The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
But he longed for a more perfect rest—for sleep—for a few hours of
delicious forgetfulness. That would come later. Provisionally he
rested. And he thought: “I wish she would give over this damned
nonsense. It’s exasperating.”
There must have been something imperfect in Mrs Verloc’s sentiment of
regained freedom. Instead of taking the way of the door she leaned back,
with her shoulders against the tablet of the mantelpiece, as a wayfarer
rests against a fence. A tinge of wildness in her aspect was derived
from the black veil hanging like a rag against her cheek, and from the
fixity of her black gaze where the light of the room was absorbed and
lost without the trace of a single gleam. This woman, capable of a
bargain the mere suspicion of which would have been infinitely shocking
to Mr Verloc’s idea of love, remained irresolute, as if scrupulously
aware of something wanting on her part for the formal closing of the
transaction.
On the sofa Mr Verloc wriggled his shoulders into perfect comfort, and
from the fulness of his heart emitted a wish which was certainly as pious
as anything likely to come from such a source.
“I wish to goodness,” he growled huskily, “I had never seen Greenwich
Park or anything belonging to it.”
The veiled sound filled the small room with its moderate volume, well
adapted to the modest nature of the wish. The waves of air of the proper
length, propagated in accordance with correct mathematical formulas,
flowed around all the inanimate things in the room, lapped against Mrs
Verloc’s head as if it had been a head of stone. And incredible as it
may appear, the eyes of Mrs Verloc seemed to grow still larger. The
audible wish of Mr Verloc’s overflowing heart flowed into an empty place
in his wife’s memory. Greenwich Park. A park! That’s where the boy was
killed. A park—smashed branches, torn leaves, gravel, bits of brotherly
flesh and bone, all spouting up together in the manner of a firework.
She remembered now what she had heard, and she remembered it pictorially.
They had to gather him up with the shovel. Trembling all over with
irrepressible shudders, she saw before her the very implement with its
ghastly load scraped up from the ground. Mrs Verloc closed her eyes
desperately, throwing upon that vision the night of her eyelids, where
after a rainlike fall of mangled limbs the decapitated head of Stevie
lingered suspended alone, and fading out slowly like the last star of a
pyrotechnic display. Mrs Verloc opened her eyes.
Her face was no longer stony. Anybody could have noted the subtle change
on her features, in the stare of her eyes, giving her a new and startling
expression; an expression seldom observed by competent persons under the
conditions of leisure and security demanded for thorough analysis, but
whose meaning could not be mistaken at a glance. Mrs Verloc’s doubts as
to the end of the bargain no longer existed; her wits, no longer
disconnected, were working under the control of her will. But Mr Verloc
observed nothing. He was reposing in that pathetic condition of optimism
induced by excess of fatigue. He did not want any more trouble—with his
wife too—of all people in the world. He had been unanswerable in his
vindication. He was loved for himself. The present phase of her silence
he interpreted favourably. This was the time to make it up with her.
The silence had lasted long enough. He broke it by calling to her in an
undertone.
“Winnie.”
“Yes,” answered obediently Mrs Verloc the free woman. She commanded her
wits now, her vocal organs; she felt herself to be in an almost
preternaturally perfect control of every fibre of her body. It was all
her own, because the bargain was at an end. She was clear sighted. She
had become cunning. She chose to answer him so readily for a purpose.
She did not wish that man to change his position on the sofa which was
very suitable to the circumstances. She succeeded. The man did not
stir. But after answering him she remained leaning negligently against
the mantelpiece in the attitude of a resting wayfarer. She was
unhurried. Her brow was smooth. The head and shoulders of Mr Verloc
were hidden from her by the high side of the sofa. She kept her eyes
fixed on his feet.
She remained thus mysteriously still and suddenly collected till Mr
Verloc was heard with an accent of marital authority, and moving slightly
to make room for her to sit on the edge of the sofa.
“Come here,” he said in a peculiar tone, which might have been the tone
of brutality, but was intimately known to Mrs Verloc as the note of
wooing.
She started forward at once, as if she were still a loyal woman bound to
that man by an unbroken contract. Her right hand skimmed slightly the
end of the table, and when she had passed on towards the sofa the carving
knife had vanished without the slightest sound from the side of the dish.
Mr Verloc heard the creaky plank in the floor, and was content. He
waited. Mrs Verloc was coming. As if the homeless soul of Stevie had
flown for shelter straight to the breast of his sister, guardian and
protector, the resemblance of her face with that of her brother grew at
every step, even to the droop of the lower lip, even to the slight
divergence of the eyes. But Mr Verloc did not see that. He was lying on
his back and staring upwards. He saw partly on the ceiling and partly on
the wall the moving shadow of an arm with a clenched hand holding a
carving knife. It flickered up and down. Its movements were leisurely.
They were leisurely enough for Mr Verloc to recognise the limb and the
weapon.
They were leisurely enough for him to take in the full meaning of the
portent, and to taste the flavour of death rising in his gorge. His wife
had gone raving mad—murdering mad. They were leisurely enough for the
first paralysing effect of this discovery to pass away before a resolute
determination to come out victorious from the ghastly struggle with that
armed lunatic. They were leisurely enough for Mr Verloc to elaborate a
plan of defence involving a dash behind the table, and the felling of the
woman to the ground with a heavy wooden chair. But they were not
leisurely enough to allow Mr Verloc the time to move either hand or foot.
The knife was already planted in his breast. It met no resistance on its
way. Hazard has such accuracies. Into that plunging blow, delivered
over the side of the couch, Mrs Verloc had put all the inheritance of her
immemorial and obscure descent, the simple ferocity of the age of
caverns, and the unbalanced nervous fury of the age of bar-rooms. Mr
Verloc, the Secret Agent, turning slightly on his side with the force of
the blow, expired without stirring a limb, in the muttered sound of the
word “Don’t” by way of protest.
Mrs Verloc had let go the knife, and her extraordinary resemblance to her
late brother had faded, had become very ordinary now. She drew a deep
breath, the first easy breath since Chief Inspector Heat had exhibited to
her the labelled piece of Stevie’s overcoat. She leaned forward on her
folded arms over the side of the sofa. She adopted that easy attitude
not in order to watch or gloat over the body of Mr Verloc, but because of
the undulatory and swinging movements of the parlour, which for some time
behaved as though it were at sea in a tempest. She was giddy but calm.
She had become a free woman with a perfection of freedom which left her
nothing to desire and absolutely nothing to do, since Stevie’s urgent
claim on her devotion no longer existed. Mrs Verloc, who thought in
images, was not troubled now by visions, because she did not think at
all. And she did not move. She was a woman enjoying her complete
irresponsibility and endless leisure, almost in the manner of a corpse.
She did not move, she did not think. Neither did the mortal envelope of
the late Mr Verloc reposing on the sofa. Except for the fact that Mrs
Verloc breathed these two would have been perfect in accord: that accord
of prudent reserve without superfluous words, and sparing of signs, which
had been the foundation of their respectable home life. For it had been
respectable, covering by a decent reticence the problems that may arise
in the practice of a secret profession and the commerce of shady wares.
To the last its decorum had remained undisturbed by unseemly shrieks and
other misplaced sincerities of conduct. And after the striking of the
blow, this respectability was continued in immobility and silence.
Nothing moved in the parlour till Mrs Verloc raised her head slowly and
looked at the clock with inquiring mistrust. She had become aware of a
ticking sound in the room. It grew upon her ear, while she remembered
clearly that the clock on the wall was silent, had no audible tick. What
did it mean by beginning to tick so loudly all of a sudden? Its face
indicated ten minutes to nine. Mrs Verloc cared nothing for time, and
the ticking went on. She concluded it could not be the clock, and her
sullen gaze moved along the walls, wavered, and became vague, while she
strained her hearing to locate the sound. Tic, tic, tic.
After listening for some time Mrs Verloc lowered her gaze deliberately on
her husband’s body. Its attitude of repose was so home-like and familiar
that she could do so without feeling embarrassed by any pronounced
novelty in the phenomena of her home life. Mr Verloc was taking his
habitual ease. He looked comfortable.
By the position of the body the face of Mr Verloc was not visible to Mrs
Verloc, his widow. Her fine, sleepy eyes, travelling downward on the
track of the sound, became contemplative on meeting a flat object of bone
which protruded a little beyond the edge of the sofa. It was the handle
of the domestic carving knife with nothing strange about it but its
position at right angles to Mr Verloc’s waistcoat and the fact that
something dripped from it. Dark drops fell on the floorcloth one after
another, with a sound of ticking growing fast and furious like the pulse
of an insane clock. At its highest speed this ticking changed into a
continuous sound of trickling. Mrs Verloc watched that transformation
with shadows of anxiety coming and going on her face. It was a trickle,
dark, swift, thin. . . . Blood!
At this unforeseen circumstance Mrs Verloc abandoned her pose of idleness
and irresponsibility.
With a sudden snatch at her skirts and a faint shriek she ran to the
door, as if the trickle had been the first sign of a destroying flood.
Finding the table in her way she gave it a push with both hands as though
it had been alive, with such force that it went for some distance on its
four legs, making a loud, scraping racket, whilst the big dish with the
joint crashed heavily on the floor.
Then all became still. Mrs Verloc on reaching the door had stopped. A
round hat disclosed in the middle of the floor by the moving of the table
rocked slightly on its crown in the wind of her flight.
CHAPTER XII
Winnie Verloc, the widow of Mr Verloc, the sister of the late faithful
Stevie (blown to fragments in a state of innocence and in the conviction
of being engaged in a humanitarian enterprise), did not run beyond the
door of the parlour. She had indeed run away so far from a mere trickle
of blood, but that was a movement of instinctive repulsion. And there
she had paused, with staring eyes and lowered head. As though she had
run through long years in her flight across the small parlour, Mrs Verloc
by the door was quite a different person from the woman who had been
leaning over the sofa, a little swimmy in her head, but otherwise free to
enjoy the profound calm of idleness and irresponsibility. Mrs Verloc was
no longer giddy. Her head was steady. On the other hand, she was no