The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
Mr Verloc snapped at his wife huskily.
“Put it out.”
CHAPTER IX
Mr Verloc returning from the Continent at the end of ten days, brought
back a mind evidently unrefreshed by the wonders of foreign travel and a
countenance unlighted by the joys of home-coming. He entered in the
clatter of the shop bell with an air of sombre and vexed exhaustion. His
bag in hand, his head lowered, he strode straight behind the counter, and
let himself fall into the chair, as though he had tramped all the way
from Dover. It was early morning. Stevie, dusting various objects
displayed in the front windows, turned to gape at him with reverence and
awe.
“Here!” said Mr Verloc, giving a slight kick to the gladstone bag on the
floor; and Stevie flung himself upon it, seized it, bore it off with
triumphant devotion. He was so prompt that Mr Verloc was distinctly
surprised.
Already at the clatter of the shop bell Mrs Neale, blackleading the
parlour grate, had looked through the door, and rising from her knees had
gone, aproned, and grimy with everlasting toil, to tell Mrs Verloc in the
kitchen that “there was the master come back.”
Winnie came no farther than the inner shop door.
“You’ll want some breakfast,” she said from a distance.
Mr Verloc moved his hands slightly, as if overcome by an impossible
suggestion. But once enticed into the parlour he did not reject the food
set before him. He ate as if in a public place, his hat pushed off his
forehead, the skirts of his heavy overcoat hanging in a triangle on each
side of the chair. And across the length of the table covered with brown
oil-cloth Winnie, his wife, talked evenly at him the wifely talk, as
artfully adapted, no doubt, to the circumstances of this return as the
talk of Penelope to the return of the wandering Odysseus. Mrs Verloc,
however, had done no weaving during her husband’s absence. But she had
had all the upstairs room cleaned thoroughly, had sold some wares, had
seen Mr Michaelis several times. He had told her the last time that he
was going away to live in a cottage in the country, somewhere on the
London, Chatham, and Dover line. Karl Yundt had come too, once, led
under the arm by that “wicked old housekeeper of his.” He was “a
disgusting old man.” Of Comrade Ossipon, whom she had received curtly,
entrenched behind the counter with a stony face and a faraway gaze, she
said nothing, her mental reference to the robust anarchist being marked
by a short pause, with the faintest possible blush. And bringing in her
brother Stevie as soon as she could into the current of domestic events,
she mentioned that the boy had moped a good deal.
“It’s all along of mother leaving us like this.”
Mr Verloc neither said, “Damn!” nor yet “Stevie be hanged!” And Mrs
Verloc, not let into the secret of his thoughts, failed to appreciate the
generosity of this restraint.
“It isn’t that he doesn’t work as well as ever,” she continued. “He’s
been making himself very useful. You’d think he couldn’t do enough for
us.”
Mr Verloc directed a casual and somnolent glance at Stevie, who sat on
his right, delicate, pale-faced, his rosy mouth open vacantly. It was
not a critical glance. It had no intention. And if Mr Verloc thought
for a moment that his wife’s brother looked uncommonly useless, it was
only a dull and fleeting thought, devoid of that force and durability
which enables sometimes a thought to move the world. Leaning back, Mr
Verloc uncovered his head. Before his extended arm could put down the
hat Stevie pounced upon it, and bore it off reverently into the kitchen.
And again Mr Verloc was surprised.
“You could do anything with that boy, Adolf,” Mrs Verloc said, with her
best air of inflexible calmness. “He would go through fire for you.
He—”
She paused attentive, her ear turned towards the door of the kitchen.
There Mrs Neale was scrubbing the floor. At Stevie’s appearance she
groaned lamentably, having observed that he could be induced easily to
bestow for the benefit of her infant children the shilling his sister
Winnie presented him with from time to time. On all fours amongst the
puddles, wet and begrimed, like a sort of amphibious and domestic animal
living in ash-bins and dirty water, she uttered the usual exordium: “It’s
all very well for you, kept doing nothing like a gentleman.” And she
followed it with the everlasting plaint of the poor, pathetically
mendacious, miserably authenticated by the horrible breath of cheap rum
and soap-suds. She scrubbed hard, snuffling all the time, and talking
volubly. And she was sincere. And on each side of her thin red nose her
bleared, misty eyes swam in tears, because she felt really the want of
some sort of stimulant in the morning.
In the parlour Mrs Verloc observed, with knowledge:
“There’s Mrs Neale at it again with her harrowing tales about her little
children. They can’t be all so little as she makes them out. Some of
them must be big enough by now to try to do something for themselves. It
only makes Stevie angry.”
These words were confirmed by a thud as of a fist striking the kitchen
table. In the normal evolution of his sympathy Stevie had become angry
on discovering that he had no shilling in his pocket. In his inability
to relieve at once Mrs Neale’s “little ’uns’” privations, he felt that
somebody should be made to suffer for it. Mrs Verloc rose, and went into
the kitchen to “stop that nonsense.” And she did it firmly but gently.
She was well aware that directly Mrs Neale received her money she went
round the corner to drink ardent spirits in a mean and musty
public-house—the unavoidable station on the _via dolorosa_ of her life.
Mrs Verloc’s comment upon this practice had an unexpected profundity, as
coming from a person disinclined to look under the surface of things.
“Of course, what is she to do to keep up? If I were like Mrs Neale I
expect I wouldn’t act any different.”
In the afternoon of the same day, as Mr Verloc, coming with a start out
of the last of a long series of dozes before the parlour fire, declared
his intention of going out for a walk, Winnie said from the shop:
“I wish you would take that boy out with you, Adolf.”
For the third time that day Mr Verloc was surprised. He stared stupidly
at his wife. She continued in her steady manner. The boy, whenever he
was not doing anything, moped in the house. It made her uneasy; it made
her nervous, she confessed. And that from the calm Winnie sounded like
exaggeration. But, in truth, Stevie moped in the striking fashion of an
unhappy domestic animal. He would go up on the dark landing, to sit on
the floor at the foot of the tall clock, with his knees drawn up and his
head in his hands. To come upon his pallid face, with its big eyes
gleaming in the dusk, was discomposing; to think of him up there was
uncomfortable.
Mr Verloc got used to the startling novelty of the idea. He was fond of
his wife as a man should be—that is, generously. But a weighty objection
presented itself to his mind, and he formulated it.
“He’ll lose sight of me perhaps, and get lost in the street,” he said.
Mrs Verloc shook her head competently.
“He won’t. You don’t know him. That boy just worships you. But if you
should miss him—”
Mrs Verloc paused for a moment, but only for a moment.
“You just go on, and have your walk out. Don’t worry. He’ll be all
right. He’s sure to turn up safe here before very long.”
This optimism procured for Mr Verloc his fourth surprise of the day.
“Is he?” he grunted doubtfully. But perhaps his brother-in-law was not
such an idiot as he looked. His wife would know best. He turned away
his heavy eyes, saying huskily: “Well, let him come along, then,” and
relapsed into the clutches of black care, that perhaps prefers to sit
behind a horseman, but knows also how to tread close on the heels of
people not sufficiently well off to keep horses—like Mr Verloc, for
instance.
Winnie, at the shop door, did not see this fatal attendant upon Mr
Verloc’s walks. She watched the two figures down the squalid street, one
tall and burly, the other slight and short, with a thin neck, and the
peaked shoulders raised slightly under the large semi-transparent ears.
The material of their overcoats was the same, their hats were black and
round in shape. Inspired by the similarity of wearing apparel, Mrs
Verloc gave rein to her fancy.
“Might be father and son,” she said to herself. She thought also that Mr
Verloc was as much of a father as poor Stevie ever had in his life. She
was aware also that it was her work. And with peaceful pride she
congratulated herself on a certain resolution she had taken a few years
before. It had cost her some effort, and even a few tears.
She congratulated herself still more on observing in the course of days
that Mr Verloc seemed to be taking kindly to Stevie’s companionship.
Now, when ready to go out for his walk, Mr Verloc called aloud to the
boy, in the spirit, no doubt, in which a man invites the attendance of
the household dog, though, of course, in a different manner. In the
house Mr Verloc could be detected staring curiously at Stevie a good
deal. His own demeanour had changed. Taciturn still, he was not so
listless. Mrs Verloc thought that he was rather jumpy at times. It
might have been regarded as an improvement. As to Stevie, he moped no
longer at the foot of the clock, but muttered to himself in corners
instead in a threatening tone. When asked “What is it you’re saying,
Stevie?” he merely opened his mouth, and squinted at his sister. At odd
times he clenched his fists without apparent cause, and when discovered
in solitude would be scowling at the wall, with the sheet of paper and
the pencil given him for drawing circles lying blank and idle on the
kitchen table. This was a change, but it was no improvement. Mrs Verloc
including all these vagaries under the general definition of excitement,
began to fear that Stevie was hearing more than was good for him of her
husband’s conversations with his friends. During his “walks” Mr Verloc,
of course, met and conversed with various persons. It could hardly be
otherwise. His walks were an integral part of his outdoor activities,
which his wife had never looked deeply into. Mrs Verloc felt that the
position was delicate, but she faced it with the same impenetrable
calmness which impressed and even astonished the customers of the shop
and made the other visitors keep their distance a little wonderingly.
No! She feared that there were things not good for Stevie to hear of,
she told her husband. It only excited the poor boy, because he could not
help them being so. Nobody could.
It was in the shop. Mr Verloc made no comment. He made no retort, and
yet the retort was obvious. But he refrained from pointing out to his
wife that the idea of making Stevie the companion of his walks was her
own, and nobody else’s. At that moment, to an impartial observer, Mr
Verloc would have appeared more than human in his magnanimity. He took
down a small cardboard box from a shelf, peeped in to see that the
contents were all right, and put it down gently on the counter. Not till
that was done did he break the silence, to the effect that most likely
Stevie would profit greatly by being sent out of town for a while; only
he supposed his wife could not get on without him.
“Could not get on without him!” repeated Mrs Verloc slowly. “I couldn’t
get on without him if it were for his good! The idea! Of course, I can
get on without him. But there’s nowhere for him to go.”
Mr Verloc got out some brown paper and a ball of string; and meanwhile he
muttered that Michaelis was living in a little cottage in the country.