The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
not mad. It was, as it were, a symbolic longing; and at the same time it
was very distinct, because springing from experience, the mother of
wisdom. Thus when as a child he cowered in a dark corner scared,
wretched, sore, and miserable with the black, black misery of the soul,
his sister Winnie used to come along, and carry him off to bed with her,
as into a heaven of consoling peace. Stevie, though apt to forget mere
facts, such as his name and address for instance, had a faithful memory
of sensations. To be taken into a bed of compassion was the supreme
remedy, with the only one disadvantage of being difficult of application
on a large scale. And looking at the cabman, Stevie perceived this
clearly, because he was reasonable.
The cabman went on with his leisurely preparations as if Stevie had not
existed. He made as if to hoist himself on the box, but at the last
moment from some obscure motive, perhaps merely from disgust with
carriage exercise, desisted. He approached instead the motionless
partner of his labours, and stooping to seize the bridle, lifted up the
big, weary head to the height of his shoulder with one effort of his
right arm, like a feat of strength.
“Come on,” he whispered secretly.
Limping, he led the cab away. There was an air of austerity in this
departure, the scrunched gravel of the drive crying out under the slowly
turning wheels, the horse’s lean thighs moving with ascetic deliberation
away from the light into the obscurity of the open space bordered dimly
by the pointed roofs and the feebly shining windows of the little
alms-houses. The plaint of the gravel travelled slowly all round the
drive. Between the lamps of the charitable gateway the slow cortege
reappeared, lighted up for a moment, the short, thick man limping busily,
with the horse’s head held aloft in his fist, the lank animal walking in
stiff and forlorn dignity, the dark, low box on wheels rolling behind
comically with an air of waddling. They turned to the left. There was a
pub down the street, within fifty yards of the gate.
Stevie left alone beside the private lamp-post of the Charity, his hands
thrust deep into his pockets, glared with vacant sulkiness. At the
bottom of his pockets his incapable weak hands were clinched hard into a
pair of angry fists. In the face of anything which affected directly or
indirectly his morbid dread of pain, Stevie ended by turning vicious. A
magnanimous indignation swelled his frail chest to bursting, and caused
his candid eyes to squint. Supremely wise in knowing his own
powerlessness, Stevie was not wise enough to restrain his passions. The
tenderness of his universal charity had two phases as indissolubly joined
and connected as the reverse and obverse sides of a medal. The anguish
of immoderate compassion was succeeded by the pain of an innocent but
pitiless rage. Those two states expressing themselves outwardly by the
same signs of futile bodily agitation, his sister Winnie soothed his
excitement without ever fathoming its twofold character. Mrs Verloc
wasted no portion of this transient life in seeking for fundamental
information. This is a sort of economy having all the appearances and
some of the advantages of prudence. Obviously it may be good for one not
to know too much. And such a view accords very well with constitutional
indolence.
On that evening on which it may be said that Mrs Verloc’s mother having
parted for good from her children had also departed this life, Winnie
Verloc did not investigate her brother’s psychology. The poor boy was
excited, of course. After once more assuring the old woman on the
threshold that she would know how to guard against the risk of Stevie
losing himself for very long on his pilgrimages of filial piety, she took
her brother’s arm to walk away. Stevie did not even mutter to himself,
but with the special sense of sisterly devotion developed in her earliest
infancy, she felt that the boy was very much excited indeed. Holding
tight to his arm, under the appearance of leaning on it, she thought of
some words suitable to the occasion.
“Now, Stevie, you must look well after me at the crossings, and get first
into the ’bus, like a good brother.”
This appeal to manly protection was received by Stevie with his usual
docility. It flattered him. He raised his head and threw out his chest.
“Don’t be nervous, Winnie. Mustn’t be nervous! ’Bus all right,” he
answered in a brusque, slurring stammer partaking of the timorousness of
a child and the resolution of a man. He advanced fearlessly with the
woman on his arm, but his lower lip dropped. Nevertheless, on the
pavement of the squalid and wide thoroughfare, whose poverty in all the
amenities of life stood foolishly exposed by a mad profusion of
gas-lights, their resemblance to each other was so pronounced as to
strike the casual passers-by.
Before the doors of the public-house at the corner, where the profusion
of gas-light reached the height of positive wickedness, a four-wheeled
cab standing by the curbstone with no one on the box, seemed cast out
into the gutter on account of irremediable decay. Mrs Verloc recognised
the conveyance. Its aspect was so profoundly lamentable, with such a
perfection of grotesque misery and weirdness of macabre detail, as if it
were the Cab of Death itself, that Mrs Verloc, with that ready compassion
of a woman for a horse (when she is not sitting behind him), exclaimed
vaguely:
“Poor brute!”
Hanging back suddenly, Stevie inflicted an arresting jerk upon his
sister.
“Poor! Poor!” he ejaculated appreciatively. “Cabman poor too. He told
me himself.”
The contemplation of the infirm and lonely steed overcame him. Jostled,
but obstinate, he would remain there, trying to express the view newly
opened to his sympathies of the human and equine misery in close
association. But it was very difficult. “Poor brute, poor people!” was
all he could repeat. It did not seem forcible enough, and he came to a
stop with an angry splutter: “Shame!” Stevie was no master of phrases,
and perhaps for that very reason his thoughts lacked clearness and
precision. But he felt with greater completeness and some profundity.
That little word contained all his sense of indignation and horror at one
sort of wretchedness having to feed upon the anguish of the other—at the
poor cabman beating the poor horse in the name, as it were, of his poor
kids at home. And Stevie knew what it was to be beaten. He knew it from
experience. It was a bad world. Bad! Bad!
Mrs Verloc, his only sister, guardian, and protector, could not pretend
to such depths of insight. Moreover, she had not experienced the magic
of the cabman’s eloquence. She was in the dark as to the inwardness of
the word “Shame.” And she said placidly:
“Come along, Stevie. You can’t help that.”
The docile Stevie went along; but now he went along without pride,
shamblingly, and muttering half words, and even words that would have
been whole if they had not been made up of halves that did not belong to
each other. It was as though he had been trying to fit all the words he
could remember to his sentiments in order to get some sort of
corresponding idea. And, as a matter of fact, he got it at last. He
hung back to utter it at once.
“Bad world for poor people.”
Directly he had expressed that thought he became aware that it was
familiar to him already in all its consequences. This circumstance
strengthened his conviction immensely, but also augmented his
indignation. Somebody, he felt, ought to be punished for it—punished
with great severity. Being no sceptic, but a moral creature, he was in a
manner at the mercy of his righteous passions.
“Beastly!” he added concisely.
It was clear to Mrs Verloc that he was greatly excited.
“Nobody can help that,” she said. “Do come along. Is that the way
you’re taking care of me?”
Stevie mended his pace obediently. He prided himself on being a good
brother. His morality, which was very complete, demanded that from him.
Yet he was pained at the information imparted by his sister Winnie who
was good. Nobody could help that! He came along gloomily, but presently
he brightened up. Like the rest of mankind, perplexed by the mystery of
the universe, he had his moments of consoling trust in the organised
powers of the earth.
“Police,” he suggested confidently.
“The police aren’t for that,” observed Mrs Verloc cursorily, hurrying on
her way.
Stevie’s face lengthened considerably. He was thinking. The more
intense his thinking, the slacker was the droop of his lower jaw.
And it was with an aspect of hopeless vacancy that he gave up his
intellectual enterprise.
“Not for that?” he mumbled, resigned but surprised. “Not for that?” He
had formed for himself an ideal conception of the metropolitan police as
a sort of benevolent institution for the suppression of evil. The notion
of benevolence especially was very closely associated with his sense of
the power of the men in blue. He had liked all police constables
tenderly, with a guileless trustfulness. And he was pained. He was
irritated, too, by a suspicion of duplicity in the members of the force.
For Stevie was frank and as open as the day himself. What did they mean
by pretending then? Unlike his sister, who put her trust in face values,
he wished to go to the bottom of the matter. He carried on his inquiry
by means of an angry challenge.
“What for are they then, Winn? What are they for? Tell me.”
Winnie disliked controversy. But fearing most a fit of black depression
consequent on Stevie missing his mother very much at first, she did not
altogether decline the discussion. Guiltless of all irony, she answered
yet in a form which was not perhaps unnatural in the wife of Mr Verloc,
Delegate of the Central Red Committee, personal friend of certain
anarchists, and a votary of social revolution.
“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.”
She avoided using the verb “to steal,” because it always made her brother
uncomfortable. For Stevie was delicately honest. Certain simple
principles had been instilled into him so anxiously (on account of his
“queerness”) that the mere names of certain transgressions filled him
with horror. He had been always easily impressed by speeches. He was
impressed and startled now, and his intelligence was very alert.
“What?” he asked at once anxiously. “Not even if they were hungry?
Mustn’t they?”
The two had paused in their walk.
“Not if they were ever so,” said Mrs Verloc, with the equanimity of a
person untroubled by the problem of the distribution of wealth, and
exploring the perspective of the roadway for an omnibus of the right
colour. “Certainly not. But what’s the use of talking about all that?
You aren’t ever hungry.”
She cast a swift glance at the boy, like a young man, by her side. She
saw him amiable, attractive, affectionate, and only a little, a very
little, peculiar. And she could not see him otherwise, for he was
connected with what there was of the salt of passion in her tasteless
life—the passion of indignation, of courage, of pity, and even of
self-sacrifice. She did not add: “And you aren’t likely ever to be as
long as I live.” But she might very well have done so, since she had
taken effectual steps to that end. Mr Verloc was a very good husband.
It was her honest impression that nobody could help liking the boy. She
cried out suddenly:
“Quick, Stevie. Stop that green ’bus.”
And Stevie, tremulous and important with his sister Winnie on his arm,
flung up the other high above his head at the approaching ’bus, with
complete success.