The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
three lights on one stand in the middle. The dark forms of the man and
woman glided slowly arm in arm along the walls with a loverlike and
homeless aspect in the miserable night.
“What would you say if I were to tell you that I was going to find you?”
Mrs Verloc asked, gripping his arm with force.
“I would say that you couldn’t find anyone more ready to help you in your
trouble,” answered Ossipon, with a notion of making tremendous headway.
In fact, the progress of this delicate affair was almost taking his
breath away.
“In my trouble!” Mrs Verloc repeated slowly.
“Yes.”
“And do you know what my trouble is?” she whispered with strange
intensity.
“Ten minutes after seeing the evening paper,” explained Ossipon with
ardour, “I met a fellow whom you may have seen once or twice at the shop
perhaps, and I had a talk with him which left no doubt whatever in my
mind. Then I started for here, wondering whether you—I’ve been fond of
you beyond words ever since I set eyes on your face,” he cried, as if
unable to command his feelings.
Comrade Ossipon assumed correctly that no woman was capable of wholly
disbelieving such a statement. But he did not know that Mrs Verloc
accepted it with all the fierceness the instinct of self-preservation
puts into the grip of a drowning person. To the widow of Mr Verloc the
robust anarchist was like a radiant messenger of life.
They walked slowly, in step. “I thought so,” Mrs Verloc murmured
faintly.
“You’ve read it in my eyes,” suggested Ossipon with great assurance.
“Yes,” she breathed out into his inclined ear.
“A love like mine could not be concealed from a woman like you,” he went
on, trying to detach his mind from material considerations such as the
business value of the shop, and the amount of money Mr Verloc might have
left in the bank. He applied himself to the sentimental side of the
affair. In his heart of hearts he was a little shocked at his success.
Verloc had been a good fellow, and certainly a very decent husband as far
as one could see. However, Comrade Ossipon was not going to quarrel with
his luck for the sake of a dead man. Resolutely he suppressed his
sympathy for the ghost of Comrade Verloc, and went on.
“I could not conceal it. I was too full of you. I daresay you could not
help seeing it in my eyes. But I could not guess it. You were always so
distant. . . .”
“What else did you expect?” burst out Mrs Verloc. “I was a respectable
woman—”
She paused, then added, as if speaking to herself, in sinister
resentment: “Till he made me what I am.”
Ossipon let that pass, and took up his running. “He never did seem to me
to be quite worthy of you,” he began, throwing loyalty to the winds.
“You were worthy of a better fate.”
Mrs Verloc interrupted bitterly:
“Better fate! He cheated me out of seven years of life.”
“You seemed to live so happily with him.” Ossipon tried to exculpate the
lukewarmness of his past conduct. “It’s that what’s made me timid. You
seemed to love him. I was surprised—and jealous,” he added.
“Love him!” Mrs Verloc cried out in a whisper, full of scorn and rage.
“Love him! I was a good wife to him. I am a respectable woman. You
thought I loved him! You did! Look here, Tom—”
The sound of this name thrilled Comrade Ossipon with pride. For his name
was Alexander, and he was called Tom by arrangement with the most
familiar of his intimates. It was a name of friendship—of moments of
expansion. He had no idea that she had ever heard it used by anybody.
It was apparent that she had not only caught it, but had treasured it in
her memory—perhaps in her heart.
“Look here, Tom! I was a young girl. I was done up. I was tired. I
had two people depending on what I could do, and it did seem as if I
couldn’t do any more. Two people—mother and the boy. He was much more
mine than mother’s. I sat up nights and nights with him on my lap, all
alone upstairs, when I wasn’t more than eight years old myself. And
then—He was mine, I tell you. . . . You can’t understand that. No man
can understand it. What was I to do? There was a young fellow—”
The memory of the early romance with the young butcher survived,
tenacious, like the image of a glimpsed ideal in that heart quailing
before the fear of the gallows and full of revolt against death.
“That was the man I loved then,” went on the widow of Mr Verloc. “I
suppose he could see it in my eyes too. Five and twenty shillings a
week, and his father threatened to kick him out of the business if he
made such a fool of himself as to marry a girl with a crippled mother and
a crazy idiot of a boy on her hands. But he would hang about me, till
one evening I found the courage to slam the door in his face. I had to
do it. I loved him dearly. Five and twenty shillings a week! There was
that other man—a good lodger. What is a girl to do? Could I’ve gone on
the streets? He seemed kind. He wanted me, anyhow. What was I to do
with mother and that poor boy? Eh? I said yes. He seemed good-natured,
he was freehanded, he had money, he never said anything. Seven
years—seven years a good wife to him, the kind, the good, the generous,
the—And he loved me. Oh yes. He loved me till I sometimes wished
myself—Seven years. Seven years a wife to him. And do you know what he
was, that dear friend of yours? Do you know what he was? He was a
devil!”
The superhuman vehemence of that whispered statement completely stunned
Comrade Ossipon. Winnie Verloc turning about held him by both arms,
facing him under the falling mist in the darkness and solitude of Brett
Place, in which all sounds of life seemed lost as if in a triangular well
of asphalt and bricks, of blind houses and unfeeling stones.
“No; I didn’t know,” he declared, with a sort of flabby stupidity, whose
comical aspect was lost upon a woman haunted by the fear of the gallows,
“but I do now. I—I understand,” he floundered on, his mind speculating
as to what sort of atrocities Verloc could have practised under the
sleepy, placid appearances of his married estate. It was positively
awful. “I understand,” he repeated, and then by a sudden inspiration
uttered an—“Unhappy woman!” of lofty commiseration instead of the more
familiar “Poor darling!” of his usual practice. This was no usual case.
He felt conscious of something abnormal going on, while he never lost
sight of the greatness of the stake. “Unhappy, brave woman!”
He was glad to have discovered that variation; but he could discover
nothing else.
“Ah, but he is dead now,” was the best he could do. And he put a
remarkable amount of animosity into his guarded exclamation. Mrs Verloc
caught at his arm with a sort of frenzy.
“You guessed then he was dead,” she murmured, as if beside herself.
“You! You guessed what I had to do. Had to!”
There were suggestions of triumph, relief, gratitude in the indefinable
tone of these words. It engrossed the whole attention of Ossipon to the
detriment of mere literal sense. He wondered what was up with her, why
she had worked herself into this state of wild excitement. He even began
to wonder whether the hidden causes of that Greenwich Park affair did not
lie deep in the unhappy circumstances of the Verlocs’ married life. He
went so far as to suspect Mr Verloc of having selected that extraordinary
manner of committing suicide. By Jove! that would account for the utter
inanity and wrong-headedness of the thing. No anarchist manifestation
was required by the circumstances. Quite the contrary; and Verloc was as
well aware of that as any other revolutionist of his standing. What an
immense joke if Verloc had simply made fools of the whole of Europe, of
the revolutionary world, of the police, of the press, and of the cocksure
Professor as well. Indeed, thought Ossipon, in astonishment, it seemed
almost certain that he did! Poor beggar! It struck him as very possible
that of that household of two it wasn’t precisely the man who was the
devil.
Alexander Ossipon, nicknamed the Doctor, was naturally inclined to think
indulgently of his men friends. He eyed Mrs Verloc hanging on his arm.
Of his women friends he thought in a specially practical way. Why Mrs
Verloc should exclaim at his knowledge of Mr Verloc’s death, which was no
guess at all, did not disturb him beyond measure. They often talked like
lunatics. But he was curious to know how she had been informed. The
papers could tell her nothing beyond the mere fact: the man blown to
pieces in Greenwich Park not having been identified. It was
inconceivable on any theory that Verloc should have given her an inkling
of his intention—whatever it was. This problem interested Comrade
Ossipon immensely. He stopped short. They had gone then along the three
sides of Brett Place, and were near the end of Brett Street again.
“How did you first come to hear of it?” he asked in a tone he tried to
render appropriate to the character of the revelations which had been
made to him by the woman at his side.
She shook violently for a while before she answered in a listless voice.
“From the police. A chief inspector came, Chief Inspector Heat he said
he was. He showed me—”
Mrs Verloc choked. “Oh, Tom, they had to gather him up with a shovel.”
Her breast heaved with dry sobs. In a moment Ossipon found his tongue.
“The police! Do you mean to say the police came already? That Chief
Inspector Heat himself actually came to tell you.”
“Yes,” she confirmed in the same listless tone. “He came just like this.
He came. I didn’t know. He showed me a piece of overcoat, and—just like
that. Do you know this? he says.”
“Heat! Heat! And what did he do?”
Mrs Verloc’s head dropped. “Nothing. He did nothing. He went away.
The police were on that man’s side,” she murmured tragically. “Another
one came too.”
“Another—another inspector, do you mean?” asked Ossipon, in great
excitement, and very much in the tone of a scared child.
“I don’t know. He came. He looked like a foreigner. He may have been
one of them Embassy people.”
Comrade Ossipon nearly collapsed under this new shock.
“Embassy! Are you aware what you are saying? What Embassy? What on
earth do you mean by Embassy?”
“It’s that place in Chesham Square. The people he cursed so. I don’t
know. What does it matter!”
“And that fellow, what did he do or say to you?”
“I don’t remember. . . . Nothing . . . . I don’t care. Don’t ask me,”
she pleaded in a weary voice.
“All right. I won’t,” assented Ossipon tenderly. And he meant it too,
not because he was touched by the pathos of the pleading voice, but
because he felt himself losing his footing in the depths of this
tenebrous affair. Police! Embassy! Phew! For fear of adventuring his
intelligence into ways where its natural lights might fail to guide it
safely he dismissed resolutely all suppositions, surmises, and theories
out of his mind. He had the woman there, absolutely flinging herself at
him, and that was the principal consideration. But after what he had
heard nothing could astonish him any more. And when Mrs Verloc, as if
startled suddenly out of a dream of safety, began to urge upon him wildly
the necessity of an immediate flight on the Continent, he did not exclaim
in the least. He simply said with unaffected regret that there was no
train till the morning, and stood looking thoughtfully at her face,
veiled in black net, in the light of a gas lamp veiled in a gauze of
mist.
Near him, her black form merged in the night, like a figure half
chiselled out of a block of black stone. It was impossible to say what
she knew, how deep she was involved with policemen and Embassies. But if
she wanted to get away, it was not for him to object. He was anxious to