The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
to interview by appointment his Private Secretary—“a very polite
gentleman, all in black, with a gentle, sad voice, but so very, very thin
and quiet. He was like a shadow, my dear.”
Winnie, prolonging her dusting operations till the tale was told to the
end, walked out of the parlour into the kitchen (down two steps) in her
usual manner, without the slightest comment.
Shedding a few tears in sign of rejoicing at her daughter’s mansuetude in
this terrible affair, Mrs Verloc’s mother gave play to her astuteness in
the direction of her furniture, because it was her own; and sometimes she
wished it hadn’t been. Heroism is all very well, but there are
circumstances when the disposal of a few tables and chairs, brass
bedsteads, and so on, may be big with remote and disastrous consequences.
She required a few pieces herself, the Foundation which, after many
importunities, had gathered her to its charitable breast, giving nothing
but bare planks and cheaply papered bricks to the objects of its
solicitude. The delicacy guiding her choice to the least valuable and
most dilapidated articles passed unacknowledged, because Winnie’s
philosophy consisted in not taking notice of the inside of facts; she
assumed that mother took what suited her best. As to Mr Verloc, his
intense meditation, like a sort of Chinese wall, isolated him completely
from the phenomena of this world of vain effort and illusory appearances.
Her selection made, the disposal of the rest became a perplexing question
in a particular way. She was leaving it in Brett Street, of course. But
she had two children. Winnie was provided for by her sensible union with
that excellent husband, Mr Verloc. Stevie was destitute—and a little
peculiar. His position had to be considered before the claims of legal
justice and even the promptings of partiality. The possession of the
furniture would not be in any sense a provision. He ought to have it—the
poor boy. But to give it to him would be like tampering with his
position of complete dependence. It was a sort of claim which she feared
to weaken. Moreover, the susceptibilities of Mr Verloc would perhaps not
brook being beholden to his brother-in-law for the chairs he sat on. In
a long experience of gentlemen lodgers, Mrs Verloc’s mother had acquired
a dismal but resigned notion of the fantastic side of human nature. What
if Mr Verloc suddenly took it into his head to tell Stevie to take his
blessed sticks somewhere out of that? A division, on the other hand,
however carefully made, might give some cause of offence to Winnie. No,
Stevie must remain destitute and dependent. And at the moment of leaving
Brett Street she had said to her daughter: “No use waiting till I am
dead, is there? Everything I leave here is altogether your own now, my
dear.”
Winnie, with her hat on, silent behind her mother’s back, went on
arranging the collar of the old woman’s cloak. She got her hand-bag, an
umbrella, with an impassive face. The time had come for the expenditure
of the sum of three-and-sixpence on what might well be supposed the last
cab drive of Mrs Verloc’s mother’s life. They went out at the shop door.
The conveyance awaiting them would have illustrated the proverb that
“truth can be more cruel than caricature,” if such a proverb existed.
Crawling behind an infirm horse, a metropolitan hackney carriage drew up
on wobbly wheels and with a maimed driver on the box. This last
peculiarity caused some embarrassment. Catching sight of a hooked iron
contrivance protruding from the left sleeve of the man’s coat, Mrs
Verloc’s mother lost suddenly the heroic courage of these days. She
really couldn’t trust herself. “What do you think, Winnie?” She hung
back. The passionate expostulations of the big-faced cabman seemed to be
squeezed out of a blocked throat. Leaning over from his box, he
whispered with mysterious indignation. What was the matter now? Was it
possible to treat a man so? His enormous and unwashed countenance flamed
red in the muddy stretch of the street. Was it likely they would have
given him a licence, he inquired desperately, if—
The police constable of the locality quieted him by a friendly glance;
then addressing himself to the two women without marked consideration,
said:
“He’s been driving a cab for twenty years. I never knew him to have an
accident.”
“Accident!” shouted the driver in a scornful whisper.
The policeman’s testimony settled it. The modest assemblage of seven
people, mostly under age, dispersed. Winnie followed her mother into the
cab. Stevie climbed on the box. His vacant mouth and distressed eyes
depicted the state of his mind in regard to the transactions which were
taking place. In the narrow streets the progress of the journey was made
sensible to those within by the near fronts of the houses gliding past
slowly and shakily, with a great rattle and jingling of glass, as if
about to collapse behind the cab; and the infirm horse, with the harness
hung over his sharp backbone flapping very loose about his thighs,
appeared to be dancing mincingly on his toes with infinite patience.
Later on, in the wider space of Whitehall, all visual evidences of motion
became imperceptible. The rattle and jingle of glass went on
indefinitely in front of the long Treasury building—and time itself
seemed to stand still.
At last Winnie observed: “This isn’t a very good horse.”
Her eyes gleamed in the shadow of the cab straight ahead, immovable. On
the box, Stevie shut his vacant mouth first, in order to ejaculate
earnestly: “Don’t.”
The driver, holding high the reins twisted around the hook, took no
notice. Perhaps he had not heard. Stevie’s breast heaved.
“Don’t whip.”
The man turned slowly his bloated and sodden face of many colours
bristling with white hairs. His little red eyes glistened with moisture.
His big lips had a violet tint. They remained closed. With the dirty
back of his whip-hand he rubbed the stubble sprouting on his enormous
chin.
“You mustn’t,” stammered out Stevie violently. “It hurts.”
“Mustn’t whip,” queried the other in a thoughtful whisper, and
immediately whipped. He did this, not because his soul was cruel and his
heart evil, but because he had to earn his fare. And for a time the
walls of St Stephen’s, with its towers and pinnacles, contemplated in
immobility and silence a cab that jingled. It rolled too, however. But
on the bridge there was a commotion. Stevie suddenly proceeded to get
down from the box. There were shouts on the pavement, people ran
forward, the driver pulled up, whispering curses of indignation and
astonishment. Winnie lowered the window, and put her head out, white as
a ghost. In the depths of the cab, her mother was exclaiming, in tones
of anguish: “Is that boy hurt? Is that boy hurt?”
Stevie was not hurt, he had not even fallen, but excitement as usual had
robbed him of the power of connected speech. He could do no more than
stammer at the window. “Too heavy. Too heavy.” Winnie put out her hand
on to his shoulder.
“Stevie! Get up on the box directly, and don’t try to get down again.”
“No. No. Walk. Must walk.”
In trying to state the nature of that necessity he stammered himself into
utter incoherence. No physical impossibility stood in the way of his
whim. Stevie could have managed easily to keep pace with the infirm,
dancing horse without getting out of breath. But his sister withheld her
consent decisively. “The idea! Whoever heard of such a thing! Run
after a cab!” Her mother, frightened and helpless in the depths of the
conveyance, entreated: “Oh, don’t let him, Winnie. He’ll get lost.
Don’t let him.”
“Certainly not. What next! Mr Verloc will be sorry to hear of this
nonsense, Stevie,—I can tell you. He won’t be happy at all.”
The idea of Mr Verloc’s grief and unhappiness acting as usual powerfully
upon Stevie’s fundamentally docile disposition, he abandoned all
resistance, and climbed up again on the box, with a face of despair.
The cabby turned at him his enormous and inflamed countenance
truculently. “Don’t you go for trying this silly game again, young
fellow.”
After delivering himself thus in a stern whisper, strained almost to
extinction, he drove on, ruminating solemnly. To his mind the incident
remained somewhat obscure. But his intellect, though it had lost its
pristine vivacity in the benumbing years of sedentary exposure to the
weather, lacked not independence or sanity. Gravely he dismissed the
hypothesis of Stevie being a drunken young nipper.
Inside the cab the spell of silence, in which the two women had endured
shoulder to shoulder the jolting, rattling, and jingling of the journey,
had been broken by Stevie’s outbreak. Winnie raised her voice.
“You’ve done what you wanted, mother. You’ll have only yourself to thank
for it if you aren’t happy afterwards. And I don’t think you’ll be.
That I don’t. Weren’t you comfortable enough in the house? Whatever
people’ll think of us—you throwing yourself like this on a Charity?”
“My dear,” screamed the old woman earnestly above the noise, “you’ve been
the best of daughters to me. As to Mr Verloc—there—”
Words failing her on the subject of Mr Verloc’s excellence, she turned
her old tearful eyes to the roof of the cab. Then she averted her head
on the pretence of looking out of the window, as if to judge of their
progress. It was insignificant, and went on close to the curbstone.
Night, the early dirty night, the sinister, noisy, hopeless and rowdy
night of South London, had overtaken her on her last cab drive. In the
gas-light of the low-fronted shops her big cheeks glowed with an orange
hue under a black and mauve bonnet.
Mrs Verloc’s mother’s complexion had become yellow by the effect of age
and from a natural predisposition to biliousness, favoured by the trials
of a difficult and worried existence, first as wife, then as widow. It
was a complexion, that under the influence of a blush would take on an
orange tint. And this woman, modest indeed but hardened in the fires of
adversity, of an age, moreover, when blushes are not expected, had
positively blushed before her daughter. In the privacy of a
four-wheeler, on her way to a charity cottage (one of a row) which by the
exiguity of its dimensions and the simplicity of its accommodation, might
well have been devised in kindness as a place of training for the still
more straitened circumstances of the grave, she was forced to hide from
her own child a blush of remorse and shame.
Whatever people will think? She knew very well what they did think, the
people Winnie had in her mind—the old friends of her husband, and others
too, whose interest she had solicited with such flattering success. She
had not known before what a good beggar she could be. But she guessed
very well what inference was drawn from her application. On account of
that shrinking delicacy, which exists side by side with aggressive
brutality in masculine nature, the inquiries into her circumstances had
not been pushed very far. She had checked them by a visible compression
of the lips and some display of an emotion determined to be eloquently
silent. And the men would become suddenly incurious, after the manner of
their kind. She congratulated herself more than once on having nothing
to do with women, who being naturally more callous and avid of details,
would have been anxious to be exactly informed by what sort of unkind
conduct her daughter and son-in-law had driven her to that sad extremity.
It was only before the Secretary of the great brewer M. P. and Chairman
of the Charity, who, acting for his principal, felt bound to be
conscientiously inquisitive as to the real circumstances of the