บทที่ บทที่ 11 · Chapter XI

. Chapter XI

After Chief Inspector Heat had left him Mr Verloc moved about the

parlour.

From time to time he eyed his wife through the open door. “She knows all

about it now,” he thought to himself with commiseration for her sorrow

and with some satisfaction as regarded himself. Mr Verloc’s soul, if

lacking greatness perhaps, was capable of tender sentiments. The

prospect of having to break the news to her had put him into a fever.

Chief Inspector Heat had relieved him of the task. That was good as far

as it went. It remained for him now to face her grief.

Mr Verloc had never expected to have to face it on account of death,

whose catastrophic character cannot be argued away by sophisticated

reasoning or persuasive eloquence. Mr Verloc never meant Stevie to

perish with such abrupt violence. He did not mean him to perish at all.

Stevie dead was a much greater nuisance than ever he had been when alive.

Mr Verloc had augured a favourable issue to his enterprise, basing

himself not on Stevie’s intelligence, which sometimes plays queer tricks

with a man, but on the blind docility and on the blind devotion of the

boy. Though not much of a psychologist, Mr Verloc had gauged the depth

of Stevie’s fanaticism. He dared cherish the hope of Stevie walking away

from the walls of the Observatory as he had been instructed to do, taking

the way shown to him several times previously, and rejoining his

brother-in-law, the wise and good Mr Verloc, outside the precincts of the

park. Fifteen minutes ought to have been enough for the veriest fool to

deposit the engine and walk away. And the Professor had guaranteed more

than fifteen minutes. But Stevie had stumbled within five minutes of

being left to himself. And Mr Verloc was shaken morally to pieces. He

had foreseen everything but that. He had foreseen Stevie distracted and

lost—sought for—found in some police station or provincial workhouse in

the end. He had foreseen Stevie arrested, and was not afraid, because Mr

Verloc had a great opinion of Stevie’s loyalty, which had been carefully

indoctrinated with the necessity of silence in the course of many walks.

Like a peripatetic philosopher, Mr Verloc, strolling along the streets of

London, had modified Stevie’s view of the police by conversations full of

subtle reasonings. Never had a sage a more attentive and admiring

disciple. The submission and worship were so apparent that Mr Verloc had

come to feel something like a liking for the boy. In any case, he had

not foreseen the swift bringing home of his connection. That his wife

should hit upon the precaution of sewing the boy’s address inside his

overcoat was the last thing Mr Verloc would have thought of. One can’t

think of everything. That was what she meant when she said that he need

not worry if he lost Stevie during their walks. She had assured him that

the boy would turn up all right. Well, he had turned up with a

vengeance!

“Well, well,” muttered Mr Verloc in his wonder. What did she mean by it?

Spare him the trouble of keeping an anxious eye on Stevie? Most likely

she had meant well. Only she ought to have told him of the precaution

she had taken.

Mr Verloc walked behind the counter of the shop. His intention was not

to overwhelm his wife with bitter reproaches. Mr Verloc felt no

bitterness. The unexpected march of events had converted him to the

doctrine of fatalism. Nothing could be helped now. He said:

“I didn’t mean any harm to come to the boy.”

Mrs Verloc shuddered at the sound of her husband’s voice. She did not

uncover her face. The trusted secret agent of the late Baron

Stott-Wartenheim looked at her for a time with a heavy, persistent,

undiscerning glance. The torn evening paper was lying at her feet. It

could not have told her much. Mr Verloc felt the need of talking to his

wife.

“It’s that damned Heat—eh?” he said. “He upset you. He’s a brute,

blurting it out like this to a woman. I made myself ill thinking how to

break it to you. I sat for hours in the little parlour of Cheshire

Cheese thinking over the best way. You understand I never meant any harm

to come to that boy.”

Mr Verloc, the Secret Agent, was speaking the truth. It was his marital

affection that had received the greatest shock from the premature

explosion. He added:

“I didn’t feel particularly gay sitting there and thinking of you.”

He observed another slight shudder of his wife, which affected his

sensibility. As she persisted in hiding her face in her hands, he

thought he had better leave her alone for a while. On this delicate

impulse Mr Verloc withdrew into the parlour again, where the gas jet

purred like a contented cat. Mrs Verloc’s wifely forethought had left

the cold beef on the table with carving knife and fork and half a loaf of

bread for Mr Verloc’s supper. He noticed all these things now for the

first time, and cutting himself a piece of bread and meat, began to eat.

His appetite did not proceed from callousness. Mr Verloc had not eaten

any breakfast that day. He had left his home fasting. Not being an

energetic man, he found his resolution in nervous excitement, which

seemed to hold him mainly by the throat. He could not have swallowed

anything solid. Michaelis’ cottage was as destitute of provisions as the

cell of a prisoner. The ticket-of-leave apostle lived on a little milk

and crusts of stale bread. Moreover, when Mr Verloc arrived he had

already gone upstairs after his frugal meal. Absorbed in the toil and

delight of literary composition, he had not even answered Mr Verloc’s

shout up the little staircase.

“I am taking this young fellow home for a day or two.”

And, in truth, Mr Verloc did not wait for an answer, but had marched out

of the cottage at once, followed by the obedient Stevie.

Now that all action was over and his fate taken out of his hands with

unexpected swiftness, Mr Verloc felt terribly empty physically. He

carved the meat, cut the bread, and devoured his supper standing by the

table, and now and then casting a glance towards his wife. Her prolonged

immobility disturbed the comfort of his refection. He walked again into

the shop, and came up very close to her. This sorrow with a veiled face

made Mr Verloc uneasy. He expected, of course, his wife to be very much

upset, but he wanted her to pull herself together. He needed all her

assistance and all her loyalty in these new conjunctures his fatalism had

already accepted.

“Can’t be helped,” he said in a tone of gloomy sympathy. “Come, Winnie,

we’ve got to think of to-morrow. You’ll want all your wits about you

after I am taken away.”

He paused. Mrs Verloc’s breast heaved convulsively. This was not

reassuring to Mr Verloc, in whose view the newly created situation

required from the two people most concerned in it calmness, decision, and

other qualities incompatible with the mental disorder of passionate

sorrow. Mr Verloc was a humane man; he had come home prepared to allow

every latitude to his wife’s affection for her brother.

Only he did not understand either the nature or the whole extent of that

sentiment. And in this he was excusable, since it was impossible for him

to understand it without ceasing to be himself. He was startled and

disappointed, and his speech conveyed it by a certain roughness of tone.

“You might look at a fellow,” he observed after waiting a while.

As if forced through the hands covering Mrs Verloc’s face the answer

came, deadened, almost pitiful.

“I don’t want to look at you as long as I live.”

“Eh? What!” Mr Verloc was merely startled by the superficial and

literal meaning of this declaration. It was obviously unreasonable, the

mere cry of exaggerated grief. He threw over it the mantle of his

marital indulgence. The mind of Mr Verloc lacked profundity. Under the

mistaken impression that the value of individuals consists in what they

are in themselves, he could not possibly comprehend the value of Stevie

in the eyes of Mrs Verloc. She was taking it confoundedly hard, he

thought to himself. It was all the fault of that damned Heat. What did

he want to upset the woman for? But she mustn’t be allowed, for her own

good, to carry on so till she got quite beside herself.

“Look here! You can’t sit like this in the shop,” he said with affected

severity, in which there was some real annoyance; for urgent practical

matters must be talked over if they had to sit up all night. “Somebody

might come in at any minute,” he added, and waited again. No effect was

produced, and the idea of the finality of death occurred to Mr Verloc

during the pause. He changed his tone. “Come. This won’t bring him

back,” he said gently, feeling ready to take her in his arms and press

her to his breast, where impatience and compassion dwelt side by side.

But except for a short shudder Mrs Verloc remained apparently unaffected

by the force of that terrible truism. It was Mr Verloc himself who was

moved. He was moved in his simplicity to urge moderation by asserting

the claims of his own personality.

“Do be reasonable, Winnie. What would it have been if you had lost me!”

He had vaguely expected to hear her cry out. But she did not budge. She

leaned back a little, quieted down to a complete unreadable stillness.

Mr Verloc’s heart began to beat faster with exasperation and something

resembling alarm. He laid his hand on her shoulder, saying:

“Don’t be a fool, Winnie.”

She gave no sign. It was impossible to talk to any purpose with a woman

whose face one cannot see. Mr Verloc caught hold of his wife’s wrists.

But her hands seemed glued fast. She swayed forward bodily to his tug,

and nearly went off the chair. Startled to feel her so helplessly limp,

he was trying to put her back on the chair when she stiffened suddenly

all over, tore herself out of his hands, ran out of the shop, across the

parlour, and into the kitchen. This was very swift. He had just a

glimpse of her face and that much of her eyes that he knew she had not

looked at him.

It all had the appearance of a struggle for the possession of a chair,

because Mr Verloc instantly took his wife’s place in it. Mr Verloc did

not cover his face with his hands, but a sombre thoughtfulness veiled his

features. A term of imprisonment could not be avoided. He did not wish

now to avoid it. A prison was a place as safe from certain unlawful

vengeances as the grave, with this advantage, that in a prison there is

room for hope. What he saw before him was a term of imprisonment, an

early release and then life abroad somewhere, such as he had contemplated

already, in case of failure. Well, it was a failure, if not exactly the

sort of failure he had feared. It had been so near success that he could

have positively terrified Mr Vladimir out of his ferocious scoffing with

this proof of occult efficiency. So at least it seemed now to Mr Verloc.

His prestige with the Embassy would have been immense if—if his wife had

not had the unlucky notion of sewing on the address inside Stevie’s

overcoat. Mr Verloc, who was no fool, had soon perceived the

extraordinary character of the influence he had over Stevie, though he

did not understand exactly its origin—the doctrine of his supreme wisdom

and goodness inculcated by two anxious women. In all the eventualities

he had foreseen Mr Verloc had calculated with correct insight on Stevie’s

instinctive loyalty and blind discretion. The eventuality he had not

foreseen had appalled him as a humane man and a fond husband. From every

other point of view it was rather advantageous. Nothing can equal the

everlasting discretion of death. Mr Verloc, sitting perplexed and

frightened in the small parlour of the Cheshire Cheese, could not help

acknowledging that to himself, because his sensibility did not stand in

the way of his judgment. Stevie’s violent disintegration, however

disturbing to think about, only assured the success; for, of course, the

knocking down of a wall was not the aim of Mr Vladimir’s menaces, but the

production of a moral effect. With much trouble and distress on Mr

Verloc’s part the effect might be said to have been produced. When,

however, most unexpectedly, it came home to roost in Brett Street, Mr

Verloc, who had been struggling like a man in a nightmare for the

preservation of his position, accepted the blow in the spirit of a

convinced fatalist. The position was gone through no one’s fault really.

A small, tiny fact had done it. It was like slipping on a bit of orange

peel in the dark and breaking your leg.

Mr Verloc drew a weary breath. He nourished no resentment against his

wife. He thought: She will have to look after the shop while they keep

me locked up. And thinking also how cruelly she would miss Stevie at

first, he felt greatly concerned about her health and spirits. How would

she stand her solitude—absolutely alone in that house? It would not do

for her to break down while he was locked up? What would become of the

shop then? The shop was an asset. Though Mr Verloc’s fatalism accepted

his undoing as a secret agent, he had no mind to be utterly ruined,

mostly, it must be owned, from regard for his wife.

Silent, and out of his line of sight in the kitchen, she frightened him.

If only she had had her mother with her. But that silly old woman—An

angry dismay possessed Mr Verloc. He must talk with his wife. He could

tell her certainly that a man does get desperate under certain

circumstances. But he did not go incontinently to impart to her that

information. First of all, it was clear to him that this evening was no

time for business. He got up to close the street door and put the gas

out in the shop.

Having thus assured a solitude around his hearthstone Mr Verloc walked

into the parlour, and glanced down into the kitchen. Mrs Verloc was

sitting in the place where poor Stevie usually established himself of an

evening with paper and pencil for the pastime of drawing these

coruscations of innumerable circles suggesting chaos and eternity. Her

arms were folded on the table, and her head was lying on her arms. Mr

Verloc contemplated her back and the arrangement of her hair for a time,

then walked away from the kitchen door. Mrs Verloc’s philosophical,

almost disdainful incuriosity, the foundation of their accord in domestic

life made it extremely difficult to get into contact with her, now this

tragic necessity had arisen. Mr Verloc felt this difficulty acutely. He

turned around the table in the parlour with his usual air of a large

animal in a cage.

Curiosity being one of the forms of self-revelation, a systematically

incurious person remains always partly mysterious. Every time he passed

near the door Mr Verloc glanced at his wife uneasily. It was not that he

was afraid of her. Mr Verloc imagined himself loved by that woman. But

she had not accustomed him to make confidences. And the confidence he

had to make was of a profound psychological order. How with his want of

practice could he tell her what he himself felt but vaguely: that there

are conspiracies of fatal destiny, that a notion grows in a mind

sometimes till it acquires an outward existence, an independent power of

its own, and even a suggestive voice? He could not inform her that a man

may be haunted by a fat, witty, clean-shaved face till the wildest

expedient to get rid of it appears a child of wisdom.

On this mental reference to a First Secretary of a great Embassy, Mr

Verloc stopped in the doorway, and looking down into the kitchen with an

angry face and clenched fists, addressed his wife.

“You don’t know what a brute I had to deal with.”

He started off to make another perambulation of the table; then when he

had come to the door again he stopped, glaring in from the height of two

steps.

“A silly, jeering, dangerous brute, with no more sense than—After all

these years! A man like me! And I have been playing my head at that

game. You didn’t know. Quite right, too. What was the good of telling

you that I stood the risk of having a knife stuck into me any time these

seven years we’ve been married? I am not a chap to worry a woman that’s

fond of me. You had no business to know.” Mr Verloc took another turn

round the parlour, fuming.

“A venomous beast,” he began again from the doorway. “Drive me out into

a ditch to starve for a joke. I could see he thought it was a damned

good joke. A man like me! Look here! Some of the highest in the world

got to thank me for walking on their two legs to this day. That’s the

man you’ve got married to, my girl!”

He perceived that his wife had sat up. Mrs Verloc’s arms remained lying

stretched on the table. Mr Verloc watched at her back as if he could

read there the effect of his words.

“There isn’t a murdering plot for the last eleven years that I hadn’t my

finger in at the risk of my life. There’s scores of these revolutionists

I’ve sent off, with their bombs in their blamed pockets, to get

themselves caught on the frontier. The old Baron knew what I was worth

to his country. And here suddenly a swine comes along—an ignorant,

overbearing swine.”

Mr Verloc, stepping slowly down two steps, entered the kitchen, took a

tumbler off the dresser, and holding it in his hand, approached the sink,

without looking at his wife. “It wasn’t the old Baron who would have had

the wicked folly of getting me to call on him at eleven in the morning.

There are two or three in this town that, if they had seen me going in,

would have made no bones about knocking me on the head sooner or later.

It was a silly, murderous trick to expose for nothing a man—like me.”

Mr Verloc, turning on the tap above the sink, poured three glasses of

water, one after another, down his throat to quench the fires of his

indignation. Mr Vladimir’s conduct was like a hot brand which set his

internal economy in a blaze. He could not get over the disloyalty of it.

This man, who would not work at the usual hard tasks which society sets

to its humbler members, had exercised his secret industry with an

indefatigable devotion. There was in Mr Verloc a fund of loyalty. He

had been loyal to his employers, to the cause of social stability,—and to

his affections too—as became apparent when, after standing the tumbler in

the sink, he turned about, saying:

“If I hadn’t thought of you I would have taken the bullying brute by the

throat and rammed his head into the fireplace. I’d have been more than a

match for that pink-faced, smooth-shaved—”

Mr Verloc, neglected to finish the sentence, as if there could be no

doubt of the terminal word. For the first time in his life he was taking

that incurious woman into his confidence. The singularity of the event,

the force and importance of the personal feelings aroused in the course

of this confession, drove Stevie’s fate clean out of Mr Verloc’s mind.

The boy’s stuttering existence of fears and indignations, together with

the violence of his end, had passed out of Mr Verloc’s mental sight for a

time. For that reason, when he looked up he was startled by the

inappropriate character of his wife’s stare. It was not a wild stare,

and it was not inattentive, but its attention was peculiar and not

satisfactory, inasmuch that it seemed concentrated upon some point beyond

Mr Verloc’s person. The impression was so strong that Mr Verloc glanced

over his shoulder. There was nothing behind him: there was just the

whitewashed wall. The excellent husband of Winnie Verloc saw no writing

on the wall. He turned to his wife again, repeating, with some emphasis:

“I would have taken him by the throat. As true as I stand here, if I

hadn’t thought of you then I would have half choked the life out of the

brute before I let him get up. And don’t you think he would have been

anxious to call the police either. He wouldn’t have dared. You

understand why—don’t you?”

He blinked at his wife knowingly.

“No,” said Mrs Verloc in an unresonant voice, and without looking at him

at all. “What are you talking about?”

A great discouragement, the result of fatigue, came upon Mr Verloc. He

had had a very full day, and his nerves had been tried to the utmost.

After a month of maddening worry, ending in an unexpected catastrophe,

the storm-tossed spirit of Mr Verloc longed for repose. His career as a

secret agent had come to an end in a way no one could have foreseen;

only, now, perhaps he could manage to get a night’s sleep at last. But

looking at his wife, he doubted it. She was taking it very hard—not at

all like herself, he thought. He made an effort to speak.

“You’ll have to pull yourself together, my girl,” he said

sympathetically. “What’s done can’t be undone.”

Mrs Verloc gave a slight start, though not a muscle of her white face

moved in the least. Mr Verloc, who was not looking at her, continued

ponderously.

“You go to bed now. What you want is a good cry.”

This opinion had nothing to recommend it but the general consent of

mankind. It is universally understood that, as if it were nothing more

substantial than vapour floating in the sky, every emotion of a woman is

bound to end in a shower. And it is very probable that had Stevie died

in his bed under her despairing gaze, in her protecting arms, Mrs

Verloc’s grief would have found relief in a flood of bitter and pure

tears. Mrs Verloc, in common with other human beings, was provided with

a fund of unconscious resignation sufficient to meet the normal

manifestation of human destiny. Without “troubling her head about it,”

she was aware that it “did not stand looking into very much.” But the

lamentable circumstances of Stevie’s end, which to Mr Verloc’s mind had

only an episodic character, as part of a greater disaster, dried her

tears at their very source. It was the effect of a white-hot iron drawn

across her eyes; at the same time her heart, hardened and chilled into a

lump of ice, kept her body in an inward shudder, set her features into a

frozen contemplative immobility addressed to a whitewashed wall with no

writing on it. The exigencies of Mrs Verloc’s temperament, which, when

stripped of its philosophical reserve, was maternal and violent, forced

her to roll a series of thoughts in her motionless head. These thoughts

were rather imagined than expressed. Mrs Verloc was a woman of

singularly few words, either for public or private use. With the rage

and dismay of a betrayed woman, she reviewed the tenor of her life in

visions concerned mostly with Stevie’s difficult existence from its

earliest days. It was a life of single purpose and of a noble unity of

inspiration, like those rare lives that have left their mark on the

thoughts and feelings of mankind. But the visions of Mrs Verloc lacked

nobility and magnificence. She saw herself putting the boy to bed by the

light of a single candle on the deserted top floor of a “business house,”

dark under the roof and scintillating exceedingly with lights and cut

glass at the level of the street like a fairy palace. That meretricious

splendour was the only one to be met in Mrs Verloc’s visions. She

remembered brushing the boy’s hair and tying his pinafores—herself in a

pinafore still; the consolations administered to a small and badly scared

creature by another creature nearly as small but not quite so badly

scared; she had the vision of the blows intercepted (often with her own

head), of a door held desperately shut against a man’s rage (not for very

long); of a poker flung once (not very far), which stilled that

particular storm into the dumb and awful silence which follows a

thunder-clap. And all these scenes of violence came and went accompanied

by the unrefined noise of deep vociferations proceeding from a man

wounded in his paternal pride, declaring himself obviously accursed since

one of his kids was a “slobbering idjut and the other a wicked

she-devil.” It was of her that this had been said many years ago.

Mrs Verloc heard the words again in a ghostly fashion, and then the

dreary shadow of the Belgravian mansion descended upon her shoulders. It

was a crushing memory, an exhausting vision of countless breakfast trays

carried up and down innumerable stairs, of endless haggling over pence,

of the endless drudgery of sweeping, dusting, cleaning, from basement to

attics; while the impotent mother, staggering on swollen legs, cooked in

a grimy kitchen, and poor Stevie, the unconscious presiding genius of all

their toil, blacked the gentlemen’s boots in the scullery. But this

vision had a breath of a hot London summer in it, and for a central

figure a young man wearing his Sunday best, with a straw hat on his dark

head and a wooden pipe in his mouth. Affectionate and jolly, he was a

fascinating companion for a voyage down the sparkling stream of life;

only his boat was very small. There was room in it for a girl-partner at

the oar, but no accommodation for passengers. He was allowed to drift

away from the threshold of the Belgravian mansion while Winnie averted

her tearful eyes. He was not a lodger. The lodger was Mr Verloc,

indolent, and keeping late hours, sleepily jocular of a morning from

under his bed-clothes, but with gleams of infatuation in his heavy lidded

eyes, and always with some money in his pockets. There was no sparkle of

any kind on the lazy stream of his life. It flowed through secret

places. But his barque seemed a roomy craft, and his taciturn

magnanimity accepted as a matter of course the presence of passengers.

Mrs Verloc pursued the visions of seven years’ security for Stevie,

loyally paid for on her part; of security growing into confidence, into a

domestic feeling, stagnant and deep like a placid pool, whose guarded

surface hardly shuddered on the occasional passage of Comrade Ossipon,

the robust anarchist with shamelessly inviting eyes, whose glance had a

corrupt clearness sufficient to enlighten any woman not absolutely

imbecile.

A few seconds only had elapsed since the last word had been uttered aloud

in the kitchen, and Mrs Verloc was staring already at the vision of an

episode not more than a fortnight old. With eyes whose pupils were

extremely dilated she stared at the vision of her husband and poor Stevie

walking up Brett Street side by side away from the shop. It was the last

scene of an existence created by Mrs Verloc’s genius; an existence

foreign to all grace and charm, without beauty and almost without

decency, but admirable in the continuity of feeling and tenacity of

purpose. And this last vision had such plastic relief, such nearness of

form, such a fidelity of suggestive detail, that it wrung from Mrs Verloc

an anguished and faint murmur, reproducing the supreme illusion of her

life, an appalled murmur that died out on her blanched lips.

“Might have been father and son.”

Mr Verloc stopped, and raised a care-worn face. “Eh? What did you say?”

he asked. Receiving no reply, he resumed his sinister tramping. Then

with a menacing flourish of a thick, fleshy fist, he burst out:

“Yes. The Embassy people. A pretty lot, ain’t they! Before a week’s

out I’ll make some of them wish themselves twenty feet underground. Eh?

What?”

He glanced sideways, with his head down. Mrs Verloc gazed at the

whitewashed wall. A blank wall—perfectly blank. A blankness to run at

and dash your head against. Mrs Verloc remained immovably seated. She

kept still as the population of half the globe would keep still in

astonishment and despair, were the sun suddenly put out in the summer sky

by the perfidy of a trusted providence.

“The Embassy,” Mr Verloc began again, after a preliminary grimace which

bared his teeth wolfishly. “I wish I could get loose in there with a

cudgel for half-an-hour. I would keep on hitting till there wasn’t a

single unbroken bone left amongst the whole lot. But never mind, I’ll

teach them yet what it means trying to throw out a man like me to rot in

the streets. I’ve a tongue in my head. All the world shall know what

I’ve done for them. I am not afraid. I don’t care. Everything’ll come

out. Every damned thing. Let them look out!”

In these terms did Mr Verloc declare his thirst for revenge. It was a

very appropriate revenge. It was in harmony with the promptings of Mr

Verloc’s genius. It had also the advantage of being within the range of

his powers and of adjusting itself easily to the practice of his life,

which had consisted precisely in betraying the secret and unlawful

proceedings of his fellow-men. Anarchists or diplomats were all one to

him. Mr Verloc was temperamentally no respecter of persons. His scorn

was equally distributed over the whole field of his operations. But as a

member of a revolutionary proletariat—which he undoubtedly was—he

nourished a rather inimical sentiment against social distinction.

“Nothing on earth can stop me now,” he added, and paused, looking fixedly

at his wife, who was looking fixedly at a blank wall.

The silence in the kitchen was prolonged, and Mr Verloc felt

disappointed. He had expected his wife to say something. But Mrs

Verloc’s lips, composed in their usual form, preserved a statuesque

immobility like the rest of her face. And Mr Verloc was disappointed.

Yet the occasion did not, he recognised, demand speech from her. She was

a woman of very few words. For reasons involved in the very foundation

of his psychology, Mr Verloc was inclined to put his trust in any woman

who had given herself to him. Therefore he trusted his wife. Their

accord was perfect, but it was not precise. It was a tacit accord,

congenial to Mrs Verloc’s incuriosity and to Mr Verloc’s habits of mind,

which were indolent and secret. They refrained from going to the bottom

of facts and motives.

This reserve, expressing, in a way, their profound confidence in each

other, introduced at the same time a certain element of vagueness into

their intimacy. No system of conjugal relations is perfect. Mr Verloc

presumed that his wife had understood him, but he would have been glad to

hear her say what she thought at the moment. It would have been a

comfort.

There were several reasons why this comfort was denied him. There was a

physical obstacle: Mrs Verloc had no sufficient command over her voice.

She did not see any alternative between screaming and silence, and

instinctively she chose the silence. Winnie Verloc was temperamentally a

silent person. And there was the paralysing atrocity of the thought

which occupied her. Her cheeks were blanched, her lips ashy, her

immobility amazing. And she thought without looking at Mr Verloc: “This

man took the boy away to murder him. He took the boy away from his home

to murder him. He took the boy away from me to murder him!”

Mrs Verloc’s whole being was racked by that inconclusive and maddening

thought. It was in her veins, in her bones, in the roots of her hair.

Mentally she assumed the biblical attitude of mourning—the covered face,

the rent garments; the sound of wailing and lamentation filled her head.

But her teeth were violently clenched, and her tearless eyes were hot

with rage, because she was not a submissive creature. The protection she

had extended over her brother had been in its origin of a fierce and

indignant complexion. She had to love him with a militant love. She had

battled for him—even against herself. His loss had the bitterness of

defeat, with the anguish of a baffled passion. It was not an ordinary

stroke of death. Moreover, it was not death that took Stevie from her.

It was Mr Verloc who took him away. She had seen him. She had watched

him, without raising a hand, take the boy away. And she had let him go,

like—like a fool—a blind fool. Then after he had murdered the boy he

came home to her. Just came home like any other man would come home to

his wife. . . .

Through her set teeth Mrs Verloc muttered at the wall:

“And I thought he had caught a cold.”

Mr Verloc heard these words and appropriated them.

“It was nothing,” he said moodily. “I was upset. I was upset on your

account.”

Mrs Verloc, turning her head slowly, transferred her stare from the wall

to her husband’s person. Mr Verloc, with the tips of his fingers between

his lips, was looking on the ground.

“Can’t be helped,” he mumbled, letting his hand fall. “You must pull

yourself together. You’ll want all your wits about you. It is you who

brought the police about our ears. Never mind, I won’t say anything more

about it,” continued Mr Verloc magnanimously. “You couldn’t know.”

“I couldn’t,” breathed out Mrs Verloc. It was as if a corpse had spoken.

Mr Verloc took up the thread of his discourse.

“I don’t blame you. I’ll make them sit up. Once under lock and key it

will be safe enough for me to talk—you understand. You must reckon on me

being two years away from you,” he continued, in a tone of sincere

concern. “It will be easier for you than for me. You’ll have something

to do, while I—Look here, Winnie, what you must do is to keep this

business going for two years. You know enough for that. You’ve a good

head on you. I’ll send you word when it’s time to go about trying to

sell. You’ll have to be extra careful. The comrades will be keeping an

eye on you all the time. You’ll have to be as artful as you know how,

and as close as the grave. No one must know what you are going to do. I

have no mind to get a knock on the head or a stab in the back directly I

am let out.”

Thus spoke Mr Verloc, applying his mind with ingenuity and forethought to

the problems of the future. His voice was sombre, because he had a

correct sentiment of the situation. Everything which he did not wish to

pass had come to pass. The future had become precarious. His judgment,

perhaps, had been momentarily obscured by his dread of Mr Vladimir’s

truculent folly. A man somewhat over forty may be excusably thrown into

considerable disorder by the prospect of losing his employment,

especially if the man is a secret agent of political police, dwelling

secure in the consciousness of his high value and in the esteem of high

personages. He was excusable.

Now the thing had ended in a crash. Mr Verloc was cool; but he was not

cheerful. A secret agent who throws his secrecy to the winds from desire

of vengeance, and flaunts his achievements before the public eye, becomes

the mark for desperate and bloodthirsty indignations. Without unduly

exaggerating the danger, Mr Verloc tried to bring it clearly before his

wife’s mind. He repeated that he had no intention to let the

revolutionists do away with him.

He looked straight into his wife’s eyes. The enlarged pupils of the

woman received his stare into their unfathomable depths.

“I am too fond of you for that,” he said, with a little nervous laugh.

A faint flush coloured Mrs Verloc’s ghastly and motionless face. Having

done with the visions of the past, she had not only heard, but had also

understood the words uttered by her husband. By their extreme disaccord

with her mental condition these words produced on her a slightly

suffocating effect. Mrs Verloc’s mental condition had the merit of

simplicity; but it was not sound. It was governed too much by a fixed

idea. Every nook and cranny of her brain was filled with the thought

that this man, with whom she had lived without distaste for seven years,

had taken the “poor boy” away from her in order to kill him—the man to

whom she had grown accustomed in body and mind; the man whom she had

trusted, took the boy away to kill him! In its form, in its substance,

in its effect, which was universal, altering even the aspect of inanimate

things, it was a thought to sit still and marvel at for ever and ever.

Mrs Verloc sat still. And across that thought (not across the kitchen)

the form of Mr Verloc went to and fro, familiarly in hat and overcoat,

stamping with his boots upon her brain. He was probably talking too; but

Mrs Verloc’s thought for the most part covered the voice.

Now and then, however, the voice would make itself heard. Several

connected words emerged at times. Their purport was generally hopeful.

On each of these occasions Mrs Verloc’s dilated pupils, losing their

far-off fixity, followed her husband’s movements with the effect of black

care and impenetrable attention. Well informed upon all matters relating

to his secret calling, Mr Verloc augured well for the success of his

plans and combinations. He really believed that it would be upon the

whole easy for him to escape the knife of infuriated revolutionists. He

had exaggerated the strength of their fury and the length of their arm

(for professional purposes) too often to have many illusions one way or

the other. For to exaggerate with judgment one must begin by measuring

with nicety. He knew also how much virtue and how much infamy is

forgotten in two years—two long years. His first really confidential

discourse to his wife was optimistic from conviction. He also thought it

good policy to display all the assurance he could muster. It would put

heart into the poor woman. On his liberation, which, harmonising with

the whole tenor of his life, would be secret, of course, they would

vanish together without loss of time. As to covering up the tracks, he

begged his wife to trust him for that. He knew how it was to be done so

that the devil himself—

He waved his hand. He seemed to boast. He wished only to put heart into

her. It was a benevolent intention, but Mr Verloc had the misfortune not

to be in accord with his audience.

The self-confident tone grew upon Mrs Verloc’s ear which let most of the

words go by; for what were words to her now? What could words do to her,

for good or evil in the face of her fixed idea? Her black glance

followed that man who was asserting his impunity—the man who had taken

poor Stevie from home to kill him somewhere. Mrs Verloc could not

remember exactly where, but her heart began to beat very perceptibly.

Mr Verloc, in a soft and conjugal tone, was now expressing his firm

belief that there were yet a good few years of quiet life before them

both. He did not go into the question of means. A quiet life it must be

and, as it were, nestling in the shade, concealed among men whose flesh

is grass; modest, like the life of violets. The words used by Mr Verloc

were: “Lie low for a bit.” And far from England, of course. It was not

clear whether Mr Verloc had in his mind Spain or South America; but at

any rate somewhere abroad.

This last word, falling into Mrs Verloc’s ear, produced a definite

impression. This man was talking of going abroad. The impression was

completely disconnected; and such is the force of mental habit that Mrs

Verloc at once and automatically asked herself: “And what of Stevie?”

It was a sort of forgetfulness; but instantly she became aware that there

was no longer any occasion for anxiety on that score. There would never

be any occasion any more. The poor boy had been taken out and killed.

The poor boy was dead.

This shaking piece of forgetfulness stimulated Mrs Verloc’s intelligence.

She began to perceive certain consequences which would have surprised Mr

Verloc. There was no need for her now to stay there, in that kitchen, in

that house, with that man—since the boy was gone for ever. No need

whatever. And on that Mrs Verloc rose as if raised by a spring. But

neither could she see what there was to keep her in the world at all.

And this inability arrested her. Mr Verloc watched her with marital

solicitude.

“You’re looking more like yourself,” he said uneasily. Something

peculiar in the blackness of his wife’s eyes disturbed his optimism. At

that precise moment Mrs Verloc began to look upon herself as released

from all earthly ties.

She had her freedom. Her contract with existence, as represented by that

man standing over there, was at an end. She was a free woman. Had this

view become in some way perceptible to Mr Verloc he would have been

extremely shocked. In his affairs of the heart Mr Verloc had been always

carelessly generous, yet always with no other idea than that of being

loved for himself. Upon this matter, his ethical notions being in

agreement with his vanity, he was completely incorrigible. That this

should be so in the case of his virtuous and legal connection he was

perfectly certain. He had grown older, fatter, heavier, in the belief

that he lacked no fascination for being loved for his own sake. When he

saw Mrs Verloc starting to walk out of the kitchen without a word he was

disappointed.

“Where are you going to?” he called out rather sharply. “Upstairs?”

Mrs Verloc in the doorway turned at the voice. An instinct of prudence

born of fear, the excessive fear of being approached and touched by that

man, induced her to nod at him slightly (from the height of two steps),

with a stir of the lips which the conjugal optimism of Mr Verloc took for

a wan and uncertain smile.

“That’s right,” he encouraged her gruffly. “Rest and quiet’s what you

want. Go on. It won’t be long before I am with you.”

Mrs Verloc, the free woman who had had really no idea where she was going

to, obeyed the suggestion with rigid steadiness.

Mr Verloc watched her. She disappeared up the stairs. He was

disappointed. There was that within him which would have been more

satisfied if she had been moved to throw herself upon his breast. But he

was generous and indulgent. Winnie was always undemonstrative and

silent. Neither was Mr Verloc himself prodigal of endearments and words

as a rule. But this was not an ordinary evening. It was an occasion

when a man wants to be fortified and strengthened by open proofs of

sympathy and affection. Mr Verloc sighed, and put out the gas in the

kitchen. Mr Verloc’s sympathy with his wife was genuine and intense. It

almost brought tears into his eyes as he stood in the parlour reflecting

on the loneliness hanging over her head. In this mood Mr Verloc missed

Stevie very much out of a difficult world. He thought mournfully of his

end. If only that lad had not stupidly destroyed himself!

The sensation of unappeasable hunger, not unknown after the strain of a

hazardous enterprise to adventurers of tougher fibre than Mr Verloc,

overcame him again. The piece of roast beef, laid out in the likeness of

funereal baked meats for Stevie’s obsequies, offered itself largely to

his notice. And Mr Verloc again partook. He partook ravenously, without

restraint and decency, cutting thick slices with the sharp carving knife,

and swallowing them without bread. In the course of that refection it

occurred to Mr Verloc that he was not hearing his wife move about the

bedroom as he should have done. The thought of finding her perhaps

sitting on the bed in the dark not only cut Mr Verloc’s appetite, but

also took from him the inclination to follow her upstairs just yet.

Laying down the carving knife, Mr Verloc listened with careworn

attention.

He was comforted by hearing her move at last. She walked suddenly across

the room, and threw the window up. After a period of stillness up there,

during which he figured her to himself with her head out, he heard the

sash being lowered slowly. Then she made a few steps, and sat down.

Every resonance of his house was familiar to Mr Verloc, who was

thoroughly domesticated. When next he heard his wife’s footsteps

overhead he knew, as well as if he had seen her doing it, that she had

been putting on her walking shoes. Mr Verloc wriggled his shoulders

slightly at this ominous symptom, and moving away from the table, stood

with his back to the fireplace, his head on one side, and gnawing

perplexedly at the tips of his fingers. He kept track of her movements

by the sound. She walked here and there violently, with abrupt

stoppages, now before the chest of drawers, then in front of the

wardrobe. An immense load of weariness, the harvest of a day of shocks

and surprises, weighed Mr Verloc’s energies to the ground.

He did not raise his eyes till he heard his wife descending the stairs.

It was as he had guessed. She was dressed for going out.

Mrs Verloc was a free woman. She had thrown open the window of the

bedroom either with the intention of screaming Murder! Help! or of

throwing herself out. For she did not exactly know what use to make of

her freedom. Her personality seemed to have been torn into two pieces,

whose mental operations did not adjust themselves very well to each

other. The street, silent and deserted from end to end, repelled her by

taking sides with that man who was so certain of his impunity. She was

afraid to shout lest no one should come. Obviously no one would come.

Her instinct of self-preservation recoiled from the depth of the fall

into that sort of slimy, deep trench. Mrs Verloc closed the window, and

dressed herself to go out into the street by another way. She was a free

woman. She had dressed herself thoroughly, down to the tying of a black

veil over her face. As she appeared before him in the light of the

parlour, Mr Verloc observed that she had even her little handbag hanging

from her left wrist. . . . Flying off to her mother, of course.

The thought that women were wearisome creatures after all presented

itself to his fatigued brain. But he was too generous to harbour it for

more than an instant. This man, hurt cruelly in his vanity, remained

magnanimous in his conduct, allowing himself no satisfaction of a bitter

smile or of a contemptuous gesture. With true greatness of soul, he only

glanced at the wooden clock on the wall, and said in a perfectly calm but

forcible manner:

“Five and twenty minutes past eight, Winnie. There’s no sense in going

over there so late. You will never manage to get back to-night.”

Before his extended hand Mrs Verloc had stopped short. He added heavily:

“Your mother will be gone to bed before you get there. This is the sort

of news that can wait.”

Nothing was further from Mrs Verloc’s thoughts than going to her mother.

She recoiled at the mere idea, and feeling a chair behind her, she obeyed

the suggestion of the touch, and sat down. Her intention had been simply

to get outside the door for ever. And if this feeling was correct, its

mental form took an unrefined shape corresponding to her origin and

station. “I would rather walk the streets all the days of my life,” she

thought. But this creature, whose moral nature had been subjected to a

shock of which, in the physical order, the most violent earthquake of

history could only be a faint and languid rendering, was at the mercy of

mere trifles, of casual contacts. She sat down. With her hat and veil

she had the air of a visitor, of having looked in on Mr Verloc for a

moment. Her instant docility encouraged him, whilst her aspect of only

temporary and silent acquiescence provoked him a little.

“Let me tell you, Winnie,” he said with authority, “that your place is

here this evening. Hang it all! you brought the damned police high and

low about my ears. I don’t blame you—but it’s your doing all the same.

You’d better take this confounded hat off. I can’t let you go out, old

girl,” he added in a softened voice.

Mrs Verloc’s mind got hold of that declaration with morbid tenacity. The

man who had taken Stevie out from under her very eyes to murder him in a

locality whose name was at the moment not present to her memory would not

allow her to go out. Of course he wouldn’t.

Now he had murdered Stevie he would never let her go. He would want to

keep her for nothing. And on this characteristic reasoning, having all

the force of insane logic, Mrs Verloc’s disconnected wits went to work

practically. She could slip by him, open the door, run out. But he

would dash out after her, seize her round the body, drag her back into

the shop. She could scratch, kick, and bite—and stab too; but for

stabbing she wanted a knife. Mrs Verloc sat still under her black veil,

in her own house, like a masked and mysterious visitor of impenetrable

intentions.

Mr Verloc’s magnanimity was not more than human. She had exasperated him

at last.

“Can’t you say something? You have your own dodges for vexing a man. Oh

yes! I know your deaf-and-dumb trick. I’ve seen you at it before

to-day. But just now it won’t do. And to begin with, take this damned

thing off. One can’t tell whether one is talking to a dummy or to a live

woman.”

He advanced, and stretching out his hand, dragged the veil off, unmasking

a still, unreadable face, against which his nervous exasperation was

shattered like a glass bubble flung against a rock. “That’s better,” he

said, to cover his momentary uneasiness, and retreated back to his old

station by the mantelpiece. It never entered his head that his wife

could give him up. He felt a little ashamed of himself, for he was fond

and generous. What could he do? Everything had been said already. He

protested vehemently.

“By heavens! You know that I hunted high and low. I ran the risk of

giving myself away to find somebody for that accursed job. And I tell

you again I couldn’t find anyone crazy enough or hungry enough. What do

you take me for—a murderer, or what? The boy is gone. Do you think I

wanted him to blow himself up? He’s gone. His troubles are over. Ours

are just going to begin, I tell you, precisely because he did blow

himself. I don’t blame you. But just try to understand that it was a

pure accident; as much an accident as if he had been run over by a ’bus

while crossing the street.”

His generosity was not infinite, because he was a human being—and not a

monster, as Mrs Verloc believed him to be. He paused, and a snarl

lifting his moustaches above a gleam of white teeth gave him the

expression of a reflective beast, not very dangerous—a slow beast with a

sleek head, gloomier than a seal, and with a husky voice.

“And when it comes to that, it’s as much your doing as mine. That’s so.

You may glare as much as you like. I know what you can do in that way.

Strike me dead if I ever would have thought of the lad for that purpose.

It was you who kept on shoving him in my way when I was half distracted

with the worry of keeping the lot of us out of trouble. What the devil

made you? One would think you were doing it on purpose. And I am damned

if I know that you didn’t. There’s no saying how much of what’s going on

you have got hold of on the sly with your infernal don’t-care-a-damn way

of looking nowhere in particular, and saying nothing at all. . . . ”

His husky domestic voice ceased for a while. Mrs Verloc made no reply.

Before that silence he felt ashamed of what he had said. But as often

happens to peaceful men in domestic tiffs, being ashamed he pushed

another point.

“You have a devilish way of holding your tongue sometimes,” he began

again, without raising his voice. “Enough to make some men go mad. It’s

lucky for you that I am not so easily put out as some of them would be by

your deaf-and-dumb sulks. I am fond of you. But don’t you go too far.

This isn’t the time for it. We ought to be thinking of what we’ve got to

do. And I can’t let you go out to-night, galloping off to your mother

with some crazy tale or other about me. I won’t have it. Don’t you make

any mistake about it: if you will have it that I killed the boy, then

you’ve killed him as much as I.”

In sincerity of feeling and openness of statement, these words went far

beyond anything that had ever been said in this home, kept up on the

wages of a secret industry eked out by the sale of more or less secret

wares: the poor expedients devised by a mediocre mankind for preserving

an imperfect society from the dangers of moral and physical corruption,

both secret too of their kind. They were spoken because Mr Verloc had

felt himself really outraged; but the reticent decencies of this home

life, nestling in a shady street behind a shop where the sun never shone,

remained apparently undisturbed. Mrs Verloc heard him out with perfect

propriety, and then rose from her chair in her hat and jacket like a

visitor at the end of a call. She advanced towards her husband, one arm

extended as if for a silent leave-taking. Her net veil dangling down by

one end on the left side of her face gave an air of disorderly formality

to her restrained movements. But when she arrived as far as the

hearthrug, Mr Verloc was no longer standing there. He had moved off in

the direction of the sofa, without raising his eyes to watch the effect

of his tirade. He was tired, resigned in a truly marital spirit. But he

felt hurt in the tender spot of his secret weakness. If she would go on

sulking in that dreadful overcharged silence—why then she must. She was

a master in that domestic art. Mr Verloc flung himself heavily upon the

sofa, disregarding as usual the fate of his hat, which, as if accustomed

to take care of itself, made for a safe shelter under the table.

He was tired. The last particle of his nervous force had been expended

in the wonders and agonies of this day full of surprising failures coming

at the end of a harassing month of scheming and insomnia. He was tired.

A man isn’t made of stone. Hang everything! Mr Verloc reposed

characteristically, clad in his outdoor garments. One side of his open

overcoat was lying partly on the ground. Mr Verloc wallowed on his back.

But he longed for a more perfect rest—for sleep—for a few hours of

delicious forgetfulness. That would come later. Provisionally he

rested. And he thought: “I wish she would give over this damned

nonsense. It’s exasperating.”

There must have been something imperfect in Mrs Verloc’s sentiment of

regained freedom. Instead of taking the way of the door she leaned back,

with her shoulders against the tablet of the mantelpiece, as a wayfarer

rests against a fence. A tinge of wildness in her aspect was derived

from the black veil hanging like a rag against her cheek, and from the

fixity of her black gaze where the light of the room was absorbed and

lost without the trace of a single gleam. This woman, capable of a

bargain the mere suspicion of which would have been infinitely shocking

to Mr Verloc’s idea of love, remained irresolute, as if scrupulously

aware of something wanting on her part for the formal closing of the

transaction.

On the sofa Mr Verloc wriggled his shoulders into perfect comfort, and

from the fulness of his heart emitted a wish which was certainly as pious

as anything likely to come from such a source.

“I wish to goodness,” he growled huskily, “I had never seen Greenwich

Park or anything belonging to it.”

The veiled sound filled the small room with its moderate volume, well

adapted to the modest nature of the wish. The waves of air of the proper

length, propagated in accordance with correct mathematical formulas,

flowed around all the inanimate things in the room, lapped against Mrs

Verloc’s head as if it had been a head of stone. And incredible as it

may appear, the eyes of Mrs Verloc seemed to grow still larger. The

audible wish of Mr Verloc’s overflowing heart flowed into an empty place

in his wife’s memory. Greenwich Park. A park! That’s where the boy was

killed. A park—smashed branches, torn leaves, gravel, bits of brotherly

flesh and bone, all spouting up together in the manner of a firework.

She remembered now what she had heard, and she remembered it pictorially.

They had to gather him up with the shovel. Trembling all over with

irrepressible shudders, she saw before her the very implement with its

ghastly load scraped up from the ground. Mrs Verloc closed her eyes

desperately, throwing upon that vision the night of her eyelids, where

after a rainlike fall of mangled limbs the decapitated head of Stevie

lingered suspended alone, and fading out slowly like the last star of a

pyrotechnic display. Mrs Verloc opened her eyes.

Her face was no longer stony. Anybody could have noted the subtle change

on her features, in the stare of her eyes, giving her a new and startling

expression; an expression seldom observed by competent persons under the

conditions of leisure and security demanded for thorough analysis, but

whose meaning could not be mistaken at a glance. Mrs Verloc’s doubts as

to the end of the bargain no longer existed; her wits, no longer

disconnected, were working under the control of her will. But Mr Verloc

observed nothing. He was reposing in that pathetic condition of optimism

induced by excess of fatigue. He did not want any more trouble—with his

wife too—of all people in the world. He had been unanswerable in his

vindication. He was loved for himself. The present phase of her silence

he interpreted favourably. This was the time to make it up with her.

The silence had lasted long enough. He broke it by calling to her in an

undertone.

“Winnie.”

“Yes,” answered obediently Mrs Verloc the free woman. She commanded her

wits now, her vocal organs; she felt herself to be in an almost

preternaturally perfect control of every fibre of her body. It was all

her own, because the bargain was at an end. She was clear sighted. She

had become cunning. She chose to answer him so readily for a purpose.

She did not wish that man to change his position on the sofa which was

very suitable to the circumstances. She succeeded. The man did not

stir. But after answering him she remained leaning negligently against

the mantelpiece in the attitude of a resting wayfarer. She was

unhurried. Her brow was smooth. The head and shoulders of Mr Verloc

were hidden from her by the high side of the sofa. She kept her eyes

fixed on his feet.

She remained thus mysteriously still and suddenly collected till Mr

Verloc was heard with an accent of marital authority, and moving slightly

to make room for her to sit on the edge of the sofa.

“Come here,” he said in a peculiar tone, which might have been the tone

of brutality, but was intimately known to Mrs Verloc as the note of

wooing.

She started forward at once, as if she were still a loyal woman bound to

that man by an unbroken contract. Her right hand skimmed slightly the

end of the table, and when she had passed on towards the sofa the carving

knife had vanished without the slightest sound from the side of the dish.

Mr Verloc heard the creaky plank in the floor, and was content. He

waited. Mrs Verloc was coming. As if the homeless soul of Stevie had

flown for shelter straight to the breast of his sister, guardian and

protector, the resemblance of her face with that of her brother grew at

every step, even to the droop of the lower lip, even to the slight

divergence of the eyes. But Mr Verloc did not see that. He was lying on

his back and staring upwards. He saw partly on the ceiling and partly on

the wall the moving shadow of an arm with a clenched hand holding a

carving knife. It flickered up and down. Its movements were leisurely.

They were leisurely enough for Mr Verloc to recognise the limb and the

weapon.

They were leisurely enough for him to take in the full meaning of the

portent, and to taste the flavour of death rising in his gorge. His wife

had gone raving mad—murdering mad. They were leisurely enough for the

first paralysing effect of this discovery to pass away before a resolute

determination to come out victorious from the ghastly struggle with that

armed lunatic. They were leisurely enough for Mr Verloc to elaborate a

plan of defence involving a dash behind the table, and the felling of the

woman to the ground with a heavy wooden chair. But they were not

leisurely enough to allow Mr Verloc the time to move either hand or foot.

The knife was already planted in his breast. It met no resistance on its

way. Hazard has such accuracies. Into that plunging blow, delivered

over the side of the couch, Mrs Verloc had put all the inheritance of her

immemorial and obscure descent, the simple ferocity of the age of

caverns, and the unbalanced nervous fury of the age of bar-rooms. Mr

Verloc, the Secret Agent, turning slightly on his side with the force of

the blow, expired without stirring a limb, in the muttered sound of the

word “Don’t” by way of protest.

Mrs Verloc had let go the knife, and her extraordinary resemblance to her

late brother had faded, had become very ordinary now. She drew a deep

breath, the first easy breath since Chief Inspector Heat had exhibited to

her the labelled piece of Stevie’s overcoat. She leaned forward on her

folded arms over the side of the sofa. She adopted that easy attitude

not in order to watch or gloat over the body of Mr Verloc, but because of

the undulatory and swinging movements of the parlour, which for some time

behaved as though it were at sea in a tempest. She was giddy but calm.

She had become a free woman with a perfection of freedom which left her

nothing to desire and absolutely nothing to do, since Stevie’s urgent

claim on her devotion no longer existed. Mrs Verloc, who thought in

images, was not troubled now by visions, because she did not think at

all. And she did not move. She was a woman enjoying her complete

irresponsibility and endless leisure, almost in the manner of a corpse.

She did not move, she did not think. Neither did the mortal envelope of

the late Mr Verloc reposing on the sofa. Except for the fact that Mrs

Verloc breathed these two would have been perfect in accord: that accord

of prudent reserve without superfluous words, and sparing of signs, which

had been the foundation of their respectable home life. For it had been

respectable, covering by a decent reticence the problems that may arise

in the practice of a secret profession and the commerce of shady wares.

To the last its decorum had remained undisturbed by unseemly shrieks and

other misplaced sincerities of conduct. And after the striking of the

blow, this respectability was continued in immobility and silence.

Nothing moved in the parlour till Mrs Verloc raised her head slowly and

looked at the clock with inquiring mistrust. She had become aware of a

ticking sound in the room. It grew upon her ear, while she remembered

clearly that the clock on the wall was silent, had no audible tick. What

did it mean by beginning to tick so loudly all of a sudden? Its face

indicated ten minutes to nine. Mrs Verloc cared nothing for time, and

the ticking went on. She concluded it could not be the clock, and her

sullen gaze moved along the walls, wavered, and became vague, while she

strained her hearing to locate the sound. Tic, tic, tic.

After listening for some time Mrs Verloc lowered her gaze deliberately on

her husband’s body. Its attitude of repose was so home-like and familiar

that she could do so without feeling embarrassed by any pronounced

novelty in the phenomena of her home life. Mr Verloc was taking his

habitual ease. He looked comfortable.

By the position of the body the face of Mr Verloc was not visible to Mrs

Verloc, his widow. Her fine, sleepy eyes, travelling downward on the

track of the sound, became contemplative on meeting a flat object of bone

which protruded a little beyond the edge of the sofa. It was the handle

of the domestic carving knife with nothing strange about it but its

position at right angles to Mr Verloc’s waistcoat and the fact that

something dripped from it. Dark drops fell on the floorcloth one after

another, with a sound of ticking growing fast and furious like the pulse

of an insane clock. At its highest speed this ticking changed into a

continuous sound of trickling. Mrs Verloc watched that transformation

with shadows of anxiety coming and going on her face. It was a trickle,

dark, swift, thin. . . . Blood!

At this unforeseen circumstance Mrs Verloc abandoned her pose of idleness

and irresponsibility.

With a sudden snatch at her skirts and a faint shriek she ran to the

door, as if the trickle had been the first sign of a destroying flood.

Finding the table in her way she gave it a push with both hands as though

it had been alive, with such force that it went for some distance on its

four legs, making a loud, scraping racket, whilst the big dish with the

joint crashed heavily on the floor.

Then all became still. Mrs Verloc on reaching the door had stopped. A

round hat disclosed in the middle of the floor by the moving of the table

rocked slightly on its crown in the wind of her flight.