Chapter Chapter 3 · Chapter III

. Chapter III

“ . . . All idealisation makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take

away its character of complexity—it is to destroy it. Leave that to the

moralists, my boy. History is made by men, but they do not make it in

their heads. The ideas that are born in their consciousness play an

insignificant part in the march of events. History is dominated and

determined by the tool and the production—by the force of economic

conditions. Capitalism has made socialism, and the laws made by the

capitalism for the protection of property are responsible for anarchism.

No one can tell what form the social organisation may take in the future.

Then why indulge in prophetic phantasies? At best they can only

interpret the mind of the prophet, and can have no objective value.

Leave that pastime to the moralists, my boy.”

Michaelis, the ticket-of-leave apostle, was speaking in an even voice, a

voice that wheezed as if deadened and oppressed by the layer of fat on

his chest. He had come out of a highly hygienic prison round like a tub,

with an enormous stomach and distended cheeks of a pale, semi-transparent

complexion, as though for fifteen years the servants of an outraged

society had made a point of stuffing him with fattening foods in a damp

and lightless cellar. And ever since he had never managed to get his

weight down as much as an ounce.

It was said that for three seasons running a very wealthy old lady had

sent him for a cure to Marienbad—where he was about to share the public

curiosity once with a crowned head—but the police on that occasion

ordered him to leave within twelve hours. His martyrdom was continued by

forbidding him all access to the healing waters. But he was resigned

now.

With his elbow presenting no appearance of a joint, but more like a bend

in a dummy’s limb, thrown over the back of a chair, he leaned forward

slightly over his short and enormous thighs to spit into the grate.

“Yes! I had the time to think things out a little,” he added without

emphasis. “Society has given me plenty of time for meditation.”

On the other side of the fireplace, in the horse-hair arm-chair where Mrs

Verloc’s mother was generally privileged to sit, Karl Yundt giggled

grimly, with a faint black grimace of a toothless mouth. The terrorist,

as he called himself, was old and bald, with a narrow, snow-white wisp of

a goatee hanging limply from his chin. An extraordinary expression of

underhand malevolence survived in his extinguished eyes. When he rose

painfully the thrusting forward of a skinny groping hand deformed by

gouty swellings suggested the effort of a moribund murderer summoning all

his remaining strength for a last stab. He leaned on a thick stick,

which trembled under his other hand.

“I have always dreamed,” he mouthed fiercely, “of a band of men absolute

in their resolve to discard all scruples in the choice of means, strong

enough to give themselves frankly the name of destroyers, and free from

the taint of that resigned pessimism which rots the world. No pity for

anything on earth, including themselves, and death enlisted for good and

all in the service of humanity—that’s what I would have liked to see.”

His little bald head quivered, imparting a comical vibration to the wisp

of white goatee. His enunciation would have been almost totally

unintelligible to a stranger. His worn-out passion, resembling in its

impotent fierceness the excitement of a senile sensualist, was badly

served by a dried throat and toothless gums which seemed to catch the tip

of his tongue. Mr Verloc, established in the corner of the sofa at the

other end of the room, emitted two hearty grunts of assent.

The old terrorist turned slowly his head on his skinny neck from side to

side.

“And I could never get as many as three such men together. So much for

your rotten pessimism,” he snarled at Michaelis, who uncrossed his thick

legs, similar to bolsters, and slid his feet abruptly under his chair in

sign of exasperation.

He a pessimist! Preposterous! He cried out that the charge was

outrageous. He was so far from pessimism that he saw already the end of

all private property coming along logically, unavoidably, by the mere

development of its inherent viciousness. The possessors of property had

not only to face the awakened proletariat, but they had also to fight

amongst themselves. Yes. Struggle, warfare, was the condition of

private ownership. It was fatal. Ah! he did not depend upon emotional

excitement to keep up his belief, no declamations, no anger, no visions

of blood-red flags waving, or metaphorical lurid suns of vengeance rising

above the horizon of a doomed society. Not he! Cold reason, he boasted,

was the basis of his optimism. Yes, optimism—

His laborious wheezing stopped, then, after a gasp or two, he added:

“Don’t you think that, if I had not been the optimist I am, I could not

have found in fifteen years some means to cut my throat? And, in the

last instance, there were always the walls of my cell to dash my head

against.”

The shortness of breath took all fire, all animation out of his voice;

his great, pale cheeks hung like filled pouches, motionless, without a

quiver; but in his blue eyes, narrowed as if peering, there was the same

look of confident shrewdness, a little crazy in its fixity, they must

have had while the indomitable optimist sat thinking at night in his

cell. Before him, Karl Yundt remained standing, one wing of his faded

greenish havelock thrown back cavalierly over his shoulder. Seated in

front of the fireplace, Comrade Ossipon, ex-medical student, the

principal writer of the F. P. leaflets, stretched out his robust legs,

keeping the soles of his boots turned up to the glow in the grate. A

bush of crinkly yellow hair topped his red, freckled face, with a

flattened nose and prominent mouth cast in the rough mould of the negro

type. His almond-shaped eyes leered languidly over the high cheek-bones.

He wore a grey flannel shirt, the loose ends of a black silk tie hung

down the buttoned breast of his serge coat; and his head resting on the

back of his chair, his throat largely exposed, he raised to his lips a

cigarette in a long wooden tube, puffing jets of smoke straight up at the

ceiling.

Michaelis pursued his idea—_the_ idea of his solitary reclusion—the

thought vouchsafed to his captivity and growing like a faith revealed in

visions. He talked to himself, indifferent to the sympathy or hostility

of his hearers, indifferent indeed to their presence, from the habit he

had acquired of thinking aloud hopefully in the solitude of the four

whitewashed walls of his cell, in the sepulchral silence of the great

blind pile of bricks near a river, sinister and ugly like a colossal

mortuary for the socially drowned.

He was no good in discussion, not because any amount of argument could

shake his faith, but because the mere fact of hearing another voice

disconcerted him painfully, confusing his thoughts at once—these thoughts

that for so many years, in a mental solitude more barren than a waterless

desert, no living voice had ever combatted, commented, or approved.

No one interrupted him now, and he made again the confession of his

faith, mastering him irresistible and complete like an act of grace: the

secret of fate discovered in the material side of life; the economic

condition of the world responsible for the past and shaping the future;

the source of all history, of all ideas, guiding the mental development

of mankind and the very impulses of their passion—

A harsh laugh from Comrade Ossipon cut the tirade dead short in a sudden

faltering of the tongue and a bewildered unsteadiness of the apostle’s

mildly exalted eyes. He closed them slowly for a moment, as if to

collect his routed thoughts. A silence fell; but what with the two

gas-jets over the table and the glowing grate the little parlour behind

Mr Verloc’s shop had become frightfully hot. Mr Verloc, getting off the

sofa with ponderous reluctance, opened the door leading into the kitchen

to get more air, and thus disclosed the innocent Stevie, seated very good

and quiet at a deal table, drawing circles, circles, circles; innumerable

circles, concentric, eccentric; a coruscating whirl of circles that by

their tangled multitude of repeated curves, uniformity of form, and

confusion of intersecting lines suggested a rendering of cosmic chaos,

the symbolism of a mad art attempting the inconceivable. The artist

never turned his head; and in all his soul’s application to the task his

back quivered, his thin neck, sunk into a deep hollow at the base of the

skull, seemed ready to snap.

Mr Verloc, after a grunt of disapproving surprise, returned to the sofa.

Alexander Ossipon got up, tall in his threadbare blue serge suit under

the low ceiling, shook off the stiffness of long immobility, and strolled

away into the kitchen (down two steps) to look over Stevie’s shoulder.

He came back, pronouncing oracularly: “Very good. Very characteristic,

perfectly typical.”

“What’s very good?” grunted inquiringly Mr Verloc, settled again in the

corner of the sofa. The other explained his meaning negligently, with a

shade of condescension and a toss of his head towards the kitchen:

“Typical of this form of degeneracy—these drawings, I mean.”

“You would call that lad a degenerate, would you?” mumbled Mr Verloc.

Comrade Alexander Ossipon—nicknamed the Doctor, ex-medical student

without a degree; afterwards wandering lecturer to working-men’s

associations upon the socialistic aspects of hygiene; author of a popular

quasi-medical study (in the form of a cheap pamphlet seized promptly by

the police) entitled “The Corroding Vices of the Middle Classes”; special

delegate of the more or less mysterious Red Committee, together with Karl

Yundt and Michaelis for the work of literary propaganda—turned upon the

obscure familiar of at least two Embassies that glance of insufferable,

hopelessly dense sufficiency which nothing but the frequentation of

science can give to the dulness of common mortals.

“That’s what he may be called scientifically. Very good type too,

altogether, of that sort of degenerate. It’s enough to glance at the

lobes of his ears. If you read Lombroso—”

Mr Verloc, moody and spread largely on the sofa, continued to look down

the row of his waistcoat buttons; but his cheeks became tinged by a faint

blush. Of late even the merest derivative of the word science (a term in

itself inoffensive and of indefinite meaning) had the curious power of

evoking a definitely offensive mental vision of Mr Vladimir, in his body

as he lived, with an almost supernatural clearness. And this phenomenon,

deserving justly to be classed amongst the marvels of science, induced in

Mr Verloc an emotional state of dread and exasperation tending to express

itself in violent swearing. But he said nothing. It was Karl Yundt who

was heard, implacable to his last breath.

“Lombroso is an ass.”

Comrade Ossipon met the shock of this blasphemy by an awful, vacant

stare. And the other, his extinguished eyes without gleams blackening

the deep shadows under the great, bony forehead, mumbled, catching the

tip of his tongue between his lips at every second word as though he were

chewing it angrily:

“Did you ever see such an idiot? For him the criminal is the prisoner.

Simple, is it not? What about those who shut him up there—forced him in

there? Exactly. Forced him in there. And what is crime? Does he know

that, this imbecile who has made his way in this world of gorged fools by

looking at the ears and teeth of a lot of poor, luckless devils? Teeth

and ears mark the criminal? Do they? And what about the law that marks

him still better—the pretty branding instrument invented by the overfed

to protect themselves against the hungry? Red-hot applications on their

vile skins—hey? Can’t you smell and hear from here the thick hide of the

people burn and sizzle? That’s how criminals are made for your Lombrosos

to write their silly stuff about.”

The knob of his stick and his legs shook together with passion, whilst

the trunk, draped in the wings of the havelock, preserved his historic

attitude of defiance. He seemed to sniff the tainted air of social

cruelty, to strain his ear for its atrocious sounds. There was an

extraordinary force of suggestion in this posturing. The all but

moribund veteran of dynamite wars had been a great actor in his

time—actor on platforms, in secret assemblies, in private interviews.

The famous terrorist had never in his life raised personally as much as

his little finger against the social edifice. He was no man of action;

he was not even an orator of torrential eloquence, sweeping the masses

along in the rushing noise and foam of a great enthusiasm. With a more

subtle intention, he took the part of an insolent and venomous evoker of

sinister impulses which lurk in the blind envy and exasperated vanity of

ignorance, in the suffering and misery of poverty, in all the hopeful and

noble illusions of righteous anger, pity, and revolt. The shadow of his

evil gift clung to him yet like the smell of a deadly drug in an old vial

of poison, emptied now, useless, ready to be thrown away upon the

rubbish-heap of things that had served their time.

Michaelis, the ticket-of-leave apostle, smiled vaguely with his glued

lips; his pasty moon face drooped under the weight of melancholy assent.

He had been a prisoner himself. His own skin had sizzled under the

red-hot brand, he murmured softly. But Comrade Ossipon, nicknamed the

Doctor, had got over the shock by that time.

“You don’t understand,” he began disdainfully, but stopped short,

intimidated by the dead blackness of the cavernous eyes in the face

turned slowly towards him with a blind stare, as if guided only by the

sound. He gave the discussion up, with a slight shrug of the shoulders.

Stevie, accustomed to move about disregarded, had got up from the kitchen

table, carrying off his drawing to bed with him. He had reached the

parlour door in time to receive in full the shock of Karl Yundt’s

eloquent imagery. The sheet of paper covered with circles dropped out of

his fingers, and he remained staring at the old terrorist, as if rooted

suddenly to the spot by his morbid horror and dread of physical pain.

Stevie knew very well that hot iron applied to one’s skin hurt very much.

His scared eyes blazed with indignation: it would hurt terribly. His

mouth dropped open.

Michaelis by staring unwinkingly at the fire had regained that sentiment

of isolation necessary for the continuity of his thought. His optimism

had begun to flow from his lips. He saw Capitalism doomed in its cradle,

born with the poison of the principle of competition in its system. The

great capitalists devouring the little capitalists, concentrating the

power and the tools of production in great masses, perfecting industrial

processes, and in the madness of self-aggrandisement only preparing,

organising, enriching, making ready the lawful inheritance of the

suffering proletariat. Michaelis pronounced the great word

“Patience”—and his clear blue glance, raised to the low ceiling of Mr

Verloc’s parlour, had a character of seraphic trustfulness. In the

doorway Stevie, calmed, seemed sunk in hebetude.

Comrade Ossipon’s face twitched with exasperation.

“Then it’s no use doing anything—no use whatever.”

“I don’t say that,” protested Michaelis gently. His vision of truth had

grown so intense that the sound of a strange voice failed to rout it this

time. He continued to look down at the red coals. Preparation for the

future was necessary, and he was willing to admit that the great change

would perhaps come in the upheaval of a revolution. But he argued that

revolutionary propaganda was a delicate work of high conscience. It was

the education of the masters of the world. It should be as careful as

the education given to kings. He would have it advance its tenets

cautiously, even timidly, in our ignorance of the effect that may be

produced by any given economic change upon the happiness, the morals, the

intellect, the history of mankind. For history is made with tools, not

with ideas; and everything is changed by economic conditions—art,

philosophy, love, virtue—truth itself!

The coals in the grate settled down with a slight crash; and Michaelis,

the hermit of visions in the desert of a penitentiary, got up

impetuously. Round like a distended balloon, he opened his short, thick

arms, as if in a pathetically hopeless attempt to embrace and hug to his

breast a self-regenerated universe. He gasped with ardour.

“The future is as certain as the past—slavery, feudalism, individualism,

collectivism. This is the statement of a law, not an empty prophecy.”

The disdainful pout of Comrade Ossipon’s thick lips accentuated the negro

type of his face.

“Nonsense,” he said calmly enough. “There is no law and no certainty.

The teaching propaganda be hanged. What the people knows does not

matter, were its knowledge ever so accurate. The only thing that matters

to us is the emotional state of the masses. Without emotion there is no

action.”

He paused, then added with modest firmness:

“I am speaking now to you scientifically—scientifically—Eh? What did you

say, Verloc?”

“Nothing,” growled from the sofa Mr Verloc, who, provoked by the

abhorrent sound, had merely muttered a “Damn.”

The venomous spluttering of the old terrorist without teeth was heard.

“Do you know how I would call the nature of the present economic

conditions? I would call it cannibalistic. That’s what it is! They are

nourishing their greed on the quivering flesh and the warm blood of the

people—nothing else.”

Stevie swallowed the terrifying statement with an audible gulp, and at

once, as though it had been swift poison, sank limply in a sitting

posture on the steps of the kitchen door.

Michaelis gave no sign of having heard anything. His lips seemed glued

together for good; not a quiver passed over his heavy cheeks. With

troubled eyes he looked for his round, hard hat, and put it on his round

head. His round and obese body seemed to float low between the chairs

under the sharp elbow of Karl Yundt. The old terrorist, raising an

uncertain and clawlike hand, gave a swaggering tilt to a black felt

sombrero shading the hollows and ridges of his wasted face. He got in

motion slowly, striking the floor with his stick at every step. It was

rather an affair to get him out of the house because, now and then, he

would stop, as if to think, and did not offer to move again till impelled

forward by Michaelis. The gentle apostle grasped his arm with brotherly

care; and behind them, his hands in his pockets, the robust Ossipon

yawned vaguely. A blue cap with a patent leather peak set well at the

back of his yellow bush of hair gave him the aspect of a Norwegian sailor

bored with the world after a thundering spree. Mr Verloc saw his guests

off the premises, attending them bareheaded, his heavy overcoat hanging

open, his eyes on the ground.

He closed the door behind their backs with restrained violence, turned

the key, shot the bolt. He was not satisfied with his friends. In the

light of Mr Vladimir’s philosophy of bomb throwing they appeared

hopelessly futile. The part of Mr Verloc in revolutionary politics

having been to observe, he could not all at once, either in his own home

or in larger assemblies, take the initiative of action. He had to be

cautious. Moved by the just indignation of a man well over forty,

menaced in what is dearest to him—his repose and his security—he asked

himself scornfully what else could have been expected from such a lot,

this Karl Yundt, this Michaelis—this Ossipon.

Pausing in his intention to turn off the gas burning in the middle of the

shop, Mr Verloc descended into the abyss of moral reflections. With the

insight of a kindred temperament he pronounced his verdict. A lazy

lot—this Karl Yundt, nursed by a blear-eyed old woman, a woman he had

years ago enticed away from a friend, and afterwards had tried more than

once to shake off into the gutter. Jolly lucky for Yundt that she had

persisted in coming up time after time, or else there would have been no

one now to help him out of the ’bus by the Green Park railings, where

that spectre took its constitutional crawl every fine morning. When that

indomitable snarling old witch died the swaggering spectre would have to

vanish too—there would be an end to fiery Karl Yundt. And Mr Verloc’s

morality was offended also by the optimism of Michaelis, annexed by his

wealthy old lady, who had taken lately to sending him to a cottage she

had in the country. The ex-prisoner could moon about the shady lanes for

days together in a delicious and humanitarian idleness. As to Ossipon,

that beggar was sure to want for nothing as long as there were silly

girls with savings-bank books in the world. And Mr Verloc,

temperamentally identical with his associates, drew fine distinctions in

his mind on the strength of insignificant differences. He drew them with

a certain complacency, because the instinct of conventional

respectability was strong within him, being only overcome by his dislike

of all kinds of recognised labour—a temperamental defect which he shared

with a large proportion of revolutionary reformers of a given social

state. For obviously one does not revolt against the advantages and

opportunities of that state, but against the price which must be paid for

the same in the coin of accepted morality, self-restraint, and toil. The

majority of revolutionists are the enemies of discipline and fatigue

mostly. There are natures too, to whose sense of justice the price

exacted looms up monstrously enormous, odious, oppressive, worrying,

humiliating, extortionate, intolerable. Those are the fanatics. The

remaining portion of social rebels is accounted for by vanity, the mother

of all noble and vile illusions, the companion of poets, reformers,

charlatans, prophets, and incendiaries.

Lost for a whole minute in the abyss of meditation, Mr Verloc did not

reach the depth of these abstract considerations. Perhaps he was not

able. In any case he had not the time. He was pulled up painfully by

the sudden recollection of Mr Vladimir, another of his associates, whom

in virtue of subtle moral affinities he was capable of judging correctly.

He considered him as dangerous. A shade of envy crept into his thoughts.

Loafing was all very well for these fellows, who knew not Mr Vladimir,

and had women to fall back upon; whereas he had a woman to provide for—

At this point, by a simple association of ideas, Mr Verloc was brought

face to face with the necessity of going to bed some time or other that

evening. Then why not go now—at once? He sighed. The necessity was not

so normally pleasurable as it ought to have been for a man of his age and

temperament. He dreaded the demon of sleeplessness, which he felt had

marked him for its own. He raised his arm, and turned off the flaring

gas-jet above his head.

A bright band of light fell through the parlour door into the part of the

shop behind the counter. It enabled Mr Verloc to ascertain at a glance

the number of silver coins in the till. These were but few; and for the

first time since he opened his shop he took a commercial survey of its

value. This survey was unfavourable. He had gone into trade for no

commercial reasons. He had been guided in the selection of this peculiar

line of business by an instinctive leaning towards shady transactions,

where money is picked up easily. Moreover, it did not take him out of

his own sphere—the sphere which is watched by the police. On the

contrary, it gave him a publicly confessed standing in that sphere, and

as Mr Verloc had unconfessed relations which made him familiar with yet

careless of the police, there was a distinct advantage in such a

situation. But as a means of livelihood it was by itself insufficient.

He took the cash-box out of the drawer, and turning to leave the shop,

became aware that Stevie was still downstairs.

What on earth is he doing there? Mr Verloc asked himself. What’s the

meaning of these antics? He looked dubiously at his brother-in-law, but

he did not ask him for information. Mr Verloc’s intercourse with Stevie

was limited to the casual mutter of a morning, after breakfast, “My

boots,” and even that was more a communication at large of a need than a

direct order or request. Mr Verloc perceived with some surprise that he

did not know really what to say to Stevie. He stood still in the middle

of the parlour, and looked into the kitchen in silence. Nor yet did he

know what would happen if he did say anything. And this appeared very

queer to Mr Verloc in view of the fact, borne upon him suddenly, that he

had to provide for this fellow too. He had never given a moment’s

thought till then to that aspect of Stevie’s existence.

Positively he did not know how to speak to the lad. He watched him

gesticulating and murmuring in the kitchen. Stevie prowled round the

table like an excited animal in a cage. A tentative “Hadn’t you better

go to bed now?” produced no effect whatever; and Mr Verloc, abandoning

the stony contemplation of his brother-in-law’s behaviour, crossed the

parlour wearily, cash-box in hand. The cause of the general lassitude he

felt while climbing the stairs being purely mental, he became alarmed by

its inexplicable character. He hoped he was not sickening for anything.

He stopped on the dark landing to examine his sensations. But a slight

and continuous sound of snoring pervading the obscurity interfered with

their clearness. The sound came from his mother-in-law’s room. Another

one to provide for, he thought—and on this thought walked into the

bedroom.

Mrs Verloc had fallen asleep with the lamp (no gas was laid upstairs)

turned up full on the table by the side of the bed. The light thrown

down by the shade fell dazzlingly on the white pillow sunk by the weight

of her head reposing with closed eyes and dark hair done up in several

plaits for the night. She woke up with the sound of her name in her

ears, and saw her husband standing over her.

“Winnie! Winnie!”

At first she did not stir, lying very quiet and looking at the cash-box

in Mr Verloc’s hand. But when she understood that her brother was

“capering all over the place downstairs” she swung out in one sudden

movement on to the edge of the bed. Her bare feet, as if poked through

the bottom of an unadorned, sleeved calico sack buttoned tightly at neck

and wrists, felt over the rug for the slippers while she looked upward

into her husband’s face.

“I don’t know how to manage him,” Mr Verloc explained peevishly. “Won’t

do to leave him downstairs alone with the lights.”

She said nothing, glided across the room swiftly, and the door closed

upon her white form.

Mr Verloc deposited the cash-box on the night table, and began the

operation of undressing by flinging his overcoat on to a distant chair.

His coat and waistcoat followed. He walked about the room in his

stockinged feet, and his burly figure, with the hands worrying nervously

at his throat, passed and repassed across the long strip of looking-glass

in the door of his wife’s wardrobe. Then after slipping his braces off

his shoulders he pulled up violently the venetian blind, and leaned his

forehead against the cold window-pane—a fragile film of glass stretched

between him and the enormity of cold, black, wet, muddy, inhospitable

accumulation of bricks, slates, and stones, things in themselves unlovely

and unfriendly to man.

Mr Verloc felt the latent unfriendliness of all out of doors with a force

approaching to positive bodily anguish. There is no occupation that

fails a man more completely than that of a secret agent of police. It’s

like your horse suddenly falling dead under you in the midst of an

uninhabited and thirsty plain. The comparison occurred to Mr Verloc

because he had sat astride various army horses in his time, and had now

the sensation of an incipient fall. The prospect was as black as the

window-pane against which he was leaning his forehead. And suddenly the

face of Mr Vladimir, clean-shaved and witty, appeared enhaloed in the

glow of its rosy complexion like a sort of pink seal, impressed on the

fatal darkness.

This luminous and mutilated vision was so ghastly physically that Mr

Verloc started away from the window, letting down the venetian blind with

a great rattle. Discomposed and speechless with the apprehension of more

such visions, he beheld his wife re-enter the room and get into bed in a

calm business-like manner which made him feel hopelessly lonely in the

world. Mrs Verloc expressed her surprise at seeing him up yet.

“I don’t feel very well,” he muttered, passing his hands over his moist

brow.

“Giddiness?”

“Yes. Not at all well.”

Mrs Verloc, with all the placidity of an experienced wife, expressed a

confident opinion as to the cause, and suggested the usual remedies; but

her husband, rooted in the middle of the room, shook his lowered head

sadly.

“You’ll catch cold standing there,” she observed.

Mr Verloc made an effort, finished undressing, and got into bed. Down

below in the quiet, narrow street measured footsteps approached the

house, then died away unhurried and firm, as if the passer-by had started

to pace out all eternity, from gas-lamp to gas-lamp in a night without

end; and the drowsy ticking of the old clock on the landing became

distinctly audible in the bedroom.

Mrs Verloc, on her back, and staring at the ceiling, made a remark.

“Takings very small to-day.”

Mr Verloc, in the same position, cleared his throat as if for an

important statement, but merely inquired:

“Did you turn off the gas downstairs?”

“Yes; I did,” answered Mrs Verloc conscientiously. “That poor boy is in

a very excited state to-night,” she murmured, after a pause which lasted

for three ticks of the clock.

Mr Verloc cared nothing for Stevie’s excitement, but he felt horribly

wakeful, and dreaded facing the darkness and silence that would follow

the extinguishing of the lamp. This dread led him to make the remark

that Stevie had disregarded his suggestion to go to bed. Mrs Verloc,

falling into the trap, started to demonstrate at length to her husband

that this was not “impudence” of any sort, but simply “excitement.”

There was no young man of his age in London more willing and docile than

Stephen, she affirmed; none more affectionate and ready to please, and

even useful, as long as people did not upset his poor head. Mrs Verloc,

turning towards her recumbent husband, raised herself on her elbow, and

hung over him in her anxiety that he should believe Stevie to be a useful

member of the family. That ardour of protecting compassion exalted

morbidly in her childhood by the misery of another child tinged her

sallow cheeks with a faint dusky blush, made her big eyes gleam under the

dark lids. Mrs Verloc then looked younger; she looked as young as Winnie

used to look, and much more animated than the Winnie of the Belgravian

mansion days had ever allowed herself to appear to gentlemen lodgers. Mr

Verloc’s anxieties had prevented him from attaching any sense to what his

wife was saying. It was as if her voice were talking on the other side

of a very thick wall. It was her aspect that recalled him to himself.

He appreciated this woman, and the sentiment of this appreciation,

stirred by a display of something resembling emotion, only added another

pang to his mental anguish. When her voice ceased he moved uneasily, and

said:

“I haven’t been feeling well for the last few days.”

He might have meant this as an opening to a complete confidence; but Mrs

Verloc laid her head on the pillow again, and staring upward, went on:

“That boy hears too much of what is talked about here. If I had known

they were coming to-night I would have seen to it that he went to bed at

the same time I did. He was out of his mind with something he overheard

about eating people’s flesh and drinking blood. What’s the good of

talking like that?”

There was a note of indignant scorn in her voice. Mr Verloc was fully

responsive now.

“Ask Karl Yundt,” he growled savagely.

Mrs Verloc, with great decision, pronounced Karl Yundt “a disgusting old

man.” She declared openly her affection for Michaelis. Of the robust

Ossipon, in whose presence she always felt uneasy behind an attitude of

stony reserve, she said nothing whatever. And continuing to talk of that

brother, who had been for so many years an object of care and fears:

“He isn’t fit to hear what’s said here. He believes it’s all true. He

knows no better. He gets into his passions over it.”

Mr Verloc made no comment.

“He glared at me, as if he didn’t know who I was, when I went downstairs.

His heart was going like a hammer. He can’t help being excitable. I

woke mother up, and asked her to sit with him till he went to sleep. It

isn’t his fault. He’s no trouble when he’s left alone.”

Mr Verloc made no comment.

“I wish he had never been to school,” Mrs Verloc began again brusquely.

“He’s always taking away those newspapers from the window to read. He

gets a red face poring over them. We don’t get rid of a dozen numbers in

a month. They only take up room in the front window. And Mr Ossipon

brings every week a pile of these F. P. tracts to sell at a halfpenny

each. I wouldn’t give a halfpenny for the whole lot. It’s silly

reading—that’s what it is. There’s no sale for it. The other day Stevie

got hold of one, and there was a story in it of a German soldier officer

tearing half-off the ear of a recruit, and nothing was done to him for

it. The brute! I couldn’t do anything with Stevie that afternoon. The

story was enough, too, to make one’s blood boil. But what’s the use of

printing things like that? We aren’t German slaves here, thank God.

It’s not our business—is it?”

Mr Verloc made no reply.

“I had to take the carving knife from the boy,” Mrs Verloc continued, a

little sleepily now. “He was shouting and stamping and sobbing. He

can’t stand the notion of any cruelty. He would have stuck that officer

like a pig if he had seen him then. It’s true, too! Some people don’t

deserve much mercy.” Mrs Verloc’s voice ceased, and the expression of

her motionless eyes became more and more contemplative and veiled during

the long pause. “Comfortable, dear?” she asked in a faint, far-away

voice. “Shall I put out the light now?”

The dreary conviction that there was no sleep for him held Mr Verloc mute

and hopelessly inert in his fear of darkness. He made a great effort.

“Yes. Put it out,” he said at last in a hollow tone.