The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
applicant, that she had burst into tears outright and aloud, as a
cornered woman will weep. The thin and polite gentleman, after
contemplating her with an air of being “struck all of a heap,” abandoned
his position under the cover of soothing remarks. She must not distress
herself. The deed of the Charity did not absolutely specify “childless
widows.” In fact, it did not by any means disqualify her. But the
discretion of the Committee must be an informed discretion. One could
understand very well her unwillingness to be a burden, etc. etc.
Thereupon, to his profound disappointment, Mrs Verloc’s mother wept some
more with an augmented vehemence.
The tears of that large female in a dark, dusty wig, and ancient silk
dress festooned with dingy white cotton lace, were the tears of genuine
distress. She had wept because she was heroic and unscrupulous and full
of love for both her children. Girls frequently get sacrificed to the
welfare of the boys. In this case she was sacrificing Winnie. By the
suppression of truth she was slandering her. Of course, Winnie was
independent, and need not care for the opinion of people that she would
never see and who would never see her; whereas poor Stevie had nothing in
the world he could call his own except his mother’s heroism and
unscrupulousness.
The first sense of security following on Winnie’s marriage wore off in
time (for nothing lasts), and Mrs Verloc’s mother, in the seclusion of
the back bedroom, had recalled the teaching of that experience which the
world impresses upon a widowed woman. But she had recalled it without
vain bitterness; her store of resignation amounted almost to dignity.
She reflected stoically that everything decays, wears out, in this world;
that the way of kindness should be made easy to the well disposed; that
her daughter Winnie was a most devoted sister, and a very self-confident
wife indeed. As regards Winnie’s sisterly devotion, her stoicism
flinched. She excepted that sentiment from the rule of decay affecting
all things human and some things divine. She could not help it; not to
do so would have frightened her too much. But in considering the
conditions of her daughter’s married state, she rejected firmly all
flattering illusions. She took the cold and reasonable view that the
less strain put on Mr Verloc’s kindness the longer its effects were
likely to last. That excellent man loved his wife, of course, but he
would, no doubt, prefer to keep as few of her relations as was consistent
with the proper display of that sentiment. It would be better if its
whole effect were concentrated on poor Stevie. And the heroic old woman
resolved on going away from her children as an act of devotion and as a
move of deep policy.
The “virtue” of this policy consisted in this (Mrs Verloc’s mother was
subtle in her way), that Stevie’s moral claim would be strengthened. The
poor boy—a good, useful boy, if a little peculiar—had not a sufficient
standing. He had been taken over with his mother, somewhat in the same
way as the furniture of the Belgravian mansion had been taken over, as if
on the ground of belonging to her exclusively. What will happen, she
asked herself (for Mrs Verloc’s mother was in a measure imaginative),
when I die? And when she asked herself that question it was with dread.
It was also terrible to think that she would not then have the means of
knowing what happened to the poor boy. But by making him over to his
sister, by going thus away, she gave him the advantage of a directly
dependent position. This was the more subtle sanction of Mrs Verloc’s
mother’s heroism and unscrupulousness. Her act of abandonment was really
an arrangement for settling her son permanently in life. Other people
made material sacrifices for such an object, she in that way. It was the
only way. Moreover, she would be able to see how it worked. Ill or well
she would avoid the horrible incertitude on the death-bed. But it was
hard, hard, cruelly hard.
The cab rattled, jingled, jolted; in fact, the last was quite
extraordinary. By its disproportionate violence and magnitude it
obliterated every sensation of onward movement; and the effect was of
being shaken in a stationary apparatus like a mediæval device for the
punishment of crime, or some very newfangled invention for the cure of a
sluggish liver. It was extremely distressing; and the raising of Mrs
Verloc’s mother’s voice sounded like a wail of pain.
“I know, my dear, you’ll come to see me as often as you can spare the
time. Won’t you?”
“Of course,” answered Winnie shortly, staring straight before her.
And the cab jolted in front of a steamy, greasy shop in a blaze of gas
and in the smell of fried fish.
The old woman raised a wail again.
“And, my dear, I must see that poor boy every Sunday. He won’t mind
spending the day with his old mother—”
Winnie screamed out stolidly:
“Mind! I should think not. That poor boy will miss you something cruel.
I wish you had thought a little of that, mother.”
Not think of it! The heroic woman swallowed a playful and inconvenient
object like a billiard ball, which had tried to jump out of her throat.
Winnie sat mute for a while, pouting at the front of the cab, then
snapped out, which was an unusual tone with her:
“I expect I’ll have a job with him at first, he’ll be that restless—”
“Whatever you do, don’t let him worry your husband, my dear.”
Thus they discussed on familiar lines the bearings of a new situation.
And the cab jolted. Mrs Verloc’s mother expressed some misgivings.
Could Stevie be trusted to come all that way alone? Winnie maintained
that he was much less “absent-minded” now. They agreed as to that. It
could not be denied. Much less—hardly at all. They shouted at each
other in the jingle with comparative cheerfulness. But suddenly the
maternal anxiety broke out afresh. There were two omnibuses to take, and
a short walk between. It was too difficult! The old woman gave way to
grief and consternation.
Winnie stared forward.
“Don’t you upset yourself like this, mother. You must see him, of
course.”
“No, my dear. I’ll try not to.”
She mopped her streaming eyes.
“But you can’t spare the time to come with him, and if he should forget
himself and lose his way and somebody spoke to him sharply, his name and
address may slip his memory, and he’ll remain lost for days and days—”
The vision of a workhouse infirmary for poor Stevie—if only during
inquiries—wrung her heart. For she was a proud woman. Winnie’s stare
had grown hard, intent, inventive.
“I can’t bring him to you myself every week,” she cried. “But don’t you
worry, mother. I’ll see to it that he don’t get lost for long.”
They felt a peculiar bump; a vision of brick pillars lingered before the
rattling windows of the cab; a sudden cessation of atrocious jolting and
uproarious jingling dazed the two women. What had happened? They sat
motionless and scared in the profound stillness, till the door came open,
and a rough, strained whispering was heard:
“Here you are!”
A range of gabled little houses, each with one dim yellow window, on the
ground floor, surrounded the dark open space of a grass plot planted with
shrubs and railed off from the patchwork of lights and shadows in the
wide road, resounding with the dull rumble of traffic. Before the door
of one of these tiny houses—one without a light in the little downstairs
window—the cab had come to a standstill. Mrs Verloc’s mother got out
first, backwards, with a key in her hand. Winnie lingered on the
flagstone path to pay the cabman. Stevie, after helping to carry inside
a lot of small parcels, came out and stood under the light of a gas-lamp
belonging to the Charity. The cabman looked at the pieces of silver,
which, appearing very minute in his big, grimy palm, symbolised the
insignificant results which reward the ambitious courage and toil of a
mankind whose day is short on this earth of evil.
He had been paid decently—four one-shilling pieces—and he contemplated
them in perfect stillness, as if they had been the surprising terms of a
melancholy problem. The slow transfer of that treasure to an inner
pocket demanded much laborious groping in the depths of decayed clothing.
His form was squat and without flexibility. Stevie, slender, his
shoulders a little up, and his hands thrust deep in the side pockets of
his warm overcoat, stood at the edge of the path, pouting.
The cabman, pausing in his deliberate movements, seemed struck by some
misty recollection.
“Oh! ’Ere you are, young fellow,” he whispered. “You’ll know him
again—won’t you?”
Stevie was staring at the horse, whose hind quarters appeared unduly
elevated by the effect of emaciation. The little stiff tail seemed to
have been fitted in for a heartless joke; and at the other end the thin,
flat neck, like a plank covered with old horse-hide, drooped to the
ground under the weight of an enormous bony head. The ears hung at
different angles, negligently; and the macabre figure of that mute
dweller on the earth steamed straight up from ribs and backbone in the
muggy stillness of the air.
The cabman struck lightly Stevie’s breast with the iron hook protruding
from a ragged, greasy sleeve.
“Look ’ere, young feller. ’Ow’d _you_ like to sit behind this ’oss up to
two o’clock in the morning p’raps?”
Stevie looked vacantly into the fierce little eyes with red-edged lids.
“He ain’t lame,” pursued the other, whispering with energy. “He ain’t
got no sore places on ’im. ’Ere he is. ’Ow would _you_ like—”
His strained, extinct voice invested his utterance with a character of
vehement secrecy. Stevie’s vacant gaze was changing slowly into dread.
“You may well look! Till three and four o’clock in the morning. Cold
and ’ungry. Looking for fares. Drunks.”
His jovial purple cheeks bristled with white hairs; and like Virgil’s
Silenus, who, his face smeared with the juice of berries, discoursed of
Olympian Gods to the innocent shepherds of Sicily, he talked to Stevie of
domestic matters and the affairs of men whose sufferings are great and
immortality by no means assured.
“I am a night cabby, I am,” he whispered, with a sort of boastful
exasperation. “I’ve got to take out what they will blooming well give me
at the yard. I’ve got my missus and four kids at ’ome.”
The monstrous nature of that declaration of paternity seemed to strike
the world dumb. A silence reigned during which the flanks of the old
horse, the steed of apocalyptic misery, smoked upwards in the light of
the charitable gas-lamp.
The cabman grunted, then added in his mysterious whisper:
“This ain’t an easy world.” Stevie’s face had been twitching for some
time, and at last his feelings burst out in their usual concise form.
“Bad! Bad!”
His gaze remained fixed on the ribs of the horse, self-conscious and
sombre, as though he were afraid to look about him at the badness of the
world. And his slenderness, his rosy lips and pale, clear complexion,
gave him the aspect of a delicate boy, notwithstanding the fluffy growth
of golden hair on his cheeks. He pouted in a scared way like a child.
The cabman, short and broad, eyed him with his fierce little eyes that
seemed to smart in a clear and corroding liquid.
“’Ard on ’osses, but dam’ sight ’arder on poor chaps like me,” he wheezed
just audibly.
“Poor! Poor!” stammered out Stevie, pushing his hands deeper into his
pockets with convulsive sympathy. He could say nothing; for the
tenderness to all pain and all misery, the desire to make the horse happy
and the cabman happy, had reached the point of a bizarre longing to take
them to bed with him. And that, he knew, was impossible. For Stevie was