Bab Bab 8 · Chapter VIII

. Chapter VIII

Having infused by persistent importunities some sort of heat into the

chilly interest of several licensed victuallers (the acquaintances once

upon a time of her late unlucky husband), Mrs Verloc’s mother had at last

secured her admission to certain almshouses founded by a wealthy

innkeeper for the destitute widows of the trade.

This end, conceived in the astuteness of her uneasy heart, the old woman

had pursued with secrecy and determination. That was the time when her

daughter Winnie could not help passing a remark to Mr Verloc that “mother

has been spending half-crowns and five shillings almost every day this

last week in cab fares.” But the remark was not made grudgingly. Winnie

respected her mother’s infirmities. She was only a little surprised at

this sudden mania for locomotion. Mr Verloc, who was sufficiently

magnificent in his way, had grunted the remark impatiently aside as

interfering with his meditations. These were frequent, deep, and

prolonged; they bore upon a matter more important than five shillings.

Distinctly more important, and beyond all comparison more difficult to

consider in all its aspects with philosophical serenity.

Her object attained in astute secrecy, the heroic old woman had made a

clean breast of it to Mrs Verloc. Her soul was triumphant and her heart

tremulous. Inwardly she quaked, because she dreaded and admired the

calm, self-contained character of her daughter Winnie, whose displeasure

was made redoubtable by a diversity of dreadful silences. But she did

not allow her inward apprehensions to rob her of the advantage of

venerable placidity conferred upon her outward person by her triple chin,

the floating ampleness of her ancient form, and the impotent condition of

her legs.

The shock of the information was so unexpected that Mrs Verloc, against

her usual practice when addressed, interrupted the domestic occupation

she was engaged upon. It was the dusting of the furniture in the parlour

behind the shop. She turned her head towards her mother.

“Whatever did you want to do that for?” she exclaimed, in scandalised

astonishment.

The shock must have been severe to make her depart from that distant and

uninquiring acceptance of facts which was her force and her safeguard in

life.

“Weren’t you made comfortable enough here?”

She had lapsed into these inquiries, but next moment she saved the

consistency of her conduct by resuming her dusting, while the old woman

sat scared and dumb under her dingy white cap and lustreless dark wig.

Winnie finished the chair, and ran the duster along the mahogany at the

back of the horse-hair sofa on which Mr Verloc loved to take his ease in

hat and overcoat. She was intent on her work, but presently she

permitted herself another question.

“How in the world did you manage it, mother?”

As not affecting the inwardness of things, which it was Mrs Verloc’s

principle to ignore, this curiosity was excusable. It bore merely on the

methods. The old woman welcomed it eagerly as bringing forward something

that could be talked about with much sincerity.

She favoured her daughter by an exhaustive answer, full of names and

enriched by side comments upon the ravages of time as observed in the

alteration of human countenances. The names were principally the names

of licensed victuallers—“poor daddy’s friends, my dear.” She enlarged

with special appreciation on the kindness and condescension of a large

brewer, a Baronet and an M. P., the Chairman of the Governors of the

Charity. She expressed herself thus warmly because she had been allowed

to interview by appointment his Private Secretary—“a very polite

gentleman, all in black, with a gentle, sad voice, but so very, very thin

and quiet. He was like a shadow, my dear.”

Winnie, prolonging her dusting operations till the tale was told to the

end, walked out of the parlour into the kitchen (down two steps) in her

usual manner, without the slightest comment.

Shedding a few tears in sign of rejoicing at her daughter’s mansuetude in

this terrible affair, Mrs Verloc’s mother gave play to her astuteness in

the direction of her furniture, because it was her own; and sometimes she

wished it hadn’t been. Heroism is all very well, but there are

circumstances when the disposal of a few tables and chairs, brass

bedsteads, and so on, may be big with remote and disastrous consequences.

She required a few pieces herself, the Foundation which, after many

importunities, had gathered her to its charitable breast, giving nothing

but bare planks and cheaply papered bricks to the objects of its

solicitude. The delicacy guiding her choice to the least valuable and

most dilapidated articles passed unacknowledged, because Winnie’s

philosophy consisted in not taking notice of the inside of facts; she

assumed that mother took what suited her best. As to Mr Verloc, his

intense meditation, like a sort of Chinese wall, isolated him completely

from the phenomena of this world of vain effort and illusory appearances.

Her selection made, the disposal of the rest became a perplexing question

in a particular way. She was leaving it in Brett Street, of course. But

she had two children. Winnie was provided for by her sensible union with

that excellent husband, Mr Verloc. Stevie was destitute—and a little

peculiar. His position had to be considered before the claims of legal

justice and even the promptings of partiality. The possession of the

furniture would not be in any sense a provision. He ought to have it—the

poor boy. But to give it to him would be like tampering with his

position of complete dependence. It was a sort of claim which she feared

to weaken. Moreover, the susceptibilities of Mr Verloc would perhaps not

brook being beholden to his brother-in-law for the chairs he sat on. In

a long experience of gentlemen lodgers, Mrs Verloc’s mother had acquired

a dismal but resigned notion of the fantastic side of human nature. What

if Mr Verloc suddenly took it into his head to tell Stevie to take his

blessed sticks somewhere out of that? A division, on the other hand,

however carefully made, might give some cause of offence to Winnie. No,

Stevie must remain destitute and dependent. And at the moment of leaving

Brett Street she had said to her daughter: “No use waiting till I am

dead, is there? Everything I leave here is altogether your own now, my

dear.”

Winnie, with her hat on, silent behind her mother’s back, went on

arranging the collar of the old woman’s cloak. She got her hand-bag, an

umbrella, with an impassive face. The time had come for the expenditure

of the sum of three-and-sixpence on what might well be supposed the last

cab drive of Mrs Verloc’s mother’s life. They went out at the shop door.

The conveyance awaiting them would have illustrated the proverb that

“truth can be more cruel than caricature,” if such a proverb existed.

Crawling behind an infirm horse, a metropolitan hackney carriage drew up

on wobbly wheels and with a maimed driver on the box. This last

peculiarity caused some embarrassment. Catching sight of a hooked iron

contrivance protruding from the left sleeve of the man’s coat, Mrs

Verloc’s mother lost suddenly the heroic courage of these days. She

really couldn’t trust herself. “What do you think, Winnie?” She hung

back. The passionate expostulations of the big-faced cabman seemed to be

squeezed out of a blocked throat. Leaning over from his box, he

whispered with mysterious indignation. What was the matter now? Was it

possible to treat a man so? His enormous and unwashed countenance flamed

red in the muddy stretch of the street. Was it likely they would have

given him a licence, he inquired desperately, if—

The police constable of the locality quieted him by a friendly glance;

then addressing himself to the two women without marked consideration,

said:

“He’s been driving a cab for twenty years. I never knew him to have an

accident.”

“Accident!” shouted the driver in a scornful whisper.

The policeman’s testimony settled it. The modest assemblage of seven

people, mostly under age, dispersed. Winnie followed her mother into the

cab. Stevie climbed on the box. His vacant mouth and distressed eyes

depicted the state of his mind in regard to the transactions which were

taking place. In the narrow streets the progress of the journey was made

sensible to those within by the near fronts of the houses gliding past

slowly and shakily, with a great rattle and jingling of glass, as if

about to collapse behind the cab; and the infirm horse, with the harness

hung over his sharp backbone flapping very loose about his thighs,

appeared to be dancing mincingly on his toes with infinite patience.

Later on, in the wider space of Whitehall, all visual evidences of motion

became imperceptible. The rattle and jingle of glass went on

indefinitely in front of the long Treasury building—and time itself

seemed to stand still.

At last Winnie observed: “This isn’t a very good horse.”

Her eyes gleamed in the shadow of the cab straight ahead, immovable. On

the box, Stevie shut his vacant mouth first, in order to ejaculate

earnestly: “Don’t.”

The driver, holding high the reins twisted around the hook, took no

notice. Perhaps he had not heard. Stevie’s breast heaved.

“Don’t whip.”

The man turned slowly his bloated and sodden face of many colours

bristling with white hairs. His little red eyes glistened with moisture.

His big lips had a violet tint. They remained closed. With the dirty

back of his whip-hand he rubbed the stubble sprouting on his enormous

chin.

“You mustn’t,” stammered out Stevie violently. “It hurts.”

“Mustn’t whip,” queried the other in a thoughtful whisper, and

immediately whipped. He did this, not because his soul was cruel and his

heart evil, but because he had to earn his fare. And for a time the

walls of St Stephen’s, with its towers and pinnacles, contemplated in

immobility and silence a cab that jingled. It rolled too, however. But

on the bridge there was a commotion. Stevie suddenly proceeded to get

down from the box. There were shouts on the pavement, people ran

forward, the driver pulled up, whispering curses of indignation and

astonishment. Winnie lowered the window, and put her head out, white as

a ghost. In the depths of the cab, her mother was exclaiming, in tones

of anguish: “Is that boy hurt? Is that boy hurt?”

Stevie was not hurt, he had not even fallen, but excitement as usual had

robbed him of the power of connected speech. He could do no more than

stammer at the window. “Too heavy. Too heavy.” Winnie put out her hand

on to his shoulder.

“Stevie! Get up on the box directly, and don’t try to get down again.”

“No. No. Walk. Must walk.”

In trying to state the nature of that necessity he stammered himself into

utter incoherence. No physical impossibility stood in the way of his

whim. Stevie could have managed easily to keep pace with the infirm,

dancing horse without getting out of breath. But his sister withheld her

consent decisively. “The idea! Whoever heard of such a thing! Run

after a cab!” Her mother, frightened and helpless in the depths of the

conveyance, entreated: “Oh, don’t let him, Winnie. He’ll get lost.

Don’t let him.”

“Certainly not. What next! Mr Verloc will be sorry to hear of this

nonsense, Stevie,—I can tell you. He won’t be happy at all.”

The idea of Mr Verloc’s grief and unhappiness acting as usual powerfully

upon Stevie’s fundamentally docile disposition, he abandoned all

resistance, and climbed up again on the box, with a face of despair.

The cabby turned at him his enormous and inflamed countenance

truculently. “Don’t you go for trying this silly game again, young

fellow.”

After delivering himself thus in a stern whisper, strained almost to

extinction, he drove on, ruminating solemnly. To his mind the incident

remained somewhat obscure. But his intellect, though it had lost its

pristine vivacity in the benumbing years of sedentary exposure to the

weather, lacked not independence or sanity. Gravely he dismissed the

hypothesis of Stevie being a drunken young nipper.

Inside the cab the spell of silence, in which the two women had endured

shoulder to shoulder the jolting, rattling, and jingling of the journey,

had been broken by Stevie’s outbreak. Winnie raised her voice.

“You’ve done what you wanted, mother. You’ll have only yourself to thank

for it if you aren’t happy afterwards. And I don’t think you’ll be.

That I don’t. Weren’t you comfortable enough in the house? Whatever

people’ll think of us—you throwing yourself like this on a Charity?”

“My dear,” screamed the old woman earnestly above the noise, “you’ve been

the best of daughters to me. As to Mr Verloc—there—”

Words failing her on the subject of Mr Verloc’s excellence, she turned

her old tearful eyes to the roof of the cab. Then she averted her head

on the pretence of looking out of the window, as if to judge of their

progress. It was insignificant, and went on close to the curbstone.

Night, the early dirty night, the sinister, noisy, hopeless and rowdy

night of South London, had overtaken her on her last cab drive. In the

gas-light of the low-fronted shops her big cheeks glowed with an orange

hue under a black and mauve bonnet.

Mrs Verloc’s mother’s complexion had become yellow by the effect of age

and from a natural predisposition to biliousness, favoured by the trials

of a difficult and worried existence, first as wife, then as widow. It

was a complexion, that under the influence of a blush would take on an

orange tint. And this woman, modest indeed but hardened in the fires of

adversity, of an age, moreover, when blushes are not expected, had

positively blushed before her daughter. In the privacy of a

four-wheeler, on her way to a charity cottage (one of a row) which by the

exiguity of its dimensions and the simplicity of its accommodation, might

well have been devised in kindness as a place of training for the still

more straitened circumstances of the grave, she was forced to hide from

her own child a blush of remorse and shame.

Whatever people will think? She knew very well what they did think, the

people Winnie had in her mind—the old friends of her husband, and others

too, whose interest she had solicited with such flattering success. She

had not known before what a good beggar she could be. But she guessed

very well what inference was drawn from her application. On account of

that shrinking delicacy, which exists side by side with aggressive

brutality in masculine nature, the inquiries into her circumstances had

not been pushed very far. She had checked them by a visible compression

of the lips and some display of an emotion determined to be eloquently

silent. And the men would become suddenly incurious, after the manner of

their kind. She congratulated herself more than once on having nothing

to do with women, who being naturally more callous and avid of details,

would have been anxious to be exactly informed by what sort of unkind

conduct her daughter and son-in-law had driven her to that sad extremity.

It was only before the Secretary of the great brewer M. P. and Chairman

of the Charity, who, acting for his principal, felt bound to be

conscientiously inquisitive as to the real circumstances of the

applicant, that she had burst into tears outright and aloud, as a

cornered woman will weep. The thin and polite gentleman, after

contemplating her with an air of being “struck all of a heap,” abandoned

his position under the cover of soothing remarks. She must not distress

herself. The deed of the Charity did not absolutely specify “childless

widows.” In fact, it did not by any means disqualify her. But the

discretion of the Committee must be an informed discretion. One could

understand very well her unwillingness to be a burden, etc. etc.

Thereupon, to his profound disappointment, Mrs Verloc’s mother wept some

more with an augmented vehemence.

The tears of that large female in a dark, dusty wig, and ancient silk

dress festooned with dingy white cotton lace, were the tears of genuine

distress. She had wept because she was heroic and unscrupulous and full

of love for both her children. Girls frequently get sacrificed to the

welfare of the boys. In this case she was sacrificing Winnie. By the

suppression of truth she was slandering her. Of course, Winnie was

independent, and need not care for the opinion of people that she would

never see and who would never see her; whereas poor Stevie had nothing in

the world he could call his own except his mother’s heroism and

unscrupulousness.

The first sense of security following on Winnie’s marriage wore off in

time (for nothing lasts), and Mrs Verloc’s mother, in the seclusion of

the back bedroom, had recalled the teaching of that experience which the

world impresses upon a widowed woman. But she had recalled it without

vain bitterness; her store of resignation amounted almost to dignity.

She reflected stoically that everything decays, wears out, in this world;

that the way of kindness should be made easy to the well disposed; that

her daughter Winnie was a most devoted sister, and a very self-confident

wife indeed. As regards Winnie’s sisterly devotion, her stoicism

flinched. She excepted that sentiment from the rule of decay affecting

all things human and some things divine. She could not help it; not to

do so would have frightened her too much. But in considering the

conditions of her daughter’s married state, she rejected firmly all

flattering illusions. She took the cold and reasonable view that the

less strain put on Mr Verloc’s kindness the longer its effects were

likely to last. That excellent man loved his wife, of course, but he

would, no doubt, prefer to keep as few of her relations as was consistent

with the proper display of that sentiment. It would be better if its

whole effect were concentrated on poor Stevie. And the heroic old woman

resolved on going away from her children as an act of devotion and as a

move of deep policy.

The “virtue” of this policy consisted in this (Mrs Verloc’s mother was

subtle in her way), that Stevie’s moral claim would be strengthened. The

poor boy—a good, useful boy, if a little peculiar—had not a sufficient

standing. He had been taken over with his mother, somewhat in the same

way as the furniture of the Belgravian mansion had been taken over, as if

on the ground of belonging to her exclusively. What will happen, she

asked herself (for Mrs Verloc’s mother was in a measure imaginative),

when I die? And when she asked herself that question it was with dread.

It was also terrible to think that she would not then have the means of

knowing what happened to the poor boy. But by making him over to his

sister, by going thus away, she gave him the advantage of a directly

dependent position. This was the more subtle sanction of Mrs Verloc’s

mother’s heroism and unscrupulousness. Her act of abandonment was really

an arrangement for settling her son permanently in life. Other people

made material sacrifices for such an object, she in that way. It was the

only way. Moreover, she would be able to see how it worked. Ill or well

she would avoid the horrible incertitude on the death-bed. But it was

hard, hard, cruelly hard.

The cab rattled, jingled, jolted; in fact, the last was quite

extraordinary. By its disproportionate violence and magnitude it

obliterated every sensation of onward movement; and the effect was of

being shaken in a stationary apparatus like a mediæval device for the

punishment of crime, or some very newfangled invention for the cure of a

sluggish liver. It was extremely distressing; and the raising of Mrs

Verloc’s mother’s voice sounded like a wail of pain.

“I know, my dear, you’ll come to see me as often as you can spare the

time. Won’t you?”

“Of course,” answered Winnie shortly, staring straight before her.

And the cab jolted in front of a steamy, greasy shop in a blaze of gas

and in the smell of fried fish.

The old woman raised a wail again.

“And, my dear, I must see that poor boy every Sunday. He won’t mind

spending the day with his old mother—”

Winnie screamed out stolidly:

“Mind! I should think not. That poor boy will miss you something cruel.

I wish you had thought a little of that, mother.”

Not think of it! The heroic woman swallowed a playful and inconvenient

object like a billiard ball, which had tried to jump out of her throat.

Winnie sat mute for a while, pouting at the front of the cab, then

snapped out, which was an unusual tone with her:

“I expect I’ll have a job with him at first, he’ll be that restless—”

“Whatever you do, don’t let him worry your husband, my dear.”

Thus they discussed on familiar lines the bearings of a new situation.

And the cab jolted. Mrs Verloc’s mother expressed some misgivings.

Could Stevie be trusted to come all that way alone? Winnie maintained

that he was much less “absent-minded” now. They agreed as to that. It

could not be denied. Much less—hardly at all. They shouted at each

other in the jingle with comparative cheerfulness. But suddenly the

maternal anxiety broke out afresh. There were two omnibuses to take, and

a short walk between. It was too difficult! The old woman gave way to

grief and consternation.

Winnie stared forward.

“Don’t you upset yourself like this, mother. You must see him, of

course.”

“No, my dear. I’ll try not to.”

She mopped her streaming eyes.

“But you can’t spare the time to come with him, and if he should forget

himself and lose his way and somebody spoke to him sharply, his name and

address may slip his memory, and he’ll remain lost for days and days—”

The vision of a workhouse infirmary for poor Stevie—if only during

inquiries—wrung her heart. For she was a proud woman. Winnie’s stare

had grown hard, intent, inventive.

“I can’t bring him to you myself every week,” she cried. “But don’t you

worry, mother. I’ll see to it that he don’t get lost for long.”

They felt a peculiar bump; a vision of brick pillars lingered before the

rattling windows of the cab; a sudden cessation of atrocious jolting and

uproarious jingling dazed the two women. What had happened? They sat

motionless and scared in the profound stillness, till the door came open,

and a rough, strained whispering was heard:

“Here you are!”

A range of gabled little houses, each with one dim yellow window, on the

ground floor, surrounded the dark open space of a grass plot planted with

shrubs and railed off from the patchwork of lights and shadows in the

wide road, resounding with the dull rumble of traffic. Before the door

of one of these tiny houses—one without a light in the little downstairs

window—the cab had come to a standstill. Mrs Verloc’s mother got out

first, backwards, with a key in her hand. Winnie lingered on the

flagstone path to pay the cabman. Stevie, after helping to carry inside

a lot of small parcels, came out and stood under the light of a gas-lamp

belonging to the Charity. The cabman looked at the pieces of silver,

which, appearing very minute in his big, grimy palm, symbolised the

insignificant results which reward the ambitious courage and toil of a

mankind whose day is short on this earth of evil.

He had been paid decently—four one-shilling pieces—and he contemplated

them in perfect stillness, as if they had been the surprising terms of a

melancholy problem. The slow transfer of that treasure to an inner

pocket demanded much laborious groping in the depths of decayed clothing.

His form was squat and without flexibility. Stevie, slender, his

shoulders a little up, and his hands thrust deep in the side pockets of

his warm overcoat, stood at the edge of the path, pouting.

The cabman, pausing in his deliberate movements, seemed struck by some

misty recollection.

“Oh! ’Ere you are, young fellow,” he whispered. “You’ll know him

again—won’t you?”

Stevie was staring at the horse, whose hind quarters appeared unduly

elevated by the effect of emaciation. The little stiff tail seemed to

have been fitted in for a heartless joke; and at the other end the thin,

flat neck, like a plank covered with old horse-hide, drooped to the

ground under the weight of an enormous bony head. The ears hung at

different angles, negligently; and the macabre figure of that mute

dweller on the earth steamed straight up from ribs and backbone in the

muggy stillness of the air.

The cabman struck lightly Stevie’s breast with the iron hook protruding

from a ragged, greasy sleeve.

“Look ’ere, young feller. ’Ow’d _you_ like to sit behind this ’oss up to

two o’clock in the morning p’raps?”

Stevie looked vacantly into the fierce little eyes with red-edged lids.

“He ain’t lame,” pursued the other, whispering with energy. “He ain’t

got no sore places on ’im. ’Ere he is. ’Ow would _you_ like—”

His strained, extinct voice invested his utterance with a character of

vehement secrecy. Stevie’s vacant gaze was changing slowly into dread.

“You may well look! Till three and four o’clock in the morning. Cold

and ’ungry. Looking for fares. Drunks.”

His jovial purple cheeks bristled with white hairs; and like Virgil’s

Silenus, who, his face smeared with the juice of berries, discoursed of

Olympian Gods to the innocent shepherds of Sicily, he talked to Stevie of

domestic matters and the affairs of men whose sufferings are great and

immortality by no means assured.

“I am a night cabby, I am,” he whispered, with a sort of boastful

exasperation. “I’ve got to take out what they will blooming well give me

at the yard. I’ve got my missus and four kids at ’ome.”

The monstrous nature of that declaration of paternity seemed to strike

the world dumb. A silence reigned during which the flanks of the old

horse, the steed of apocalyptic misery, smoked upwards in the light of

the charitable gas-lamp.

The cabman grunted, then added in his mysterious whisper:

“This ain’t an easy world.” Stevie’s face had been twitching for some

time, and at last his feelings burst out in their usual concise form.

“Bad! Bad!”

His gaze remained fixed on the ribs of the horse, self-conscious and

sombre, as though he were afraid to look about him at the badness of the

world. And his slenderness, his rosy lips and pale, clear complexion,

gave him the aspect of a delicate boy, notwithstanding the fluffy growth

of golden hair on his cheeks. He pouted in a scared way like a child.

The cabman, short and broad, eyed him with his fierce little eyes that

seemed to smart in a clear and corroding liquid.

“’Ard on ’osses, but dam’ sight ’arder on poor chaps like me,” he wheezed

just audibly.

“Poor! Poor!” stammered out Stevie, pushing his hands deeper into his

pockets with convulsive sympathy. He could say nothing; for the

tenderness to all pain and all misery, the desire to make the horse happy

and the cabman happy, had reached the point of a bizarre longing to take

them to bed with him. And that, he knew, was impossible. For Stevie was

not mad. It was, as it were, a symbolic longing; and at the same time it

was very distinct, because springing from experience, the mother of

wisdom. Thus when as a child he cowered in a dark corner scared,

wretched, sore, and miserable with the black, black misery of the soul,

his sister Winnie used to come along, and carry him off to bed with her,

as into a heaven of consoling peace. Stevie, though apt to forget mere

facts, such as his name and address for instance, had a faithful memory

of sensations. To be taken into a bed of compassion was the supreme

remedy, with the only one disadvantage of being difficult of application

on a large scale. And looking at the cabman, Stevie perceived this

clearly, because he was reasonable.

The cabman went on with his leisurely preparations as if Stevie had not

existed. He made as if to hoist himself on the box, but at the last

moment from some obscure motive, perhaps merely from disgust with

carriage exercise, desisted. He approached instead the motionless

partner of his labours, and stooping to seize the bridle, lifted up the

big, weary head to the height of his shoulder with one effort of his

right arm, like a feat of strength.

“Come on,” he whispered secretly.

Limping, he led the cab away. There was an air of austerity in this

departure, the scrunched gravel of the drive crying out under the slowly

turning wheels, the horse’s lean thighs moving with ascetic deliberation

away from the light into the obscurity of the open space bordered dimly

by the pointed roofs and the feebly shining windows of the little

alms-houses. The plaint of the gravel travelled slowly all round the

drive. Between the lamps of the charitable gateway the slow cortege

reappeared, lighted up for a moment, the short, thick man limping busily,

with the horse’s head held aloft in his fist, the lank animal walking in

stiff and forlorn dignity, the dark, low box on wheels rolling behind

comically with an air of waddling. They turned to the left. There was a

pub down the street, within fifty yards of the gate.

Stevie left alone beside the private lamp-post of the Charity, his hands

thrust deep into his pockets, glared with vacant sulkiness. At the

bottom of his pockets his incapable weak hands were clinched hard into a

pair of angry fists. In the face of anything which affected directly or

indirectly his morbid dread of pain, Stevie ended by turning vicious. A

magnanimous indignation swelled his frail chest to bursting, and caused

his candid eyes to squint. Supremely wise in knowing his own

powerlessness, Stevie was not wise enough to restrain his passions. The

tenderness of his universal charity had two phases as indissolubly joined

and connected as the reverse and obverse sides of a medal. The anguish

of immoderate compassion was succeeded by the pain of an innocent but

pitiless rage. Those two states expressing themselves outwardly by the

same signs of futile bodily agitation, his sister Winnie soothed his

excitement without ever fathoming its twofold character. Mrs Verloc

wasted no portion of this transient life in seeking for fundamental

information. This is a sort of economy having all the appearances and

some of the advantages of prudence. Obviously it may be good for one not

to know too much. And such a view accords very well with constitutional

indolence.

On that evening on which it may be said that Mrs Verloc’s mother having

parted for good from her children had also departed this life, Winnie

Verloc did not investigate her brother’s psychology. The poor boy was

excited, of course. After once more assuring the old woman on the

threshold that she would know how to guard against the risk of Stevie

losing himself for very long on his pilgrimages of filial piety, she took

her brother’s arm to walk away. Stevie did not even mutter to himself,

but with the special sense of sisterly devotion developed in her earliest

infancy, she felt that the boy was very much excited indeed. Holding

tight to his arm, under the appearance of leaning on it, she thought of

some words suitable to the occasion.

“Now, Stevie, you must look well after me at the crossings, and get first

into the ’bus, like a good brother.”

This appeal to manly protection was received by Stevie with his usual

docility. It flattered him. He raised his head and threw out his chest.

“Don’t be nervous, Winnie. Mustn’t be nervous! ’Bus all right,” he

answered in a brusque, slurring stammer partaking of the timorousness of

a child and the resolution of a man. He advanced fearlessly with the

woman on his arm, but his lower lip dropped. Nevertheless, on the

pavement of the squalid and wide thoroughfare, whose poverty in all the

amenities of life stood foolishly exposed by a mad profusion of

gas-lights, their resemblance to each other was so pronounced as to

strike the casual passers-by.

Before the doors of the public-house at the corner, where the profusion

of gas-light reached the height of positive wickedness, a four-wheeled

cab standing by the curbstone with no one on the box, seemed cast out

into the gutter on account of irremediable decay. Mrs Verloc recognised

the conveyance. Its aspect was so profoundly lamentable, with such a

perfection of grotesque misery and weirdness of macabre detail, as if it

were the Cab of Death itself, that Mrs Verloc, with that ready compassion

of a woman for a horse (when she is not sitting behind him), exclaimed

vaguely:

“Poor brute!”

Hanging back suddenly, Stevie inflicted an arresting jerk upon his

sister.

“Poor! Poor!” he ejaculated appreciatively. “Cabman poor too. He told

me himself.”

The contemplation of the infirm and lonely steed overcame him. Jostled,

but obstinate, he would remain there, trying to express the view newly

opened to his sympathies of the human and equine misery in close

association. But it was very difficult. “Poor brute, poor people!” was

all he could repeat. It did not seem forcible enough, and he came to a

stop with an angry splutter: “Shame!” Stevie was no master of phrases,

and perhaps for that very reason his thoughts lacked clearness and

precision. But he felt with greater completeness and some profundity.

That little word contained all his sense of indignation and horror at one

sort of wretchedness having to feed upon the anguish of the other—at the

poor cabman beating the poor horse in the name, as it were, of his poor

kids at home. And Stevie knew what it was to be beaten. He knew it from

experience. It was a bad world. Bad! Bad!

Mrs Verloc, his only sister, guardian, and protector, could not pretend

to such depths of insight. Moreover, she had not experienced the magic

of the cabman’s eloquence. She was in the dark as to the inwardness of

the word “Shame.” And she said placidly:

“Come along, Stevie. You can’t help that.”

The docile Stevie went along; but now he went along without pride,

shamblingly, and muttering half words, and even words that would have

been whole if they had not been made up of halves that did not belong to

each other. It was as though he had been trying to fit all the words he

could remember to his sentiments in order to get some sort of

corresponding idea. And, as a matter of fact, he got it at last. He

hung back to utter it at once.

“Bad world for poor people.”

Directly he had expressed that thought he became aware that it was

familiar to him already in all its consequences. This circumstance

strengthened his conviction immensely, but also augmented his

indignation. Somebody, he felt, ought to be punished for it—punished

with great severity. Being no sceptic, but a moral creature, he was in a

manner at the mercy of his righteous passions.

“Beastly!” he added concisely.

It was clear to Mrs Verloc that he was greatly excited.

“Nobody can help that,” she said. “Do come along. Is that the way

you’re taking care of me?”

Stevie mended his pace obediently. He prided himself on being a good

brother. His morality, which was very complete, demanded that from him.

Yet he was pained at the information imparted by his sister Winnie who

was good. Nobody could help that! He came along gloomily, but presently

he brightened up. Like the rest of mankind, perplexed by the mystery of

the universe, he had his moments of consoling trust in the organised

powers of the earth.

“Police,” he suggested confidently.

“The police aren’t for that,” observed Mrs Verloc cursorily, hurrying on

her way.

Stevie’s face lengthened considerably. He was thinking. The more

intense his thinking, the slacker was the droop of his lower jaw.

And it was with an aspect of hopeless vacancy that he gave up his

intellectual enterprise.

“Not for that?” he mumbled, resigned but surprised. “Not for that?” He

had formed for himself an ideal conception of the metropolitan police as

a sort of benevolent institution for the suppression of evil. The notion

of benevolence especially was very closely associated with his sense of

the power of the men in blue. He had liked all police constables

tenderly, with a guileless trustfulness. And he was pained. He was

irritated, too, by a suspicion of duplicity in the members of the force.

For Stevie was frank and as open as the day himself. What did they mean

by pretending then? Unlike his sister, who put her trust in face values,

he wished to go to the bottom of the matter. He carried on his inquiry

by means of an angry challenge.

“What for are they then, Winn? What are they for? Tell me.”

Winnie disliked controversy. But fearing most a fit of black depression

consequent on Stevie missing his mother very much at first, she did not

altogether decline the discussion. Guiltless of all irony, she answered

yet in a form which was not perhaps unnatural in the wife of Mr Verloc,

Delegate of the Central Red Committee, personal friend of certain

anarchists, and a votary of social revolution.

“Don’t you know what the police are for, Stevie? They are there so that

them as have nothing shouldn’t take anything away from them who have.”

She avoided using the verb “to steal,” because it always made her brother

uncomfortable. For Stevie was delicately honest. Certain simple

principles had been instilled into him so anxiously (on account of his

“queerness”) that the mere names of certain transgressions filled him

with horror. He had been always easily impressed by speeches. He was

impressed and startled now, and his intelligence was very alert.

“What?” he asked at once anxiously. “Not even if they were hungry?

Mustn’t they?”

The two had paused in their walk.

“Not if they were ever so,” said Mrs Verloc, with the equanimity of a

person untroubled by the problem of the distribution of wealth, and

exploring the perspective of the roadway for an omnibus of the right

colour. “Certainly not. But what’s the use of talking about all that?

You aren’t ever hungry.”

She cast a swift glance at the boy, like a young man, by her side. She

saw him amiable, attractive, affectionate, and only a little, a very

little, peculiar. And she could not see him otherwise, for he was

connected with what there was of the salt of passion in her tasteless

life—the passion of indignation, of courage, of pity, and even of

self-sacrifice. She did not add: “And you aren’t likely ever to be as

long as I live.” But she might very well have done so, since she had

taken effectual steps to that end. Mr Verloc was a very good husband.

It was her honest impression that nobody could help liking the boy. She

cried out suddenly:

“Quick, Stevie. Stop that green ’bus.”

And Stevie, tremulous and important with his sister Winnie on his arm,

flung up the other high above his head at the approaching ’bus, with

complete success.

An hour afterwards Mr Verloc raised his eyes from a newspaper he was

reading, or at any rate looking at, behind the counter, and in the

expiring clatter of the door-bell beheld Winnie, his wife, enter and

cross the shop on her way upstairs, followed by Stevie, his

brother-in-law. The sight of his wife was agreeable to Mr Verloc. It

was his idiosyncrasy. The figure of his brother-in-law remained

imperceptible to him because of the morose thoughtfulness that lately had

fallen like a veil between Mr Verloc and the appearances of the world of

senses. He looked after his wife fixedly, without a word, as though she

had been a phantom. His voice for home use was husky and placid, but now

it was heard not at all. It was not heard at supper, to which he was

called by his wife in the usual brief manner: “Adolf.” He sat down to

consume it without conviction, wearing his hat pushed far back on his

head. It was not devotion to an outdoor life, but the frequentation of

foreign cafés which was responsible for that habit, investing with a

character of unceremonious impermanency Mr Verloc’s steady fidelity to

his own fireside. Twice at the clatter of the cracked bell he arose

without a word, disappeared into the shop, and came back silently.

During these absences Mrs Verloc, becoming acutely aware of the vacant

place at her right hand, missed her mother very much, and stared stonily;

while Stevie, from the same reason, kept on shuffling his feet, as though

the floor under the table were uncomfortably hot. When Mr Verloc

returned to sit in his place, like the very embodiment of silence, the

character of Mrs Verloc’s stare underwent a subtle change, and Stevie

ceased to fidget with his feet, because of his great and awed regard for

his sister’s husband. He directed at him glances of respectful

compassion. Mr Verloc was sorry. His sister Winnie had impressed upon

him (in the omnibus) that Mr Verloc would be found at home in a state of

sorrow, and must not be worried. His father’s anger, the irritability of

gentlemen lodgers, and Mr Verloc’s predisposition to immoderate grief,

had been the main sanctions of Stevie’s self-restraint. Of these

sentiments, all easily provoked, but not always easy to understand, the

last had the greatest moral efficiency—because Mr Verloc was _good_. His

mother and his sister had established that ethical fact on an unshakable

foundation. They had established, erected, consecrated it behind Mr

Verloc’s back, for reasons that had nothing to do with abstract morality.

And Mr Verloc was not aware of it. It is but bare justice to him to say

that he had no notion of appearing good to Stevie. Yet so it was. He

was even the only man so qualified in Stevie’s knowledge, because the

gentlemen lodgers had been too transient and too remote to have anything

very distinct about them but perhaps their boots; and as regards the

disciplinary measures of his father, the desolation of his mother and

sister shrank from setting up a theory of goodness before the victim. It

would have been too cruel. And it was even possible that Stevie would

not have believed them. As far as Mr Verloc was concerned, nothing could

stand in the way of Stevie’s belief. Mr Verloc was obviously yet

mysteriously _good_. And the grief of a good man is august.

Stevie gave glances of reverential compassion to his brother-in-law. Mr

Verloc was sorry. The brother of Winnie had never before felt himself in

such close communion with the mystery of that man’s goodness. It was an

understandable sorrow. And Stevie himself was sorry. He was very sorry.

The same sort of sorrow. And his attention being drawn to this

unpleasant state, Stevie shuffled his feet. His feelings were habitually

manifested by the agitation of his limbs.

“Keep your feet quiet, dear,” said Mrs Verloc, with authority and

tenderness; then turning towards her husband in an indifferent voice, the

masterly achievement of instinctive tact: “Are you going out to-night?”

she asked.

The mere suggestion seemed repugnant to Mr Verloc. He shook his head

moodily, and then sat still with downcast eyes, looking at the piece of

cheese on his plate for a whole minute. At the end of that time he got

up, and went out—went right out in the clatter of the shop-door bell. He

acted thus inconsistently, not from any desire to make himself

unpleasant, but because of an unconquerable restlessness. It was no

earthly good going out. He could not find anywhere in London what he

wanted. But he went out. He led a cortege of dismal thoughts along dark

streets, through lighted streets, in and out of two flash bars, as if in

a half-hearted attempt to make a night of it, and finally back again to

his menaced home, where he sat down fatigued behind the counter, and they

crowded urgently round him, like a pack of hungry black hounds. After

locking up the house and putting out the gas he took them upstairs with

him—a dreadful escort for a man going to bed. His wife had preceded him

some time before, and with her ample form defined vaguely under the

counterpane, her head on the pillow, and a hand under the cheek offered

to his distraction the view of early drowsiness arguing the possession of

an equable soul. Her big eyes stared wide open, inert and dark against

the snowy whiteness of the linen. She did not move.

She had an equable soul. She felt profoundly that things do not stand

much looking into. She made her force and her wisdom of that instinct.

But the taciturnity of Mr Verloc had been lying heavily upon her for a

good many days. It was, as a matter of fact, affecting her nerves.

Recumbent and motionless, she said placidly:

“You’ll catch cold walking about in your socks like this.”

This speech, becoming the solicitude of the wife and the prudence of the

woman, took Mr Verloc unawares. He had left his boots downstairs, but he

had forgotten to put on his slippers, and he had been turning about the

bedroom on noiseless pads like a bear in a cage. At the sound of his

wife’s voice he stopped and stared at her with a somnambulistic,

expressionless gaze so long that Mrs Verloc moved her limbs slightly

under the bed-clothes. But she did not move her black head sunk in the

white pillow one hand under her cheek and the big, dark, unwinking eyes.

Under her husband’s expressionless stare, and remembering her mother’s

empty room across the landing, she felt an acute pang of loneliness. She

had never been parted from her mother before. They had stood by each

other. She felt that they had, and she said to herself that now mother

was gone—gone for good. Mrs Verloc had no illusions. Stevie remained,

however. And she said:

“Mother’s done what she wanted to do. There’s no sense in it that I can

see. I’m sure she couldn’t have thought you had enough of her. It’s

perfectly wicked, leaving us like that.”

Mr Verloc was not a well-read person; his range of allusive phrases was

limited, but there was a peculiar aptness in circumstances which made him

think of rats leaving a doomed ship. He very nearly said so. He had

grown suspicious and embittered. Could it be that the old woman had such

an excellent nose? But the unreasonableness of such a suspicion was

patent, and Mr Verloc held his tongue. Not altogether, however. He

muttered heavily:

“Perhaps it’s just as well.”

He began to undress. Mrs Verloc kept very still, perfectly still, with

her eyes fixed in a dreamy, quiet stare. And her heart for the fraction

of a second seemed to stand still too. That night she was “not quite

herself,” as the saying is, and it was borne upon her with some force

that a simple sentence may hold several diverse meanings—mostly

disagreeable. How was it just as well? And why? But she did not allow

herself to fall into the idleness of barren speculation. She was rather

confirmed in her belief that things did not stand being looked into.

Practical and subtle in her way, she brought Stevie to the front without

loss of time, because in her the singleness of purpose had the unerring

nature and the force of an instinct.

“What I am going to do to cheer up that boy for the first few days I’m

sure I don’t know. He’ll be worrying himself from morning till night

before he gets used to mother being away. And he’s such a good boy. I

couldn’t do without him.”

Mr Verloc went on divesting himself of his clothing with the unnoticing

inward concentration of a man undressing in the solitude of a vast and

hopeless desert. For thus inhospitably did this fair earth, our common

inheritance, present itself to the mental vision of Mr Verloc. All was

so still without and within that the lonely ticking of the clock on the

landing stole into the room as if for the sake of company.

Mr Verloc, getting into bed on his own side, remained prone and mute

behind Mrs Verloc’s back. His thick arms rested abandoned on the outside

of the counterpane like dropped weapons, like discarded tools. At that

moment he was within a hair’s breadth of making a clean breast of it all

to his wife. The moment seemed propitious. Looking out of the corners

of his eyes, he saw her ample shoulders draped in white, the back of her

head, with the hair done for the night in three plaits tied up with black

tapes at the ends. And he forbore. Mr Verloc loved his wife as a wife

should be loved—that is, maritally, with the regard one has for one’s

chief possession. This head arranged for the night, those ample

shoulders, had an aspect of familiar sacredness—the sacredness of

domestic peace. She moved not, massive and shapeless like a recumbent

statue in the rough; he remembered her wide-open eyes looking into the

empty room. She was mysterious, with the mysteriousness of living

beings. The far-famed secret agent [delta] of the late Baron

Stott-Wartenheim’s alarmist despatches was not the man to break into such

mysteries. He was easily intimidated. And he was also indolent, with

the indolence which is so often the secret of good nature. He forbore

touching that mystery out of love, timidity, and indolence. There would

be always time enough. For several minutes he bore his sufferings

silently in the drowsy silence of the room. And then he disturbed it by

a resolute declaration.

“I am going on the Continent to-morrow.”

His wife might have fallen asleep already. He could not tell. As a

matter of fact, Mrs Verloc had heard him. Her eyes remained very wide

open, and she lay very still, confirmed in her instinctive conviction

that things don’t bear looking into very much. And yet it was nothing

very unusual for Mr Verloc to take such a trip. He renewed his stock

from Paris and Brussels. Often he went over to make his purchases

personally. A little select connection of amateurs was forming around

the shop in Brett Street, a secret connection eminently proper for any

business undertaken by Mr Verloc, who, by a mystic accord of temperament

and necessity, had been set apart to be a secret agent all his life.

He waited for a while, then added: “I’ll be away a week or perhaps a

fortnight. Get Mrs Neale to come for the day.”

Mrs Neale was the charwoman of Brett Street. Victim of her marriage with

a debauched joiner, she was oppressed by the needs of many infant

children. Red-armed, and aproned in coarse sacking up to the arm-pits,

she exhaled the anguish of the poor in a breath of soap-suds and rum, in

the uproar of scrubbing, in the clatter of tin pails.

Mrs Verloc, full of deep purpose, spoke in the tone of the shallowest

indifference.

“There is no need to have the woman here all day. I shall do very well

with Stevie.”

She let the lonely clock on the landing count off fifteen ticks into the

abyss of eternity, and asked:

“Shall I put the light out?”

Mr Verloc snapped at his wife huskily.

“Put it out.”