The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
when a man wants to be fortified and strengthened by open proofs of
sympathy and affection. Mr Verloc sighed, and put out the gas in the
kitchen. Mr Verloc’s sympathy with his wife was genuine and intense. It
almost brought tears into his eyes as he stood in the parlour reflecting
on the loneliness hanging over her head. In this mood Mr Verloc missed
Stevie very much out of a difficult world. He thought mournfully of his
end. If only that lad had not stupidly destroyed himself!
The sensation of unappeasable hunger, not unknown after the strain of a
hazardous enterprise to adventurers of tougher fibre than Mr Verloc,
overcame him again. The piece of roast beef, laid out in the likeness of
funereal baked meats for Stevie’s obsequies, offered itself largely to
his notice. And Mr Verloc again partook. He partook ravenously, without
restraint and decency, cutting thick slices with the sharp carving knife,
and swallowing them without bread. In the course of that refection it
occurred to Mr Verloc that he was not hearing his wife move about the
bedroom as he should have done. The thought of finding her perhaps
sitting on the bed in the dark not only cut Mr Verloc’s appetite, but
also took from him the inclination to follow her upstairs just yet.
Laying down the carving knife, Mr Verloc listened with careworn
attention.
He was comforted by hearing her move at last. She walked suddenly across
the room, and threw the window up. After a period of stillness up there,
during which he figured her to himself with her head out, he heard the
sash being lowered slowly. Then she made a few steps, and sat down.
Every resonance of his house was familiar to Mr Verloc, who was
thoroughly domesticated. When next he heard his wife’s footsteps
overhead he knew, as well as if he had seen her doing it, that she had
been putting on her walking shoes. Mr Verloc wriggled his shoulders
slightly at this ominous symptom, and moving away from the table, stood
with his back to the fireplace, his head on one side, and gnawing
perplexedly at the tips of his fingers. He kept track of her movements
by the sound. She walked here and there violently, with abrupt
stoppages, now before the chest of drawers, then in front of the
wardrobe. An immense load of weariness, the harvest of a day of shocks
and surprises, weighed Mr Verloc’s energies to the ground.
He did not raise his eyes till he heard his wife descending the stairs.
It was as he had guessed. She was dressed for going out.
Mrs Verloc was a free woman. She had thrown open the window of the
bedroom either with the intention of screaming Murder! Help! or of
throwing herself out. For she did not exactly know what use to make of
her freedom. Her personality seemed to have been torn into two pieces,
whose mental operations did not adjust themselves very well to each
other. The street, silent and deserted from end to end, repelled her by
taking sides with that man who was so certain of his impunity. She was
afraid to shout lest no one should come. Obviously no one would come.
Her instinct of self-preservation recoiled from the depth of the fall
into that sort of slimy, deep trench. Mrs Verloc closed the window, and
dressed herself to go out into the street by another way. She was a free
woman. She had dressed herself thoroughly, down to the tying of a black
veil over her face. As she appeared before him in the light of the
parlour, Mr Verloc observed that she had even her little handbag hanging
from her left wrist. . . . Flying off to her mother, of course.
The thought that women were wearisome creatures after all presented
itself to his fatigued brain. But he was too generous to harbour it for
more than an instant. This man, hurt cruelly in his vanity, remained
magnanimous in his conduct, allowing himself no satisfaction of a bitter
smile or of a contemptuous gesture. With true greatness of soul, he only
glanced at the wooden clock on the wall, and said in a perfectly calm but
forcible manner:
“Five and twenty minutes past eight, Winnie. There’s no sense in going
over there so late. You will never manage to get back to-night.”
Before his extended hand Mrs Verloc had stopped short. He added heavily:
“Your mother will be gone to bed before you get there. This is the sort
of news that can wait.”
Nothing was further from Mrs Verloc’s thoughts than going to her mother.
She recoiled at the mere idea, and feeling a chair behind her, she obeyed
the suggestion of the touch, and sat down. Her intention had been simply
to get outside the door for ever. And if this feeling was correct, its
mental form took an unrefined shape corresponding to her origin and
station. “I would rather walk the streets all the days of my life,” she
thought. But this creature, whose moral nature had been subjected to a
shock of which, in the physical order, the most violent earthquake of
history could only be a faint and languid rendering, was at the mercy of
mere trifles, of casual contacts. She sat down. With her hat and veil
she had the air of a visitor, of having looked in on Mr Verloc for a
moment. Her instant docility encouraged him, whilst her aspect of only
temporary and silent acquiescence provoked him a little.
“Let me tell you, Winnie,” he said with authority, “that your place is
here this evening. Hang it all! you brought the damned police high and
low about my ears. I don’t blame you—but it’s your doing all the same.
You’d better take this confounded hat off. I can’t let you go out, old
girl,” he added in a softened voice.
Mrs Verloc’s mind got hold of that declaration with morbid tenacity. The
man who had taken Stevie out from under her very eyes to murder him in a
locality whose name was at the moment not present to her memory would not
allow her to go out. Of course he wouldn’t.
Now he had murdered Stevie he would never let her go. He would want to
keep her for nothing. And on this characteristic reasoning, having all
the force of insane logic, Mrs Verloc’s disconnected wits went to work
practically. She could slip by him, open the door, run out. But he
would dash out after her, seize her round the body, drag her back into
the shop. She could scratch, kick, and bite—and stab too; but for
stabbing she wanted a knife. Mrs Verloc sat still under her black veil,
in her own house, like a masked and mysterious visitor of impenetrable
intentions.
Mr Verloc’s magnanimity was not more than human. She had exasperated him
at last.
“Can’t you say something? You have your own dodges for vexing a man. Oh
yes! I know your deaf-and-dumb trick. I’ve seen you at it before
to-day. But just now it won’t do. And to begin with, take this damned
thing off. One can’t tell whether one is talking to a dummy or to a live
woman.”
He advanced, and stretching out his hand, dragged the veil off, unmasking
a still, unreadable face, against which his nervous exasperation was
shattered like a glass bubble flung against a rock. “That’s better,” he
said, to cover his momentary uneasiness, and retreated back to his old
station by the mantelpiece. It never entered his head that his wife
could give him up. He felt a little ashamed of himself, for he was fond
and generous. What could he do? Everything had been said already. He
protested vehemently.
“By heavens! You know that I hunted high and low. I ran the risk of
giving myself away to find somebody for that accursed job. And I tell
you again I couldn’t find anyone crazy enough or hungry enough. What do
you take me for—a murderer, or what? The boy is gone. Do you think I
wanted him to blow himself up? He’s gone. His troubles are over. Ours
are just going to begin, I tell you, precisely because he did blow
himself. I don’t blame you. But just try to understand that it was a
pure accident; as much an accident as if he had been run over by a ’bus
while crossing the street.”
His generosity was not infinite, because he was a human being—and not a
monster, as Mrs Verloc believed him to be. He paused, and a snarl
lifting his moustaches above a gleam of white teeth gave him the
expression of a reflective beast, not very dangerous—a slow beast with a
sleek head, gloomier than a seal, and with a husky voice.
“And when it comes to that, it’s as much your doing as mine. That’s so.
You may glare as much as you like. I know what you can do in that way.
Strike me dead if I ever would have thought of the lad for that purpose.
It was you who kept on shoving him in my way when I was half distracted
with the worry of keeping the lot of us out of trouble. What the devil
made you? One would think you were doing it on purpose. And I am damned
if I know that you didn’t. There’s no saying how much of what’s going on
you have got hold of on the sly with your infernal don’t-care-a-damn way
of looking nowhere in particular, and saying nothing at all. . . . ”
His husky domestic voice ceased for a while. Mrs Verloc made no reply.
Before that silence he felt ashamed of what he had said. But as often
happens to peaceful men in domestic tiffs, being ashamed he pushed
another point.
“You have a devilish way of holding your tongue sometimes,” he began
again, without raising his voice. “Enough to make some men go mad. It’s
lucky for you that I am not so easily put out as some of them would be by
your deaf-and-dumb sulks. I am fond of you. But don’t you go too far.
This isn’t the time for it. We ought to be thinking of what we’ve got to
do. And I can’t let you go out to-night, galloping off to your mother
with some crazy tale or other about me. I won’t have it. Don’t you make
any mistake about it: if you will have it that I killed the boy, then
you’ve killed him as much as I.”
In sincerity of feeling and openness of statement, these words went far
beyond anything that had ever been said in this home, kept up on the
wages of a secret industry eked out by the sale of more or less secret
wares: the poor expedients devised by a mediocre mankind for preserving
an imperfect society from the dangers of moral and physical corruption,
both secret too of their kind. They were spoken because Mr Verloc had
felt himself really outraged; but the reticent decencies of this home
life, nestling in a shady street behind a shop where the sun never shone,
remained apparently undisturbed. Mrs Verloc heard him out with perfect
propriety, and then rose from her chair in her hat and jacket like a
visitor at the end of a call. She advanced towards her husband, one arm
extended as if for a silent leave-taking. Her net veil dangling down by
one end on the left side of her face gave an air of disorderly formality
to her restrained movements. But when she arrived as far as the
hearthrug, Mr Verloc was no longer standing there. He had moved off in
the direction of the sofa, without raising his eyes to watch the effect
of his tirade. He was tired, resigned in a truly marital spirit. But he
felt hurt in the tender spot of his secret weakness. If she would go on
sulking in that dreadful overcharged silence—why then she must. She was
a master in that domestic art. Mr Verloc flung himself heavily upon the
sofa, disregarding as usual the fate of his hat, which, as if accustomed
to take care of itself, made for a safe shelter under the table.
He was tired. The last particle of his nervous force had been expended
in the wonders and agonies of this day full of surprising failures coming
at the end of a harassing month of scheming and insomnia. He was tired.
A man isn’t made of stone. Hang everything! Mr Verloc reposed
characteristically, clad in his outdoor garments. One side of his open
overcoat was lying partly on the ground. Mr Verloc wallowed on his back.