The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
the individual and for the society. It was sorry, sorry meddling. It
would leave Michaelis unscathed; it would drag to light the Professor’s
home industry; disorganise the whole system of supervision; make no end
of a row in the papers, which, from that point of view, appeared to him
by a sudden illumination as invariably written by fools for the reading
of imbeciles. Mentally he agreed with the words Mr Verloc let fall at
last in answer to his last remark.
“Perhaps not. But it will upset many things. I have been a straight
man, and I shall keep straight in this—”
“If they let you,” said the Chief Inspector cynically. “You will be
preached to, no doubt, before they put you into the dock. And in the end
you may yet get let in for a sentence that will surprise you. I wouldn’t
trust too much the gentleman who’s been talking to you.”
Mr Verloc listened, frowning.
“My advice to you is to clear out while you may. I have no instructions.
There are some of them,” continued Chief Inspector Heat, laying a
peculiar stress on the word “them,” “who think you are already out of the
world.”
“Indeed!” Mr Verloc was moved to say. Though since his return from
Greenwich he had spent most of his time sitting in the tap-room of an
obscure little public-house, he could hardly have hoped for such
favourable news.
“That’s the impression about you.” The Chief Inspector nodded at him.
“Vanish. Clear out.”
“Where to?” snarled Mr Verloc. He raised his head, and gazing at the
closed door of the parlour, muttered feelingly: “I only wish you would
take me away to-night. I would go quietly.”
“I daresay,” assented sardonically the Chief Inspector, following the
direction of his glance.
The brow of Mr Verloc broke into slight moisture. He lowered his husky
voice confidentially before the unmoved Chief Inspector.
“The lad was half-witted, irresponsible. Any court would have seen that
at once. Only fit for the asylum. And that was the worst that would’ve
happened to him if—”
The Chief Inspector, his hand on the door handle, whispered into Mr
Verloc’s face.
“He may’ve been half-witted, but you must have been crazy. What drove
you off your head like this?”
Mr Verloc, thinking of Mr Vladimir, did not hesitate in the choice of
words.
“A Hyperborean swine,” he hissed forcibly. “A what you might call a—a
gentleman.”
The Chief Inspector, steady-eyed, nodded briefly his comprehension, and
opened the door. Mrs Verloc, behind the counter, might have heard but
did not see his departure, pursued by the aggressive clatter of the bell.
She sat at her post of duty behind the counter. She sat rigidly erect in
the chair with two dirty pink pieces of paper lying spread out at her
feet. The palms of her hands were pressed convulsively to her face, with
the tips of the fingers contracted against the forehead, as though the
skin had been a mask which she was ready to tear off violently. The
perfect immobility of her pose expressed the agitation of rage and
despair, all the potential violence of tragic passions, better than any
shallow display of shrieks, with the beating of a distracted head against
the walls, could have done. Chief Inspector Heat, crossing the shop at
his busy, swinging pace, gave her only a cursory glance. And when the
cracked bell ceased to tremble on its curved ribbon of steel nothing
stirred near Mrs Verloc, as if her attitude had the locking power of a
spell. Even the butterfly-shaped gas flames posed on the ends of the
suspended T-bracket burned without a quiver. In that shop of shady wares
fitted with deal shelves painted a dull brown, which seemed to devour the
sheen of the light, the gold circlet of the wedding ring on Mrs Verloc’s
left hand glittered exceedingly with the untarnished glory of a piece
from some splendid treasure of jewels, dropped in a dust-bin.
CHAPTER X
The Assistant Commissioner, driven rapidly in a hansom from the
neighbourhood of Soho in the direction of Westminster, got out at the
very centre of the Empire on which the sun never sets. Some stalwart
constables, who did not seem particularly impressed by the duty of
watching the august spot, saluted him. Penetrating through a portal by
no means lofty into the precincts of the House which is _the_ House, _par
excellence_ in the minds of many millions of men, he was met at last by
the volatile and revolutionary Toodles.
That neat and nice young man concealed his astonishment at the early
appearance of the Assistant Commissioner, whom he had been told to look
out for some time about midnight. His turning up so early he concluded
to be the sign that things, whatever they were, had gone wrong. With an
extremely ready sympathy, which in nice youngsters goes often with a
joyous temperament, he felt sorry for the great Presence he called “The
Chief,” and also for the Assistant Commissioner, whose face appeared to
him more ominously wooden than ever before, and quite wonderfully long.
“What a queer, foreign-looking chap he is,” he thought to himself,
smiling from a distance with friendly buoyancy. And directly they came
together he began to talk with the kind intention of burying the
awkwardness of failure under a heap of words. It looked as if the great
assault threatened for that night were going to fizzle out. An inferior
henchman of “that brute Cheeseman” was up boring mercilessly a very thin
House with some shamelessly cooked statistics. He, Toodles, hoped he
would bore them into a count out every minute. But then he might be only
marking time to let that guzzling Cheeseman dine at his leisure. Anyway,
the Chief could not be persuaded to go home.
“He will see you at once, I think. He’s sitting all alone in his room
thinking of all the fishes of the sea,” concluded Toodles airily. “Come
along.”
Notwithstanding the kindness of his disposition, the young private
secretary (unpaid) was accessible to the common failings of humanity. He
did not wish to harrow the feelings of the Assistant Commissioner, who
looked to him uncommonly like a man who has made a mess of his job. But
his curiosity was too strong to be restrained by mere compassion. He
could not help, as they went along, to throw over his shoulder lightly:
“And your sprat?”
“Got him,” answered the Assistant Commissioner with a concision which did
not mean to be repellent in the least.
“Good. You’ve no idea how these great men dislike to be disappointed in
small things.”
After this profound observation the experienced Toodles seemed to
reflect. At any rate he said nothing for quite two seconds. Then:
“I’m glad. But—I say—is it really such a very small thing as you make it
out?”
“Do you know what may be done with a sprat?” the Assistant Commissioner
asked in his turn.
“He’s sometimes put into a sardine box,” chuckled Toodles, whose
erudition on the subject of the fishing industry was fresh and, in
comparison with his ignorance of all other industrial matters, immense.
“There are sardine canneries on the Spanish coast which—”
The Assistant Commissioner interrupted the apprentice statesman.
“Yes. Yes. But a sprat is also thrown away sometimes in order to catch
a whale.”
“A whale. Phew!” exclaimed Toodles, with bated breath. “You’re after a
whale, then?”
“Not exactly. What I am after is more like a dog-fish. You don’t know
perhaps what a dog-fish is like.”
“Yes; I do. We’re buried in special books up to our necks—whole shelves
full of them—with plates. . . . It’s a noxious, rascally-looking,
altogether detestable beast, with a sort of smooth face and moustaches.”
“Described to a T,” commended the Assistant Commissioner. “Only mine is
clean-shaven altogether. You’ve seen him. It’s a witty fish.”
“I have seen him!” said Toodles incredulously. “I can’t conceive where I
could have seen him.”
“At the Explorers, I should say,” dropped the Assistant Commissioner
calmly. At the name of that extremely exclusive club Toodles looked
scared, and stopped short.
“Nonsense,” he protested, but in an awe-struck tone. “What do you mean?
A member?”
“Honorary,” muttered the Assistant Commissioner through his teeth.
“Heavens!”
Toodles looked so thunderstruck that the Assistant Commissioner smiled
faintly.
“That’s between ourselves strictly,” he said.
“That’s the beastliest thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” declared
Toodles feebly, as if astonishment had robbed him of all his buoyant
strength in a second.
The Assistant Commissioner gave him an unsmiling glance. Till they came
to the door of the great man’s room, Toodles preserved a scandalised and
solemn silence, as though he were offended with the Assistant
Commissioner for exposing such an unsavoury and disturbing fact. It
revolutionised his idea of the Explorers’ Club’s extreme selectness, of
its social purity. Toodles was revolutionary only in politics; his
social beliefs and personal feelings he wished to preserve unchanged
through all the years allotted to him on this earth which, upon the
whole, he believed to be a nice place to live on.
He stood aside.
“Go in without knocking,” he said.
Shades of green silk fitted low over all the lights imparted to the room
something of a forest’s deep gloom. The haughty eyes were physically the
great man’s weak point. This point was wrapped up in secrecy. When an
opportunity offered, he rested them conscientiously.
The Assistant Commissioner entering saw at first only a big pale hand
supporting a big head, and concealing the upper part of a big pale face.
An open despatch-box stood on the writing-table near a few oblong sheets
of paper and a scattered handful of quill pens. There was absolutely
nothing else on the large flat surface except a little bronze statuette
draped in a toga, mysteriously watchful in its shadowy immobility. The
Assistant Commissioner, invited to take a chair, sat down. In the dim
light, the salient points of his personality, the long face, the black
hair, his lankness, made him look more foreign than ever.
The great man manifested no surprise, no eagerness, no sentiment
whatever. The attitude in which he rested his menaced eyes was
profoundly meditative. He did not alter it the least bit. But his tone
was not dreamy.
“Well! What is it that you’ve found out already? You came upon
something unexpected on the first step.”
“Not exactly unexpected, Sir Ethelred. What I mainly came upon was a
psychological state.”
The Great Presence made a slight movement. “You must be lucid, please.”
“Yes, Sir Ethelred. You know no doubt that most criminals at some time
or other feel an irresistible need of confessing—of making a clean breast
of it to somebody—to anybody. And they do it often to the police. In
that Verloc whom Heat wished so much to screen I’ve found a man in that
particular psychological state. The man, figuratively speaking, flung
himself on my breast. It was enough on my part to whisper to him who I
was and to add ‘I know that you are at the bottom of this affair.’ It
must have seemed miraculous to him that we should know already, but he
took it all in the stride. The wonderfulness of it never checked him for
a moment. There remained for me only to put to him the two questions:
Who put you up to it? and Who was the man who did it? He answered the
first with remarkable emphasis. As to the second question, I gather that
the fellow with the bomb was his brother-in-law—quite a lad—a weak-minded
creature. . . . It is rather a curious affair—too long perhaps to state
fully just now.”
“What then have you learned?” asked the great man.
“First, I’ve learned that the ex-convict Michaelis had nothing to do with
it, though indeed the lad had been living with him temporarily in the