The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
indefatigable devotion. There was in Mr Verloc a fund of loyalty. He
had been loyal to his employers, to the cause of social stability,—and to
his affections too—as became apparent when, after standing the tumbler in
the sink, he turned about, saying:
“If I hadn’t thought of you I would have taken the bullying brute by the
throat and rammed his head into the fireplace. I’d have been more than a
match for that pink-faced, smooth-shaved—”
Mr Verloc, neglected to finish the sentence, as if there could be no
doubt of the terminal word. For the first time in his life he was taking
that incurious woman into his confidence. The singularity of the event,
the force and importance of the personal feelings aroused in the course
of this confession, drove Stevie’s fate clean out of Mr Verloc’s mind.
The boy’s stuttering existence of fears and indignations, together with
the violence of his end, had passed out of Mr Verloc’s mental sight for a
time. For that reason, when he looked up he was startled by the
inappropriate character of his wife’s stare. It was not a wild stare,
and it was not inattentive, but its attention was peculiar and not
satisfactory, inasmuch that it seemed concentrated upon some point beyond
Mr Verloc’s person. The impression was so strong that Mr Verloc glanced
over his shoulder. There was nothing behind him: there was just the
whitewashed wall. The excellent husband of Winnie Verloc saw no writing
on the wall. He turned to his wife again, repeating, with some emphasis:
“I would have taken him by the throat. As true as I stand here, if I
hadn’t thought of you then I would have half choked the life out of the
brute before I let him get up. And don’t you think he would have been
anxious to call the police either. He wouldn’t have dared. You
understand why—don’t you?”
He blinked at his wife knowingly.
“No,” said Mrs Verloc in an unresonant voice, and without looking at him
at all. “What are you talking about?”
A great discouragement, the result of fatigue, came upon Mr Verloc. He
had had a very full day, and his nerves had been tried to the utmost.
After a month of maddening worry, ending in an unexpected catastrophe,
the storm-tossed spirit of Mr Verloc longed for repose. His career as a
secret agent had come to an end in a way no one could have foreseen;
only, now, perhaps he could manage to get a night’s sleep at last. But
looking at his wife, he doubted it. She was taking it very hard—not at
all like herself, he thought. He made an effort to speak.
“You’ll have to pull yourself together, my girl,” he said
sympathetically. “What’s done can’t be undone.”
Mrs Verloc gave a slight start, though not a muscle of her white face
moved in the least. Mr Verloc, who was not looking at her, continued
ponderously.
“You go to bed now. What you want is a good cry.”
This opinion had nothing to recommend it but the general consent of
mankind. It is universally understood that, as if it were nothing more
substantial than vapour floating in the sky, every emotion of a woman is
bound to end in a shower. And it is very probable that had Stevie died
in his bed under her despairing gaze, in her protecting arms, Mrs
Verloc’s grief would have found relief in a flood of bitter and pure
tears. Mrs Verloc, in common with other human beings, was provided with
a fund of unconscious resignation sufficient to meet the normal
manifestation of human destiny. Without “troubling her head about it,”
she was aware that it “did not stand looking into very much.” But the
lamentable circumstances of Stevie’s end, which to Mr Verloc’s mind had
only an episodic character, as part of a greater disaster, dried her
tears at their very source. It was the effect of a white-hot iron drawn
across her eyes; at the same time her heart, hardened and chilled into a
lump of ice, kept her body in an inward shudder, set her features into a
frozen contemplative immobility addressed to a whitewashed wall with no
writing on it. The exigencies of Mrs Verloc’s temperament, which, when
stripped of its philosophical reserve, was maternal and violent, forced
her to roll a series of thoughts in her motionless head. These thoughts
were rather imagined than expressed. Mrs Verloc was a woman of
singularly few words, either for public or private use. With the rage
and dismay of a betrayed woman, she reviewed the tenor of her life in
visions concerned mostly with Stevie’s difficult existence from its
earliest days. It was a life of single purpose and of a noble unity of
inspiration, like those rare lives that have left their mark on the
thoughts and feelings of mankind. But the visions of Mrs Verloc lacked
nobility and magnificence. She saw herself putting the boy to bed by the
light of a single candle on the deserted top floor of a “business house,”
dark under the roof and scintillating exceedingly with lights and cut
glass at the level of the street like a fairy palace. That meretricious
splendour was the only one to be met in Mrs Verloc’s visions. She
remembered brushing the boy’s hair and tying his pinafores—herself in a
pinafore still; the consolations administered to a small and badly scared
creature by another creature nearly as small but not quite so badly
scared; she had the vision of the blows intercepted (often with her own
head), of a door held desperately shut against a man’s rage (not for very
long); of a poker flung once (not very far), which stilled that
particular storm into the dumb and awful silence which follows a
thunder-clap. And all these scenes of violence came and went accompanied
by the unrefined noise of deep vociferations proceeding from a man
wounded in his paternal pride, declaring himself obviously accursed since
one of his kids was a “slobbering idjut and the other a wicked
she-devil.” It was of her that this had been said many years ago.
Mrs Verloc heard the words again in a ghostly fashion, and then the
dreary shadow of the Belgravian mansion descended upon her shoulders. It
was a crushing memory, an exhausting vision of countless breakfast trays
carried up and down innumerable stairs, of endless haggling over pence,
of the endless drudgery of sweeping, dusting, cleaning, from basement to
attics; while the impotent mother, staggering on swollen legs, cooked in
a grimy kitchen, and poor Stevie, the unconscious presiding genius of all
their toil, blacked the gentlemen’s boots in the scullery. But this
vision had a breath of a hot London summer in it, and for a central
figure a young man wearing his Sunday best, with a straw hat on his dark
head and a wooden pipe in his mouth. Affectionate and jolly, he was a
fascinating companion for a voyage down the sparkling stream of life;
only his boat was very small. There was room in it for a girl-partner at
the oar, but no accommodation for passengers. He was allowed to drift
away from the threshold of the Belgravian mansion while Winnie averted
her tearful eyes. He was not a lodger. The lodger was Mr Verloc,
indolent, and keeping late hours, sleepily jocular of a morning from
under his bed-clothes, but with gleams of infatuation in his heavy lidded
eyes, and always with some money in his pockets. There was no sparkle of
any kind on the lazy stream of his life. It flowed through secret
places. But his barque seemed a roomy craft, and his taciturn
magnanimity accepted as a matter of course the presence of passengers.
Mrs Verloc pursued the visions of seven years’ security for Stevie,
loyally paid for on her part; of security growing into confidence, into a
domestic feeling, stagnant and deep like a placid pool, whose guarded
surface hardly shuddered on the occasional passage of Comrade Ossipon,
the robust anarchist with shamelessly inviting eyes, whose glance had a
corrupt clearness sufficient to enlighten any woman not absolutely
imbecile.
A few seconds only had elapsed since the last word had been uttered aloud
in the kitchen, and Mrs Verloc was staring already at the vision of an
episode not more than a fortnight old. With eyes whose pupils were
extremely dilated she stared at the vision of her husband and poor Stevie
walking up Brett Street side by side away from the shop. It was the last
scene of an existence created by Mrs Verloc’s genius; an existence
foreign to all grace and charm, without beauty and almost without
decency, but admirable in the continuity of feeling and tenacity of
purpose. And this last vision had such plastic relief, such nearness of
form, such a fidelity of suggestive detail, that it wrung from Mrs Verloc
an anguished and faint murmur, reproducing the supreme illusion of her
life, an appalled murmur that died out on her blanched lips.
“Might have been father and son.”
Mr Verloc stopped, and raised a care-worn face. “Eh? What did you say?”
he asked. Receiving no reply, he resumed his sinister tramping. Then
with a menacing flourish of a thick, fleshy fist, he burst out:
“Yes. The Embassy people. A pretty lot, ain’t they! Before a week’s
out I’ll make some of them wish themselves twenty feet underground. Eh?
What?”
He glanced sideways, with his head down. Mrs Verloc gazed at the
whitewashed wall. A blank wall—perfectly blank. A blankness to run at
and dash your head against. Mrs Verloc remained immovably seated. She
kept still as the population of half the globe would keep still in
astonishment and despair, were the sun suddenly put out in the summer sky
by the perfidy of a trusted providence.
“The Embassy,” Mr Verloc began again, after a preliminary grimace which
bared his teeth wolfishly. “I wish I could get loose in there with a
cudgel for half-an-hour. I would keep on hitting till there wasn’t a
single unbroken bone left amongst the whole lot. But never mind, I’ll
teach them yet what it means trying to throw out a man like me to rot in
the streets. I’ve a tongue in my head. All the world shall know what
I’ve done for them. I am not afraid. I don’t care. Everything’ll come
out. Every damned thing. Let them look out!”
In these terms did Mr Verloc declare his thirst for revenge. It was a
very appropriate revenge. It was in harmony with the promptings of Mr
Verloc’s genius. It had also the advantage of being within the range of
his powers and of adjusting itself easily to the practice of his life,
which had consisted precisely in betraying the secret and unlawful
proceedings of his fellow-men. Anarchists or diplomats were all one to
him. Mr Verloc was temperamentally no respecter of persons. His scorn
was equally distributed over the whole field of his operations. But as a
member of a revolutionary proletariat—which he undoubtedly was—he
nourished a rather inimical sentiment against social distinction.
“Nothing on earth can stop me now,” he added, and paused, looking fixedly
at his wife, who was looking fixedly at a blank wall.
The silence in the kitchen was prolonged, and Mr Verloc felt
disappointed. He had expected his wife to say something. But Mrs
Verloc’s lips, composed in their usual form, preserved a statuesque
immobility like the rest of her face. And Mr Verloc was disappointed.
Yet the occasion did not, he recognised, demand speech from her. She was
a woman of very few words. For reasons involved in the very foundation
of his psychology, Mr Verloc was inclined to put his trust in any woman
who had given herself to him. Therefore he trusted his wife. Their
accord was perfect, but it was not precise. It was a tacit accord,
congenial to Mrs Verloc’s incuriosity and to Mr Verloc’s habits of mind,
which were indolent and secret. They refrained from going to the bottom
of facts and motives.
This reserve, expressing, in a way, their profound confidence in each