusion, entered the street
in his turn, and came upon a large van arrested in front of the dimly lit
window-panes of a carter’s eating-house. The man was refreshing himself
inside, and the horses, their big heads lowered to the ground, fed out of
nose-bags steadily. Farther on, on the opposite side of the street,
another suspect patch of dim light issued from Mr Verloc’s shop front,
hung with papers, heaving with vague piles of cardboard boxes and the
shapes of books. The Assistant Commissioner stood observing it across
the roadway. There could be no mistake. By the side of the front
window, encumbered by the shadows of nondescript things, the door,
standing ajar, let escape on the pavement a narrow, clear streak of
gas-light within.
Behind the Assistant Commissioner the van and horses, merged into one
mass, seemed something alive—a square-backed black monster blocking half
the street, with sudden iron-shod stampings, fierce jingles, and heavy,
blowing sighs. The harshly festive, ill-omened glare of a large and
prosperous public-house faced the other end of Brett Street across a wide
road. This barrier of blazing lights, opposing the shadows gathered
about the humble abode of Mr Verloc’s domestic happiness, seemed to drive
the obscurity of the street back upon itself, make it more sullen,
brooding, and sinister.
CHAPTER VIII
Having infused by persistent importunities some sort of heat into the
chilly interest of several licensed victuallers (the acquaintances once
upon a time of her late unlucky husband), Mrs Verloc’s mother had at last
secured her admission to certain almshouses founded by a wealthy
innkeeper for the destitute widows of the trade.
This end, conceived in the astuteness of her uneasy heart, the old woman
had pursued with secrecy and determination. That was the time when her
daughter Winnie could not help passing a remark to Mr Verloc that “mother
has been spending half-crowns and five shillings almost every day this
last week in cab fares.” But the remark was not made grudgingly. Winnie
respected her mother’s infirmities. She was only a little surprised at
this sudden mania for locomotion. Mr Verloc, who was sufficiently
magnificent in his way, had grunted the remark impatiently aside as
interfering with his meditations. These were frequent, deep, and
prolonged; they bore upon a matter more important than five shillings.
Distinctly more important, and beyond all comparison more difficult to
consider in all its aspects with philosophical serenity.
Her object attained in astute secrecy, the heroic old woman had made a
clean breast of it to Mrs Verloc. Her soul was triumphant and her heart
tremulous. Inwardly she quaked, because she dreaded and admired the
calm, self-contained character of her daughter Winnie, whose displeasure
was made redoubtable by a diversity of dreadful silences. But she did
not allow her inward apprehensions to rob her of the advantage of
venerable placidity conferred upon her outward person by her triple chin,
the floating ampleness of her ancient form, and the impotent condition of
her legs.
The shock of the information was so unexpected that Mrs Verloc, against
her usual practice when addressed, interrupted the domestic occupation
she was engaged upon. It was the dusting of the furniture in the parlour
behind the shop. She turned her head towards her mother.
“Whatever did you want to do that for?” she exclaimed, in scandalised
astonishment.
The shock must have been severe to make her depart from that distant and
uninquiring acceptance of facts which was her force and her safeguard in
life.
“Weren’t you made comfortable enough here?”
She had lapsed into these inquiries, but next moment she saved the
consistency of her conduct by resuming her dusting, while the old woman
sat scared and dumb under her dingy white cap and lustreless dark wig.
Winnie finished the chair, and ran the duster along the mahogany at the
back of the horse-hair sofa on which Mr Verloc loved to take his ease in
hat and overcoat. She was intent on her work, but presently she
permitted herself another question.
“How in the world did you manage it, mother?”
As not affecting the inwardness of things, which it was Mrs Verloc’s
principle to ignore, this curiosity was excusable. It bore merely on the
methods. The old woman welcomed it eagerly as bringing forward something
that could be talked about with much sincerity.
She favoured her daughter by an exhaustive answer, full of names and
enriched by side comments upon the ravages of time as observed in the
alteration of human countenances. The names were principally the names
of licensed victuallers—“poor daddy’s friends, my dear.” She enlarged
with special appreciation on the kindness and condescension of a large
brewer, a Baronet and an M. P., the Chairman of the Governors of the
Charity. She expressed herself thus warmly because she had been allowed