Chương Chương 2 · Chapter II

. Chapter II

Such was the house, the household, and the business Mr Verloc left behind

him on his way westward at the hour of half-past ten in the morning. It

was unusually early for him; his whole person exhaled the charm of almost

dewy freshness; he wore his blue cloth overcoat unbuttoned; his boots

were shiny; his cheeks, freshly shaven, had a sort of gloss; and even his

heavy-lidded eyes, refreshed by a night of peaceful slumber, sent out

glances of comparative alertness. Through the park railings these

glances beheld men and women riding in the Row, couples cantering past

harmoniously, others advancing sedately at a walk, loitering groups of

three or four, solitary horsemen looking unsociable, and solitary women

followed at a long distance by a groom with a cockade to his hat and a

leather belt over his tight-fitting coat. Carriages went bowling by,

mostly two-horse broughams, with here and there a victoria with the skin

of some wild beast inside and a woman’s face and hat emerging above the

folded hood. And a peculiarly London sun—against which nothing could be

said except that it looked bloodshot—glorified all this by its stare. It

hung at a moderate elevation above Hyde Park Corner with an air of

punctual and benign vigilance. The very pavement under Mr Verloc’s feet

had an old-gold tinge in that diffused light, in which neither wall, nor

tree, nor beast, nor man cast a shadow. Mr Verloc was going westward

through a town without shadows in an atmosphere of powdered old gold.

There were red, coppery gleams on the roofs of houses, on the corners of

walls, on the panels of carriages, on the very coats of the horses, and

on the broad back of Mr Verloc’s overcoat, where they produced a dull

effect of rustiness. But Mr Verloc was not in the least conscious of

having got rusty. He surveyed through the park railings the evidences of

the town’s opulence and luxury with an approving eye. All these people

had to be protected. Protection is the first necessity of opulence and

luxury. They had to be protected; and their horses, carriages, houses,

servants had to be protected; and the source of their wealth had to be

protected in the heart of the city and the heart of the country; the

whole social order favourable to their hygienic idleness had to be

protected against the shallow enviousness of unhygienic labour. It had

to—and Mr Verloc would have rubbed his hands with satisfaction had he not

been constitutionally averse from every superfluous exertion. His

idleness was not hygienic, but it suited him very well. He was in a

manner devoted to it with a sort of inert fanaticism, or perhaps rather

with a fanatical inertness. Born of industrious parents for a life of

toil, he had embraced indolence from an impulse as profound as

inexplicable and as imperious as the impulse which directs a man’s

preference for one particular woman in a given thousand. He was too lazy

even for a mere demagogue, for a workman orator, for a leader of labour.

It was too much trouble. He required a more perfect form of ease; or it

might have been that he was the victim of a philosophical unbelief in the

effectiveness of every human effort. Such a form of indolence requires,

implies, a certain amount of intelligence. Mr Verloc was not devoid of

intelligence—and at the notion of a menaced social order he would perhaps

have winked to himself if there had not been an effort to make in that

sign of scepticism. His big, prominent eyes were not well adapted to

winking. They were rather of the sort that closes solemnly in slumber

with majestic effect.

Undemonstrative and burly in a fat-pig style, Mr Verloc, without either

rubbing his hands with satisfaction or winking sceptically at his

thoughts, proceeded on his way. He trod the pavement heavily with his

shiny boots, and his general get-up was that of a well-to-do mechanic in

business for himself. He might have been anything from a picture-frame

maker to a lock-smith; an employer of labour in a small way. But there

was also about him an indescribable air which no mechanic could have

acquired in the practice of his handicraft however dishonestly exercised:

the air common to men who live on the vices, the follies, or the baser

fears of mankind; the air of moral nihilism common to keepers of gambling

hells and disorderly houses; to private detectives and inquiry agents; to

drink sellers and, I should say, to the sellers of invigorating electric

belts and to the inventors of patent medicines. But of that last I am

not sure, not having carried my investigations so far into the depths.

For all I know, the expression of these last may be perfectly diabolic.

I shouldn’t be surprised. What I want to affirm is that Mr Verloc’s

expression was by no means diabolic.

Before reaching Knightsbridge, Mr Verloc took a turn to the left out of

the busy main thoroughfare, uproarious with the traffic of swaying

omnibuses and trotting vans, in the almost silent, swift flow of hansoms.

Under his hat, worn with a slight backward tilt, his hair had been

carefully brushed into respectful sleekness; for his business was with an

Embassy. And Mr Verloc, steady like a rock—a soft kind of rock—marched

now along a street which could with every propriety be described as

private. In its breadth, emptiness, and extent it had the majesty of

inorganic nature, of matter that never dies. The only reminder of

mortality was a doctor’s brougham arrested in august solitude close to

the curbstone. The polished knockers of the doors gleamed as far as the

eye could reach, the clean windows shone with a dark opaque lustre. And

all was still. But a milk cart rattled noisily across the distant

perspective; a butcher boy, driving with the noble recklessness of a

charioteer at Olympic Games, dashed round the corner sitting high above a

pair of red wheels. A guilty-looking cat issuing from under the stones

ran for a while in front of Mr Verloc, then dived into another basement;

and a thick police constable, looking a stranger to every emotion, as if

he too were part of inorganic nature, surging apparently out of a

lamp-post, took not the slightest notice of Mr Verloc. With a turn to

the left Mr Verloc pursued his way along a narrow street by the side of a

yellow wall which, for some inscrutable reason, had No. 1 Chesham Square

written on it in black letters. Chesham Square was at least sixty yards

away, and Mr Verloc, cosmopolitan enough not to be deceived by London’s

topographical mysteries, held on steadily, without a sign of surprise or

indignation. At last, with business-like persistency, he reached the

Square, and made diagonally for the number 10. This belonged to an

imposing carriage gate in a high, clean wall between two houses, of which

one rationally enough bore the number 9 and the other was numbered 37;

but the fact that this last belonged to Porthill Street, a street well

known in the neighbourhood, was proclaimed by an inscription placed above

the ground-floor windows by whatever highly efficient authority is

charged with the duty of keeping track of London’s strayed houses. Why

powers are not asked of Parliament (a short act would do) for compelling

those edifices to return where they belong is one of the mysteries of

municipal administration. Mr Verloc did not trouble his head about it,

his mission in life being the protection of the social mechanism, not its

perfectionment or even its criticism.

It was so early that the porter of the Embassy issued hurriedly out of

his lodge still struggling with the left sleeve of his livery coat. His

waistcoat was red, and he wore knee-breeches, but his aspect was

flustered. Mr Verloc, aware of the rush on his flank, drove it off by

simply holding out an envelope stamped with the arms of the Embassy, and

passed on. He produced the same talisman also to the footman who opened

the door, and stood back to let him enter the hall.

A clear fire burned in a tall fireplace, and an elderly man standing with

his back to it, in evening dress and with a chain round his neck, glanced

up from the newspaper he was holding spread out in both hands before his

calm and severe face. He didn’t move; but another lackey, in brown

trousers and claw-hammer coat edged with thin yellow cord, approaching Mr

Verloc listened to the murmur of his name, and turning round on his heel

in silence, began to walk, without looking back once. Mr Verloc, thus

led along a ground-floor passage to the left of the great carpeted

staircase, was suddenly motioned to enter a quite small room furnished

with a heavy writing-table and a few chairs. The servant shut the door,

and Mr Verloc remained alone. He did not take a seat. With his hat and

stick held in one hand he glanced about, passing his other podgy hand

over his uncovered sleek head.

Another door opened noiselessly, and Mr Verloc immobilising his glance in

that direction saw at first only black clothes, the bald top of a head,

and a drooping dark grey whisker on each side of a pair of wrinkled

hands. The person who had entered was holding a batch of papers before

his eyes and walked up to the table with a rather mincing step, turning

the papers over the while. Privy Councillor Wurmt, Chancelier

d’Ambassade, was rather short-sighted. This meritorious official laying

the papers on the table, disclosed a face of pasty complexion and of

melancholy ugliness surrounded by a lot of fine, long dark grey hairs,

barred heavily by thick and bushy eyebrows. He put on a black-framed

pince-nez upon a blunt and shapeless nose, and seemed struck by Mr

Verloc’s appearance. Under the enormous eyebrows his weak eyes blinked

pathetically through the glasses.

He made no sign of greeting; neither did Mr Verloc, who certainly knew

his place; but a subtle change about the general outlines of his

shoulders and back suggested a slight bending of Mr Verloc’s spine under

the vast surface of his overcoat. The effect was of unobtrusive

deference.

“I have here some of your reports,” said the bureaucrat in an

unexpectedly soft and weary voice, and pressing the tip of his forefinger

on the papers with force. He paused; and Mr Verloc, who had recognised

his own handwriting very well, waited in an almost breathless silence.

“We are not very satisfied with the attitude of the police here,” the

other continued, with every appearance of mental fatigue.

The shoulders of Mr Verloc, without actually moving, suggested a shrug.

And for the first time since he left his home that morning his lips

opened.

“Every country has its police,” he said philosophically. But as the

official of the Embassy went on blinking at him steadily he felt

constrained to add: “Allow me to observe that I have no means of action

upon the police here.”

“What is desired,” said the man of papers, “is the occurrence of

something definite which should stimulate their vigilance. That is

within your province—is it not so?”

Mr Verloc made no answer except by a sigh, which escaped him

involuntarily, for instantly he tried to give his face a cheerful

expression. The official blinked doubtfully, as if affected by the dim

light of the room. He repeated vaguely.

“The vigilance of the police—and the severity of the magistrates. The

general leniency of the judicial procedure here, and the utter absence of

all repressive measures, are a scandal to Europe. What is wished for

just now is the accentuation of the unrest—of the fermentation which

undoubtedly exists—”

“Undoubtedly, undoubtedly,” broke in Mr Verloc in a deep deferential bass

of an oratorical quality, so utterly different from the tone in which he

had spoken before that his interlocutor remained profoundly surprised.

“It exists to a dangerous degree. My reports for the last twelve months

make it sufficiently clear.”

“Your reports for the last twelve months,” State Councillor Wurmt began

in his gentle and dispassionate tone, “have been read by me. I failed to

discover why you wrote them at all.”

A sad silence reigned for a time. Mr Verloc seemed to have swallowed his

tongue, and the other gazed at the papers on the table fixedly. At last

he gave them a slight push.

“The state of affairs you expose there is assumed to exist as the first

condition of your employment. What is required at present is not

writing, but the bringing to light of a distinct, significant fact—I

would almost say of an alarming fact.”

“I need not say that all my endeavours shall be directed to that end,” Mr

Verloc said, with convinced modulations in his conversational husky tone.

But the sense of being blinked at watchfully behind the blind glitter of

these eye-glasses on the other side of the table disconcerted him. He

stopped short with a gesture of absolute devotion. The useful,

hard-working, if obscure member of the Embassy had an air of being

impressed by some newly-born thought.

“You are very corpulent,” he said.

This observation, really of a psychological nature, and advanced with the

modest hesitation of an officeman more familiar with ink and paper than

with the requirements of active life, stung Mr Verloc in the manner of a

rude personal remark. He stepped back a pace.

“Eh? What were you pleased to say?” he exclaimed, with husky resentment.

The Chancelier d’Ambassade entrusted with the conduct of this interview

seemed to find it too much for him.

“I think,” he said, “that you had better see Mr Vladimir. Yes, decidedly

I think you ought to see Mr Vladimir. Be good enough to wait here,” he

added, and went out with mincing steps.

At once Mr Verloc passed his hand over his hair. A slight perspiration

had broken out on his forehead. He let the air escape from his pursed-up

lips like a man blowing at a spoonful of hot soup. But when the servant

in brown appeared at the door silently, Mr Verloc had not moved an inch

from the place he had occupied throughout the interview. He had remained

motionless, as if feeling himself surrounded by pitfalls.

He walked along a passage lighted by a lonely gas-jet, then up a flight

of winding stairs, and through a glazed and cheerful corridor on the

first floor. The footman threw open a door, and stood aside. The feet

of Mr Verloc felt a thick carpet. The room was large, with three

windows; and a young man with a shaven, big face, sitting in a roomy

arm-chair before a vast mahogany writing-table, said in French to the

Chancelier d’Ambassade, who was going out with the papers in his hand:

“You are quite right, mon cher. He’s fat—the animal.”

Mr Vladimir, First Secretary, had a drawing-room reputation as an

agreeable and entertaining man. He was something of a favourite in

society. His wit consisted in discovering droll connections between

incongruous ideas; and when talking in that strain he sat well forward of

his seat, with his left hand raised, as if exhibiting his funny

demonstrations between the thumb and forefinger, while his round and

clean-shaven face wore an expression of merry perplexity.

But there was no trace of merriment or perplexity in the way he looked at

Mr Verloc. Lying far back in the deep arm-chair, with squarely spread

elbows, and throwing one leg over a thick knee, he had with his smooth

and rosy countenance the air of a preternaturally thriving baby that will

not stand nonsense from anybody.

“You understand French, I suppose?” he said.

Mr Verloc stated huskily that he did. His whole vast bulk had a forward

inclination. He stood on the carpet in the middle of the room, clutching

his hat and stick in one hand; the other hung lifelessly by his side. He

muttered unobtrusively somewhere deep down in his throat something about

having done his military service in the French artillery. At once, with

contemptuous perversity, Mr Vladimir changed the language, and began to

speak idiomatic English without the slightest trace of a foreign accent.

“Ah! Yes. Of course. Let’s see. How much did you get for obtaining

the design of the improved breech-block of their new field-gun?”

“Five years’ rigorous confinement in a fortress,” Mr Verloc answered

unexpectedly, but without any sign of feeling.

“You got off easily,” was Mr Vladimir’s comment. “And, anyhow, it served

you right for letting yourself get caught. What made you go in for that

sort of thing—eh?”

Mr Verloc’s husky conversational voice was heard speaking of youth, of a

fatal infatuation for an unworthy—

“Aha! Cherchez la femme,” Mr Vladimir deigned to interrupt, unbending,

but without affability; there was, on the contrary, a touch of grimness

in his condescension. “How long have you been employed by the Embassy

here?” he asked.

“Ever since the time of the late Baron Stott-Wartenheim,” Mr Verloc

answered in subdued tones, and protruding his lips sadly, in sign of

sorrow for the deceased diplomat. The First Secretary observed this play

of physiognomy steadily.

“Ah! ever since. Well! What have you got to say for yourself?” he asked

sharply.

Mr Verloc answered with some surprise that he was not aware of having

anything special to say. He had been summoned by a letter—And he plunged

his hand busily into the side pocket of his overcoat, but before the

mocking, cynical watchfulness of Mr Vladimir, concluded to leave it

there.

“Bah!” said that latter. “What do you mean by getting out of condition

like this? You haven’t got even the physique of your profession. You—a

member of a starving proletariat—never! You—a desperate socialist or

anarchist—which is it?”

“Anarchist,” stated Mr Verloc in a deadened tone.

“Bosh!” went on Mr Vladimir, without raising his voice. “You startled

old Wurmt himself. You wouldn’t deceive an idiot. They all are that

by-the-by, but you seem to me simply impossible. So you began your

connection with us by stealing the French gun designs. And you got

yourself caught. That must have been very disagreeable to our

Government. You don’t seem to be very smart.”

Mr Verloc tried to exculpate himself huskily.

“As I’ve had occasion to observe before, a fatal infatuation for an

unworthy—”

Mr Vladimir raised a large white, plump hand. “Ah, yes. The unlucky

attachment—of your youth. She got hold of the money, and then sold you

to the police—eh?”

The doleful change in Mr Verloc’s physiognomy, the momentary drooping of

his whole person, confessed that such was the regrettable case. Mr

Vladimir’s hand clasped the ankle reposing on his knee. The sock was of

dark blue silk.

“You see, that was not very clever of you. Perhaps you are too

susceptible.”

Mr Verloc intimated in a throaty, veiled murmur that he was no longer

young.

“Oh! That’s a failing which age does not cure,” Mr Vladimir remarked,

with sinister familiarity. “But no! You are too fat for that. You

could not have come to look like this if you had been at all susceptible.

I’ll tell you what I think is the matter: you are a lazy fellow. How

long have you been drawing pay from this Embassy?”

“Eleven years,” was the answer, after a moment of sulky hesitation.

“I’ve been charged with several missions to London while His Excellency

Baron Stott-Wartenheim was still Ambassador in Paris. Then by his

Excellency’s instructions I settled down in London. I am English.”

“You are! Are you? Eh?”

“A natural-born British subject,” Mr Verloc said stolidly. “But my

father was French, and so—”

“Never mind explaining,” interrupted the other. “I daresay you could

have been legally a Marshal of France and a Member of Parliament in

England—and then, indeed, you would have been of some use to our

Embassy.”

This flight of fancy provoked something like a faint smile on Mr Verloc’s

face. Mr Vladimir retained an imperturbable gravity.

“But, as I’ve said, you are a lazy fellow; you don’t use your

opportunities. In the time of Baron Stott-Wartenheim we had a lot of

soft-headed people running this Embassy. They caused fellows of your

sort to form a false conception of the nature of a secret service fund.

It is my business to correct this misapprehension by telling you what the

secret service is not. It is not a philanthropic institution. I’ve had

you called here on purpose to tell you this.”

Mr Vladimir observed the forced expression of bewilderment on Verloc’s

face, and smiled sarcastically.

“I see that you understand me perfectly. I daresay you are intelligent

enough for your work. What we want now is activity—activity.”

On repeating this last word Mr Vladimir laid a long white forefinger on

the edge of the desk. Every trace of huskiness disappeared from Verloc’s

voice. The nape of his gross neck became crimson above the velvet collar

of his overcoat. His lips quivered before they came widely open.

“If you’ll only be good enough to look up my record,” he boomed out in

his great, clear oratorical bass, “you’ll see I gave a warning only three

months ago, on the occasion of the Grand Duke Romuald’s visit to Paris,

which was telegraphed from here to the French police, and—”

“Tut, tut!” broke out Mr Vladimir, with a frowning grimace. “The French

police had no use for your warning. Don’t roar like this. What the

devil do you mean?”

With a note of proud humility Mr Verloc apologised for forgetting

himself. His voice,—famous for years at open-air meetings and at

workmen’s assemblies in large halls, had contributed, he said, to his

reputation of a good and trustworthy comrade. It was, therefore, a part

of his usefulness. It had inspired confidence in his principles. “I was

always put up to speak by the leaders at a critical moment,” Mr Verloc

declared, with obvious satisfaction. There was no uproar above which he

could not make himself heard, he added; and suddenly he made a

demonstration.

“Allow me,” he said. With lowered forehead, without looking up, swiftly

and ponderously he crossed the room to one of the French windows. As if

giving way to an uncontrollable impulse, he opened it a little. Mr

Vladimir, jumping up amazed from the depths of the arm-chair, looked over

his shoulder; and below, across the courtyard of the Embassy, well beyond

the open gate, could be seen the broad back of a policeman watching idly

the gorgeous perambulator of a wealthy baby being wheeled in state across

the Square.

“Constable!” said Mr Verloc, with no more effort than if he were

whispering; and Mr Vladimir burst into a laugh on seeing the policeman

spin round as if prodded by a sharp instrument. Mr Verloc shut the

window quietly, and returned to the middle of the room.

“With a voice like that,” he said, putting on the husky conversational

pedal, “I was naturally trusted. And I knew what to say, too.”

Mr Vladimir, arranging his cravat, observed him in the glass over the

mantelpiece.

“I daresay you have the social revolutionary jargon by heart well

enough,” he said contemptuously. “Vox et. . . You haven’t ever studied

Latin—have you?”

“No,” growled Mr Verloc. “You did not expect me to know it. I belong to

the million. Who knows Latin? Only a few hundred imbeciles who aren’t

fit to take care of themselves.”

For some thirty seconds longer Mr Vladimir studied in the mirror the

fleshy profile, the gross bulk, of the man behind him. And at the same

time he had the advantage of seeing his own face, clean-shaved and round,

rosy about the gills, and with the thin sensitive lips formed exactly for

the utterance of those delicate witticisms which had made him such a

favourite in the very highest society. Then he turned, and advanced into

the room with such determination that the very ends of his quaintly

old-fashioned bow necktie seemed to bristle with unspeakable menaces.

The movement was so swift and fierce that Mr Verloc, casting an oblique

glance, quailed inwardly.

“Aha! You dare be impudent,” Mr Vladimir began, with an amazingly

guttural intonation not only utterly un-English, but absolutely

un-European, and startling even to Mr Verloc’s experience of cosmopolitan

slums. “You dare! Well, I am going to speak plain English to you.

Voice won’t do. We have no use for your voice. We don’t want a voice.

We want facts—startling facts—damn you,” he added, with a sort of

ferocious discretion, right into Mr Verloc’s face.

“Don’t you try to come over me with your Hyperborean manners,” Mr Verloc

defended himself huskily, looking at the carpet. At this his

interlocutor, smiling mockingly above the bristling bow of his necktie,

switched the conversation into French.

“You give yourself for an ‘agent provocateur.’ The proper business of an

‘agent provocateur’ is to provoke. As far as I can judge from your

record kept here, you have done nothing to earn your money for the last

three years.”

“Nothing!” exclaimed Verloc, stirring not a limb, and not raising his

eyes, but with the note of sincere feeling in his tone. “I have several

times prevented what might have been—”

“There is a proverb in this country which says prevention is better than

cure,” interrupted Mr Vladimir, throwing himself into the arm-chair. “It

is stupid in a general way. There is no end to prevention. But it is

characteristic. They dislike finality in this country. Don’t you be too

English. And in this particular instance, don’t be absurd. The evil is

already here. We don’t want prevention—we want cure.”

He paused, turned to the desk, and turning over some papers lying there,

spoke in a changed business-like tone, without looking at Mr Verloc.

“You know, of course, of the International Conference assembled in

Milan?”

Mr Verloc intimated hoarsely that he was in the habit of reading the

daily papers. To a further question his answer was that, of course, he

understood what he read. At this Mr Vladimir, smiling faintly at the

documents he was still scanning one after another, murmured “As long as

it is not written in Latin, I suppose.”

“Or Chinese,” added Mr Verloc stolidly.

“H’m. Some of your revolutionary friends’ effusions are written in a

_charabia_ every bit as incomprehensible as Chinese—” Mr Vladimir let

fall disdainfully a grey sheet of printed matter. “What are all these

leaflets headed F. P., with a hammer, pen, and torch crossed? What does

it mean, this F. P.?” Mr Verloc approached the imposing writing-table.

“The Future of the Proletariat. It’s a society,” he explained, standing

ponderously by the side of the arm-chair, “not anarchist in principle,

but open to all shades of revolutionary opinion.”

“Are you in it?”

“One of the Vice-Presidents,” Mr Verloc breathed out heavily; and the

First Secretary of the Embassy raised his head to look at him.

“Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself,” he said incisively. “Isn’t

your society capable of anything else but printing this prophetic bosh in

blunt type on this filthy paper eh? Why don’t you do something? Look

here. I’ve this matter in hand now, and I tell you plainly that you will

have to earn your money. The good old Stott-Wartenheim times are over.

No work, no pay.”

Mr Verloc felt a queer sensation of faintness in his stout legs. He

stepped back one pace, and blew his nose loudly.

He was, in truth, startled and alarmed. The rusty London sunshine

struggling clear of the London mist shed a lukewarm brightness into the

First Secretary’s private room; and in the silence Mr Verloc heard

against a window-pane the faint buzzing of a fly—his first fly of the

year—heralding better than any number of swallows the approach of spring.

The useless fussing of that tiny energetic organism affected unpleasantly

this big man threatened in his indolence.

In the pause Mr Vladimir formulated in his mind a series of disparaging

remarks concerning Mr Verloc’s face and figure. The fellow was

unexpectedly vulgar, heavy, and impudently unintelligent. He looked

uncommonly like a master plumber come to present his bill. The First

Secretary of the Embassy, from his occasional excursions into the field

of American humour, had formed a special notion of that class of mechanic

as the embodiment of fraudulent laziness and incompetency.

This was then the famous and trusty secret agent, so secret that he was

never designated otherwise but by the symbol [delta] in the late Baron

Stott-Wartenheim’s official, semi-official, and confidential

correspondence; the celebrated agent [delta], whose warnings had the

power to change the schemes and the dates of royal, imperial, grand ducal

journeys, and sometimes caused them to be put off altogether! This

fellow! And Mr Vladimir indulged mentally in an enormous and derisive

fit of merriment, partly at his own astonishment, which he judged naive,

but mostly at the expense of the universally regretted Baron

Stott-Wartenheim. His late Excellency, whom the august favour of his

Imperial master had imposed as Ambassador upon several reluctant

Ministers of Foreign Affairs, had enjoyed in his lifetime a fame for an

owlish, pessimistic gullibility. His Excellency had the social

revolution on the brain. He imagined himself to be a diplomatist set

apart by a special dispensation to watch the end of diplomacy, and pretty

nearly the end of the world, in a horrid democratic upheaval. His

prophetic and doleful despatches had been for years the joke of Foreign

Offices. He was said to have exclaimed on his deathbed (visited by his

Imperial friend and master): “Unhappy Europe! Thou shalt perish by the

moral insanity of thy children!” He was fated to be the victim of the

first humbugging rascal that came along, thought Mr Vladimir, smiling

vaguely at Mr Verloc.

“You ought to venerate the memory of Baron Stott-Wartenheim,” he

exclaimed suddenly.

The lowered physiognomy of Mr Verloc expressed a sombre and weary

annoyance.

“Permit me to observe to you,” he said, “that I came here because I was

summoned by a peremptory letter. I have been here only twice before in

the last eleven years, and certainly never at eleven in the morning. It

isn’t very wise to call me up like this. There is just a chance of being

seen. And that would be no joke for me.”

Mr Vladimir shrugged his shoulders.

“It would destroy my usefulness,” continued the other hotly.

“That’s your affair,” murmured Mr Vladimir, with soft brutality. “When

you cease to be useful you shall cease to be employed. Yes. Right off.

Cut short. You shall—” Mr Vladimir, frowning, paused, at a loss for a

sufficiently idiomatic expression, and instantly brightened up, with a

grin of beautifully white teeth. “You shall be chucked,” he brought out

ferociously.

Once more Mr Verloc had to react with all the force of his will against

that sensation of faintness running down one’s legs which once upon a

time had inspired some poor devil with the felicitous expression: “My

heart went down into my boots.” Mr Verloc, aware of the sensation,

raised his head bravely.

Mr Vladimir bore the look of heavy inquiry with perfect serenity.

“What we want is to administer a tonic to the Conference in Milan,” he

said airily. “Its deliberations upon international action for the

suppression of political crime don’t seem to get anywhere. England lags.

This country is absurd with its sentimental regard for individual

liberty. It’s intolerable to think that all your friends have got only

to come over to—”

“In that way I have them all under my eye,” Mr Verloc interrupted

huskily.

“It would be much more to the point to have them all under lock and key.

England must be brought into line. The imbecile bourgeoisie of this

country make themselves the accomplices of the very people whose aim is

to drive them out of their houses to starve in ditches. And they have

the political power still, if they only had the sense to use it for their

preservation. I suppose you agree that the middle classes are stupid?”

Mr Verloc agreed hoarsely.

“They are.”

“They have no imagination. They are blinded by an idiotic vanity. What

they want just now is a jolly good scare. This is the psychological

moment to set your friends to work. I have had you called here to

develop to you my idea.”

And Mr Vladimir developed his idea from on high, with scorn and

condescension, displaying at the same time an amount of ignorance as to

the real aims, thoughts, and methods of the revolutionary world which

filled the silent Mr Verloc with inward consternation. He confounded

causes with effects more than was excusable; the most distinguished

propagandists with impulsive bomb throwers; assumed organisation where in

the nature of things it could not exist; spoke of the social

revolutionary party one moment as of a perfectly disciplined army, where

the word of chiefs was supreme, and at another as if it had been the

loosest association of desperate brigands that ever camped in a mountain

gorge. Once Mr Verloc had opened his mouth for a protest, but the

raising of a shapely, large white hand arrested him. Very soon he became

too appalled to even try to protest. He listened in a stillness of dread

which resembled the immobility of profound attention.

“A series of outrages,” Mr Vladimir continued calmly, “executed here in

this country; not only _planned_ here—that would not do—they would not

mind. Your friends could set half the Continent on fire without

influencing the public opinion here in favour of a universal repressive

legislation. They will not look outside their backyard here.”

Mr Verloc cleared his throat, but his heart failed him, and he said

nothing.

“These outrages need not be especially sanguinary,” Mr Vladimir went on,

as if delivering a scientific lecture, “but they must be sufficiently

startling—effective. Let them be directed against buildings, for

instance. What is the fetish of the hour that all the bourgeoisie

recognise—eh, Mr Verloc?”

Mr Verloc opened his hands and shrugged his shoulders slightly.

“You are too lazy to think,” was Mr Vladimir’s comment upon that gesture.

“Pay attention to what I say. The fetish of to-day is neither royalty

nor religion. Therefore the palace and the church should be left alone.

You understand what I mean, Mr Verloc?”

The dismay and the scorn of Mr Verloc found vent in an attempt at levity.

“Perfectly. But what of the Embassies? A series of attacks on the

various Embassies,” he began; but he could not withstand the cold,

watchful stare of the First Secretary.

“You can be facetious, I see,” the latter observed carelessly. “That’s

all right. It may enliven your oratory at socialistic congresses. But

this room is no place for it. It would be infinitely safer for you to

follow carefully what I am saying. As you are being called upon to

furnish facts instead of cock-and-bull stories, you had better try to

make your profit off what I am taking the trouble to explain to you. The

sacrosanct fetish of to-day is science. Why don’t you get some of your

friends to go for that wooden-faced panjandrum—eh? Is it not part of

these institutions which must be swept away before the F. P. comes

along?”

Mr Verloc said nothing. He was afraid to open his lips lest a groan

should escape him.

“This is what you should try for. An attempt upon a crowned head or on a

president is sensational enough in a way, but not so much as it used to

be. It has entered into the general conception of the existence of all

chiefs of state. It’s almost conventional—especially since so many

presidents have been assassinated. Now let us take an outrage upon—say a

church. Horrible enough at first sight, no doubt, and yet not so

effective as a person of an ordinary mind might think. No matter how

revolutionary and anarchist in inception, there would be fools enough to

give such an outrage the character of a religious manifestation. And

that would detract from the especial alarming significance we wish to

give to the act. A murderous attempt on a restaurant or a theatre would

suffer in the same way from the suggestion of non-political passion: the

exasperation of a hungry man, an act of social revenge. All this is used

up; it is no longer instructive as an object lesson in revolutionary

anarchism. Every newspaper has ready-made phrases to explain such

manifestations away. I am about to give you the philosophy of bomb

throwing from my point of view; from the point of view you pretend to

have been serving for the last eleven years. I will try not to talk

above your head. The sensibilities of the class you are attacking are

soon blunted. Property seems to them an indestructible thing. You can’t

count upon their emotions either of pity or fear for very long. A bomb

outrage to have any influence on public opinion now must go beyond the

intention of vengeance or terrorism. It must be purely destructive. It

must be that, and only that, beyond the faintest suspicion of any other

object. You anarchists should make it clear that you are perfectly

determined to make a clean sweep of the whole social creation. But how

to get that appallingly absurd notion into the heads of the middle

classes so that there should be no mistake? That’s the question. By

directing your blows at something outside the ordinary passions of

humanity is the answer. Of course, there is art. A bomb in the National

Gallery would make some noise. But it would not be serious enough. Art

has never been their fetish. It’s like breaking a few back windows in a

man’s house; whereas, if you want to make him really sit up, you must try

at least to raise the roof. There would be some screaming of course, but

from whom? Artists—art critics and such like—people of no account.

Nobody minds what they say. But there is learning—science. Any imbecile

that has got an income believes in that. He does not know why, but he

believes it matters somehow. It is the sacrosanct fetish. All the

damned professors are radicals at heart. Let them know that their great

panjandrum has got to go too, to make room for the Future of the

Proletariat. A howl from all these intellectual idiots is bound to help

forward the labours of the Milan Conference. They will be writing to the

papers. Their indignation would be above suspicion, no material

interests being openly at stake, and it will alarm every selfishness of

the class which should be impressed. They believe that in some

mysterious way science is at the source of their material prosperity.

They do. And the absurd ferocity of such a demonstration will affect

them more profoundly than the mangling of a whole street—or theatre—full

of their own kind. To that last they can always say: ‘Oh! it’s mere

class hate.’ But what is one to say to an act of destructive ferocity so

absurd as to be incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable; in

fact, mad? Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot

placate it either by threats, persuasion, or bribes. Moreover, I am a

civilised man. I would never dream of directing you to organise a mere

butchery, even if I expected the best results from it. But I wouldn’t

expect from a butchery the result I want. Murder is always with us. It

is almost an institution. The demonstration must be against

learning—science. But not every science will do. The attack must have

all the shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy. Since bombs are

your means of expression, it would be really telling if one could throw a

bomb into pure mathematics. But that is impossible. I have been trying

to educate you; I have expounded to you the higher philosophy of your

usefulness, and suggested to you some serviceable arguments. The

practical application of my teaching interests _you_ mostly. But from

the moment I have undertaken to interview you I have also given some

attention to the practical aspect of the question. What do you think of

having a go at astronomy?”

For sometime already Mr Verloc’s immobility by the side of the arm-chair

resembled a state of collapsed coma—a sort of passive insensibility

interrupted by slight convulsive starts, such as may be observed in the

domestic dog having a nightmare on the hearthrug. And it was in an

uneasy doglike growl that he repeated the word:

“Astronomy.”

He had not recovered thoroughly as yet from that state of bewilderment

brought about by the effort to follow Mr Vladimir’s rapid incisive

utterance. It had overcome his power of assimilation. It had made him

angry. This anger was complicated by incredulity. And suddenly it

dawned upon him that all this was an elaborate joke. Mr Vladimir

exhibited his white teeth in a smile, with dimples on his round, full

face posed with a complacent inclination above the bristling bow of his

neck-tie. The favourite of intelligent society women had assumed his

drawing-room attitude accompanying the delivery of delicate witticisms.

Sitting well forward, his white hand upraised, he seemed to hold

delicately between his thumb and forefinger the subtlety of his

suggestion.

“There could be nothing better. Such an outrage combines the greatest

possible regard for humanity with the most alarming display of ferocious

imbecility. I defy the ingenuity of journalists to persuade their public

that any given member of the proletariat can have a personal grievance

against astronomy. Starvation itself could hardly be dragged in

there—eh? And there are other advantages. The whole civilised world has

heard of Greenwich. The very boot-blacks in the basement of Charing

Cross Station know something of it. See?”

The features of Mr Vladimir, so well known in the best society by their

humorous urbanity, beamed with cynical self-satisfaction, which would

have astonished the intelligent women his wit entertained so exquisitely.

“Yes,” he continued, with a contemptuous smile, “the blowing up of the

first meridian is bound to raise a howl of execration.”

“A difficult business,” Mr Verloc mumbled, feeling that this was the only

safe thing to say.

“What is the matter? Haven’t you the whole gang under your hand? The

very pick of the basket? That old terrorist Yundt is here. I see him

walking about Piccadilly in his green havelock almost every day. And

Michaelis, the ticket-of-leave apostle—you don’t mean to say you don’t

know where he is? Because if you don’t, I can tell you,” Mr Vladimir

went on menacingly. “If you imagine that you are the only one on the

secret fund list, you are mistaken.”

This perfectly gratuitous suggestion caused Mr Verloc to shuffle his feet

slightly.

“And the whole Lausanne lot—eh? Haven’t they been flocking over here at

the first hint of the Milan Conference? This is an absurd country.”

“It will cost money,” Mr Verloc said, by a sort of instinct.

“That cock won’t fight,” Mr Vladimir retorted, with an amazingly genuine

English accent. “You’ll get your screw every month, and no more till

something happens. And if nothing happens very soon you won’t get even

that. What’s your ostensible occupation? What are you supposed to live

by?”

“I keep a shop,” answered Mr Verloc.

“A shop! What sort of shop?”

“Stationery, newspapers. My wife—”

“Your what?” interrupted Mr Vladimir in his guttural Central Asian tones.

“My wife.” Mr Verloc raised his husky voice slightly. “I am married.”

“That be damned for a yarn,” exclaimed the other in unfeigned

astonishment. “Married! And you a professed anarchist, too! What is

this confounded nonsense? But I suppose it’s merely a manner of

speaking. Anarchists don’t marry. It’s well known. They can’t. It

would be apostasy.”

“My wife isn’t one,” Mr Verloc mumbled sulkily. “Moreover, it’s no

concern of yours.”

“Oh yes, it is,” snapped Mr Vladimir. “I am beginning to be convinced

that you are not at all the man for the work you’ve been employed on.

Why, you must have discredited yourself completely in your own world by

your marriage. Couldn’t you have managed without? This is your virtuous

attachment—eh? What with one sort of attachment and another you are

doing away with your usefulness.”

Mr Verloc, puffing out his cheeks, let the air escape violently, and that

was all. He had armed himself with patience. It was not to be tried

much longer. The First Secretary became suddenly very curt, detached,

final.

“You may go now,” he said. “A dynamite outrage must be provoked. I give

you a month. The sittings of the Conference are suspended. Before it

reassembles again something must have happened here, or your connection

with us ceases.”

He changed the note once more with an unprincipled versatility.

“Think over my philosophy, Mr—Mr—Verloc,” he said, with a sort of

chaffing condescension, waving his hand towards the door. “Go for the

first meridian. You don’t know the middle classes as well as I do.

Their sensibilities are jaded. The first meridian. Nothing better, and

nothing easier, I should think.”

He had got up, and with his thin sensitive lips twitching humorously,

watched in the glass over the mantelpiece Mr Verloc backing out of the

room heavily, hat and stick in hand. The door closed.

The footman in trousers, appearing suddenly in the corridor, let Mr

Verloc another way out and through a small door in the corner of the

courtyard. The porter standing at the gate ignored his exit completely;

and Mr Verloc retraced the path of his morning’s pilgrimage as if in a

dream—an angry dream. This detachment from the material world was so

complete that, though the mortal envelope of Mr Verloc had not hastened

unduly along the streets, that part of him to which it would be

unwarrantably rude to refuse immortality, found itself at the shop door

all at once, as if borne from west to east on the wings of a great wind.

He walked straight behind the counter, and sat down on a wooden chair

that stood there. No one appeared to disturb his solitude. Stevie, put

into a green baize apron, was now sweeping and dusting upstairs, intent

and conscientious, as though he were playing at it; and Mrs Verloc,

warned in the kitchen by the clatter of the cracked bell, had merely come

to the glazed door of the parlour, and putting the curtain aside a

little, had peered into the dim shop. Seeing her husband sitting there

shadowy and bulky, with his hat tilted far back on his head, she had at

once returned to her stove. An hour or more later she took the green

baize apron off her brother Stevie, and instructed him to wash his hands

and face in the peremptory tone she had used in that connection for

fifteen years or so—ever since she had, in fact, ceased to attend to the

boy’s hands and face herself. She spared presently a glance away from

her dishing-up for the inspection of that face and those hands which

Stevie, approaching the kitchen table, offered for her approval with an

air of self-assurance hiding a perpetual residue of anxiety. Formerly

the anger of the father was the supremely effective sanction of these

rites, but Mr Verloc’s placidity in domestic life would have made all

mention of anger incredible even to poor Stevie’s nervousness. The

theory was that Mr Verloc would have been inexpressibly pained and

shocked by any deficiency of cleanliness at meal times. Winnie after the

death of her father found considerable consolation in the feeling that

she need no longer tremble for poor Stevie. She could not bear to see

the boy hurt. It maddened her. As a little girl she had often faced

with blazing eyes the irascible licensed victualler in defence of her

brother. Nothing now in Mrs Verloc’s appearance could lead one to

suppose that she was capable of a passionate demonstration.

She finished her dishing-up. The table was laid in the parlour. Going

to the foot of the stairs, she screamed out “Mother!” Then opening the

glazed door leading to the shop, she said quietly “Adolf!” Mr Verloc had

not changed his position; he had not apparently stirred a limb for an

hour and a half. He got up heavily, and came to his dinner in his

overcoat and with his hat on, without uttering a word. His silence in

itself had nothing startlingly unusual in this household, hidden in the

shades of the sordid street seldom touched by the sun, behind the dim

shop with its wares of disreputable rubbish. Only that day Mr Verloc’s

taciturnity was so obviously thoughtful that the two women were impressed

by it. They sat silent themselves, keeping a watchful eye on poor

Stevie, lest he should break out into one of his fits of loquacity. He

faced Mr Verloc across the table, and remained very good and quiet,

staring vacantly. The endeavour to keep him from making himself

objectionable in any way to the master of the house put no inconsiderable

anxiety into these two women’s lives. “That boy,” as they alluded to him

softly between themselves, had been a source of that sort of anxiety

almost from the very day of his birth. The late licensed victualler’s

humiliation at having such a very peculiar boy for a son manifested

itself by a propensity to brutal treatment; for he was a person of fine

sensibilities, and his sufferings as a man and a father were perfectly

genuine. Afterwards Stevie had to be kept from making himself a nuisance

to the single gentlemen lodgers, who are themselves a queer lot, and are

easily aggrieved. And there was always the anxiety of his mere existence

to face. Visions of a workhouse infirmary for her child had haunted the

old woman in the basement breakfast-room of the decayed Belgravian house.

“If you had not found such a good husband, my dear,” she used to say to

her daughter, “I don’t know what would have become of that poor boy.”

Mr Verloc extended as much recognition to Stevie as a man not

particularly fond of animals may give to his wife’s beloved cat; and this

recognition, benevolent and perfunctory, was essentially of the same

quality. Both women admitted to themselves that not much more could be

reasonably expected. It was enough to earn for Mr Verloc the old woman’s

reverential gratitude. In the early days, made sceptical by the trials

of friendless life, she used sometimes to ask anxiously: “You don’t

think, my dear, that Mr Verloc is getting tired of seeing Stevie about?”

To this Winnie replied habitually by a slight toss of her head. Once,

however, she retorted, with a rather grim pertness: “He’ll have to get

tired of me first.” A long silence ensued. The mother, with her feet

propped up on a stool, seemed to be trying to get to the bottom of that

answer, whose feminine profundity had struck her all of a heap. She had

never really understood why Winnie had married Mr Verloc. It was very

sensible of her, and evidently had turned out for the best, but her girl

might have naturally hoped to find somebody of a more suitable age.

There had been a steady young fellow, only son of a butcher in the next

street, helping his father in business, with whom Winnie had been walking

out with obvious gusto. He was dependent on his father, it is true; but

the business was good, and his prospects excellent. He took her girl to

the theatre on several evenings. Then just as she began to dread to hear

of their engagement (for what could she have done with that big house

alone, with Stevie on her hands), that romance came to an abrupt end, and

Winnie went about looking very dull. But Mr Verloc, turning up

providentially to occupy the first-floor front bedroom, there had been no

more question of the young butcher. It was clearly providential.