The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
the edge of the desk. Every trace of huskiness disappeared from Verloc’s
voice. The nape of his gross neck became crimson above the velvet collar
of his overcoat. His lips quivered before they came widely open.
“If you’ll only be good enough to look up my record,” he boomed out in
his great, clear oratorical bass, “you’ll see I gave a warning only three
months ago, on the occasion of the Grand Duke Romuald’s visit to Paris,
which was telegraphed from here to the French police, and—”
“Tut, tut!” broke out Mr Vladimir, with a frowning grimace. “The French
police had no use for your warning. Don’t roar like this. What the
devil do you mean?”
With a note of proud humility Mr Verloc apologised for forgetting
himself. His voice,—famous for years at open-air meetings and at
workmen’s assemblies in large halls, had contributed, he said, to his
reputation of a good and trustworthy comrade. It was, therefore, a part
of his usefulness. It had inspired confidence in his principles. “I was
always put up to speak by the leaders at a critical moment,” Mr Verloc
declared, with obvious satisfaction. There was no uproar above which he
could not make himself heard, he added; and suddenly he made a
demonstration.
“Allow me,” he said. With lowered forehead, without looking up, swiftly
and ponderously he crossed the room to one of the French windows. As if
giving way to an uncontrollable impulse, he opened it a little. Mr
Vladimir, jumping up amazed from the depths of the arm-chair, looked over
his shoulder; and below, across the courtyard of the Embassy, well beyond
the open gate, could be seen the broad back of a policeman watching idly
the gorgeous perambulator of a wealthy baby being wheeled in state across
the Square.
“Constable!” said Mr Verloc, with no more effort than if he were
whispering; and Mr Vladimir burst into a laugh on seeing the policeman
spin round as if prodded by a sharp instrument. Mr Verloc shut the
window quietly, and returned to the middle of the room.
“With a voice like that,” he said, putting on the husky conversational
pedal, “I was naturally trusted. And I knew what to say, too.”
Mr Vladimir, arranging his cravat, observed him in the glass over the
mantelpiece.
“I daresay you have the social revolutionary jargon by heart well
enough,” he said contemptuously. “Vox et. . . You haven’t ever studied
Latin—have you?”
“No,” growled Mr Verloc. “You did not expect me to know it. I belong to
the million. Who knows Latin? Only a few hundred imbeciles who aren’t
fit to take care of themselves.”
For some thirty seconds longer Mr Vladimir studied in the mirror the
fleshy profile, the gross bulk, of the man behind him. And at the same
time he had the advantage of seeing his own face, clean-shaved and round,
rosy about the gills, and with the thin sensitive lips formed exactly for
the utterance of those delicate witticisms which had made him such a
favourite in the very highest society. Then he turned, and advanced into
the room with such determination that the very ends of his quaintly
old-fashioned bow necktie seemed to bristle with unspeakable menaces.
The movement was so swift and fierce that Mr Verloc, casting an oblique
glance, quailed inwardly.
“Aha! You dare be impudent,” Mr Vladimir began, with an amazingly
guttural intonation not only utterly un-English, but absolutely
un-European, and startling even to Mr Verloc’s experience of cosmopolitan
slums. “You dare! Well, I am going to speak plain English to you.
Voice won’t do. We have no use for your voice. We don’t want a voice.
We want facts—startling facts—damn you,” he added, with a sort of
ferocious discretion, right into Mr Verloc’s face.
“Don’t you try to come over me with your Hyperborean manners,” Mr Verloc
defended himself huskily, looking at the carpet. At this his
interlocutor, smiling mockingly above the bristling bow of his necktie,
switched the conversation into French.
“You give yourself for an ‘agent provocateur.’ The proper business of an
‘agent provocateur’ is to provoke. As far as I can judge from your
record kept here, you have done nothing to earn your money for the last
three years.”
“Nothing!” exclaimed Verloc, stirring not a limb, and not raising his
eyes, but with the note of sincere feeling in his tone. “I have several
times prevented what might have been—”
“There is a proverb in this country which says prevention is better than
cure,” interrupted Mr Vladimir, throwing himself into the arm-chair. “It
is stupid in a general way. There is no end to prevention. But it is
characteristic. They dislike finality in this country. Don’t you be too
English. And in this particular instance, don’t be absurd. The evil is
already here. We don’t want prevention—we want cure.”
He paused, turned to the desk, and turning over some papers lying there,
spoke in a changed business-like tone, without looking at Mr Verloc.
“You know, of course, of the International Conference assembled in
Milan?”
Mr Verloc intimated hoarsely that he was in the habit of reading the
daily papers. To a further question his answer was that, of course, he
understood what he read. At this Mr Vladimir, smiling faintly at the
documents he was still scanning one after another, murmured “As long as
it is not written in Latin, I suppose.”
“Or Chinese,” added Mr Verloc stolidly.
“H’m. Some of your revolutionary friends’ effusions are written in a
_charabia_ every bit as incomprehensible as Chinese—” Mr Vladimir let
fall disdainfully a grey sheet of printed matter. “What are all these
leaflets headed F. P., with a hammer, pen, and torch crossed? What does
it mean, this F. P.?” Mr Verloc approached the imposing writing-table.
“The Future of the Proletariat. It’s a society,” he explained, standing
ponderously by the side of the arm-chair, “not anarchist in principle,
but open to all shades of revolutionary opinion.”
“Are you in it?”
“One of the Vice-Presidents,” Mr Verloc breathed out heavily; and the
First Secretary of the Embassy raised his head to look at him.
“Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself,” he said incisively. “Isn’t
your society capable of anything else but printing this prophetic bosh in
blunt type on this filthy paper eh? Why don’t you do something? Look
here. I’ve this matter in hand now, and I tell you plainly that you will
have to earn your money. The good old Stott-Wartenheim times are over.
No work, no pay.”
Mr Verloc felt a queer sensation of faintness in his stout legs. He
stepped back one pace, and blew his nose loudly.
He was, in truth, startled and alarmed. The rusty London sunshine
struggling clear of the London mist shed a lukewarm brightness into the
First Secretary’s private room; and in the silence Mr Verloc heard
against a window-pane the faint buzzing of a fly—his first fly of the
year—heralding better than any number of swallows the approach of spring.
The useless fussing of that tiny energetic organism affected unpleasantly
this big man threatened in his indolence.
In the pause Mr Vladimir formulated in his mind a series of disparaging
remarks concerning Mr Verloc’s face and figure. The fellow was
unexpectedly vulgar, heavy, and impudently unintelligent. He looked
uncommonly like a master plumber come to present his bill. The First
Secretary of the Embassy, from his occasional excursions into the field
of American humour, had formed a special notion of that class of mechanic
as the embodiment of fraudulent laziness and incompetency.
This was then the famous and trusty secret agent, so secret that he was
never designated otherwise but by the symbol [delta] in the late Baron
Stott-Wartenheim’s official, semi-official, and confidential
correspondence; the celebrated agent [delta], whose warnings had the
power to change the schemes and the dates of royal, imperial, grand ducal
journeys, and sometimes caused them to be put off altogether! This
fellow! And Mr Vladimir indulged mentally in an enormous and derisive
fit of merriment, partly at his own astonishment, which he judged naive,
but mostly at the expense of the universally regretted Baron
Stott-Wartenheim. His late Excellency, whom the august favour of his
Imperial master had imposed as Ambassador upon several reluctant
Ministers of Foreign Affairs, had enjoyed in his lifetime a fame for an
owlish, pessimistic gullibility. His Excellency had the social
revolution on the brain. He imagined himself to be a diplomatist set
apart by a special dispensation to watch the end of diplomacy, and pretty
nearly the end of the world, in a horrid democratic upheaval. His
prophetic and doleful despatches had been for years the joke of Foreign
Offices. He was said to have exclaimed on his deathbed (visited by his
Imperial friend and master): “Unhappy Europe! Thou shalt perish by the
moral insanity of thy children!” He was fated to be the victim of the
first humbugging rascal that came along, thought Mr Vladimir, smiling
vaguely at Mr Verloc.
“You ought to venerate the memory of Baron Stott-Wartenheim,” he
exclaimed suddenly.
The lowered physiognomy of Mr Verloc expressed a sombre and weary
annoyance.
“Permit me to observe to you,” he said, “that I came here because I was
summoned by a peremptory letter. I have been here only twice before in
the last eleven years, and certainly never at eleven in the morning. It
isn’t very wise to call me up like this. There is just a chance of being
seen. And that would be no joke for me.”
Mr Vladimir shrugged his shoulders.
“It would destroy my usefulness,” continued the other hotly.
“That’s your affair,” murmured Mr Vladimir, with soft brutality. “When
you cease to be useful you shall cease to be employed. Yes. Right off.
Cut short. You shall—” Mr Vladimir, frowning, paused, at a loss for a
sufficiently idiomatic expression, and instantly brightened up, with a
grin of beautifully white teeth. “You shall be chucked,” he brought out
ferociously.
Once more Mr Verloc had to react with all the force of his will against
that sensation of faintness running down one’s legs which once upon a
time had inspired some poor devil with the felicitous expression: “My
heart went down into my boots.” Mr Verloc, aware of the sensation,
raised his head bravely.
Mr Vladimir bore the look of heavy inquiry with perfect serenity.
“What we want is to administer a tonic to the Conference in Milan,” he
said airily. “Its deliberations upon international action for the
suppression of political crime don’t seem to get anywhere. England lags.
This country is absurd with its sentimental regard for individual
liberty. It’s intolerable to think that all your friends have got only
to come over to—”
“In that way I have them all under my eye,” Mr Verloc interrupted
huskily.
“It would be much more to the point to have them all under lock and key.
England must be brought into line. The imbecile bourgeoisie of this
country make themselves the accomplices of the very people whose aim is
to drive them out of their houses to starve in ditches. And they have
the political power still, if they only had the sense to use it for their
preservation. I suppose you agree that the middle classes are stupid?”
Mr Verloc agreed hoarsely.
“They are.”
“They have no imagination. They are blinded by an idiotic vanity. What
they want just now is a jolly good scare. This is the psychological
moment to set your friends to work. I have had you called here to
develop to you my idea.”
And Mr Vladimir developed his idea from on high, with scorn and
condescension, displaying at the same time an amount of ignorance as to
the real aims, thoughts, and methods of the revolutionary world which