The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
Ossipon’s rigidity had something business-like, a queer official
expression. He was heard again all of a sudden, as though he had
released a catch in order to speak.
“Look here! Do you know whether your—whether he kept his account at the
bank in his own name or in some other name.”
Mrs Verloc turned upon him her masked face and the big white gleam of her
eyes.
“Other name?” she said thoughtfully.
“Be exact in what you say,” Ossipon lectured in the swift motion of the
hansom. “It’s extremely important. I will explain to you. The bank has
the numbers of these notes. If they were paid to him in his own name,
then when his—his death becomes known, the notes may serve to track us
since we have no other money. You have no other money on you?”
She shook her head negatively.
“None whatever?” he insisted.
“A few coppers.”
“It would be dangerous in that case. The money would have then to be
dealt specially with. Very specially. We’d have perhaps to lose more
than half the amount in order to get these notes changed in a certain
safe place I know of in Paris. In the other case I mean if he had his
account and got paid out under some other name—say Smith, for
instance—the money is perfectly safe to use. You understand? The bank
has no means of knowing that Mr Verloc and, say, Smith are one and the
same person. Do you see how important it is that you should make no
mistake in answering me? Can you answer that query at all? Perhaps not.
Eh?”
She said composedly:
“I remember now! He didn’t bank in his own name. He told me once that
it was on deposit in the name of Prozor.”
“You are sure?”
“Certain.”
“You don’t think the bank had any knowledge of his real name? Or anybody
in the bank or—”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“How can I know? Is it likely, Tom?
“No. I suppose it’s not likely. It would have been more comfortable to
know. . . . Here we are. Get out first, and walk straight in. Move
smartly.”
He remained behind, and paid the cabman out of his own loose silver. The
programme traced by his minute foresight was carried out. When Mrs
Verloc, with her ticket for St Malo in her hand, entered the ladies’
waiting-room, Comrade Ossipon walked into the bar, and in seven minutes
absorbed three goes of hot brandy and water.
“Trying to drive out a cold,” he explained to the barmaid, with a
friendly nod and a grimacing smile. Then he came out, bringing out from
that festive interlude the face of a man who had drunk at the very
Fountain of Sorrow. He raised his eyes to the clock. It was time. He
waited.
Punctual, Mrs Verloc came out, with her veil down, and all black—black as
commonplace death itself, crowned with a few cheap and pale flowers. She
passed close to a little group of men who were laughing, but whose
laughter could have been struck dead by a single word. Her walk was
indolent, but her back was straight, and Comrade Ossipon looked after it
in terror before making a start himself.
The train was drawn up, with hardly anybody about its row of open doors.
Owing to the time of the year and to the abominable weather there were
hardly any passengers. Mrs Verloc walked slowly along the line of empty
compartments till Ossipon touched her elbow from behind.
“In here.”
She got in, and he remained on the platform looking about. She bent
forward, and in a whisper:
“What is it, Tom? Is there any danger? Wait a moment. There’s the
guard.”
She saw him accost the man in uniform. They talked for a while. She
heard the guard say “Very well, sir,” and saw him touch his cap. Then
Ossipon came back, saying: “I told him not to let anybody get into our
compartment.”
She was leaning forward on her seat. “You think of everything. . . .
You’ll get me off, Tom?” she asked in a gust of anguish, lifting her veil
brusquely to look at her saviour.
She had uncovered a face like adamant. And out of this face the eyes
looked on, big, dry, enlarged, lightless, burnt out like two black holes
in the white, shining globes.
“There is no danger,” he said, gazing into them with an earnestness
almost rapt, which to Mrs Verloc, flying from the gallows, seemed to be
full of force and tenderness. This devotion deeply moved her—and the
adamantine face lost the stern rigidity of its terror. Comrade Ossipon
gazed at it as no lover ever gazed at his mistress’s face. Alexander
Ossipon, anarchist, nicknamed the Doctor, author of a medical (and
improper) pamphlet, late lecturer on the social aspects of hygiene to
working men’s clubs, was free from the trammels of conventional
morality—but he submitted to the rule of science. He was scientific, and
he gazed scientifically at that woman, the sister of a degenerate, a
degenerate herself—of a murdering type. He gazed at her, and invoked
Lombroso, as an Italian peasant recommends himself to his favourite
saint. He gazed scientifically. He gazed at her cheeks, at her nose, at
her eyes, at her ears. . . . Bad! . . . Fatal! Mrs Verloc’s pale lips
parting, slightly relaxed under his passionately attentive gaze, he gazed
also at her teeth. . . . Not a doubt remained . . . a murdering type. . . .
If Comrade Ossipon did not recommend his terrified soul to Lombroso, it
was only because on scientific grounds he could not believe that he
carried about him such a thing as a soul. But he had in him the
scientific spirit, which moved him to testify on the platform of a
railway station in nervous jerky phrases.
“He was an extraordinary lad, that brother of yours. Most interesting to
study. A perfect type in a way. Perfect!”
He spoke scientifically in his secret fear. And Mrs Verloc, hearing
these words of commendation vouchsafed to her beloved dead, swayed
forward with a flicker of light in her sombre eyes, like a ray of
sunshine heralding a tempest of rain.
“He was that indeed,” she whispered softly, with quivering lips. “You
took a lot of notice of him, Tom. I loved you for it.”
“It’s almost incredible the resemblance there was between you two,”
pursued Ossipon, giving a voice to his abiding dread, and trying to
conceal his nervous, sickening impatience for the train to start. “Yes;
he resembled you.”
These words were not especially touching or sympathetic. But the fact of
that resemblance insisted upon was enough in itself to act upon her
emotions powerfully. With a little faint cry, and throwing her arms out,
Mrs Verloc burst into tears at last.
Ossipon entered the carriage, hastily closed the door and looked out to
see the time by the station clock. Eight minutes more. For the first
three of these Mrs Verloc wept violently and helplessly without pause or
interruption. Then she recovered somewhat, and sobbed gently in an
abundant fall of tears. She tried to talk to her saviour, to the man who
was the messenger of life.
“Oh, Tom! How could I fear to die after he was taken away from me so
cruelly! How could I! How could I be such a coward!”
She lamented aloud her love of life, that life without grace or charm,
and almost without decency, but of an exalted faithfulness of purpose,
even unto murder. And, as often happens in the lament of poor humanity,
rich in suffering but indigent in words, the truth—the very cry of
truth—was found in a worn and artificial shape picked up somewhere among
the phrases of sham sentiment.
“How could I be so afraid of death! Tom, I tried. But I am afraid. I
tried to do away with myself. And I couldn’t. Am I hard? I suppose the
cup of horrors was not full enough for such as me. Then when you came. . . . ”
She paused. Then in a gust of confidence and gratitude, “I will live all
my days for you, Tom!” she sobbed out.
“Go over into the other corner of the carriage, away from the platform,”
said Ossipon solicitously. She let her saviour settle her comfortably,
and he watched the coming on of another crisis of weeping, still more
violent than the first. He watched the symptoms with a sort of medical
air, as if counting seconds. He heard the guard’s whistle at last. An
involuntary contraction of the upper lip bared his teeth with all the
aspect of savage resolution as he felt the train beginning to move. Mrs
Verloc heard and felt nothing, and Ossipon, her saviour, stood still. He
felt the train roll quicker, rumbling heavily to the sound of the woman’s
loud sobs, and then crossing the carriage in two long strides he opened
the door deliberately, and leaped out.
He had leaped out at the very end of the platform; and such was his
determination in sticking to his desperate plan that he managed by a sort
of miracle, performed almost in the air, to slam to the door of the
carriage. Only then did he find himself rolling head over heels like a
shot rabbit. He was bruised, shaken, pale as death, and out of breath
when he got up. But he was calm, and perfectly able to meet the excited
crowd of railway men who had gathered round him in a moment. He
explained, in gentle and convincing tones, that his wife had started at a
moment’s notice for Brittany to her dying mother; that, of course, she
was greatly up-set, and he considerably concerned at her state; that he
was trying to cheer her up, and had absolutely failed to notice at first
that the train was moving out. To the general exclamation, “Why didn’t
you go on to Southampton, then, sir?” he objected the inexperience of a
young sister-in-law left alone in the house with three small children,
and her alarm at his absence, the telegraph offices being closed. He had
acted on impulse. “But I don’t think I’ll ever try that again,” he
concluded; smiled all round; distributed some small change, and marched
without a limp out of the station.
Outside, Comrade Ossipon, flush of safe banknotes as never before in his
life, refused the offer of a cab.
“I can walk,” he said, with a little friendly laugh to the civil driver.
He could walk. He walked. He crossed the bridge. Later on the towers
of the Abbey saw in their massive immobility the yellow bush of his hair
passing under the lamps. The lights of Victoria saw him too, and Sloane
Square, and the railings of the park. And Comrade Ossipon once more
found himself on a bridge. The river, a sinister marvel of still shadows
and flowing gleams mingling below in a black silence, arrested his
attention. He stood looking over the parapet for a long time. The clock
tower boomed a brazen blast above his drooping head. He looked up at the
dial. . . . Half-past twelve of a wild night in the Channel.
And again Comrade Ossipon walked. His robust form was seen that night in
distant parts of the enormous town slumbering monstrously on a carpet of
mud under a veil of raw mist. It was seen crossing the streets without
life and sound, or diminishing in the interminable straight perspectives
of shadowy houses bordering empty roadways lined by strings of gas lamps.
He walked through Squares, Places, Ovals, Commons, through monotonous
streets with unknown names where the dust of humanity settles inert and
hopeless out of the stream of life. He walked. And suddenly turning
into a strip of a front garden with a mangy grass plot, he let himself
into a small grimy house with a latch-key he took out of his pocket.
He threw himself down on his bed all dressed, and lay still for a whole
quarter of an hour. Then he sat up suddenly, drawing up his knees, and
clasping his legs. The first dawn found him open-eyed, in that same
posture. This man who could walk so long, so far, so aimlessly, without
showing a sign of fatigue, could also remain sitting still for hours
without stirring a limb or an eyelid. But when the late sun sent its
rays into the room he unclasped his hands, and fell back on the pillow.