the
SECRET AGENT
a simple tale

by
JOSEPH CONRAD

second
edition

methuen &
co.,
36 essex street w c.
london

First Published . . .
September 1907

Second Edition . . .
October 1907

TO
H. G. WELLS

the chronicler
of mr lewisham’s love
the biographer of kipps and the
historian of the ages to come

this simple
tale of the xix century
is affectionately offered

CHAPTER I

Mr Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally
in charge of his brother-in-law. It could be done, because
there was very little business at any time, and practically none
at all before the evening. Mr Verloc cared but little about
his ostensible business. And, moreover, his wife was in
charge of his brother-in-law.

The shop was small, and so was the house. It was one of
those grimy brick houses which existed in large quantities before
the era of reconstruction dawned upon London. The shop was
a square box of a place, with the front glazed in small
panes. In the daytime the door remained closed; in the
evening it stood discreetly but suspiciously ajar.

The window contained photographs of more or less undressed
dancing girls; nondescript packages in wrappers like patent
medicines; closed yellow paper envelopes, very flimsy, and marked
two-and-six in heavy black figures; a few numbers of ancient
French comic publications hung across a string as if to dry; a
dingy blue china bowl, a casket of black wood, bottles of marking
ink, and rubber stamps; a few books, with titles hinting at
impropriety; a few apparently old copies of obscure newspapers,
badly printed, with titles like The Torch, The
Gong—rousing titles. And the two gas jets inside
the panes were always turned low, either for economy’s sake
or for the sake of the customers.

These customers were either very young men, who hung about the
window for a time before slipping in suddenly; or men of a more
mature age, but looking generally as if they were not in
funds. Some of that last kind had the collars of their
overcoats turned right up to their moustaches, and traces of mud
on the bottom of their nether garments, which had the appearance
of being much worn and not very valuable. And the legs
inside them did not, as a general rule, seem of much account
either. With their hands plunged deep in the side pockets
of their coats, they dodged in sideways, one shoulder first, as
if afraid to start the bell going.

The bell, hung on the door by means of a curved ribbon of
steel, was difficult to circumvent. It was hopelessly
cracked; but of an evening, at the slightest provocation, it
clattered behind the customer with impudent virulence.

It clattered; and at that signal, through the dusty glass door
behind the painted deal counter, Mr Verloc would issue hastily
from the parlour at the back. His eyes were naturally
heavy; he had an air of having wallowed, fully dressed, all day
on an unmade bed. Another man would have felt such an
appearance a distinct disadvantage. In a commercial
transaction of the retail order much depends on the
seller’s engaging and amiable aspect. But Mr Verloc
knew his business, and remained undisturbed by any sort of
æsthetic doubt about his appearance. With a firm,
steady-eyed impudence, which seemed to hold back the threat of
some abominable menace, he would proceed to sell over the counter
some object looking obviously and scandalously not worth the
money which passed in the transaction: a small cardboard box with
apparently nothing inside, for instance, or one of those
carefully closed yellow flimsy envelopes, or a soiled volume in
paper covers with a promising title. Now and then it
happened that one of the faded, yellow dancing girls would get
sold to an amateur, as though she had been alive and young.

Sometimes it was Mrs Verloc who would appear at the call of
the cracked bell. Winnie Verloc was a young woman with a
full bust, in a tight bodice, and with broad hips. Her hair
was very tidy. Steady-eyed like her husband, she preserved
an air of unfathomable indifference behind the rampart of the
counter. Then the customer of comparatively tender years
would get suddenly disconcerted at having to deal with a woman,
and with rage in his heart would proffer a request for a bottle
of marking ink, retail value sixpence (price in Verloc’s
shop one-and-sixpence), which, once outside, he would drop
stealthily into the gutter.

The evening visitors—the men with collars turned up and
soft hats rammed down—nodded familiarly to Mrs Verloc, and
with a muttered greeting, lifted up the flap at the end of the
counter in order to pass into the back parlour, which gave access
to a passage and to a steep flight of stairs. The door of
the shop was the only means of entrance to the house in which Mr
Verloc carried on his business of a seller of shady wares,
exercised his vocation of a protector of society, and cultivated
his domestic virtues. These last were pronounced. He
was thoroughly domesticated. Neither his spiritual, nor his
mental, nor his physical needs were of the kind to take him much
abroad. He found at home the ease of his body and the peace
of his conscience, together with Mrs Verloc’s wifely
attentions and Mrs Verloc’s mother’s deferential
regard.

Winnie’s mother was a stout, wheezy woman, with a large
brown face. She wore a black wig under a white cap.
Her swollen legs rendered her inactive. She considered
herself to be of French descent, which might have been true; and
after a good many years of married life with a licensed
victualler of the more common sort, she provided for the years of
widowhood by letting furnished apartments for gentlemen near
Vauxhall Bridge Road in a square once of some splendour and still
included in the district of Belgravia. This topographical
fact was of some advantage in advertising her rooms; but the
patrons of the worthy widow were not exactly of the fashionable
kind. Such as they were, her daughter Winnie helped to look
after them. Traces of the French descent which the widow
boasted of were apparent in Winnie too. They were apparent
in the extremely neat and artistic arrangement of her glossy dark
hair. Winnie had also other charms: her youth; her full,
rounded form; her clear complexion; the provocation of her
unfathomable reserve, which never went so far as to prevent
conversation, carried on on the lodgers’ part with
animation, and on hers with an equable amiability. It must
be that Mr Verloc was susceptible to these fascinations. Mr
Verloc was an intermittent patron. He came and went without
any very apparent reason. He generally arrived in London
(like the influenza) from the Continent, only he arrived
unheralded by the Press; and his visitations set in with great
severity. He breakfasted in bed, and remained wallowing
there with an air of quiet enjoyment till noon every
day—and sometimes even to a later hour. But when he
went out he seemed to experience a great difficulty in finding
his way back to his temporary home in the Belgravian
square. He left it late, and returned to it early—as
early as three or four in the morning; and on waking up at ten
addressed Winnie, bringing in the breakfast tray, with jocular,
exhausted civility, in the hoarse, failing tones of a man who had
been talking vehemently for many hours together. His
prominent, heavy-lidded eyes rolled sideways amorously and
languidly, the bedclothes were pulled up to his chin, and his
dark smooth moustache covered his thick lips capable of much
honeyed banter.

In Winnie’s mother’s opinion Mr Verloc was a very
nice gentleman. From her life’s experience gathered
in various “business houses” the good woman had taken
into her retirement an ideal of gentlemanliness as exhibited by
the patrons of private-saloon bars. Mr Verloc approached
that ideal; he attained it, in fact.

“Of course, we’ll take over your furniture,
mother,” Winnie had remarked.

The lodging-house was to be given up. It seems it would
not answer to carry it on. It would have been too much
trouble for Mr Verloc. It would not have been convenient
for his other business. What his business was he did not
say; but after his engagement to Winnie he took the trouble to
get up before noon, and descending the basement stairs, make
himself pleasant to Winnie’s mother in the breakfast-room
downstairs where she had her motionless being. He stroked
the cat, poked the fire, had his lunch served to him there.
He left its slightly stuffy cosiness with evident reluctance,
but, all the same, remained out till the night was far
advanced. He never offered to take Winnie to theatres, as
such a nice gentleman ought to have done. His evenings were
occupied. His work was in a way political, he told Winnie
once. She would have, he warned her, to be very nice to his
political friends.

And with her straight, unfathomable glance she answered that
she would be so, of course.

How much more he told her as to his occupation it was
impossible for Winnie’s mother to discover. The
married couple took her over with the furniture. The mean
aspect of the shop surprised her. The change from the
Belgravian square to the narrow street in Soho affected her legs
adversely. They became of an enormous size. On the
other hand, she experienced a complete relief from material
cares. Her son-in-law’s heavy good nature inspired
her with a sense of absolute safety. Her daughter’s
future was obviously assured, and even as to her son Stevie she
need have no anxiety. She had not been able to conceal from
herself that he was a terrible encumbrance, that poor
Stevie. But in view of Winnie’s fondness for her
delicate brother, and of Mr Verloc’s kind and generous
disposition, she felt that the poor boy was pretty safe in this
rough world. And in her heart of hearts she was not perhaps
displeased that the Verlocs had no children. As that
circumstance seemed perfectly indifferent to Mr Verloc, and as
Winnie found an object of quasi-maternal affection in her
brother, perhaps this was just as well for poor Stevie.

For he was difficult to dispose of, that boy. He was
delicate and, in a frail way, good-looking too, except for the
vacant droop of his lower lip. Under our excellent system
of compulsory education he had learned to read and write,
notwithstanding the unfavourable aspect of the lower lip.
But as errand-boy he did not turn out a great success. He
forgot his messages; he was easily diverted from the straight
path of duty by the attractions of stray cats and dogs, which he
followed down narrow alleys into unsavoury courts; by the
comedies of the streets, which he contemplated open-mouthed, to
the detriment of his employer’s interests; or by the dramas
of fallen horses, whose pathos and violence induced him sometimes
to shriek pierceingly in a crowd, which disliked to be disturbed
by sounds of distress in its quiet enjoyment of the national
spectacle. When led away by a grave and protecting
policeman, it would often become apparent that poor Stevie had
forgotten his address—at least for a time. A brusque
question caused him to stutter to the point of suffocation.
When startled by anything perplexing he used to squint
horribly. However, he never had any fits (which was
encouraging); and before the natural outbursts of impatience on
the part of his father he could always, in his childhood’s
days, run for protection behind the short skirts of his sister
Winnie. On the other hand, he might have been suspected of
hiding a fund of reckless naughtiness. When he had reached
the age of fourteen a friend of his late father, an agent for a
foreign preserved milk firm, having given him an opening as
office-boy, he was discovered one foggy afternoon, in his
chief’s absence, busy letting off fireworks on the
staircase. He touched off in quick succession a set of
fierce rockets, angry catherine wheels, loudly exploding
squibs—and the matter might have turned out very
serious. An awful panic spread through the whole
building. Wild-eyed, choking clerks stampeded through the
passages full of smoke, silk hats and elderly business men could
be seen rolling independently down the stairs. Stevie did
not seem to derive any personal gratification from what he had
done. His motives for this stroke of originality were
difficult to discover. It was only later on that Winnie
obtained from him a misty and confused confession. It seems
that two other office-boys in the building had worked upon his
feelings by tales of injustice and oppression till they had
wrought his compassion to the pitch of that frenzy. But his
father’s friend, of course, dismissed him summarily as
likely to ruin his business. After that altruistic exploit
Stevie was put to help wash the dishes in the basement kitchen,
and to black the boots of the gentlemen patronising the
Belgravian mansion. There was obviously no future in such
work. The gentlemen tipped him a shilling now and
then. Mr Verloc showed himself the most generous of
lodgers. But altogether all that did not amount to much
either in the way of gain or prospects; so that when Winnie
announced her engagement to Mr Verloc her mother could not help
wondering, with a sigh and a glance towards the scullery, what
would become of poor Stephen now.

It appeared that Mr Verloc was ready to take him over together
with his wife’s mother and with the furniture, which was
the whole visible fortune of the family. Mr Verloc gathered
everything as it came to his broad, good-natured breast.
The furniture was disposed to the best advantage all over the
house, but Mrs Verloc’s mother was confined to two back
rooms on the first floor. The luckless Stevie slept in one
of them. By this time a growth of thin fluffy hair had come
to blur, like a golden mist, the sharp line of his small lower
jaw. He helped his sister with blind love and docility in
her household duties. Mr Verloc thought that some
occupation would be good for him. His spare time he
occupied by drawing circles with compass and pencil on a piece of
paper. He applied himself to that pastime with great
industry, with his elbows spread out and bowed low over the
kitchen table. Through the open door of the parlour at the
back of the shop Winnie, his sister, glanced at him from time to
time with maternal vigilance.

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.

CHAPTER III

“ . . . All idealisation makes life poorer. To
beautify it is to take away its character of complexity—it
is to destroy it. Leave that to the moralists, my
boy. History is made by men, but they do not make it in
their heads. The ideas that are born in their consciousness
play an insignificant part in the march of events. History
is dominated and determined by the tool and the
production—by the force of economic conditions.
Capitalism has made socialism, and the laws made by the
capitalism for the protection of property are responsible for
anarchism. No one can tell what form the social
organisation may take in the future. Then why indulge in
prophetic phantasies? At best they can only interpret the
mind of the prophet, and can have no objective value. Leave
that pastime to the moralists, my boy.”

Michaelis, the ticket-of-leave apostle, was speaking in an
even voice, a voice that wheezed as if deadened and oppressed by
the layer of fat on his chest. He had come out of a highly
hygienic prison round like a tub, with an enormous stomach and
distended cheeks of a pale, semi-transparent complexion, as
though for fifteen years the servants of an outraged society had
made a point of stuffing him with fattening foods in a damp and
lightless cellar. And ever since he had never managed to
get his weight down as much as an ounce.

It was said that for three seasons running a very wealthy old
lady had sent him for a cure to Marienbad—where he was
about to share the public curiosity once with a crowned
head—but the police on that occasion ordered him to leave
within twelve hours. His martyrdom was continued by
forbidding him all access to the healing waters. But he was
resigned now.

With his elbow presenting no appearance of a joint, but more
like a bend in a dummy’s limb, thrown over the back of a
chair, he leaned forward slightly over his short and enormous
thighs to spit into the grate.

“Yes! I had the time to think things out a
little,” he added without emphasis. “Society
has given me plenty of time for meditation.”

On the other side of the fireplace, in the horse-hair
arm-chair where Mrs Verloc’s mother was generally
privileged to sit, Karl Yundt giggled grimly, with a faint black
grimace of a toothless mouth. The terrorist, as he called
himself, was old and bald, with a narrow, snow-white wisp of a
goatee hanging limply from his chin. An extraordinary
expression of underhand malevolence survived in his extinguished
eyes. When he rose painfully the thrusting forward of a
skinny groping hand deformed by gouty swellings suggested the
effort of a moribund murderer summoning all his remaining
strength for a last stab. He leaned on a thick stick, which
trembled under his other hand.

“I have always dreamed,” he mouthed fiercely,
“of a band of men absolute in their resolve to discard all
scruples in the choice of means, strong enough to give themselves
frankly the name of destroyers, and free from the taint of that
resigned pessimism which rots the world. No pity for
anything on earth, including themselves, and death enlisted for
good and all in the service of humanity—that’s what I
would have liked to see.”

His little bald head quivered, imparting a comical vibration
to the wisp of white goatee. His enunciation would have
been almost totally unintelligible to a stranger. His
worn-out passion, resembling in its impotent fierceness the
excitement of a senile sensualist, was badly served by a dried
throat and toothless gums which seemed to catch the tip of his
tongue. Mr Verloc, established in the corner of the sofa at
the other end of the room, emitted two hearty grunts of
assent.

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

“And I could never get as many as three such men
together. So much for your rotten pessimism,” he
snarled at Michaelis, who uncrossed his thick legs, similar to
bolsters, and slid his feet abruptly under his chair in sign of
exasperation.

He a pessimist! Preposterous! He cried out that
the charge was outrageous. He was so far from pessimism
that he saw already the end of all private property coming along
logically, unavoidably, by the mere development of its inherent
viciousness. The possessors of property had not only to
face the awakened proletariat, but they had also to fight amongst
themselves. Yes. Struggle, warfare, was the condition
of private ownership. It was fatal. Ah! he did not
depend upon emotional excitement to keep up his belief, no
declamations, no anger, no visions of blood-red flags waving, or
metaphorical lurid suns of vengeance rising above the horizon of
a doomed society. Not he! Cold reason, he boasted,
was the basis of his optimism. Yes, optimism—

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

“Don’t you think that, if I had not been the
optimist I am, I could not have found in fifteen years some means
to cut my throat? And, in the last instance, there were
always the walls of my cell to dash my head against.”

The shortness of breath took all fire, all animation out of
his voice; his great, pale cheeks hung like filled pouches,
motionless, without a quiver; but in his blue eyes, narrowed as
if peering, there was the same look of confident shrewdness, a
little crazy in its fixity, they must have had while the
indomitable optimist sat thinking at night in his cell.
Before him, Karl Yundt remained standing, one wing of his faded
greenish havelock thrown back cavalierly over his shoulder.
Seated in front of the fireplace, Comrade Ossipon, ex-medical
student, the principal writer of the F. P. leaflets, stretched
out his robust legs, keeping the soles of his boots turned up to
the glow in the grate. A bush of crinkly yellow hair topped
his red, freckled face, with a flattened nose and prominent mouth
cast in the rough mould of the negro type. His
almond-shaped eyes leered languidly over the high
cheek-bones. He wore a grey flannel shirt, the loose ends
of a black silk tie hung down the buttoned breast of his serge
coat; and his head resting on the back of his chair, his throat
largely exposed, he raised to his lips a cigarette in a long
wooden tube, puffing jets of smoke straight up at the
ceiling.

Michaelis pursued his idea—the idea of his
solitary reclusion—the thought vouchsafed to his captivity
and growing like a faith revealed in visions. He talked to
himself, indifferent to the sympathy or hostility of his hearers,
indifferent indeed to their presence, from the habit he had
acquired of thinking aloud hopefully in the solitude of the four
whitewashed walls of his cell, in the sepulchral silence of the
great blind pile of bricks near a river, sinister and ugly like a
colossal mortuary for the socially drowned.

He was no good in discussion, not because any amount of
argument could shake his faith, but because the mere fact of
hearing another voice disconcerted him painfully, confusing his
thoughts at once—these thoughts that for so many years, in
a mental solitude more barren than a waterless desert, no living
voice had ever combatted, commented, or approved.

No one interrupted him now, and he made again the confession
of his faith, mastering him irresistible and complete like an act
of grace: the secret of fate discovered in the material side of
life; the economic condition of the world responsible for the
past and shaping the future; the source of all history, of all
ideas, guiding the mental development of mankind and the very
impulses of their passion—

A harsh laugh from Comrade Ossipon cut the tirade dead short
in a sudden faltering of the tongue and a bewildered unsteadiness
of the apostle’s mildly exalted eyes. He closed them
slowly for a moment, as if to collect his routed thoughts.
A silence fell; but what with the two gas-jets over the table and
the glowing grate the little parlour behind Mr Verloc’s
shop had become frightfully hot. Mr Verloc, getting off the
sofa with ponderous reluctance, opened the door leading into the
kitchen to get more air, and thus disclosed the innocent Stevie,
seated very good and quiet at a deal table, drawing circles,
circles, circles; innumerable circles, concentric, eccentric; a
coruscating whirl of circles that by their tangled multitude of
repeated curves, uniformity of form, and confusion of
intersecting lines suggested a rendering of cosmic chaos, the
symbolism of a mad art attempting the inconceivable. The
artist never turned his head; and in all his soul’s
application to the task his back quivered, his thin neck, sunk
into a deep hollow at the base of the skull, seemed ready to
snap.

Mr Verloc, after a grunt of disapproving surprise, returned to
the sofa. Alexander Ossipon got up, tall in his threadbare
blue serge suit under the low ceiling, shook off the stiffness of
long immobility, and strolled away into the kitchen (down two
steps) to look over Stevie’s shoulder. He came back,
pronouncing oracularly: “Very good. Very
characteristic, perfectly typical.”

“What’s very good?” grunted inquiringly Mr
Verloc, settled again in the corner of the sofa. The other
explained his meaning negligently, with a shade of condescension
and a toss of his head towards the kitchen:

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

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

Comrade Alexander Ossipon—nicknamed the Doctor,
ex-medical student without a degree; afterwards wandering
lecturer to working-men’s associations upon the socialistic
aspects of hygiene; author of a popular quasi-medical study (in
the form of a cheap pamphlet seized promptly by the police)
entitled “The Corroding Vices of the Middle Classes”;
special delegate of the more or less mysterious Red Committee,
together with Karl Yundt and Michaelis for the work of literary
propaganda—turned upon the obscure familiar of at least two
Embassies that glance of insufferable, hopelessly dense
sufficiency which nothing but the frequentation of science can
give to the dulness of common mortals.

“That’s what he may be called
scientifically. Very good type too, altogether, of that
sort of degenerate. It’s enough to glance at the
lobes of his ears. If you read Lombroso—”

Mr Verloc, moody and spread largely on the sofa, continued to
look down the row of his waistcoat buttons; but his cheeks became
tinged by a faint blush. Of late even the merest derivative
of the word science (a term in itself inoffensive and of
indefinite meaning) had the curious power of evoking a definitely
offensive mental vision of Mr Vladimir, in his body as he lived,
with an almost supernatural clearness. And this phenomenon,
deserving justly to be classed amongst the marvels of science,
induced in Mr Verloc an emotional state of dread and exasperation
tending to express itself in violent swearing. But he said
nothing. It was Karl Yundt who was heard, implacable to his
last breath.

“Lombroso is an ass.”

Comrade Ossipon met the shock of this blasphemy by an awful,
vacant stare. And the other, his extinguished eyes without
gleams blackening the deep shadows under the great, bony
forehead, mumbled, catching the tip of his tongue between his
lips at every second word as though he were chewing it
angrily:

“Did you ever see such an idiot? For him the
criminal is the prisoner. Simple, is it not? What
about those who shut him up there—forced him in
there? Exactly. Forced him in there. And what
is crime? Does he know that, this imbecile who has made his
way in this world of gorged fools by looking at the ears and
teeth of a lot of poor, luckless devils? Teeth and ears
mark the criminal? Do they? And what about the law
that marks him still better—the pretty branding instrument
invented by the overfed to protect themselves against the
hungry? Red-hot applications on their vile
skins—hey? Can’t you smell and hear from here
the thick hide of the people burn and sizzle? That’s
how criminals are made for your Lombrosos to write their silly
stuff about.”

The knob of his stick and his legs shook together with
passion, whilst the trunk, draped in the wings of the havelock,
preserved his historic attitude of defiance. He seemed to
sniff the tainted air of social cruelty, to strain his ear for
its atrocious sounds. There was an extraordinary force of
suggestion in this posturing. The all but moribund veteran
of dynamite wars had been a great actor in his time—actor
on platforms, in secret assemblies, in private interviews.
The famous terrorist had never in his life raised personally as
much as his little finger against the social edifice. He
was no man of action; he was not even an orator of torrential
eloquence, sweeping the masses along in the rushing noise and
foam of a great enthusiasm. With a more subtle intention,
he took the part of an insolent and venomous evoker of sinister
impulses which lurk in the blind envy and exasperated vanity of
ignorance, in the suffering and misery of poverty, in all the
hopeful and noble illusions of righteous anger, pity, and
revolt. The shadow of his evil gift clung to him yet like
the smell of a deadly drug in an old vial of poison, emptied now,
useless, ready to be thrown away upon the rubbish-heap of things
that had served their time.

Michaelis, the ticket-of-leave apostle, smiled vaguely with
his glued lips; his pasty moon face drooped under the weight of
melancholy assent. He had been a prisoner himself.
His own skin had sizzled under the red-hot brand, he murmured
softly. But Comrade Ossipon, nicknamed the Doctor, had got
over the shock by that time.

“You don’t understand,” he began
disdainfully, but stopped short, intimidated by the dead
blackness of the cavernous eyes in the face turned slowly towards
him with a blind stare, as if guided only by the sound. He
gave the discussion up, with a slight shrug of the shoulders.

Stevie, accustomed to move about disregarded, had got up from
the kitchen table, carrying off his drawing to bed with
him. He had reached the parlour door in time to receive in
full the shock of Karl Yundt’s eloquent imagery. The
sheet of paper covered with circles dropped out of his fingers,
and he remained staring at the old terrorist, as if rooted
suddenly to the spot by his morbid horror and dread of physical
pain. Stevie knew very well that hot iron applied to
one’s skin hurt very much. His scared eyes blazed
with indignation: it would hurt terribly. His mouth dropped
open.

Michaelis by staring unwinkingly at the fire had regained that
sentiment of isolation necessary for the continuity of his
thought. His optimism had begun to flow from his
lips. He saw Capitalism doomed in its cradle, born with the
poison of the principle of competition in its system. The
great capitalists devouring the little capitalists, concentrating
the power and the tools of production in great masses, perfecting
industrial processes, and in the madness of self-aggrandisement
only preparing, organising, enriching, making ready the lawful
inheritance of the suffering proletariat. Michaelis
pronounced the great word “Patience”—and his
clear blue glance, raised to the low ceiling of Mr Verloc’s
parlour, had a character of seraphic trustfulness. In the
doorway Stevie, calmed, seemed sunk in hebetude.

Comrade Ossipon’s face twitched with exasperation.

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

“I don’t say that,” protested Michaelis
gently. His vision of truth had grown so intense that the
sound of a strange voice failed to rout it this time. He
continued to look down at the red coals. Preparation for
the future was necessary, and he was willing to admit that the
great change would perhaps come in the upheaval of a
revolution. But he argued that revolutionary propaganda was
a delicate work of high conscience. It was the education of
the masters of the world. It should be as careful as the
education given to kings. He would have it advance its
tenets cautiously, even timidly, in our ignorance of the effect
that may be produced by any given economic change upon the
happiness, the morals, the intellect, the history of
mankind. For history is made with tools, not with ideas;
and everything is changed by economic conditions—art,
philosophy, love, virtue—truth itself!

The coals in the grate settled down with a slight crash; and
Michaelis, the hermit of visions in the desert of a penitentiary,
got up impetuously. Round like a distended balloon, he
opened his short, thick arms, as if in a pathetically hopeless
attempt to embrace and hug to his breast a self-regenerated
universe. He gasped with ardour.

“The future is as certain as the past—slavery,
feudalism, individualism, collectivism. This is the
statement of a law, not an empty prophecy.”

The disdainful pout of Comrade Ossipon’s thick lips
accentuated the negro type of his face.

“Nonsense,” he said calmly enough.
“There is no law and no certainty. The teaching
propaganda be hanged. What the people knows does not
matter, were its knowledge ever so accurate. The only thing
that matters to us is the emotional state of the masses.
Without emotion there is no action.”

He paused, then added with modest firmness:

“I am speaking now to you
scientifically—scientifically—Eh? What did you
say, Verloc?”

“Nothing,” growled from the sofa Mr Verloc, who,
provoked by the abhorrent sound, had merely muttered a
“Damn.”

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

“Do you know how I would call the nature of the present
economic conditions? I would call it cannibalistic.
That’s what it is! They are nourishing their greed on
the quivering flesh and the warm blood of the
people—nothing else.”

Stevie swallowed the terrifying statement with an audible
gulp, and at once, as though it had been swift poison, sank
limply in a sitting posture on the steps of the kitchen door.

Michaelis gave no sign of having heard anything. His
lips seemed glued together for good; not a quiver passed over his
heavy cheeks. With troubled eyes he looked for his round,
hard hat, and put it on his round head. His round and obese
body seemed to float low between the chairs under the sharp elbow
of Karl Yundt. The old terrorist, raising an uncertain and
clawlike hand, gave a swaggering tilt to a black felt sombrero
shading the hollows and ridges of his wasted face. He got
in motion slowly, striking the floor with his stick at every
step. It was rather an affair to get him out of the house
because, now and then, he would stop, as if to think, and did not
offer to move again till impelled forward by Michaelis. The
gentle apostle grasped his arm with brotherly care; and behind
them, his hands in his pockets, the robust Ossipon yawned
vaguely. A blue cap with a patent leather peak set well at
the back of his yellow bush of hair gave him the aspect of a
Norwegian sailor bored with the world after a thundering
spree. Mr Verloc saw his guests off the premises, attending
them bareheaded, his heavy overcoat hanging open, his eyes on the
ground.

He closed the door behind their backs with restrained
violence, turned the key, shot the bolt. He was not
satisfied with his friends. In the light of Mr
Vladimir’s philosophy of bomb throwing they appeared
hopelessly futile. The part of Mr Verloc in revolutionary
politics having been to observe, he could not all at once, either
in his own home or in larger assemblies, take the initiative of
action. He had to be cautious. Moved by the just
indignation of a man well over forty, menaced in what is dearest
to him—his repose and his security—he asked himself
scornfully what else could have been expected from such a lot,
this Karl Yundt, this Michaelis—this Ossipon.

Pausing in his intention to turn off the gas burning in the
middle of the shop, Mr Verloc descended into the abyss of moral
reflections. With the insight of a kindred temperament he
pronounced his verdict. A lazy lot—this Karl Yundt,
nursed by a blear-eyed old woman, a woman he had years ago
enticed away from a friend, and afterwards had tried more than
once to shake off into the gutter. Jolly lucky for Yundt
that she had persisted in coming up time after time, or else
there would have been no one now to help him out of the
’bus by the Green Park railings, where that spectre took
its constitutional crawl every fine morning. When that
indomitable snarling old witch died the swaggering spectre would
have to vanish too—there would be an end to fiery Karl
Yundt. And Mr Verloc’s morality was offended also by
the optimism of Michaelis, annexed by his wealthy old lady, who
had taken lately to sending him to a cottage she had in the
country. The ex-prisoner could moon about the shady lanes
for days together in a delicious and humanitarian idleness.
As to Ossipon, that beggar was sure to want for nothing as long
as there were silly girls with savings-bank books in the
world. And Mr Verloc, temperamentally identical with his
associates, drew fine distinctions in his mind on the strength of
insignificant differences. He drew them with a certain
complacency, because the instinct of conventional respectability
was strong within him, being only overcome by his dislike of all
kinds of recognised labour—a temperamental defect which he
shared with a large proportion of revolutionary reformers of a
given social state. For obviously one does not revolt
against the advantages and opportunities of that state, but
against the price which must be paid for the same in the coin of
accepted morality, self-restraint, and toil. The majority
of revolutionists are the enemies of discipline and fatigue
mostly. There are natures too, to whose sense of justice
the price exacted looms up monstrously enormous, odious,
oppressive, worrying, humiliating, extortionate,
intolerable. Those are the fanatics. The remaining
portion of social rebels is accounted for by vanity, the mother
of all noble and vile illusions, the companion of poets,
reformers, charlatans, prophets, and incendiaries.

Lost for a whole minute in the abyss of meditation, Mr Verloc
did not reach the depth of these abstract considerations.
Perhaps he was not able. In any case he had not the
time. He was pulled up painfully by the sudden recollection
of Mr Vladimir, another of his associates, whom in virtue of
subtle moral affinities he was capable of judging
correctly. He considered him as dangerous. A shade of
envy crept into his thoughts. Loafing was all very well for
these fellows, who knew not Mr Vladimir, and had women to fall
back upon; whereas he had a woman to provide for—

At this point, by a simple association of ideas, Mr Verloc was
brought face to face with the necessity of going to bed some time
or other that evening. Then why not go now—at
once? He sighed. The necessity was not so normally
pleasurable as it ought to have been for a man of his age and
temperament. He dreaded the demon of sleeplessness, which
he felt had marked him for its own. He raised his arm, and
turned off the flaring gas-jet above his head.

A bright band of light fell through the parlour door into the
part of the shop behind the counter. It enabled Mr Verloc
to ascertain at a glance the number of silver coins in the
till. These were but few; and for the first time since he
opened his shop he took a commercial survey of its value.
This survey was unfavourable. He had gone into trade for no
commercial reasons. He had been guided in the selection of
this peculiar line of business by an instinctive leaning towards
shady transactions, where money is picked up easily.
Moreover, it did not take him out of his own sphere—the
sphere which is watched by the police. On the contrary, it
gave him a publicly confessed standing in that sphere, and as Mr
Verloc had unconfessed relations which made him familiar with yet
careless of the police, there was a distinct advantage in such a
situation. But as a means of livelihood it was by itself
insufficient.

He took the cash-box out of the drawer, and turning to leave
the shop, became aware that Stevie was still downstairs.

What on earth is he doing there? Mr Verloc asked
himself. What’s the meaning of these antics? He
looked dubiously at his brother-in-law, but he did not ask him
for information. Mr Verloc’s intercourse with Stevie
was limited to the casual mutter of a morning, after breakfast,
“My boots,” and even that was more a communication at
large of a need than a direct order or request. Mr Verloc
perceived with some surprise that he did not know really what to
say to Stevie. He stood still in the middle of the parlour,
and looked into the kitchen in silence. Nor yet did he know
what would happen if he did say anything. And this appeared
very queer to Mr Verloc in view of the fact, borne upon him
suddenly, that he had to provide for this fellow too. He
had never given a moment’s thought till then to that aspect
of Stevie’s existence.

Positively he did not know how to speak to the lad. He
watched him gesticulating and murmuring in the kitchen.
Stevie prowled round the table like an excited animal in a
cage. A tentative “Hadn’t you better go to bed
now?” produced no effect whatever; and Mr Verloc,
abandoning the stony contemplation of his brother-in-law’s
behaviour, crossed the parlour wearily, cash-box in hand.
The cause of the general lassitude he felt while climbing the
stairs being purely mental, he became alarmed by its inexplicable
character. He hoped he was not sickening for
anything. He stopped on the dark landing to examine his
sensations. But a slight and continuous sound of snoring
pervading the obscurity interfered with their clearness.
The sound came from his mother-in-law’s room. Another
one to provide for, he thought—and on this thought walked
into the bedroom.

Mrs Verloc had fallen asleep with the lamp (no gas was laid
upstairs) turned up full on the table by the side of the
bed. The light thrown down by the shade fell dazzlingly on
the white pillow sunk by the weight of her head reposing with
closed eyes and dark hair done up in several plaits for the
night. She woke up with the sound of her name in her ears,
and saw her husband standing over her.

“Winnie! Winnie!”

At first she did not stir, lying very quiet and looking at the
cash-box in Mr Verloc’s hand. But when she understood
that her brother was “capering all over the place
downstairs” she swung out in one sudden movement on to the
edge of the bed. Her bare feet, as if poked through the
bottom of an unadorned, sleeved calico sack buttoned tightly at
neck and wrists, felt over the rug for the slippers while she
looked upward into her husband’s face.

“I don’t know how to manage him,” Mr Verloc
explained peevishly. “Won’t do to leave him
downstairs alone with the lights.”

She said nothing, glided across the room swiftly, and the door
closed upon her white form.

Mr Verloc deposited the cash-box on the night table, and began
the operation of undressing by flinging his overcoat on to a
distant chair. His coat and waistcoat followed. He
walked about the room in his stockinged feet, and his burly
figure, with the hands worrying nervously at his throat, passed
and repassed across the long strip of looking-glass in the door
of his wife’s wardrobe. Then after slipping his
braces off his shoulders he pulled up violently the venetian
blind, and leaned his forehead against the cold
window-pane—a fragile film of glass stretched between him
and the enormity of cold, black, wet, muddy, inhospitable
accumulation of bricks, slates, and stones, things in themselves
unlovely and unfriendly to man.

Mr Verloc felt the latent unfriendliness of all out of doors
with a force approaching to positive bodily anguish. There
is no occupation that fails a man more completely than that of a
secret agent of police. It’s like your horse suddenly
falling dead under you in the midst of an uninhabited and thirsty
plain. The comparison occurred to Mr Verloc because he had
sat astride various army horses in his time, and had now the
sensation of an incipient fall. The prospect was as black
as the window-pane against which he was leaning his
forehead. And suddenly the face of Mr Vladimir,
clean-shaved and witty, appeared enhaloed in the glow of its rosy
complexion like a sort of pink seal, impressed on the fatal
darkness.

This luminous and mutilated vision was so ghastly physically
that Mr Verloc started away from the window, letting down the
venetian blind with a great rattle. Discomposed and
speechless with the apprehension of more such visions, he beheld
his wife re-enter the room and get into bed in a calm
business-like manner which made him feel hopelessly lonely in the
world. Mrs Verloc expressed her surprise at seeing him up
yet.

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

“Giddiness?”

“Yes. Not at all well.”

Mrs Verloc, with all the placidity of an experienced wife,
expressed a confident opinion as to the cause, and suggested the
usual remedies; but her husband, rooted in the middle of the
room, shook his lowered head sadly.

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

Mr Verloc made an effort, finished undressing, and got into
bed. Down below in the quiet, narrow street measured
footsteps approached the house, then died away unhurried and
firm, as if the passer-by had started to pace out all eternity,
from gas-lamp to gas-lamp in a night without end; and the drowsy
ticking of the old clock on the landing became distinctly audible
in the bedroom.

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

“Takings very small to-day.”

Mr Verloc, in the same position, cleared his throat as if for
an important statement, but merely inquired:

“Did you turn off the gas downstairs?”

“Yes; I did,” answered Mrs Verloc
conscientiously. “That poor boy is in a very excited
state to-night,” she murmured, after a pause which lasted
for three ticks of the clock.

Mr Verloc cared nothing for Stevie’s excitement, but he
felt horribly wakeful, and dreaded facing the darkness and
silence that would follow the extinguishing of the lamp.
This dread led him to make the remark that Stevie had disregarded
his suggestion to go to bed. Mrs Verloc, falling into the
trap, started to demonstrate at length to her husband that this
was not “impudence” of any sort, but simply
“excitement.” There was no young man of his age
in London more willing and docile than Stephen, she affirmed;
none more affectionate and ready to please, and even useful, as
long as people did not upset his poor head. Mrs Verloc,
turning towards her recumbent husband, raised herself on her
elbow, and hung over him in her anxiety that he should believe
Stevie to be a useful member of the family. That ardour of
protecting compassion exalted morbidly in her childhood by the
misery of another child tinged her sallow cheeks with a faint
dusky blush, made her big eyes gleam under the dark lids.
Mrs Verloc then looked younger; she looked as young as Winnie
used to look, and much more animated than the Winnie of the
Belgravian mansion days had ever allowed herself to appear to
gentlemen lodgers. Mr Verloc’s anxieties had
prevented him from attaching any sense to what his wife was
saying. It was as if her voice were talking on the other
side of a very thick wall. It was her aspect that recalled
him to himself.

He appreciated this woman, and the sentiment of this
appreciation, stirred by a display of something resembling
emotion, only added another pang to his mental anguish.
When her voice ceased he moved uneasily, and said:

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

He might have meant this as an opening to a complete
confidence; but Mrs Verloc laid her head on the pillow again, and
staring upward, went on:

“That boy hears too much of what is talked about
here. If I had known they were coming to-night I would have
seen to it that he went to bed at the same time I did. He
was out of his mind with something he overheard about eating
people’s flesh and drinking blood. What’s the
good of talking like that?”

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

“Ask Karl Yundt,” he growled savagely.

Mrs Verloc, with great decision, pronounced Karl Yundt
“a disgusting old man.” She declared openly her
affection for Michaelis. Of the robust Ossipon, in whose
presence she always felt uneasy behind an attitude of stony
reserve, she said nothing whatever. And continuing to talk
of that brother, who had been for so many years an object of care
and fears:

“He isn’t fit to hear what’s said
here. He believes it’s all true. He knows no
better. He gets into his passions over it.”

Mr Verloc made no comment.

“He glared at me, as if he didn’t know who I was,
when I went downstairs. His heart was going like a
hammer. He can’t help being excitable. I woke
mother up, and asked her to sit with him till he went to
sleep. It isn’t his fault. He’s no
trouble when he’s left alone.”

Mr Verloc made no comment.

“I wish he had never been to school,” Mrs Verloc
began again brusquely. “He’s always taking away
those newspapers from the window to read. He gets a red
face poring over them. We don’t get rid of a dozen
numbers in a month. They only take up room in the front
window. And Mr Ossipon brings every week a pile of these F.
P. tracts to sell at a halfpenny each. I wouldn’t
give a halfpenny for the whole lot. It’s silly
reading—that’s what it is. There’s no
sale for it. The other day Stevie got hold of one, and
there was a story in it of a German soldier officer tearing
half-off the ear of a recruit, and nothing was done to him for
it. The brute! I couldn’t do anything with
Stevie that afternoon. The story was enough, too, to make
one’s blood boil. But what’s the use of
printing things like that? We aren’t German slaves
here, thank God. It’s not our business—is
it?”

Mr Verloc made no reply.

“I had to take the carving knife from the boy,”
Mrs Verloc continued, a little sleepily now. “He was
shouting and stamping and sobbing. He can’t stand the
notion of any cruelty. He would have stuck that officer
like a pig if he had seen him then. It’s true,
too! Some people don’t deserve much
mercy.” Mrs Verloc’s voice ceased, and the
expression of her motionless eyes became more and more
contemplative and veiled during the long pause.
“Comfortable, dear?” she asked in a faint, far-away
voice. “Shall I put out the light now?”

The dreary conviction that there was no sleep for him held Mr
Verloc mute and hopelessly inert in his fear of darkness.
He made a great effort.

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

CHAPTER IV

Most of the thirty or so little tables covered by red cloths
with a white design stood ranged at right angles to the deep
brown wainscoting of the underground hall. Bronze
chandeliers with many globes depended from the low, slightly
vaulted ceiling, and the fresco paintings ran flat and dull all
round the walls without windows, representing scenes of the chase
and of outdoor revelry in mediæval costumes. Varlets
in green jerkins brandished hunting knives and raised on high
tankards of foaming beer.

“Unless I am very much mistaken, you are the man who
would know the inside of this confounded affair,” said the
robust Ossipon, leaning over, his elbows far out on the table and
his feet tucked back completely under his chair. His eyes
stared with wild eagerness.

An upright semi-grand piano near the door, flanked by two
palms in pots, executed suddenly all by itself a valse tune with
aggressive virtuosity. The din it raised was
deafening. When it ceased, as abruptly as it had started,
the be-spectacled, dingy little man who faced Ossipon behind a
heavy glass mug full of beer emitted calmly what had the sound of
a general proposition.

“In principle what one of us may or may not know as to
any given fact can’t be a matter for inquiry to the
others.”

“Certainly not,” Comrade Ossipon agreed in a quiet
undertone. “In principle.”

With his big florid face held between his hands he continued
to stare hard, while the dingy little man in spectacles coolly
took a drink of beer and stood the glass mug back on the
table. His flat, large ears departed widely from the sides
of his skull, which looked frail enough for Ossipon to crush
between thumb and forefinger; the dome of the forehead seemed to
rest on the rim of the spectacles; the flat cheeks, of a greasy,
unhealthy complexion, were merely smudged by the miserable
poverty of a thin dark whisker. The lamentable inferiority
of the whole physique was made ludicrous by the supremely
self-confident bearing of the individual. His speech was
curt, and he had a particularly impressive manner of keeping
silent.

Ossipon spoke again from between his hands in a mutter.

“Have you been out much to-day?”

“No. I stayed in bed all the morning,”
answered the other. “Why?”

“Oh! Nothing,” said Ossipon, gazing
earnestly and quivering inwardly with the desire to find out
something, but obviously intimidated by the little man’s
overwhelming air of unconcern. When talking with this
comrade—which happened but rarely—the big Ossipon
suffered from a sense of moral and even physical
insignificance. However, he ventured another
question. “Did you walk down here?”

“No; omnibus,” the little man answered readily
enough. He lived far away in Islington, in a small house
down a shabby street, littered with straw and dirty paper, where
out of school hours a troop of assorted children ran and
squabbled with a shrill, joyless, rowdy clamour. His single
back room, remarkable for having an extremely large cupboard, he
rented furnished from two elderly spinsters, dressmakers in a
humble way with a clientele of servant girls mostly. He had
a heavy padlock put on the cupboard, but otherwise he was a model
lodger, giving no trouble, and requiring practically no
attendance. His oddities were that he insisted on being
present when his room was being swept, and that when he went out
he locked his door, and took the key away with him.

Ossipon had a vision of these round black-rimmed spectacles
progressing along the streets on the top of an omnibus, their
self-confident glitter falling here and there on the walls of
houses or lowered upon the heads of the unconscious stream of
people on the pavements. The ghost of a sickly smile
altered the set of Ossipon’s thick lips at the thought of
the walls nodding, of people running for life at the sight of
those spectacles. If they had only known! What a
panic! He murmured interrogatively: “Been sitting
long here?”

“An hour or more,” answered the other negligently,
and took a pull at the dark beer. All his
movements—the way he grasped the mug, the act of drinking,
the way he set the heavy glass down and folded his arms—had
a firmness, an assured precision which made the big and muscular
Ossipon, leaning forward with staring eyes and protruding lips,
look the picture of eager indecision.

“An hour,” he said. “Then it may be
you haven’t heard yet the news I’ve heard just
now—in the street. Have you?”

The little man shook his head negatively the least bit.
But as he gave no indication of curiosity Ossipon ventured to add
that he had heard it just outside the place. A newspaper
boy had yelled the thing under his very nose, and not being
prepared for anything of that sort, he was very much startled and
upset. He had to come in there with a dry mouth.
“I never thought of finding you here,” he added,
murmuring steadily, with his elbows planted on the table.

“I come here sometimes,” said the other,
preserving his provoking coolness of demeanour.

“It’s wonderful that you of all people should have
heard nothing of it,” the big Ossipon continued. His
eyelids snapped nervously upon the shining eyes. “You
of all people,” he repeated tentatively. This obvious
restraint argued an incredible and inexplicable timidity of the
big fellow before the calm little man, who again lifted the glass
mug, drank, and put it down with brusque and assured
movements. And that was all.

Ossipon after waiting for something, word or sign, that did
not come, made an effort to assume a sort of indifference.

“Do you,” he said, deadening his voice still more,
“give your stuff to anybody who’s up to asking you
for it?”

“My absolute rule is never to refuse anybody—as
long as I have a pinch by me,” answered the little man with
decision.

“That’s a principle?” commented Ossipon.

“It’s a principle.”

“And you think it’s sound?”

The large round spectacles, which gave a look of staring
self-confidence to the sallow face, confronted Ossipon like
sleepless, unwinking orbs flashing a cold fire.

“Perfectly. Always. Under every
circumstance. What could stop me? Why should I
not? Why should I think twice about it?”

Ossipon gasped, as it were, discreetly.

“Do you mean to say you would hand it over to a
‘teck’ if one came to ask you for your
wares?”

The other smiled faintly.

“Let them come and try it on, and you will see,”
he said. “They know me, but I know also every one of
them. They won’t come near me—not
they.”

His thin livid lips snapped together firmly. Ossipon
began to argue.

“But they could send someone—rig a plant on
you. Don’t you see? Get the stuff from you in
that way, and then arrest you with the proof in their
hands.”

“Proof of what? Dealing in explosives without a
licence perhaps.” This was meant for a contemptuous
jeer, though the expression of the thin, sickly face remained
unchanged, and the utterance was negligent. “I
don’t think there’s one of them anxious to make that
arrest. I don’t think they could get one of them to
apply for a warrant. I mean one of the best. Not
one.”

“Why?” Ossipon asked.

“Because they know very well I take care never to part
with the last handful of my wares. I’ve it always by
me.” He touched the breast of his coat lightly.
“In a thick glass flask,” he added.

“So I have been told,” said Ossipon, with a shade
of wonder in his voice. “But I didn’t know
if—”

“They know,” interrupted the little man crisply,
leaning against the straight chair back, which rose higher than
his fragile head. “I shall never be arrested.
The game isn’t good enough for any policeman of them
all. To deal with a man like me you require sheer, naked,
inglorious heroism.” Again his lips closed with a
self-confident snap. Ossipon repressed a movement of
impatience.

“Or recklessness—or simply ignorance,” he
retorted. “They’ve only to get somebody for the
job who does not know you carry enough stuff in your pocket to
blow yourself and everything within sixty yards of you to
pieces.”

“I never affirmed I could not be eliminated,”
rejoined the other. “But that wouldn’t be an
arrest. Moreover, it’s not so easy as it
looks.”

“Bah!” Ossipon contradicted.
“Don’t be too sure of that. What’s to
prevent half-a-dozen of them jumping upon you from behind in the
street? With your arms pinned to your sides you could do
nothing—could you?”

“Yes; I could. I am seldom out in the streets
after dark,” said the little man impassively, “and
never very late. I walk always with my right hand closed
round the india-rubber ball which I have in my trouser
pocket. The pressing of this ball actuates a detonator
inside the flask I carry in my pocket. It’s the
principle of the pneumatic instantaneous shutter for a camera
lens. The tube leads up—”

With a swift disclosing gesture he gave Ossipon a glimpse of
an india-rubber tube, resembling a slender brown worm, issuing
from the armhole of his waistcoat and plunging into the inner
breast pocket of his jacket. His clothes, of a nondescript
brown mixture, were threadbare and marked with stains, dusty in
the folds, with ragged button-holes. “The detonator
is partly mechanical, partly chemical,” he explained, with
casual condescension.

“It is instantaneous, of course?” murmured
Ossipon, with a slight shudder.

“Far from it,” confessed the other, with a
reluctance which seemed to twist his mouth dolorously.
“A full twenty seconds must elapse from the moment I press
the ball till the explosion takes place.”

“Phew!” whistled Ossipon, completely
appalled. “Twenty seconds! Horrors! You
mean to say that you could face that? I should go
crazy—”

“Wouldn’t matter if you did. Of course,
it’s the weak point of this special system, which is only
for my own use. The worst is that the manner of exploding
is always the weak point with us. I am trying to invent a
detonator that would adjust itself to all conditions of action,
and even to unexpected changes of conditions. A variable
and yet perfectly precise mechanism. A really intelligent
detonator.”

“Twenty seconds,” muttered Ossipon again.
“Ough! And then—”

With a slight turn of the head the glitter of the spectacles
seemed to gauge the size of the beer saloon in the basement of
the renowned Silenus Restaurant.

“Nobody in this room could hope to escape,” was
the verdict of that survey. “Nor yet this couple
going up the stairs now.”

The piano at the foot of the staircase clanged through a
mazurka with brazen impetuosity, as though a vulgar and impudent
ghost were showing off. The keys sank and rose
mysteriously. Then all became still. For a moment
Ossipon imagined the overlighted place changed into a dreadful
black hole belching horrible fumes choked with ghastly rubbish of
smashed brickwork and mutilated corpses. He had such a
distinct perception of ruin and death that he shuddered
again. The other observed, with an air of calm
sufficiency:

“In the last instance it is character alone that makes
for one’s safety. There are very few people in the
world whose character is as well established as mine.”

“I wonder how you managed it,” growled
Ossipon.

“Force of personality,” said the other, without
raising his voice; and coming from the mouth of that obviously
miserable organism the assertion caused the robust Ossipon to
bite his lower lip. “Force of personality,” he
repeated, with ostentatious calm. “I have the means
to make myself deadly, but that by itself, you understand, is
absolutely nothing in the way of protection. What is
effective is the belief those people have in my will to use the
means. That’s their impression. It is
absolute. Therefore I am deadly.”

“There are individuals of character amongst that lot
too,” muttered Ossipon ominously.

“Possibly. But it is a matter of degree obviously,
since, for instance, I am not impressed by them. Therefore
they are inferior. They cannot be otherwise. Their
character is built upon conventional morality. It leans on
the social order. Mine stands free from everything
artificial. They are bound in all sorts of
conventions. They depend on life, which, in this
connection, is a historical fact surrounded by all sorts of
restraints and considerations, a complex organised fact open to
attack at every point; whereas I depend on death, which knows no
restraint and cannot be attacked. My superiority is
evident.”

“This is a transcendental way of putting it,” said
Ossipon, watching the cold glitter of the round spectacles.
“I’ve heard Karl Yundt say much the same thing not
very long ago.”

“Karl Yundt,” mumbled the other contemptuously,
“the delegate of the International Red Committee, has been
a posturing shadow all his life. There are three of you
delegates, aren’t there? I won’t define the
other two, as you are one of them. But what you say means
nothing. You are the worthy delegates for revolutionary
propaganda, but the trouble is not only that you are as unable to
think independently as any respectable grocer or journalist of
them all, but that you have no character whatever.”

Ossipon could not restrain a start of indignation.

“But what do you want from us?” he exclaimed in a
deadened voice. “What is it you are after
yourself?”

“A perfect detonator,” was the peremptory
answer. “What are you making that face for? You
see, you can’t even bear the mention of something
conclusive.”

“I am not making a face,” growled the annoyed
Ossipon bearishly.

“You revolutionists,” the other continued, with
leisurely self-confidence, “are the slaves of the social
convention, which is afraid of you; slaves of it as much as the
very police that stands up in the defence of that
convention. Clearly you are, since you want to
revolutionise it. It governs your thought, of course, and
your action too, and thus neither your thought nor your action
can ever be conclusive.” He paused, tranquil, with
that air of close, endless silence, then almost immediately went
on. “You are not a bit better than the forces arrayed
against you—than the police, for instance. The other
day I came suddenly upon Chief Inspector Heat at the corner of
Tottenham Court Road. He looked at me very steadily.
But I did not look at him. Why should I give him more than
a glance? He was thinking of many things—of his
superiors, of his reputation, of the law courts, of his salary,
of newspapers—of a hundred things. But I was thinking
of my perfect detonator only. He meant nothing to me.
He was as insignificant as—I can’t call to mind
anything insignificant enough to compare him with—except
Karl Yundt perhaps. Like to like. The terrorist and
the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution,
legality—counter moves in the same game; forms of idleness
at bottom identical. He plays his little game—so do
you propagandists. But I don’t play; I work fourteen
hours a day, and go hungry sometimes. My experiments cost
money now and again, and then I must do without food for a day or
two. You’re looking at my beer. Yes. I
have had two glasses already, and shall have another
presently. This is a little holiday, and I celebrate it
alone. Why not? I’ve the grit to work alone,
quite alone, absolutely alone. I’ve worked alone for
years.”

Ossipon’s face had turned dusky red.

“At the perfect detonator—eh?” he sneered,
very low.

“Yes,” retorted the other. “It is a
good definition. You couldn’t find anything half so
precise to define the nature of your activity with all your
committees and delegations. It is I who am the true
propagandist.”

“We won’t discuss that point,” said Ossipon,
with an air of rising above personal considerations.
“I am afraid I’ll have to spoil your holiday for you,
though. There’s a man blown up in Greenwich Park this
morning.”

“How do you know?”

“They have been yelling the news in the streets since
two o’clock. I bought the paper, and just ran in
here. Then I saw you sitting at this table.
I’ve got it in my pocket now.”

He pulled the newspaper out. It was a good-sized rosy
sheet, as if flushed by the warmth of its own convictions, which
were optimistic. He scanned the pages rapidly.

“Ah! Here it is. Bomb in Greenwich
Park. There isn’t much so far. Half-past
eleven. Foggy morning. Effects of explosion felt as
far as Romney Road and Park Place. Enormous hole in the
ground under a tree filled with smashed roots and broken
branches. All round fragments of a man’s body blown
to pieces. That’s all. The rest’s mere
newspaper gup. No doubt a wicked attempt to blow up the
Observatory, they say. H’m. That’s hardly
credible.”

He looked at the paper for a while longer in silence, then
passed it to the other, who after gazing abstractedly at the
print laid it down without comment.

It was Ossipon who spoke first—still resentful.

“The fragments of only one man, you note.
Ergo: blew himself up. That spoils your day off for
you—don’t it? Were you expecting that sort of
move? I hadn’t the slightest idea—not the ghost
of a notion of anything of the sort being planned to come off
here—in this country. Under the present circumstances
it’s nothing short of criminal.”

The little man lifted his thin black eyebrows with
dispassionate scorn.

“Criminal! What is that? What is
crime? What can be the meaning of such an
assertion?”

“How am I to express myself? One must use the
current words,” said Ossipon impatiently. “The
meaning of this assertion is that this business may affect our
position very adversely in this country. Isn’t that
crime enough for you? I am convinced you have been giving
away some of your stuff lately.”

Ossipon stared hard. The other, without flinching,
lowered and raised his head slowly.

“You have!” burst out the editor of the F. P.
leaflets in an intense whisper. “No! And are
you really handing it over at large like this, for the asking, to
the first fool that comes along?”

“Just so! The condemned social order has not been
built up on paper and ink, and I don’t fancy that a
combination of paper and ink will ever put an end to it, whatever
you may think. Yes, I would give the stuff with both hands
to every man, woman, or fool that likes to come along. I
know what you are thinking about. But I am not taking my
cue from the Red Committee. I would see you all hounded out
of here, or arrested—or beheaded for that
matter—without turning a hair. What happens to us as
individuals is not of the least consequence.”

He spoke carelessly, without heat, almost without feeling, and
Ossipon, secretly much affected, tried to copy this
detachment.

“If the police here knew their business they would shoot
you full of holes with revolvers, or else try to sand-bag you
from behind in broad daylight.”

The little man seemed already to have considered that point of
view in his dispassionate self-confident manner.

“Yes,” he assented with the utmost
readiness. “But for that they would have to face
their own institutions. Do you see? That requires
uncommon grit. Grit of a special kind.”

Ossipon blinked.

“I fancy that’s exactly what would happen to you
if you were to set up your laboratory in the States. They
don’t stand on ceremony with their institutions
there.”

“I am not likely to go and see. Otherwise your
remark is just,” admitted the other. “They have
more character over there, and their character is essentially
anarchistic. Fertile ground for us, the States—very
good ground. The great Republic has the root of the
destructive matter in her. The collective temperament is
lawless. Excellent. They may shoot us down,
but—”

“You are too transcendental for me,” growled
Ossipon, with moody concern.

“Logical,” protested the other. “There
are several kinds of logic. This is the enlightened
kind. America is all right. It is this country that
is dangerous, with her idealistic conception of legality.
The social spirit of this people is wrapped up in scrupulous
prejudices, and that is fatal to our work. You talk of
England being our only refuge! So much the worse.
Capua! What do we want with refuges? Here you talk,
print, plot, and do nothing. I daresay it’s very
convenient for such Karl Yundts.”

He shrugged his shoulders slightly, then added with the same
leisurely assurance: “To break up the superstition and
worship of legality should be our aim. Nothing would please
me more than to see Inspector Heat and his likes take to shooting
us down in broad daylight with the approval of the public.
Half our battle would be won then; the disintegration of the old
morality would have set in in its very temple. That is what
you ought to aim at. But you revolutionists will never
understand that. You plan the future, you lose yourselves
in reveries of economical systems derived from what is; whereas
what’s wanted is a clean sweep and a clear start for a new
conception of life. That sort of future will take care of
itself if you will only make room for it. Therefore I would
shovel my stuff in heaps at the corners of the streets if I had
enough for that; and as I haven’t, I do my best by
perfecting a really dependable detonator.”

Ossipon, who had been mentally swimming in deep waters, seized
upon the last word as if it were a saving plank.

“Yes. Your detonators. I shouldn’t
wonder if it weren’t one of your detonators that made a
clean sweep of the man in the park.”

A shade of vexation darkened the determined sallow face
confronting Ossipon.

“My difficulty consists precisely in experimenting
practically with the various kinds. They must be tried
after all. Besides—”

Ossipon interrupted.

“Who could that fellow be? I assure you that we in
London had no knowledge—Couldn’t you describe the
person you gave the stuff to?”

The other turned his spectacles upon Ossipon like a pair of
searchlights.

“Describe him,” he repeated slowly. “I
don’t think there can be the slightest objection now.
I will describe him to you in one word—Verloc.”

Ossipon, whom curiosity had lifted a few inches off his seat,
dropped back, as if hit in the face.

“Verloc! Impossible.”

The self-possessed little man nodded slightly once.

“Yes. He’s the person. You can’t
say that in this case I was giving my stuff to the first fool
that came along. He was a prominent member of the group as
far as I understand.”

“Yes,” said Ossipon. “Prominent.
No, not exactly. He was the centre for general
intelligence, and usually received comrades coming over
here. More useful than important. Man of no
ideas. Years ago he used to speak at meetings—in
France, I believe. Not very well, though. He was
trusted by such men as Latorre, Moser and all that old lot.
The only talent he showed really was his ability to elude the
attentions of the police somehow. Here, for instance, he
did not seem to be looked after very closely. He was
regularly married, you know. I suppose it’s with her
money that he started that shop. Seemed to make it pay,
too.”

Ossipon paused abruptly, muttered to himself “I wonder
what that woman will do now?” and fell into thought.

The other waited with ostentatious indifference. His
parentage was obscure, and he was generally known only by his
nickname of Professor. His title to that designation
consisted in his having been once assistant demonstrator in
chemistry at some technical institute. He quarrelled with
the authorities upon a question of unfair treatment.
Afterwards he obtained a post in the laboratory of a manufactory
of dyes. There too he had been treated with revolting
injustice. His struggles, his privations, his hard work to
raise himself in the social scale, had filled him with such an
exalted conviction of his merits that it was extremely difficult
for the world to treat him with justice—the standard of
that notion depending so much upon the patience of the
individual. The Professor had genius, but lacked the great
social virtue of resignation.

“Intellectually a nonentity,” Ossipon pronounced
aloud, abandoning suddenly the inward contemplation of Mrs
Verloc’s bereaved person and business. “Quite
an ordinary personality. You are wrong in not keeping more
in touch with the comrades, Professor,” he added in a
reproving tone. “Did he say anything to
you—give you some idea of his intentions? I
hadn’t seen him for a month. It seems impossible that
he should be gone.”

“He told me it was going to be a demonstration against a
building,” said the Professor. “I had to know
that much to prepare the missile. I pointed out to him that
I had hardly a sufficient quantity for a completely destructive
result, but he pressed me very earnestly to do my best. As
he wanted something that could be carried openly in the hand, I
proposed to make use of an old one-gallon copal varnish can I
happened to have by me. He was pleased at the idea.
It gave me some trouble, because I had to cut out the bottom
first and solder it on again afterwards. When prepared for
use, the can enclosed a wide-mouthed, well-corked jar of thick
glass packed around with some wet clay and containing sixteen
ounces of X2 green powder. The detonator was connected with
the screw top of the can. It was ingenious—a
combination of time and shock. I explained the system to
him. It was a thin tube of tin enclosing
a—”

Ossipon’s attention had wandered.

“What do you think has happened?” he
interrupted.

“Can’t tell. Screwed the top on tight, which
would make the connection, and then forgot the time. It was
set for twenty minutes. On the other hand, the time contact
being made, a sharp shock would bring about the explosion at
once. He either ran the time too close, or simply let the
thing fall. The contact was made all
right—that’s clear to me at any rate. The
system’s worked perfectly. And yet you would think
that a common fool in a hurry would be much more likely to forget
to make the contact altogether. I was worrying myself about
that sort of failure mostly. But there are more kinds of
fools than one can guard against. You can’t expect a
detonator to be absolutely fool-proof.”

He beckoned to a waiter. Ossipon sat rigid, with the
abstracted gaze of mental travail. After the man had gone
away with the money he roused himself, with an air of profound
dissatisfaction.

“It’s extremely unpleasant for me,” he
mused. “Karl has been in bed with bronchitis for a
week. There’s an even chance that he will never get
up again. Michaelis’s luxuriating in the country
somewhere. A fashionable publisher has offered him five
hundred pounds for a book. It will be a ghastly
failure. He has lost the habit of consecutive thinking in
prison, you know.”

The Professor on his feet, now buttoning his coat, looked
about him with perfect indifference.

“What are you going to do?” asked Ossipon
wearily. He dreaded the blame of the Central Red Committee,
a body which had no permanent place of abode, and of whose
membership he was not exactly informed. If this affair
eventuated in the stoppage of the modest subsidy allotted to the
publication of the F. P. pamphlets, then indeed he would have to
regret Verloc’s inexplicable folly.

“Solidarity with the extremest form of action is one
thing, and silly recklessness is another,” he said, with a
sort of moody brutality. “I don’t know what
came to Verloc. There’s some mystery there.
However, he’s gone. You may take it as you like, but
under the circumstances the only policy for the militant
revolutionary group is to disclaim all connection with this
damned freak of yours. How to make the disclaimer
convincing enough is what bothers me.”

The little man on his feet, buttoned up and ready to go, was
no taller than the seated Ossipon. He levelled his
spectacles at the latter’s face point-blank.

“You might ask the police for a testimonial of good
conduct. They know where every one of you slept last
night. Perhaps if you asked them they would consent to
publish some sort of official statement.”

“No doubt they are aware well enough that we had nothing
to do with this,” mumbled Ossipon bitterly.
“What they will say is another thing.” He
remained thoughtful, disregarding the short, owlish, shabby
figure standing by his side. “I must lay hands on
Michaelis at once, and get him to speak from his heart at one of
our gatherings. The public has a sort of sentimental regard
for that fellow. His name is known. And I am in touch
with a few reporters on the big dailies. What he would say
would be utter bosh, but he has a turn of talk that makes it go
down all the same.”

“Like treacle,” interjected the Professor, rather
low, keeping an impassive expression.

The perplexed Ossipon went on communing with himself half
audibly, after the manner of a man reflecting in perfect
solitude.

“Confounded ass! To leave such an imbecile
business on my hands. And I don’t even know
if—”

He sat with compressed lips. The idea of going for news
straight to the shop lacked charm. His notion was that
Verloc’s shop might have been turned already into a police
trap. They will be bound to make some arrests, he thought,
with something resembling virtuous indignation, for the even
tenor of his revolutionary life was menaced by no fault of
his. And yet unless he went there he ran the risk of
remaining in ignorance of what perhaps it would be very material
for him to know. Then he reflected that, if the man in the
park had been so very much blown to pieces as the evening papers
said, he could not have been identified. And if so, the
police could have no special reason for watching Verloc’s
shop more closely than any other place known to be frequented by
marked anarchists—no more reason, in fact, than for
watching the doors of the Silenus. There would be a lot of
watching all round, no matter where he went.
Still—

“I wonder what I had better do now?” he muttered,
taking counsel with himself.

A rasping voice at his elbow said, with sedate scorn:

“Fasten yourself upon the woman for all she’s
worth.”

After uttering these words the Professor walked away from the
table. Ossipon, whom that piece of insight had taken
unawares, gave one ineffectual start, and remained still, with a
helpless gaze, as though nailed fast to the seat of his
chair. The lonely piano, without as much as a music stool
to help it, struck a few chords courageously, and beginning a
selection of national airs, played him out at last to the tune of
“Blue Bells of Scotland.” The painfully
detached notes grew faint behind his back while he went slowly
upstairs, across the hall, and into the street.

In front of the great doorway a dismal row of newspaper
sellers standing clear of the pavement dealt out their wares from
the gutter. It was a raw, gloomy day of the early spring;
and the grimy sky, the mud of the streets, the rags of the dirty
men, harmonised excellently with the eruption of the damp,
rubbishy sheets of paper soiled with printers’ ink.
The posters, maculated with filth, garnished like tapestry the
sweep of the curbstone. The trade in afternoon papers was
brisk, yet, in comparison with the swift, constant march of foot
traffic, the effect was of indifference, of a disregarded
distribution. Ossipon looked hurriedly both ways before
stepping out into the cross-currents, but the Professor was
already out of sight.

CHAPTER V

The Professor had turned into a street to the left, and walked
along, with his head carried rigidly erect, in a crowd whose
every individual almost overtopped his stunted stature. It
was vain to pretend to himself that he was not
disappointed. But that was mere feeling; the stoicism of
his thought could not be disturbed by this or any other
failure. Next time, or the time after next, a telling
stroke would be delivered—something really startling—a blow
fit to open the first crack in the imposing front of the great
edifice of legal conceptions sheltering the atrocious injustice
of society. Of humble origin, and with an appearance really
so mean as to stand in the way of his considerable natural
abilities, his imagination had been fired early by the tales of
men rising from the depths of poverty to positions of authority
and affluence. The extreme, almost ascetic purity of his
thought, combined with an astounding ignorance of worldly
conditions, had set before him a goal of power and prestige to be
attained without the medium of arts, graces, tact,
wealth—by sheer weight of merit alone. On that view
he considered himself entitled to undisputed success. His
father, a delicate dark enthusiast with a sloping forehead, had
been an itinerant and rousing preacher of some obscure but rigid
Christian sect—a man supremely confident in the privileges
of his righteousness. In the son, individualist by
temperament, once the science of colleges had replaced thoroughly
the faith of conventicles, this moral attitude translated itself
into a frenzied puritanism of ambition. He nursed it as
something secularly holy. To see it thwarted opened his
eyes to the true nature of the world, whose morality was
artificial, corrupt, and blasphemous. The way of even the
most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal impulses
disguised into creeds. The Professor’s indignation
found in itself a final cause that absolved him from the sin of
turning to destruction as the agent of his ambition. To
destroy public faith in legality was the imperfect formula of his
pedantic fanaticism; but the subconscious conviction that the
framework of an established social order cannot be effectually
shattered except by some form of collective or individual
violence was precise and correct. He was a moral
agent—that was settled in his mind. By exercising his
agency with ruthless defiance he procured for himself the
appearances of power and personal prestige. That was
undeniable to his vengeful bitterness. It pacified its
unrest; and in their own way the most ardent of revolutionaries
are perhaps doing no more but seeking for peace in common with
the rest of mankind—the peace of soothed vanity, of
satisfied appetites, or perhaps of appeased conscience.

Lost in the crowd, miserable and undersized, he meditated
confidently on his power, keeping his hand in the left pocket of
his trousers, grasping lightly the india-rubber ball, the supreme
guarantee of his sinister freedom; but after a while he became
disagreeably affected by the sight of the roadway thronged with
vehicles and of the pavement crowded with men and women. He
was in a long, straight street, peopled by a mere fraction of an
immense multitude; but all round him, on and on, even to the
limits of the horizon hidden by the enormous piles of bricks, he
felt the mass of mankind mighty in its numbers. They
swarmed numerous like locusts, industrious like ants, thoughtless
like a natural force, pushing on blind and orderly and absorbed,
impervious to sentiment, to logic, to terror too perhaps.

That was the form of doubt he feared most. Impervious to
fear! Often while walking abroad, when he happened also to
come out of himself, he had such moments of dreadful and sane
mistrust of mankind. What if nothing could move them?
Such moments come to all men whose ambition aims at a direct
grasp upon humanity—to artists, politicians, thinkers,
reformers, or saints. A despicable emotional state this,
against which solitude fortifies a superior character; and with
severe exultation the Professor thought of the refuge of his
room, with its padlocked cupboard, lost in a wilderness of poor
houses, the hermitage of the perfect anarchist. In order to
reach sooner the point where he could take his omnibus, he turned
brusquely out of the populous street into a narrow and dusky
alley paved with flagstones. On one side the low brick
houses had in their dusty windows the sightless, moribund look of
incurable decay—empty shells awaiting demolition.
From the other side life had not departed wholly as yet.
Facing the only gas-lamp yawned the cavern of a second-hand
furniture dealer, where, deep in the gloom of a sort of narrow
avenue winding through a bizarre forest of wardrobes, with an
undergrowth tangle of table legs, a tall pier-glass glimmered
like a pool of water in a wood. An unhappy, homeless couch,
accompanied by two unrelated chairs, stood in the open. The
only human being making use of the alley besides the Professor,
coming stalwart and erect from the opposite direction, checked
his swinging pace suddenly.

“Hallo!” he said, and stood a little on one side
watchfully.

The Professor had already stopped, with a ready half turn
which brought his shoulders very near the other wall. His
right hand fell lightly on the back of the outcast couch, the
left remained purposefully plunged deep in the trousers pocket,
and the roundness of the heavy rimmed spectacles imparted an
owlish character to his moody, unperturbed face.

It was like a meeting in a side corridor of a mansion full of
life. The stalwart man was buttoned up in a dark overcoat,
and carried an umbrella. His hat, tilted back, uncovered a
good deal of forehead, which appeared very white in the
dusk. In the dark patches of the orbits the eyeballs
glimmered piercingly. Long, drooping moustaches, the colour
of ripe corn, framed with their points the square block of his
shaved chin.

“I am not looking for you,” he said curtly.

The Professor did not stir an inch. The blended noises
of the enormous town sank down to an inarticulate low
murmur. Chief Inspector Heat of the Special Crimes
Department changed his tone.

“Not in a hurry to get home?” he asked, with
mocking simplicity.

The unwholesome-looking little moral agent of destruction
exulted silently in the possession of personal prestige, keeping
in check this man armed with the defensive mandate of a menaced
society. More fortunate than Caligula, who wished that the
Roman Senate had only one head for the better satisfaction of his
cruel lust, he beheld in that one man all the forces he had set
at defiance: the force of law, property, oppression, and
injustice. He beheld all his enemies, and fearlessly
confronted them all in a supreme satisfaction of his
vanity. They stood perplexed before him as if before a
dreadful portent. He gloated inwardly over the chance of
this meeting affirming his superiority over all the multitude of
mankind.

It was in reality a chance meeting. Chief Inspector Heat
had had a disagreeably busy day since his department received the
first telegram from Greenwich a little before eleven in the
morning. First of all, the fact of the outrage being
attempted less than a week after he had assured a high official
that no outbreak of anarchist activity was to be apprehended was
sufficiently annoying. If he ever thought himself safe in
making a statement, it was then. He had made that statement
with infinite satisfaction to himself, because it was clear that
the high official desired greatly to hear that very thing.
He had affirmed that nothing of the sort could even be thought of
without the department being aware of it within twenty-four
hours; and he had spoken thus in his consciousness of being the
great expert of his department. He had gone even so far as
to utter words which true wisdom would have kept back. But
Chief Inspector Heat was not very wise—at least not truly
so. True wisdom, which is not certain of anything in this
world of contradictions, would have prevented him from attaining
his present position. It would have alarmed his superiors,
and done away with his chances of promotion. His promotion
had been very rapid.

“There isn’t one of them, sir, that we
couldn’t lay our hands on at any time of night and
day. We know what each of them is doing hour by
hour,” he had declared. And the high official had
deigned to smile. This was so obviously the right thing to
say for an officer of Chief Inspector Heat’s reputation
that it was perfectly delightful. The high official
believed the declaration, which chimed in with his idea of the
fitness of things. His wisdom was of an official kind, or
else he might have reflected upon a matter not of theory but of
experience that in the close-woven stuff of relations between
conspirator and police there occur unexpected solutions of
continuity, sudden holes in space and time. A given
anarchist may be watched inch by inch and minute by minute, but a
moment always comes when somehow all sight and touch of him are
lost for a few hours, during which something (generally an
explosion) more or less deplorable does happen. But the
high official, carried away by his sense of the fitness of
things, had smiled, and now the recollection of that smile was
very annoying to Chief Inspector Heat, principal expert in
anarchist procedure.

This was not the only circumstance whose recollection
depressed the usual serenity of the eminent specialist.
There was another dating back only to that very morning.
The thought that when called urgently to his Assistant
Commissioner’s private room he had been unable to conceal
his astonishment was distinctly vexing. His instinct of a
successful man had taught him long ago that, as a general rule, a
reputation is built on manner as much as on achievement.
And he felt that his manner when confronted with the telegram had
not been impressive. He had opened his eyes widely, and had
exclaimed “Impossible!” exposing himself thereby to
the unanswerable retort of a finger-tip laid forcibly on the
telegram which the Assistant Commissioner, after reading it
aloud, had flung on the desk. To be crushed, as it were,
under the tip of a forefinger was an unpleasant experience.
Very damaging, too! Furthermore, Chief Inspector Heat was
conscious of not having mended matters by allowing himself to
express a conviction.

“One thing I can tell you at once: none of our lot had
anything to do with this.”

He was strong in his integrity of a good detective, but he saw
now that an impenetrably attentive reserve towards this incident
would have served his reputation better. On the other hand,
he admitted to himself that it was difficult to preserve
one’s reputation if rank outsiders were going to take a
hand in the business. Outsiders are the bane of the police
as of other professions. The tone of the Assistant
Commissioner’s remarks had been sour enough to set
one’s teeth on edge.

And since breakfast Chief Inspector Heat had not managed to
get anything to eat.

Starting immediately to begin his investigation on the spot,
he had swallowed a good deal of raw, unwholesome fog in the
park. Then he had walked over to the hospital; and when the
investigation in Greenwich was concluded at last he had lost his
inclination for food. Not accustomed, as the doctors are,
to examine closely the mangled remains of human beings, he had
been shocked by the sight disclosed to his view when a waterproof
sheet had been lifted off a table in a certain apartment of the
hospital.

Another waterproof sheet was spread over that table in the
manner of a table-cloth, with the corners turned up over a sort
of mound—a heap of rags, scorched and bloodstained, half
concealing what might have been an accumulation of raw material
for a cannibal feast. It required considerable firmness of
mind not to recoil before that sight. Chief Inspector Heat,
an efficient officer of his department, stood his ground, but for
a whole minute he did not advance. A local constable in
uniform cast a sidelong glance, and said, with stolid
simplicity:

“He’s all there. Every bit of him. It
was a job.”

He had been the first man on the spot after the
explosion. He mentioned the fact again. He had seen
something like a heavy flash of lightning in the fog. At
that time he was standing at the door of the King William Street
Lodge talking to the keeper. The concussion made him tingle
all over. He ran between the trees towards the
Observatory. “As fast as my legs would carry
me,” he repeated twice.

Chief Inspector Heat, bending forward over the table in a
gingerly and horrified manner, let him run on. The hospital
porter and another man turned down the corners of the cloth, and
stepped aside. The Chief Inspector’s eyes searched
the gruesome detail of that heap of mixed things, which seemed to
have been collected in shambles and rag shops.

“You used a shovel,” he remarked, observing a
sprinkling of small gravel, tiny brown bits of bark, and
particles of splintered wood as fine as needles.

“Had to in one place,” said the stolid
constable. “I sent a keeper to fetch a spade.
When he heard me scraping the ground with it he leaned his
forehead against a tree, and was as sick as a dog.”

The Chief Inspector, stooping guardedly over the table, fought
down the unpleasant sensation in his throat. The shattering
violence of destruction which had made of that body a heap of
nameless fragments affected his feelings with a sense of ruthless
cruelty, though his reason told him the effect must have been as
swift as a flash of lightning. The man, whoever he was, had
died instantaneously; and yet it seemed impossible to believe
that a human body could have reached that state of disintegration
without passing through the pangs of inconceivable agony.
No physiologist, and still less of a metaphysician, Chief
Inspector Heat rose by the force of sympathy, which is a form of
fear, above the vulgar conception of time.
Instantaneous! He remembered all he had ever read in
popular publications of long and terrifying dreams dreamed in the
instant of waking; of the whole past life lived with frightful
intensity by a drowning man as his doomed head bobs up,
streaming, for the last time. The inexplicable mysteries of
conscious existence beset Chief Inspector Heat till he evolved a
horrible notion that ages of atrocious pain and mental torture
could be contained between two successive winks of an eye.
And meantime the Chief Inspector went on, peering at the table
with a calm face and the slightly anxious attention of an
indigent customer bending over what may be called the by-products
of a butcher’s shop with a view to an inexpensive Sunday
dinner. All the time his trained faculties of an excellent
investigator, who scorns no chance of information, followed the
self-satisfied, disjointed loquacity of the constable.

“A fair-haired fellow,” the last observed in a
placid tone, and paused. “The old woman who spoke to
the sergeant noticed a fair-haired fellow coming out of Maze Hill
Station.” He paused. “And he was a
fair-haired fellow. She noticed two men coming out of the
station after the uptrain had gone on,” he continued
slowly. “She couldn’t tell if they were
together. She took no particular notice of the big one, but
the other was a fair, slight chap, carrying a tin varnish can in
one hand.” The constable ceased.

“Know the woman?” muttered the Chief Inspector,
with his eyes fixed on the table, and a vague notion in his mind
of an inquest to be held presently upon a person likely to remain
for ever unknown.

“Yes. She’s housekeeper to a retired
publican, and attends the chapel in Park Place sometimes,”
the constable uttered weightily, and paused, with another oblique
glance at the table.

Then suddenly: “Well, here he is—all of him I
could see. Fair. Slight—slight enough.
Look at that foot there. I picked up the legs first, one
after another. He was that scattered you didn’t know
where to begin.”

The constable paused; the least flicker of an innocent
self-laudatory smile invested his round face with an infantile
expression.

“Stumbled,” he announced positively.
“I stumbled once myself, and pitched on my head too, while
running up. Them roots do stick out all about the
place. Stumbled against the root of a tree and fell, and
that thing he was carrying must have gone off right under his
chest, I expect.”

The echo of the words “Person unknown” repeating
itself in his inner consciousness bothered the Chief Inspector
considerably. He would have liked to trace this affair back
to its mysterious origin for his own information. He was
professionally curious. Before the public he would have
liked to vindicate the efficiency of his department by
establishing the identity of that man. He was a loyal
servant. That, however, appeared impossible. The
first term of the problem was unreadable—lacked all
suggestion but that of atrocious cruelty.

Overcoming his physical repugnance, Chief Inspector Heat
stretched out his hand without conviction for the salving of his
conscience, and took up the least soiled of the rags. It
was a narrow strip of velvet with a larger triangular piece of
dark blue cloth hanging from it. He held it up to his eyes;
and the police constable spoke.

“Velvet collar. Funny the old woman should have
noticed the velvet collar. Dark blue overcoat with a velvet
collar, she has told us. He was the chap she saw, and no
mistake. And here he is all complete, velvet collar and
all. I don’t think I missed a single piece as big as
a postage stamp.”

At this point the trained faculties of the Chief Inspector
ceased to hear the voice of the constable. He moved to one
of the windows for better light. His face, averted from the
room, expressed a startled intense interest while he examined
closely the triangular piece of broad-cloth. By a sudden
jerk he detached it, and only after stuffing it into his
pocket turned round to the room, and flung the velvet collar back
on the table—

“Cover up,” he directed the attendants curtly,
without another look, and, saluted by the constable, carried off
his spoil hastily.

A convenient train whirled him up to town, alone and pondering
deeply, in a third-class compartment. That singed piece of
cloth was incredibly valuable, and he could not defend himself
from astonishment at the casual manner it had come into his
possession. It was as if Fate had thrust that clue into his
hands. And after the manner of the average man, whose
ambition is to command events, he began to mistrust such a
gratuitous and accidental success—just because it seemed
forced upon him. The practical value of success depends not
a little on the way you look at it. But Fate looks at
nothing. It has no discretion. He no longer
considered it eminently desirable all round to establish publicly
the identity of the man who had blown himself up that morning
with such horrible completeness. But he was not certain of
the view his department would take. A department is to
those it employs a complex personality with ideas and even fads
of its own. It depends on the loyal devotion of its
servants, and the devoted loyalty of trusted servants is
associated with a certain amount of affectionate contempt, which
keeps it sweet, as it were. By a benevolent provision of
Nature no man is a hero to his valet, or else the heroes would
have to brush their own clothes. Likewise no department
appears perfectly wise to the intimacy of its workers. A
department does not know so much as some of its servants.
Being a dispassionate organism, it can never be perfectly
informed. It would not be good for its efficiency to know
too much. Chief Inspector Heat got out of the train in a
state of thoughtfulness entirely untainted with disloyalty, but
not quite free of that jealous mistrust which so often springs on
the ground of perfect devotion, whether to women or to
institutions.

It was in this mental disposition, physically very empty, but
still nauseated by what he had seen, that he had come upon the
Professor. Under these conditions which make for
irascibility in a sound, normal man, this meeting was specially
unwelcome to Chief Inspector Heat. He had not been thinking
of the Professor; he had not been thinking of any individual
anarchist at all. The complexion of that case had somehow
forced upon him the general idea of the absurdity of things
human, which in the abstract is sufficiently annoying to an
unphilosophical temperament, and in concrete instances becomes
exasperating beyond endurance. At the beginning of his
career Chief Inspector Heat had been concerned with the more
energetic forms of thieving. He had gained his spurs in
that sphere, and naturally enough had kept for it, after his
promotion to another department, a feeling not very far removed
from affection. Thieving was not a sheer absurdity.
It was a form of human industry, perverse indeed, but still an
industry exercised in an industrious world; it was work
undertaken for the same reason as the work in potteries, in coal
mines, in fields, in tool-grinding shops. It was labour,
whose practical difference from the other forms of labour
consisted in the nature of its risk, which did not lie in
ankylosis, or lead poisoning, or fire-damp, or gritty dust, but
in what may be briefly defined in its own special phraseology as
“Seven years hard.” Chief Inspector Heat was,
of course, not insensible to the gravity of moral
differences. But neither were the thieves he had been
looking after. They submitted to the severe sanctions of a
morality familiar to Chief Inspector Heat with a certain
resignation.

They were his fellow-citizens gone wrong because of imperfect
education, Chief Inspector Heat believed; but allowing for that
difference, he could understand the mind of a burglar, because,
as a matter of fact, the mind and the instincts of a burglar are
of the same kind as the mind and the instincts of a police
officer. Both recognise the same conventions, and have a
working knowledge of each other’s methods and of the
routine of their respective trades. They understand each
other, which is advantageous to both, and establishes a sort of
amenity in their relations. Products of the same machine,
one classed as useful and the other as noxious, they take the
machine for granted in different ways, but with a seriousness
essentially the same. The mind of Chief Inspector Heat was
inaccessible to ideas of revolt. But his thieves were not
rebels. His bodily vigour, his cool inflexible manner, his
courage and his fairness, had secured for him much respect and
some adulation in the sphere of his early successes. He had
felt himself revered and admired. And Chief Inspector Heat,
arrested within six paces of the anarchist nick-named the
Professor, gave a thought of regret to the world of
thieves—sane, without morbid ideals, working by routine,
respectful of constituted authorities, free from all taint of
hate and despair.

After paying this tribute to what is normal in the
constitution of society (for the idea of thieving appeared to his
instinct as normal as the idea of property), Chief Inspector Heat
felt very angry with himself for having stopped, for having
spoken, for having taken that way at all on the ground of it
being a short cut from the station to the headquarters. And
he spoke again in his big authoritative voice, which, being
moderated, had a threatening character.

“You are not wanted, I tell you,” he repeated.

The anarchist did not stir. An inward laugh of derision
uncovered not only his teeth but his gums as well, shook him all
over, without the slightest sound. Chief Inspector Heat was
led to add, against his better judgment:

“Not yet. When I want you I will know where to
find you.”

Those were perfectly proper words, within the tradition and
suitable to his character of a police officer addressing one of
his special flock. But the reception they got departed from
tradition and propriety. It was outrageous. The
stunted, weakly figure before him spoke at last.

“I’ve no doubt the papers would give you an
obituary notice then. You know best what that would be
worth to you. I should think you can imagine easily the
sort of stuff that would be printed. But you may be exposed
to the unpleasantness of being buried together with me, though I
suppose your friends would make an effort to sort us out as much
as possible.”

With all his healthy contempt for the spirit dictating such
speeches, the atrocious allusiveness of the words had its effect
on Chief Inspector Heat. He had too much insight, and too
much exact information as well, to dismiss them as rot. The
dusk of this narrow lane took on a sinister tint from the dark,
frail little figure, its back to the wall, and speaking with a
weak, self-confident voice. To the vigorous, tenacious
vitality of the Chief Inspector, the physical wretchedness of
that being, so obviously not fit to live, was ominous; for it
seemed to him that if he had the misfortune to be such a
miserable object he would not have cared how soon he died.
Life had such a strong hold upon him that a fresh wave of nausea
broke out in slight perspiration upon his brow. The murmur
of town life, the subdued rumble of wheels in the two invisible
streets to the right and left, came through the curve of the
sordid lane to his ears with a precious familiarity and an
appealing sweetness. He was human. But Chief
Inspector Heat was also a man, and he could not let such words
pass.

“All this is good to frighten children with,” he
said. “I’ll have you yet.”

It was very well said, without scorn, with an almost austere
quietness.

“Doubtless,” was the answer; “but
there’s no time like the present, believe me. For a
man of real convictions this is a fine opportunity of
self-sacrifice. You may not find another so favourable, so
humane. There isn’t even a cat near us, and these
condemned old houses would make a good heap of bricks where you
stand. You’ll never get me at so little cost to life
and property, which you are paid to protect.”

“You don’t know who you’re speaking
to,” said Chief Inspector Heat firmly. “If I
were to lay my hands on you now I would be no better than
yourself.”

“Ah! The game!’

“You may be sure our side will win in the end. It
may yet be necessary to make people believe that some of you
ought to be shot at sight like mad dogs. Then that will be
the game. But I’ll be damned if I know what yours
is. I don’t believe you know yourselves.
You’ll never get anything by it.”

“Meantime it’s you who get something from
it—so far. And you get it easily, too. I
won’t speak of your salary, but haven’t you made your
name simply by not understanding what we are after?”

“What are you after, then?” asked Chief Inspector
Heat, with scornful haste, like a man in a hurry who perceives he
is wasting his time.

The perfect anarchist answered by a smile which did not part
his thin colourless lips; and the celebrated Chief Inspector felt
a sense of superiority which induced him to raise a warning
finger.

“Give it up—whatever it is,” he said in an
admonishing tone, but not so kindly as if he were condescending
to give good advice to a cracksman of repute. “Give
it up. You’ll find we are too many for
you.”

The fixed smile on the Professor’s lips wavered, as if
the mocking spirit within had lost its assurance. Chief
Inspector Heat went on:

“Don’t you believe me eh? Well, you’ve
only got to look about you. We are. And anyway,
you’re not doing it well. You’re always making
a mess of it. Why, if the thieves didn’t know their
work better they would starve.”

The hint of an invincible multitude behind that man’s
back roused a sombre indignation in the breast of the
Professor. He smiled no longer his enigmatic and mocking
smile. The resisting power of numbers, the unattackable
stolidity of a great multitude, was the haunting fear of his
sinister loneliness. His lips trembled for some time before
he managed to say in a strangled voice:

“I am doing my work better than you’re doing
yours.”

“That’ll do now,” interrupted Chief
Inspector Heat hurriedly; and the Professor laughed right out
this time. While still laughing he moved on; but he did not
laugh long. It was a sad-faced, miserable little man who
emerged from the narrow passage into the bustle of the broad
thoroughfare. He walked with the nerveless gait of a tramp
going on, still going on, indifferent to rain or sun in a
sinister detachment from the aspects of sky and earth.
Chief Inspector Heat, on the other hand, after watching him for a
while, stepped out with the purposeful briskness of a man
disregarding indeed the inclemencies of the weather, but
conscious of having an authorised mission on this earth and the
moral support of his kind. All the inhabitants of the
immense town, the population of the whole country, and even the
teeming millions struggling upon the planet, were with
him—down to the very thieves and mendicants. Yes, the
thieves themselves were sure to be with him in his present
work. The consciousness of universal support in his general
activity heartened him to grapple with the particular
problem.

The problem immediately before the Chief Inspector was that of
managing the Assistant Commissioner of his department, his
immediate superior. This is the perennial problem of trusty
and loyal servants; anarchism gave it its particular complexion,
but nothing more. Truth to say, Chief Inspector Heat
thought but little of anarchism. He did not attach undue
importance to it, and could never bring himself to consider it
seriously. It had more the character of disorderly conduct;
disorderly without the human excuse of drunkenness, which at any
rate implies good feeling and an amiable leaning towards
festivity. As criminals, anarchists were distinctly no
class—no class at all. And recalling the Professor,
Chief Inspector Heat, without checking his swinging pace,
muttered through his teeth:

“Lunatic.”

Catching thieves was another matter altogether. It had
that quality of seriousness belonging to every form of open sport
where the best man wins under perfectly comprehensible
rules. There were no rules for dealing with
anarchists. And that was distasteful to the Chief
Inspector. It was all foolishness, but that foolishness
excited the public mind, affected persons in high places, and
touched upon international relations. A hard, merciless
contempt settled rigidly on the Chief Inspector’s face as
he walked on. His mind ran over all the anarchists of his
flock. Not one of them had half the spunk of this or that
burglar he had known. Not half—not one-tenth.

At headquarters the Chief Inspector was admitted at once to
the Assistant Commissioner’s private room. He found
him, pen in hand, bent over a great table bestrewn with papers,
as if worshipping an enormous double inkstand of bronze and
crystal. Speaking tubes resembling snakes were tied by the
heads to the back of the Assistant Commissioner’s wooden
arm-chair, and their gaping mouths seemed ready to bite his
elbows. And in this attitude he raised only his eyes, whose
lids were darker than his face and very much creased. The
reports had come in: every anarchist had been exactly accounted
for.

After saying this he lowered his eyes, signed rapidly two
single sheets of paper, and only then laid down his pen, and sat
well back, directing an inquiring gaze at his renowned
subordinate. The Chief Inspector stood it well, deferential
but inscrutable.

“I daresay you were right,” said the Assistant
Commissioner, “in telling me at first that the London
anarchists had nothing to do with this. I quite appreciate
the excellent watch kept on them by your men. On the other
hand, this, for the public, does not amount to more than a
confession of ignorance.”

The Assistant Commissioner’s delivery was leisurely, as
it were cautious. His thought seemed to rest poised on a
word before passing to another, as though words had been the
stepping-stones for his intellect picking its way across the
waters of error. “Unless you have brought something
useful from Greenwich,” he added.

The Chief Inspector began at once the account of his
investigation in a clear matter-of-fact manner. His
superior turning his chair a little, and crossing his thin legs,
leaned sideways on his elbow, with one hand shading his
eyes. His listening attitude had a sort of angular and
sorrowful grace. Gleams as of highly burnished silver
played on the sides of his ebony black head when he inclined it
slowly at the end.

Chief Inspector Heat waited with the appearance of turning
over in his mind all he had just said, but, as a matter of fact,
considering the advisability of saying something more. The
Assistant Commissioner cut his hesitation short.

“You believe there were two men?” he asked,
without uncovering his eyes.

The Chief Inspector thought it more than probable. In
his opinion, the two men had parted from each other within a
hundred yards from the Observatory walls. He explained also
how the other man could have got out of the park speedily without
being observed. The fog, though not very dense, was in his
favour. He seemed to have escorted the other to the spot,
and then to have left him there to do the job
single-handed. Taking the time those two were seen coming
out of Maze Hill Station by the old woman, and the time when the
explosion was heard, the Chief Inspector thought that the other
man might have been actually at the Greenwich Park Station, ready
to catch the next train up, at the moment his comrade was
destroying himself so thoroughly.

“Very thoroughly—eh?” murmured the Assistant
Commissioner from under the shadow of his hand.

The Chief Inspector in a few vigorous words described the
aspect of the remains. “The coroner’s jury will
have a treat,” he added grimly.

The Assistant Commissioner uncovered his eyes.

“We shall have nothing to tell them,” he remarked
languidly.

He looked up, and for a time watched the markedly
non-committal attitude of his Chief Inspector. His nature
was one that is not easily accessible to illusions. He knew
that a department is at the mercy of its subordinate officers,
who have their own conceptions of loyalty. His career had
begun in a tropical colony. He had liked his work
there. It was police work. He had been very
successful in tracking and breaking up certain nefarious secret
societies amongst the natives. Then he took his long leave,
and got married rather impulsively. It was a good match
from a worldly point of view, but his wife formed an unfavourable
opinion of the colonial climate on hearsay evidence. On the
other hand, she had influential connections. It was an
excellent match. But he did not like the work he had to do
now. He felt himself dependent on too many subordinates and
too many masters. The near presence of that strange
emotional phenomenon called public opinion weighed upon his
spirits, and alarmed him by its irrational nature. No doubt
that from ignorance he exaggerated to himself its power for good
and evil—especially for evil; and the rough east winds of
the English spring (which agreed with his wife) augmented his
general mistrust of men’s motives and of the efficiency of
their organisation. The futility of office work especially
appalled him on those days so trying to his sensitive liver.

He got up, unfolding himself to his full height, and with a
heaviness of step remarkable in so slender a man, moved across
the room to the window. The panes streamed with rain, and
the short street he looked down into lay wet and empty, as if
swept clear suddenly by a great flood. It was a very trying
day, choked in raw fog to begin with, and now drowned in cold
rain. The flickering, blurred flames of gas-lamps seemed to
be dissolving in a watery atmosphere. And the lofty
pretensions of a mankind oppressed by the miserable indignities
of the weather appeared as a colossal and hopeless vanity
deserving of scorn, wonder, and compassion.

“Horrible, horrible!” thought the Assistant
Commissioner to himself, with his face near the
window-pane. “We have been having this sort of thing
now for ten days; no, a fortnight—a fortnight.”
He ceased to think completely for a time. That utter
stillness of his brain lasted about three seconds. Then he
said perfunctorily: “You have set inquiries on foot for
tracing that other man up and down the line?”

He had no doubt that everything needful had been done.
Chief Inspector Heat knew, of course, thoroughly the business of
man-hunting. And these were the routine steps, too, that
would be taken as a matter of course by the merest
beginner. A few inquiries amongst the ticket collectors and
the porters of the two small railway stations would give
additional details as to the appearance of the two men; the
inspection of the collected tickets would show at once where they
came from that morning. It was elementary, and could not
have been neglected. Accordingly the Chief Inspector
answered that all this had been done directly the old woman had
come forward with her deposition. And he mentioned the name
of a station. “That’s where they came from,
sir,” he went on. “The porter who took the
tickets at Maze Hill remembers two chaps answering to the
description passing the barrier. They seemed to him two
respectable working men of a superior sort—sign painters or
house decorators. The big man got out of a third-class
compartment backward, with a bright tin can in his hand. On
the platform he gave it to carry to the fair young fellow who
followed him. All this agrees exactly with what the old
woman told the police sergeant in Greenwich.”

The Assistant Commissioner, still with his face turned to the
window, expressed his doubt as to these two men having had
anything to do with the outrage. All this theory rested
upon the utterances of an old charwoman who had been nearly
knocked down by a man in a hurry. Not a very substantial
authority indeed, unless on the ground of sudden inspiration,
which was hardly tenable.

“Frankly now, could she have been really
inspired?” he queried, with grave irony, keeping his back
to the room, as if entranced by the contemplation of the
town’s colossal forms half lost in the night. He did
not even look round when he heard the mutter of the word
“Providential” from the principal subordinate of his
department, whose name, printed sometimes in the papers, was
familiar to the great public as that of one of its zealous and
hard-working protectors. Chief Inspector Heat raised his
voice a little.

“Strips and bits of bright tin were quite visible to
me,” he said. “That’s a pretty good
corroboration.”

“And these men came from that little country
station,” the Assistant Commissioner mused aloud,
wondering. He was told that such was the name on two
tickets out of three given up out of that train at Maze
Hill. The third person who got out was a hawker from
Gravesend well known to the porters. The Chief Inspector
imparted that information in a tone of finality with some ill
humour, as loyal servants will do in the consciousness of their
fidelity and with the sense of the value of their loyal
exertions. And still the Assistant Commissioner did not
turn away from the darkness outside, as vast as a sea.

“Two foreign anarchists coming from that place,”
he said, apparently to the window-pane. “It’s
rather unaccountable.”’

“Yes, sir. But it would be still more
unaccountable if that Michaelis weren’t staying in a
cottage in the neighbourhood.”

At the sound of that name, falling unexpectedly into this
annoying affair, the Assistant Commissioner dismissed brusquely
the vague remembrance of his daily whist party at his club.
It was the most comforting habit of his life, in a mainly
successful display of his skill without the assistance of any
subordinate. He entered his club to play from five to
seven, before going home to dinner, forgetting for those two
hours whatever was distasteful in his life, as though the game
were a beneficent drug for allaying the pangs of moral
discontent. His partners were the gloomily humorous editor
of a celebrated magazine; a silent, elderly barrister with
malicious little eyes; and a highly martial, simple-minded old
Colonel with nervous brown hands. They were his club
acquaintances merely. He never met them elsewhere except at
the card-table. But they all seemed to approach the game in
the spirit of co-sufferers, as if it were indeed a drug against
the secret ills of existence; and every day as the sun declined
over the countless roofs of the town, a mellow, pleasurable
impatience, resembling the impulse of a sure and profound
friendship, lightened his professional labours. And now
this pleasurable sensation went out of him with something
resembling a physical shock, and was replaced by a special kind
of interest in his work of social protection—an improper
sort of interest, which may be defined best as a sudden and alert
mistrust of the weapon in his hand.

CHAPTER VI

The lady patroness of Michaelis, the ticket-of-leave apostle
of humanitarian hopes, was one of the most influential and
distinguished connections of the Assistant Commissioner’s
wife, whom she called Annie, and treated still rather as a not
very wise and utterly inexperienced young girl. But she had
consented to accept him on a friendly footing, which was by no
means the case with all of his wife’s influential
connections. Married young and splendidly at some remote
epoch of the past, she had had for a time a close view of great
affairs and even of some great men. She herself was a great
lady. Old now in the number of her years, she had that sort
of exceptional temperament which defies time with scornful
disregard, as if it were a rather vulgar convention submitted to
by the mass of inferior mankind. Many other conventions
easier to set aside, alas! failed to obtain her recognition, also
on temperamental grounds—either because they bored her, or
else because they stood in the way of her scorns and
sympathies. Admiration was a sentiment unknown to her (it
was one of the secret griefs of her most noble husband against
her)—first, as always more or less tainted with mediocrity,
and next as being in a way an admission of inferiority. And
both were frankly inconceivable to her nature. To be
fearlessly outspoken in her opinions came easily to her, since
she judged solely from the standpoint of her social
position. She was equally untrammelled in her actions; and
as her tactfulness proceeded from genuine humanity, her bodily
vigour remained remarkable and her superiority was serene and
cordial, three generations had admired her infinitely, and the
last she was likely to see had pronounced her a wonderful
woman. Meantime intelligent, with a sort of lofty
simplicity, and curious at heart, but not like many women merely
of social gossip, she amused her age by attracting within her ken
through the power of her great, almost historical, social
prestige everything that rose above the dead level of mankind,
lawfully or unlawfully, by position, wit, audacity, fortune or
misfortune. Royal Highnesses, artists, men of science,
young statesmen, and charlatans of all ages and conditions, who,
unsubstantial and light, bobbing up like corks, show best the
direction of the surface currents, had been welcomed in that
house, listened to, penetrated, understood, appraised, for her
own edification. In her own words, she liked to watch what
the world was coming to. And as she had a practical mind
her judgment of men and things, though based on special
prejudices, was seldom totally wrong, and almost never
wrong-headed. Her drawing-room was probably the only place
in the wide world where an Assistant Commissioner of Police could
meet a convict liberated on a ticket-of-leave on other than
professional and official ground. Who had brought Michaelis
there one afternoon the Assistant Commissioner did not remember
very well. He had a notion it must have been a certain
Member of Parliament of illustrious parentage and unconventional
sympathies, which were the standing joke of the comic
papers. The notabilities and even the simple notorieties of
the day brought each other freely to that temple of an old
woman’s not ignoble curiosity. You never could guess
whom you were likely to come upon being received in semi-privacy
within the faded blue silk and gilt frame screen, making a cosy
nook for a couch and a few arm-chairs in the great drawing-room,
with its hum of voices and the groups of people seated or
standing in the light of six tall windows.

Michaelis had been the object of a revulsion of popular
sentiment, the same sentiment which years ago had applauded the
ferocity of the life sentence passed upon him for complicity in a
rather mad attempt to rescue some prisoners from a police
van. The plan of the conspirators had been to shoot down
the horses and overpower the escort. Unfortunately, one of
the police constables got shot too. He left a wife and
three small children, and the death of that man aroused through
the length and breadth of a realm for whose defence, welfare, and
glory men die every day as matter of duty, an outburst of furious
indignation, of a raging implacable pity for the victim.
Three ring-leaders got hanged. Michaelis, young and slim,
locksmith by trade, and great frequenter of evening schools, did
not even know that anybody had been killed, his part with a few
others being to force open the door at the back of the special
conveyance. When arrested he had a bunch of skeleton keys
in one pocket, a heavy chisel in another, and a short crowbar in
his hand: neither more nor less than a burglar. But no
burglar would have received such a heavy sentence. The
death of the constable had made him miserable at heart, but the
failure of the plot also. He did not conceal either of
these sentiments from his empanelled countrymen, and that sort of
compunction appeared shockingly imperfect to the crammed
court. The judge on passing sentence commented feelingly
upon the depravity and callousness of the young prisoner.

That made the groundless fame of his condemnation; the fame of
his release was made for him on no better grounds by people who
wished to exploit the sentimental aspect of his imprisonment
either for purposes of their own or for no intelligible
purpose. He let them do so in the innocence of his heart
and the simplicity of his mind. Nothing that happened to
him individually had any importance. He was like those
saintly men whose personality is lost in the contemplation of
their faith. His ideas were not in the nature of
convictions. They were inaccessible to reasoning.
They formed in all their contradictions and obscurities an
invincible and humanitarian creed, which he confessed rather than
preached, with an obstinate gentleness, a smile of pacific
assurance on his lips, and his candid blue eyes cast down because
the sight of faces troubled his inspiration developed in
solitude. In that characteristic attitude, pathetic in his
grotesque and incurable obesity which he had to drag like a
galley slave’s bullet to the end of his days, the Assistant
Commissioner of Police beheld the ticket-of-leave apostle filling
a privileged arm-chair within the screen. He sat there by
the head of the old lady’s couch, mild-voiced and quiet,
with no more self-consciousness than a very small child, and with
something of a child’s charm—the appealing charm of
trustfulness. Confident of the future, whose secret ways
had been revealed to him within the four walls of a well-known
penitentiary, he had no reason to look with suspicion upon
anybody. If he could not give the great and curious lady a
very definite idea as to what the world was coming to, he had
managed without effort to impress her by his unembittered faith,
by the sterling quality of his optimism.

A certain simplicity of thought is common to serene souls at
both ends of the social scale. The great lady was simple in
her own way. His views and beliefs had nothing in them to
shock or startle her, since she judged them from the standpoint
of her lofty position. Indeed, her sympathies were easily
accessible to a man of that sort. She was not an exploiting
capitalist herself; she was, as it were, above the play of
economic conditions. And she had a great capacity of pity
for the more obvious forms of common human miseries, precisely
because she was such a complete stranger to them that she had to
translate her conception into terms of mental suffering before
she could grasp the notion of their cruelty. The Assistant
Commissioner remembered very well the conversation between these
two. He had listened in silence. It was something as
exciting in a way, and even touching in its foredoomed futility,
as the efforts at moral intercourse between the inhabitants of
remote planets. But this grotesque incarnation of
humanitarian passion appealed somehow, to one’s
imagination. At last Michaelis rose, and taking the great
lady’s extended hand, shook it, retained it for a moment in
his great cushioned palm with unembarrassed friendliness, and
turned upon the semi-private nook of the drawing-room his back,
vast and square, and as if distended under the short tweed
jacket. Glancing about in serene benevolence, he waddled
along to the distant door between the knots of other
visitors. The murmur of conversations paused on his
passage. He smiled innocently at a tall, brilliant girl,
whose eyes met his accidentally, and went out unconscious of the
glances following him across the room. Michaelis’
first appearance in the world was a success—a success of
esteem unmarred by a single murmur of derision. The
interrupted conversations were resumed in their proper tone,
grave or light. Only a well-set-up, long-limbed,
active-looking man of forty talking with two ladies near a window
remarked aloud, with an unexpected depth of feeling:
“Eighteen stone, I should say, and not five foot six.
Poor fellow! It’s terrible—terrible.”

The lady of the house, gazing absently at the Assistant
Commissioner, left alone with her on the private side of the
screen, seemed to be rearranging her mental impressions behind
her thoughtful immobility of a handsome old face. Men with
grey moustaches and full, healthy, vaguely smiling countenances
approached, circling round the screen; two mature women with a
matronly air of gracious resolution; a clean-shaved individual
with sunken cheeks, and dangling a gold-mounted eyeglass on a
broad black ribbon with an old-world, dandified effect. A
silence deferential, but full of reserves, reigned for a moment,
and then the great lady exclaimed, not with resentment, but with
a sort of protesting indignation:

“And that officially is supposed to be a
revolutionist! What nonsense.” She looked hard
at the Assistant Commissioner, who murmured apologetically:

“Not a dangerous one perhaps.”

“Not dangerous—I should think not indeed. He
is a mere believer. It’s the temperament of a
saint,” declared the great lady in a firm tone.
“And they kept him shut up for twenty years. One
shudders at the stupidity of it. And now they have let him
out everybody belonging to him is gone away somewhere or
dead. His parents are dead; the girl he was to marry has
died while he was in prison; he has lost the skill necessary for
his manual occupation. He told me all this himself with the
sweetest patience; but then, he said, he had had plenty of time
to think out things for himself. A pretty
compensation! If that’s the stuff revolutionists are
made of some of us may well go on their knees to them,” she
continued in a slightly bantering voice, while the banal society
smiles hardened on the worldly faces turned towards her with
conventional deference. “The poor creature is
obviously no longer in a position to take care of himself.
Somebody will have to look after him a little.”

“He should be recommended to follow a treatment of some
sort,” the soldierly voice of the active-looking man was
heard advising earnestly from a distance. He was in the
pink of condition for his age, and even the texture of his long
frock coat had a character of elastic soundness, as if it were a
living tissue. “The man is virtually a
cripple,” he added with unmistakable feeling.

Other voices, as if glad of the opening, murmured hasty
compassion. “Quite startling,”
“Monstrous,” “Most painful to see.”
The lank man, with the eyeglass on a broad ribbon, pronounced
mincingly the word “Grotesque,” whose justness was
appreciated by those standing near him. They smiled at each
other.

The Assistant Commissioner had expressed no opinion either
then or later, his position making it impossible for him to
ventilate any independent view of a ticket-of-leave
convict. But, in truth, he shared the view of his
wife’s friend and patron that Michaelis was a humanitarian
sentimentalist, a little mad, but upon the whole incapable of
hurting a fly intentionally. So when that name cropped up
suddenly in this vexing bomb affair he realised all the danger of
it for the ticket-of-leave apostle, and his mind reverted at once
to the old lady’s well-established infatuation. Her
arbitrary kindness would not brook patiently any interference
with Michaelis’ freedom. It was a deep, calm,
convinced infatuation. She had not only felt him to be
inoffensive, but she had said so, which last by a confusion of
her absolutist mind became a sort of incontrovertible
demonstration. It was as if the monstrosity of the man,
with his candid infant’s eyes and a fat angelic smile, had
fascinated her. She had come to believe almost his theory
of the future, since it was not repugnant to her
prejudices. She disliked the new element of plutocracy in
the social compound, and industrialism as a method of human
development appeared to her singularly repulsive in its
mechanical and unfeeling character. The humanitarian hopes
of the mild Michaelis tended not towards utter destruction, but
merely towards the complete economic ruin of the system.
And she did not really see where was the moral harm of it.
It would do away with all the multitude of the
“parvenus,” whom she disliked and mistrusted, not
because they had arrived anywhere (she denied that), but because
of their profound unintelligence of the world, which was the
primary cause of the crudity of their perceptions and the aridity
of their hearts. With the annihilation of all capital they
would vanish too; but universal ruin (providing it was universal,
as it was revealed to Michaelis) would leave the social values
untouched. The disappearance of the last piece of money
could not affect people of position. She could not conceive
how it could affect her position, for instance. She had
developed these discoveries to the Assistant Commissioner with
all the serene fearlessness of an old woman who had escaped the
blight of indifference. He had made for himself the rule to
receive everything of that sort in a silence which he took care
from policy and inclination not to make offensive. He had
an affection for the aged disciple of Michaelis, a complex
sentiment depending a little on her prestige, on her personality,
but most of all on the instinct of flattered gratitude. He
felt himself really liked in her house. She was kindness
personified. And she was practically wise too, after the
manner of experienced women. She made his married life much
easier than it would have been without her generously full
recognition of his rights as Annie’s husband. Her
influence upon his wife, a woman devoured by all sorts of small
selfishnesses, small envies, small jealousies, was
excellent. Unfortunately, both her kindness and her wisdom
were of unreasonable complexion, distinctly feminine, and
difficult to deal with. She remained a perfect woman all
along her full tale of years, and not as some of them do
become—a sort of slippery, pestilential old man in
petticoats. And it was as of a woman that he thought of
her—the specially choice incarnation of the feminine,
wherein is recruited the tender, ingenuous, and fierce bodyguard
for all sorts of men who talk under the influence of an emotion,
true or fraudulent; for preachers, seers, prophets, or
reformers.

Appreciating the distinguished and good friend of his wife,
and himself, in that way, the Assistant Commissioner became
alarmed at the convict Michaelis’ possible fate. Once
arrested on suspicion of being in some way, however remote, a
party to this outrage, the man could hardly escape being sent
back to finish his sentence at least. And that would kill
him; he would never come out alive. The Assistant
Commissioner made a reflection extremely unbecoming his official
position without being really creditable to his humanity.

“If the fellow is laid hold of again,” he thought,
“she will never forgive me.”

The frankness of such a secretly outspoken thought could not
go without some derisive self-criticism. No man engaged in
a work he does not like can preserve many saving illusions about
himself. The distaste, the absence of glamour, extend from
the occupation to the personality. It is only when our
appointed activities seem by a lucky accident to obey the
particular earnestness of our temperament that we can taste the
comfort of complete self-deception. The Assistant
Commissioner did not like his work at home. The police work
he had been engaged on in a distant part of the globe had the
saving character of an irregular sort of warfare or at least the
risk and excitement of open-air sport. His real abilities,
which were mainly of an administrative order, were combined with
an adventurous disposition. Chained to a desk in the thick
of four millions of men, he considered himself the victim of an
ironic fate—the same, no doubt, which had brought about his
marriage with a woman exceptionally sensitive in the matter of
colonial climate, besides other limitations testifying to the
delicacy of her nature—and her tastes. Though he
judged his alarm sardonically he did not dismiss the improper
thought from his mind. The instinct of self-preservation
was strong within him. On the contrary, he repeated it
mentally with profane emphasis and a fuller precision:
“Damn it! If that infernal Heat has his way the
fellow’ll die in prison smothered in his fat, and
she’ll never forgive me.”

His black, narrow figure, with the white band of the collar
under the silvery gleams on the close-cropped hair at the back of
the head, remained motionless. The silence had lasted such
a long time that Chief Inspector Heat ventured to clear his
throat. This noise produced its effect. The zealous
and intelligent officer was asked by his superior, whose back
remained turned to him immovably:

“You connect Michaelis with this affair?”

Chief Inspector Heat was very positive, but cautious.

“Well, sir,” he said, “we have enough to go
upon. A man like that has no business to be at large,
anyhow.”

“You will want some conclusive evidence,” came the
observation in a murmur.

Chief Inspector Heat raised his eyebrows at the black, narrow
back, which remained obstinately presented to his intelligence
and his zeal.

“There will be no difficulty in getting up sufficient
evidence against him,” he said, with virtuous
complacency. “You may trust me for that, sir,”
he added, quite unnecessarily, out of the fulness of his heart;
for it seemed to him an excellent thing to have that man in hand
to be thrown down to the public should it think fit to roar with
any special indignation in this case. It was impossible to
say yet whether it would roar or not. That in the last
instance depended, of course, on the newspaper press. But
in any case, Chief Inspector Heat, purveyor of prisons by trade,
and a man of legal instincts, did logically believe that
incarceration was the proper fate for every declared enemy of the
law. In the strength of that conviction he committed a
fault of tact. He allowed himself a little conceited laugh,
and repeated:

“Trust me for that, sir.”

This was too much for the forced calmness under which the
Assistant Commissioner had for upwards of eighteen months
concealed his irritation with the system and the subordinates of
his office. A square peg forced into a round hole, he had
felt like a daily outrage that long established smooth roundness
into which a man of less sharply angular shape would have fitted
himself, with voluptuous acquiescence, after a shrug or
two. What he resented most was just the necessity of taking
so much on trust. At the little laugh of Chief Inspector
Heat’s he spun swiftly on his heels, as if whirled away
from the window-pane by an electric shock. He caught on the
latter’s face not only the complacency proper to the
occasion lurking under the moustache, but the vestiges of
experimental watchfulness in the round eyes, which had been, no
doubt, fastened on his back, and now met his glance for a second
before the intent character of their stare had the time to change
to a merely startled appearance.

The Assistant Commissioner of Police had really some
qualifications for his post. Suddenly his suspicion was
awakened. It is but fair to say that his suspicions of the
police methods (unless the police happened to be a semi-military
body organised by himself) was not difficult to arouse. If
it ever slumbered from sheer weariness, it was but lightly; and
his appreciation of Chief Inspector Heat’s zeal and
ability, moderate in itself, excluded all notion of moral
confidence. “He’s up to something,” he
exclaimed mentally, and at once became angry. Crossing over
to his desk with headlong strides, he sat down violently.
“Here I am stuck in a litter of paper,” he reflected,
with unreasonable resentment, “supposed to hold all the
threads in my hands, and yet I can but hold what is put in my
hand, and nothing else. And they can fasten the other ends
of the threads where they please.”

He raised his head, and turned towards his subordinate a long,
meagre face with the accentuated features of an energetic Don
Quixote.

“Now what is it you’ve got up your
sleeve?”

The other stared. He stared without winking in a perfect
immobility of his round eyes, as he was used to stare at the
various members of the criminal class when, after being duly
cautioned, they made their statements in the tones of injured
innocence, or false simplicity, or sullen resignation. But
behind that professional and stony fixity there was some surprise
too, for in such a tone, combining nicely the note of contempt
and impatience, Chief Inspector Heat, the right-hand man of the
department, was not used to be addressed. He began in a
procrastinating manner, like a man taken unawares by a new and
unexpected experience.

“What I’ve got against that man Michaelis you
mean, sir?”

The Assistant Commissioner watched the bullet head; the points
of that Norse rover’s moustache, falling below the line of
the heavy jaw; the whole full and pale physiognomy, whose
determined character was marred by too much flesh; at the cunning
wrinkles radiating from the outer corners of the eyes—and
in that purposeful contemplation of the valuable and trusted
officer he drew a conviction so sudden that it moved him like an
inspiration.

“I have reason to think that when you came into this
room,” he said in measured tones, “it was not
Michaelis who was in your mind; not principally—perhaps not
at all.”

“You have reason to think, sir?” muttered Chief
Inspector Heat, with every appearance of astonishment, which up
to a certain point was genuine enough. He had discovered in
this affair a delicate and perplexing side, forcing upon the
discoverer a certain amount of insincerity—that sort of
insincerity which, under the names of skill, prudence,
discretion, turns up at one point or another in most human
affairs. He felt at the moment like a tight-rope artist
might feel if suddenly, in the middle of the performance, the
manager of the Music Hall were to rush out of the proper
managerial seclusion and begin to shake the rope.
Indignation, the sense of moral insecurity engendered by such a
treacherous proceeding joined to the immediate apprehension of a
broken neck, would, in the colloquial phrase, put him in a
state. And there would be also some scandalised concern for
his art too, since a man must identify himself with something
more tangible than his own personality, and establish his pride
somewhere, either in his social position, or in the quality of
the work he is obliged to do, or simply in the superiority of the
idleness he may be fortunate enough to enjoy.

“Yes,” said the Assistant Commissioner; “I
have. I do not mean to say that you have not thought of
Michaelis at all. But you are giving the fact you’ve
mentioned a prominence which strikes me as not quite candid,
Inspector Heat. If that is really the track of discovery,
why haven’t you followed it up at once, either personally
or by sending one of your men to that village?”

“Do you think, sir, I have failed in my duty
there?” the Chief Inspector asked, in a tone which he
sought to make simply reflective. Forced unexpectedly to
concentrate his faculties upon the task of preserving his
balance, he had seized upon that point, and exposed himself to a
rebuke; for, the Assistant Commissioner frowning slightly,
observed that this was a very improper remark to make.

“But since you’ve made it,” he continued
coldly, “I’ll tell you that this is not my
meaning.”

He paused, with a straight glance of his sunken eyes which was
a full equivalent of the unspoken termination “and you know
it.” The head of the so-called Special Crimes
Department debarred by his position from going out of doors
personally in quest of secrets locked up in guilty breasts, had a
propensity to exercise his considerable gifts for the detection
of incriminating truth upon his own subordinates. That
peculiar instinct could hardly be called a weakness. It was
natural. He was a born detective. It had
unconsciously governed his choice of a career, and if it ever
failed him in life it was perhaps in the one exceptional
circumstance of his marriage—which was also natural.
It fed, since it could not roam abroad, upon the human material
which was brought to it in its official seclusion. We can
never cease to be ourselves.

His elbow on the desk, his thin legs crossed, and nursing his
cheek in the palm of his meagre hand, the Assistant Commissioner
in charge of the Special Crimes branch was getting hold of the
case with growing interest. His Chief Inspector, if not an
absolutely worthy foeman of his penetration, was at any rate the
most worthy of all within his reach. A mistrust of
established reputations was strictly in character with the
Assistant Commissioner’s ability as detector. His
memory evoked a certain old fat and wealthy native chief in the
distant colony whom it was a tradition for the successive
Colonial Governors to trust and make much of as a firm friend and
supporter of the order and legality established by white men;
whereas, when examined sceptically, he was found out to be
principally his own good friend, and nobody else’s.
Not precisely a traitor, but still a man of many dangerous
reservations in his fidelity, caused by a due regard for his own
advantage, comfort, and safety. A fellow of some innocence
in his naive duplicity, but none the less dangerous. He
took some finding out. He was physically a big man, too,
and (allowing for the difference of colour, of course) Chief
Inspector Heat’s appearance recalled him to the memory of
his superior. It was not the eyes nor yet the lips
exactly. It was bizarre. But does not Alfred Wallace
relate in his famous book on the Malay Archipelago how, amongst
the Aru Islanders, he discovered in an old and naked savage with
a sooty skin a peculiar resemblance to a dear friend at home?

For the first time since he took up his appointment the
Assistant Commissioner felt as if he were going to do some real
work for his salary. And that was a pleasurable
sensation. “I’ll turn him inside out like an
old glove,” thought the Assistant Commissioner, with his
eyes resting pensively upon Chief Inspector Heat.

“No, that was not my thought,” he began
again. “There is no doubt about you knowing your
business—no doubt at all; and that’s precisely why
I—” He stopped short, and changing his tone:
“What could you bring up against Michaelis of a definite
nature? I mean apart from the fact that the two men under
suspicion—you’re certain there were two of
them—came last from a railway station within three miles of
the village where Michaelis is living now.”

“This by itself is enough for us to go upon, sir, with
that sort of man,” said the Chief Inspector, with returning
composure. The slight approving movement of the Assistant
Commissioner’s head went far to pacify the resentful
astonishment of the renowned officer. For Chief Inspector
Heat was a kind man, an excellent husband, a devoted father; and
the public and departmental confidence he enjoyed acting
favourably upon an amiable nature, disposed him to feel friendly
towards the successive Assistant Commissioners he had seen pass
through that very room. There had been three in his
time. The first one, a soldierly, abrupt, red-faced person,
with white eyebrows and an explosive temper, could be managed
with a silken thread. He left on reaching the age
limit. The second, a perfect gentleman, knowing his own and
everybody else’s place to a nicety, on resigning to take up
a higher appointment out of England got decorated for (really)
Inspector Heat’s services. To work with him had been
a pride and a pleasure. The third, a bit of a dark horse
from the first, was at the end of eighteen months something of a
dark horse still to the department. Upon the whole Chief
Inspector Heat believed him to be in the main
harmless—odd-looking, but harmless. He was speaking
now, and the Chief Inspector listened with outward deference
(which means nothing, being a matter of duty) and inwardly with
benevolent toleration.

“Michaelis reported himself before leaving London for
the country?”

“Yes, sir. He did.”

“And what may he be doing there?” continued the
Assistant Commissioner, who was perfectly informed on that
point. Fitted with painful tightness into an old wooden
arm-chair, before a worm-eaten oak table in an upstairs room of a
four-roomed cottage with a roof of moss-grown tiles, Michaelis
was writing night and day in a shaky, slanting hand that
“Autobiography of a Prisoner” which was to be like a
book of Revelation in the history of mankind. The
conditions of confined space, seclusion, and solitude in a small
four-roomed cottage were favourable to his inspiration. It
was like being in prison, except that one was never disturbed for
the odious purpose of taking exercise according to the tyrannical
regulations of his old home in the penitentiary. He could
not tell whether the sun still shone on the earth or not.
The perspiration of the literary labour dropped from his
brow. A delightful enthusiasm urged him on. It was
the liberation of his inner life, the letting out of his soul
into the wide world. And the zeal of his guileless vanity
(first awakened by the offer of five hundred pounds from a
publisher) seemed something predestined and holy.

“It would be, of course, most desirable to be informed
exactly,” insisted the Assistant Commissioner
uncandidly.

Chief Inspector Heat, conscious of renewed irritation at this
display of scrupulousness, said that the county police had been
notified from the first of Michaelis’ arrival, and that a
full report could be obtained in a few hours. A wire to the
superintendent—

Thus he spoke, rather slowly, while his mind seemed already to
be weighing the consequences. A slight knitting of the brow
was the outward sign of this. But he was interrupted by a
question.

“You’ve sent that wire already?”

“No, sir,” he answered, as if surprised.

The Assistant Commissioner uncrossed his legs suddenly.
The briskness of that movement contrasted with the casual way in
which he threw out a suggestion.

“Would you think that Michaelis had anything to do with
the preparation of that bomb, for instance?”

The Chief Inspector assumed a reflective manner.

“I wouldn’t say so. There’s no
necessity to say anything at present. He associates with
men who are classed as dangerous. He was made a delegate of
the Red Committee less than a year after his release on
licence. A sort of compliment, I suppose.”

And the Chief Inspector laughed a little angrily, a little
scornfully. With a man of that sort scrupulousness was a
misplaced and even an illegal sentiment. The celebrity
bestowed upon Michaelis on his release two years ago by some
emotional journalists in want of special copy had rankled ever
since in his breast. It was perfectly legal to arrest that
man on the barest suspicion. It was legal and expedient on
the face of it. His two former chiefs would have seen the
point at once; whereas this one, without saying either yes or no,
sat there, as if lost in a dream. Moreover, besides being
legal and expedient, the arrest of Michaelis solved a little
personal difficulty which worried Chief Inspector Heat
somewhat. This difficulty had its bearing upon his
reputation, upon his comfort, and even upon the efficient
performance of his duties. For, if Michaelis no doubt knew
something about this outrage, the Chief Inspector was fairly
certain that he did not know too much. This was just as
well. He knew much less—the Chief Inspector was
positive—than certain other individuals he had in his mind,
but whose arrest seemed to him inexpedient, besides being a more
complicated matter, on account of the rules of the game.
The rules of the game did not protect so much Michaelis, who was
an ex-convict. It would be stupid not to take advantage of
legal facilities, and the journalists who had written him up with
emotional gush would be ready to write him down with emotional
indignation.

This prospect, viewed with confidence, had the attraction of a
personal triumph for Chief Inspector Heat. And deep down in
his blameless bosom of an average married citizen, almost
unconscious but potent nevertheless, the dislike of being
compelled by events to meddle with the desperate ferocity of the
Professor had its say. This dislike had been strengthened
by the chance meeting in the lane. The encounter did not
leave behind with Chief Inspector Heat that satisfactory sense of
superiority the members of the police force get from the
unofficial but intimate side of their intercourse with the
criminal classes, by which the vanity of power is soothed, and
the vulgar love of domination over our fellow-creatures is
flattered as worthily as it deserves.

The perfect anarchist was not recognised as a fellow-creature
by Chief Inspector Heat. He was impossible—a mad dog
to be left alone. Not that the Chief Inspector was afraid
of him; on the contrary, he meant to have him some day. But
not yet; he meant to get hold of him in his own time, properly
and effectively according to the rules of the game. The
present was not the right time for attempting that feat, not the
right time for many reasons, personal and of public
service. This being the strong feeling of Inspector Heat,
it appeared to him just and proper that this affair should be
shunted off its obscure and inconvenient track, leading goodness
knows where, into a quiet (and lawful) siding called
Michaelis. And he repeated, as if reconsidering the
suggestion conscientiously:

“The bomb. No, I would not say that exactly.
We may never find that out. But it’s clear that he is
connected with this in some way, which we can find out without
much trouble.”

His countenance had that look of grave, overbearing
indifference once well known and much dreaded by the better sort
of thieves. Chief Inspector Heat, though what is called a
man, was not a smiling animal. But his inward state was
that of satisfaction at the passively receptive attitude of the
Assistant Commissioner, who murmured gently:

“And you really think that the investigation should be
made in that direction?”

“I do, sir.”

“Quite convinced?

“I am, sir. That’s the true line for us to
take.”

The Assistant Commissioner withdrew the support of his hand
from his reclining head with a suddenness that, considering his
languid attitude, seemed to menace his whole person with
collapse. But, on the contrary, he sat up, extremely alert,
behind the great writing-table on which his hand had fallen with
the sound of a sharp blow.

“What I want to know is what put it out of your head
till now.”

“Put it out of my head,” repeated the Chief
Inspector very slowly.

“Yes. Till you were called into this
room—you know.”

The Chief Inspector felt as if the air between his clothing
and his skin had become unpleasantly hot. It was the
sensation of an unprecedented and incredible experience.

“Of course,” he said, exaggerating the
deliberation of his utterance to the utmost limits of
possibility, “if there is a reason, of which I know
nothing, for not interfering with the convict Michaelis, perhaps
it’s just as well I didn’t start the county police
after him.”

This took such a long time to say that the unflagging
attention of the Assistant Commissioner seemed a wonderful feat
of endurance. His retort came without delay.

“No reason whatever that I know of. Come, Chief
Inspector, this finessing with me is highly improper on your
part—highly improper. And it’s also unfair, you
know. You shouldn’t leave me to puzzle things out for
myself like this. Really, I am surprised.”

He paused, then added smoothly: “I need scarcely tell
you that this conversation is altogether unofficial.”

These words were far from pacifying the Chief Inspector.
The indignation of a betrayed tight-rope performer was strong
within him. In his pride of a trusted servant he was
affected by the assurance that the rope was not shaken for the
purpose of breaking his neck, as by an exhibition of
impudence. As if anybody were afraid! Assistant
Commissioners come and go, but a valuable Chief Inspector is not
an ephemeral office phenomenon. He was not afraid of
getting a broken neck. To have his performance spoiled was
more than enough to account for the glow of honest
indignation. And as thought is no respecter of persons, the
thought of Chief Inspector Heat took a threatening and prophetic
shape. “You, my boy,” he said to himself,
keeping his round and habitually roving eyes fastened upon the
Assistant Commissioner’s face—“you, my boy, you
don’t know your place, and your place won’t know you
very long either, I bet.”

As if in provoking answer to that thought, something like the
ghost of an amiable smile passed on the lips of the Assistant
Commissioner. His manner was easy and business-like while
he persisted in administering another shake to the tight
rope.

“Let us come now to what you have discovered on the
spot, Chief Inspector,” he said.

“A fool and his job are soon parted,” went on the
train of prophetic thought in Chief Inspector Heat’s
head. But it was immediately followed by the reflection
that a higher official, even when “fired out” (this
was the precise image), has still the time as he flies through
the door to launch a nasty kick at the shin-bones of a
subordinate. Without softening very much the basilisk
nature of his stare, he said impassively:

“We are coming to that part of my investigation,
sir.”

“That’s right. Well, what have you brought
away from it?”

The Chief Inspector, who had made up his mind to jump off the
rope, came to the ground with gloomy frankness.

“I’ve brought away an address,” he said,
pulling out of his pocket without haste a singed rag of dark blue
cloth. “This belongs to the overcoat the fellow who
got himself blown to pieces was wearing. Of course, the
overcoat may not have been his, and may even have been
stolen. But that’s not at all probable if you look at
this.”

The Chief Inspector, stepping up to the table, smoothed out
carefully the rag of blue cloth. He had picked it up from
the repulsive heap in the mortuary, because a tailor’s name
is found sometimes under the collar. It is not often of
much use, but still—He only half expected to find anything
useful, but certainly he did not expect to find—not under
the collar at all, but stitched carefully on the under side of
the lapel—a square piece of calico with an address written
on it in marking ink.

The Chief Inspector removed his smoothing hand.

“I carried it off with me without anybody taking
notice,” he said. “I thought it best. It
can always be produced if required.”

The Assistant Commissioner, rising a little in his chair,
pulled the cloth over to his side of the table. He sat
looking at it in silence. Only the number 32 and the name
of Brett Street were written in marking ink on a piece of calico
slightly larger than an ordinary cigarette paper. He was
genuinely surprised.

“Can’t understand why he should have gone about
labelled like this,” he said, looking up at Chief Inspector
Heat. “It’s a most extraordinary
thing.”

“I met once in the smoking-room of a hotel an old
gentleman who went about with his name and address sewn on in all
his coats in case of an accident or sudden illness,” said
the Chief Inspector. “He professed to be eighty-four
years old, but he didn’t look his age. He told me he
was also afraid of losing his memory suddenly, like those people
he has been reading of in the papers.”

A question from the Assistant Commissioner, who wanted to know
what was No. 32 Brett Street, interrupted that reminiscence
abruptly. The Chief Inspector, driven down to the ground by
unfair artifices, had elected to walk the path of unreserved
openness. If he believed firmly that to know too much was
not good for the department, the judicious holding back of
knowledge was as far as his loyalty dared to go for the good of
the service. If the Assistant Commissioner wanted to
mismanage this affair nothing, of course, could prevent
him. But, on his own part, he now saw no reason for a
display of alacrity. So he answered concisely:

“It’s a shop, sir.”

The Assistant Commissioner, with his eyes lowered on the rag
of blue cloth, waited for more information. As that did not
come he proceeded to obtain it by a series of questions
propounded with gentle patience. Thus he acquired an idea
of the nature of Mr Verloc’s commerce, of his personal
appearance, and heard at last his name. In a pause the
Assistant Commissioner raised his eyes, and discovered some
animation on the Chief Inspector’s face. They looked
at each other in silence.

“Of course,” said the latter, “the
department has no record of that man.”

“Did any of my predecessors have any knowledge of what
you have told me now?” asked the Assistant Commissioner,
putting his elbows on the table and raising his joined hands
before his face, as if about to offer prayer, only that his eyes
had not a pious expression.

“No, sir; certainly not. What would have been the
object? That sort of man could never be produced publicly
to any good purpose. It was sufficient for me to know who
he was, and to make use of him in a way that could be used
publicly.”

“And do you think that sort of private knowledge
consistent with the official position you occupy?”

“Perfectly, sir. I think it’s quite
proper. I will take the liberty to tell you, sir, that it
makes me what I am—and I am looked upon as a man who knows
his work. It’s a private affair of my own. A
personal friend of mine in the French police gave me the hint
that the fellow was an Embassy spy. Private friendship,
private information, private use of it—that’s how I
look upon it.”

The Assistant Commissioner after remarking to himself that the
mental state of the renowned Chief Inspector seemed to affect the
outline of his lower jaw, as if the lively sense of his high
professional distinction had been located in that part of his
anatomy, dismissed the point for the moment with a calm “I
see.” Then leaning his cheek on his joined hands:

“Well then—speaking privately if you
like—how long have you been in private touch with this
Embassy spy?”

To this inquiry the private answer of the Chief Inspector, so
private that it was never shaped into audible words, was:

“Long before you were even thought of for your place
here.”

The so-to-speak public utterance was much more precise.

“I saw him for the first time in my life a little more
than seven years ago, when two Imperial Highnesses and the
Imperial Chancellor were on a visit here. I was put in
charge of all the arrangements for looking after them.
Baron Stott-Wartenheim was Ambassador then. He was a very
nervous old gentleman. One evening, three days before the
Guildhall Banquet, he sent word that he wanted to see me for a
moment. I was downstairs, and the carriages were at the
door to take the Imperial Highnesses and the Chancellor to the
opera. I went up at once. I found the Baron walking
up and down his bedroom in a pitiable state of distress,
squeezing his hands together. He assured me he had the
fullest confidence in our police and in my abilities, but he had
there a man just come over from Paris whose information could be
trusted implicity. He wanted me to hear what that man had
to say. He took me at once into a dressing-room next door,
where I saw a big fellow in a heavy overcoat sitting all alone on
a chair, and holding his hat and stick in one hand. The
Baron said to him in French ‘Speak, my friend.’
The light in that room was not very good. I talked with him
for some five minutes perhaps. He certainly gave me a piece
of very startling news. Then the Baron took me aside
nervously to praise him up to me, and when I turned round again I
discovered that the fellow had vanished like a ghost. Got
up and sneaked out down some back stairs, I suppose. There
was no time to run after him, as I had to hurry off after the
Ambassador down the great staircase, and see the party started
safe for the opera. However, I acted upon the information
that very night. Whether it was perfectly correct or not,
it did look serious enough. Very likely it saved us from an
ugly trouble on the day of the Imperial visit to the City.

“Some time later, a month or so after my promotion to
Chief Inspector, my attention was attracted to a big burly man, I
thought I had seen somewhere before, coming out in a hurry from a
jeweller’s shop in the Strand. I went after him, as
it was on my way towards Charing Cross, and there seeing one of
our detectives across the road, I beckoned him over, and pointed
out the fellow to him, with instructions to watch his movements
for a couple of days, and then report to me. No later than
next afternoon my man turned up to tell me that the fellow had
married his landlady’s daughter at a registrar’s
office that very day at 11.30 a.m., and had gone off with her to
Margate for a week. Our man had seen the luggage being put
on the cab. There were some old Paris labels on one of the
bags. Somehow I couldn’t get the fellow out of my
head, and the very next time I had to go to Paris on service I
spoke about him to that friend of mine in the Paris police.
My friend said: ‘From what you tell me I think you must
mean a rather well-known hanger-on and emissary of the
Revolutionary Red Committee. He says he is an Englishman by
birth. We have an idea that he has been for a good few
years now a secret agent of one of the foreign Embassies in
London.’ This woke up my memory completely. He
was the vanishing fellow I saw sitting on a chair in Baron
Stott-Wartenheim’s bathroom. I told my friend that he
was quite right. The fellow was a secret agent to my
certain knowledge. Afterwards my friend took the trouble to
ferret out the complete record of that man for me. I
thought I had better know all there was to know; but I
don’t suppose you want to hear his history now,
sir?”

The Assistant Commissioner shook his supported head.
“The history of your relations with that useful personage
is the only thing that matters just now,” he said, closing
slowly his weary, deep-set eyes, and then opening them swiftly
with a greatly refreshed glance.

“There’s nothing official about them,” said
the Chief Inspector bitterly. “I went into his shop
one evening, told him who I was, and reminded him of our first
meeting. He didn’t as much as twitch an
eyebrow. He said that he was married and settled now, and
that all he wanted was not to be interfered in his little
business. I took it upon myself to promise him that, as
long as he didn’t go in for anything obviously outrageous,
he would be left alone by the police. That was worth
something to him, because a word from us to the Custom-House
people would have been enough to get some of these packages he
gets from Paris and Brussels opened in Dover, with confiscation
to follow for certain, and perhaps a prosecution as well at the
end of it.”

“That’s a very precarious trade,” murmured
the Assistant Commissioner. “Why did he go in for
that?”

The Chief Inspector raised scornful eyebrows
dispassionately.

“Most likely got a connection—friends on the
Continent—amongst people who deal in such wares. They
would be just the sort he would consort with. He’s a
lazy dog, too—like the rest of them.”

“What do you get from him in exchange for your
protection?”

The Chief Inspector was not inclined to enlarge on the value
of Mr Verloc’s services.

“He would not be much good to anybody but myself.
One has got to know a good deal beforehand to make use of a man
like that. I can understand the sort of hint he can
give. And when I want a hint he can generally furnish it to
me.”

The Chief Inspector lost himself suddenly in a discreet
reflective mood; and the Assistant Commissioner repressed a smile
at the fleeting thought that the reputation of Chief Inspector
Heat might possibly have been made in a great part by the Secret
Agent Verloc.

“In a more general way of being of use, all our men of
the Special Crimes section on duty at Charing Cross and Victoria
have orders to take careful notice of anybody they may see with
him. He meets the new arrivals frequently, and afterwards
keeps track of them. He seems to have been told off for
that sort of duty. When I want an address in a hurry, I can
always get it from him. Of course, I know how to manage our
relations. I haven’t seen him to speak to three times
in the last two years. I drop him a line, unsigned, and he
answers me in the same way at my private address.”

From time to time the Assistant Commissioner gave an almost
imperceptible nod. The Chief Inspector added that he did
not suppose Mr Verloc to be deep in the confidence of the
prominent members of the Revolutionary International Council, but
that he was generally trusted of that there could be no
doubt. “Whenever I’ve had reason to think there
was something in the wind,” he concluded, “I’ve
always found he could tell me something worth knowing.”

The Assistant Commissioner made a significant remark.

“He failed you this time.”

“Neither had I wind of anything in any other way,”
retorted Chief Inspector Heat. “I asked him nothing,
so he could tell me nothing. He isn’t one of our
men. It isn’t as if he were in our pay.”

“No,” muttered the Assistant Commissioner.
“He’s a spy in the pay of a foreign government.
We could never confess to him.”

“I must do my work in my own way,” declared the
Chief Inspector. “When it comes to that I would deal
with the devil himself, and take the consequences. There
are things not fit for everybody to know.”

“Your idea of secrecy seems to consist in keeping the
chief of your department in the dark. That’s
stretching it perhaps a little too far, isn’t it? He
lives over his shop?”

“Who—Verloc? Oh yes. He lives over his
shop. The wife’s mother, I fancy, lives with
them.”

“Is the house watched?”

“Oh dear, no. It wouldn’t do. Certain
people who come there are watched. My opinion is that he
knows nothing of this affair.”

“How do you account for this?” The Assistant
Commissioner nodded at the cloth rag lying before him on the
table.

“I don’t account for it at all, sir.
It’s simply unaccountable. It can’t be
explained by what I know.” The Chief Inspector made
those admissions with the frankness of a man whose reputation is
established as if on a rock. “At any rate not at this
present moment. I think that the man who had most to do
with it will turn out to be Michaelis.”

“You do?”

“Yes, sir; because I can answer for all the
others.”

“What about that other man supposed to have escaped from
the park?”

“I should think he’s far away by this time,”
opined the Chief Inspector.

The Assistant Commissioner looked hard at him, and rose
suddenly, as though having made up his mind to some course of
action. As a matter of fact, he had that very moment
succumbed to a fascinating temptation. The Chief Inspector
heard himself dismissed with instructions to meet his superior
early next morning for further consultation upon the case.
He listened with an impenetrable face, and walked out of the room
with measured steps.

Whatever might have been the plans of the Assistant
Commissioner they had nothing to do with that desk work, which
was the bane of his existence because of its confined nature and
apparent lack of reality. It could not have had, or else
the general air of alacrity that came upon the Assistant
Commissioner would have been inexplicable. As soon as he
was left alone he looked for his hat impulsively, and put it on
his head. Having done that, he sat down again to reconsider
the whole matter. But as his mind was already made up, this
did not take long. And before Chief Inspector Heat had gone
very far on the way home, he also left the building.

CHAPTER VII

The Assistant Commissioner walked along a short and narrow
street like a wet, muddy trench, then crossing a very broad
thoroughfare entered a public edifice, and sought speech with a
young private secretary (unpaid) of a great personage.

This fair, smooth-faced young man, whose symmetrically
arranged hair gave him the air of a large and neat schoolboy, met
the Assistant Commissioner’s request with a doubtful look,
and spoke with bated breath.

“Would he see you? I don’t know about
that. He has walked over from the House an hour ago to talk
with the permanent Under-Secretary, and now he’s ready to
walk back again. He might have sent for him; but he does it
for the sake of a little exercise, I suppose. It’s
all the exercise he can find time for while this session
lasts. I don’t complain; I rather enjoy these little
strolls. He leans on my arm, and doesn’t open his
lips. But, I say, he’s very tired,
and—well—not in the sweetest of tempers just
now.”

“It’s in connection with that Greenwich
affair.”

“Oh! I say! He’s very bitter against
you people. But I will go and see, if you
insist.”

“Do. That’s a good fellow,” said the
Assistant Commissioner.

The unpaid secretary admired this pluck. Composing for
himself an innocent face, he opened a door, and went in with the
assurance of a nice and privileged child. And presently he
reappeared, with a nod to the Assistant Commissioner, who passing
through the same door left open for him, found himself with the
great personage in a large room.

Vast in bulk and stature, with a long white face, which,
broadened at the base by a big double chin, appeared egg-shaped
in the fringe of thin greyish whisker, the great personage seemed
an expanding man. Unfortunate from a tailoring point of
view, the cross-folds in the middle of a buttoned black coat
added to the impression, as if the fastenings of the garment were
tried to the utmost. From the head, set upward on a thick
neck, the eyes, with puffy lower lids, stared with a haughty
droop on each side of a hooked aggressive nose, nobly salient in
the vast pale circumference of the face. A shiny silk hat
and a pair of worn gloves lying ready on the end of a long table
looked expanded too, enormous.

He stood on the hearthrug in big, roomy boots, and uttered no
word of greeting.

“I would like to know if this is the beginning of
another dynamite campaign,” he asked at once in a deep,
very smooth voice. “Don’t go into
details. I have no time for that.”

The Assistant Commissioner’s figure before this big and
rustic Presence had the frail slenderness of a reed addressing
an oak. And indeed the unbroken record of that man’s
descent surpassed in the number of centuries the age of the
oldest oak in the country.

“No. As far as one can be positive about anything
I can assure you that it is not.”

“Yes. But your idea of assurances over
there,” said the great man, with a contemptuous wave of his
hand towards a window giving on the broad thoroughfare,
“seems to consist mainly in making the Secretary of State
look a fool. I have been told positively in this very room
less than a month ago that nothing of the sort was even
possible.”

The Assistant Commissioner glanced in the direction of the
window calmly.

“You will allow me to remark, Sir Ethelred, that so far
I have had no opportunity to give you assurances of any
kind.”

The haughty droop of the eyes was focussed now upon the
Assistant Commissioner.

“True,” confessed the deep, smooth voice.
“I sent for Heat. You are still rather a novice in
your new berth. And how are you getting on over
there?”

“I believe I am learning something every day.”

“Of course, of course. I hope you will get
on.”

“Thank you, Sir Ethelred. I’ve learned
something to-day, and even within the last hour or so.
There is much in this affair of a kind that does not meet the eye
in a usual anarchist outrage, even if one looked into it as deep
as can be. That’s why I am here.”

The great man put his arms akimbo, the backs of his big hands
resting on his hips.

“Very well. Go on. Only no details,
pray. Spare me the details.”

“You shall not be troubled with them, Sir
Ethelred,” the Assistant Commissioner began, with a calm
and untroubled assurance. While he was speaking the hands
on the face of the clock behind the great man’s
back—a heavy, glistening affair of massive scrolls in the
same dark marble as the mantelpiece, and with a ghostly,
evanescent tick—had moved through the space of seven
minutes. He spoke with a studious fidelity to a
parenthetical manner, into which every little fact—that is,
every detail—fitted with delightful ease. Not a
murmur nor even a movement hinted at interruption. The
great Personage might have been the statue of one of his own
princely ancestors stripped of a crusader’s war harness,
and put into an ill-fitting frock coat. The Assistant
Commissioner felt as though he were at liberty to talk for an
hour. But he kept his head, and at the end of the time
mentioned above he broke off with a sudden conclusion, which,
reproducing the opening statement, pleasantly surprised Sir
Ethelred by its apparent swiftness and force.

“The kind of thing which meets us under the surface of
this affair, otherwise without gravity, is unusual—in this
precise form at least—and requires special
treatment.”

The tone of Sir Ethelred was deepened, full of conviction.

“I should think so—involving the Ambassador of a
foreign power!”

“Oh! The Ambassador!” protested the other,
erect and slender, allowing himself a mere half smile.
“It would be stupid of me to advance anything of the
kind. And it is absolutely unnecessary, because if I am
right in my surmises, whether ambassador or hall porter
it’s a mere detail.”

Sir Ethelred opened a wide mouth, like a cavern, into which
the hooked nose seemed anxious to peer; there came from it a
subdued rolling sound, as from a distant organ with the scornful
indignation stop.

“No! These people are too impossible. What
do they mean by importing their methods of Crim-Tartary
here? A Turk would have more decency.”

“You forget, Sir Ethelred, that strictly speaking we
know nothing positively—as yet.”

“No! But how would you define it?
Shortly?”

“Barefaced audacity amounting to childishness of a
peculiar sort.”

“We can’t put up with the innocence of nasty
little children,” said the great and expanded personage,
expanding a little more, as it were. The haughty drooping
glance struck crushingly the carpet at the Assistant
Commissioner’s feet. “They’ll have to get
a hard rap on the knuckles over this affair. We must be in
a position to—What is your general idea, stated
shortly? No need to go into details.”

“No, Sir Ethelred. In principle, I should lay it
down that the existence of secret agents should not be tolerated,
as tending to augment the positive dangers of the evil against
which they are used. That the spy will fabricate his
information is a mere commonplace. But in the sphere of
political and revolutionary action, relying partly on violence,
the professional spy has every facility to fabricate the very
facts themselves, and will spread the double evil of emulation in
one direction, and of panic, hasty legislation, unreflecting
hate, on the other. However, this is an imperfect
world—”

The deep-voiced Presence on the hearthrug, motionless, with
big elbows stuck out, said hastily:

“Be lucid, please.”

“Yes, Sir Ethelred—An imperfect world.
Therefore directly the character of this affair suggested itself
to me, I thought it should be dealt with with special secrecy,
and ventured to come over here.”

“That’s right,” approved the great
Personage, glancing down complacently over his double chin.
“I am glad there’s somebody over at your shop who
thinks that the Secretary of State may be trusted now and
then.”

The Assistant Commissioner had an amused smile.

“I was really thinking that it might be better at this
stage for Heat to be replaced by—”

“What! Heat? An ass—eh?”
exclaimed the great man, with distinct animosity.

“Not at all. Pray, Sir Ethelred, don’t put
that unjust interpretation on my remarks.”

“Then what? Too clever by half?”

“Neither—at least not as a rule. All the
grounds of my surmises I have from him. The only thing
I’ve discovered by myself is that he has been making use of
that man privately. Who could blame him? He’s
an old police hand. He told me virtually that he must have
tools to work with. It occurred to me that this tool should
be surrendered to the Special Crimes division as a whole, instead
of remaining the private property of Chief Inspector Heat.
I extend my conception of our departmental duties to the
suppression of the secret agent. But Chief Inspector Heat
is an old departmental hand. He would accuse me of
perverting its morality and attacking its efficiency. He
would define it bitterly as protection extended to the criminal
class of revolutionists. It would mean just that to
him.”

“Yes. But what do you mean?”

“I mean to say, first, that there’s but poor
comfort in being able to declare that any given act of
violence—damaging property or destroying life—is not
the work of anarchism at all, but of something else
altogether—some species of authorised scoundrelism.
This, I fancy, is much more frequent than we suppose. Next,
it’s obvious that the existence of these people in the pay
of foreign governments destroys in a measure the efficiency of
our supervision. A spy of that sort can afford to be more
reckless than the most reckless of conspirators. His
occupation is free from all restraint. He’s without
as much faith as is necessary for complete negation, and without
that much law as is implied in lawlessness. Thirdly, the
existence of these spies amongst the revolutionary groups, which
we are reproached for harbouring here, does away with all
certitude. You have received a reassuring statement from
Chief Inspector Heat some time ago. It was by no means
groundless—and yet this episode happens. I call it an
episode, because this affair, I make bold to say, is episodic; it
is no part of any general scheme, however wild. The very
peculiarities which surprise and perplex Chief Inspector Heat
establish its character in my eyes. I am keeping clear of
details, Sir Ethelred.”

The Personage on the hearthrug had been listening with
profound attention.

“Just so. Be as concise as you can.”

The Assistant Commissioner intimated by an earnest deferential
gesture that he was anxious to be concise.

“There is a peculiar stupidity and feebleness in the
conduct of this affair which gives me excellent hopes of getting
behind it and finding there something else than an individual
freak of fanaticism. For it is a planned thing,
undoubtedly. The actual perpetrator seems to have been led
by the hand to the spot, and then abandoned hurriedly to his own
devices. The inference is that he was imported from abroad
for the purpose of committing this outrage. At the same
time one is forced to the conclusion that he did not know enough
English to ask his way, unless one were to accept the fantastic
theory that he was a deaf mute. I wonder now—But this
is idle. He has destroyed himself by an accident,
obviously. Not an extraordinary accident. But an
extraordinary little fact remains: the address on his clothing
discovered by the merest accident, too. It is an incredible
little fact, so incredible that the explanation which will
account for it is bound to touch the bottom of this affair.
Instead of instructing Heat to go on with this case, my intention
is to seek this explanation personally—by myself, I
mean—where it may be picked up. That is in a certain
shop in Brett Street, and on the lips of a certain secret agent
once upon a time the confidential and trusted spy of the late
Baron Stott-Wartenheim, Ambassador of a Great Power to the Court
of St James.”

The Assistant Commissioner paused, then added: “Those
fellows are a perfect pest.” In order to raise his
drooping glance to the speaker’s face, the Personage on the
hearthrug had gradually tilted his head farther back, which gave
him an aspect of extraordinary haughtiness.

“Why not leave it to Heat?”

“Because he is an old departmental hand. They have
their own morality. My line of inquiry would appear to him
an awful perversion of duty. For him the plain duty is to
fasten the guilt upon as many prominent anarchists as he can on
some slight indications he had picked up in the course of his
investigation on the spot; whereas I, he would say, am bent upon
vindicating their innocence. I am trying to be as lucid as
I can in presenting this obscure matter to you without
details.”

“He would, would he?” muttered the proud head of
Sir Ethelred from its lofty elevation.

“I am afraid so—with an indignation and disgust of
which you or I can have no idea. He’s an excellent
servant. We must not put an undue strain on his
loyalty. That’s always a mistake. Besides, I
want a free hand—a freer hand than it would be perhaps
advisable to give Chief Inspector Heat. I haven’t the
slightest wish to spare this man Verloc. He will, I
imagine, be extremely startled to find his connection with this
affair, whatever it may be, brought home to him so quickly.
Frightening him will not be very difficult. But our true
objective lies behind him somewhere. I want your authority
to give him such assurances of personal safety as I may think
proper.”

“Certainly,” said the Personage on the
hearthrug. “Find out as much as you can; find it out
in your own way.”

“I must set about it without loss of time, this very
evening,” said the Assistant Commissioner.

Sir Ethelred shifted one hand under his coat tails, and
tilting back his head, looked at him steadily.

“We’ll have a late sitting to-night,” he
said. “Come to the House with your discoveries if we
are not gone home. I’ll warn Toodles to look out for
you. He’ll take you into my room.”

The numerous family and the wide connections of the
youthful-looking Private Secretary cherished for him the hope of
an austere and exalted destiny. Meantime the social sphere
he adorned in his hours of idleness chose to pet him under the
above nickname. And Sir Ethelred, hearing it on the lips of
his wife and girls every day (mostly at breakfast-time), had
conferred upon it the dignity of unsmiling adoption.

The Assistant Commissioner was surprised and gratified
extremely.

“I shall certainly bring my discoveries to the House on
the chance of you having the time to—”

“I won’t have the time,” interrupted the
great Personage. “But I will see you. I
haven’t the time now—And you are going
yourself?”

“Yes, Sir Ethelred. I think it the best
way.”

The Personage had tilted his head so far back that, in order
to keep the Assistant Commissioner under his observation, he had
to nearly close his eyes.

“H’m. Ha! And how do you
propose—Will you assume a disguise?”

“Hardly a disguise! I’ll change my clothes,
of course.”

“Of course,” repeated the great man, with a sort
of absent-minded loftiness. He turned his big head slowly,
and over his shoulder gave a haughty oblique stare to the
ponderous marble timepiece with the sly, feeble tick. The
gilt hands had taken the opportunity to steal through no less
than five and twenty minutes behind his back.

The Assistant Commissioner, who could not see them, grew a
little nervous in the interval. But the great man presented
to him a calm and undismayed face.

“Very well,” he said, and paused, as if in
deliberate contempt of the official clock. “But what
first put you in motion in this direction?”

“I have been always of opinion,” began the
Assistant Commissioner.

“Ah. Yes! Opinion. That’s of
course. But the immediate motive?”

“What shall I say, Sir Ethelred? A new man’s
antagonism to old methods. A desire to know something at
first hand. Some impatience. It’s my old work,
but the harness is different. It has been chafing me a
little in one or two tender places.”

“I hope you’ll get on over there,” said the
great man kindly, extending his hand, soft to the touch, but
broad and powerful like the hand of a glorified farmer. The
Assistant Commissioner shook it, and withdrew.

In the outer room Toodles, who had been waiting perched on the
edge of a table, advanced to meet him, subduing his natural
buoyancy.

“Well? Satisfactory?” he asked, with airy
importance.

“Perfectly. You’ve earned my undying
gratitude,” answered the Assistant Commissioner, whose long
face looked wooden in contrast with the peculiar character of the
other’s gravity, which seemed perpetually ready to break
into ripples and chuckles.

“That’s all right. But seriously, you
can’t imagine how irritated he is by the attacks on his
Bill for the Nationalisation of Fisheries. They call it the
beginning of social revolution. Of course, it is a
revolutionary measure. But these fellows have no
decency. The personal attacks—”

“I read the papers,” remarked the Assistant
Commissioner.

“Odious? Eh? And you have no notion what a
mass of work he has got to get through every day. He does
it all himself. Seems unable to trust anyone with these
Fisheries.”

“And yet he’s given a whole half hour to the
consideration of my very small sprat,” interjected the
Assistant Commissioner.

“Small! Is it? I’m glad to hear
that. But it’s a pity you didn’t keep away,
then. This fight takes it out of him frightfully. The
man’s getting exhausted. I feel it by the way he
leans on my arm as we walk over. And, I say, is he safe in
the streets? Mullins has been marching his men up here this
afternoon. There’s a constable stuck by every
lamp-post, and every second person we meet between this and
Palace Yard is an obvious ‘tec.’ It will get on
his nerves presently. I say, these foreign scoundrels
aren’t likely to throw something at him—are
they? It would be a national calamity. The country
can’t spare him.”

“Not to mention yourself. He leans on your
arm,” suggested the Assistant Commissioner soberly.
“You would both go.”

“It would be an easy way for a young man to go down into
history? Not so many British Ministers have been
assassinated as to make it a minor incident. But seriously
now—”

“I am afraid that if you want to go down into history
you’ll have to do something for it. Seriously,
there’s no danger whatever for both of you but from
overwork.”

The sympathetic Toodles welcomed this opening for a
chuckle.

“The Fisheries won’t kill me. I am used to
late hours,” he declared, with ingenuous levity. But,
feeling an instant compunction, he began to assume an air of
statesman-like moodiness, as one draws on a glove.
“His massive intellect will stand any amount of work.
It’s his nerves that I am afraid of. The reactionary
gang, with that abusive brute Cheeseman at their head, insult him
every night.”

“If he will insist on beginning a revolution!”
murmured the Assistant Commissioner.

“The time has come, and he is the only man great enough
for the work,” protested the revolutionary Toodles, flaring
up under the calm, speculative gaze of the Assistant
Commissioner. Somewhere in a corridor a distant bell
tinkled urgently, and with devoted vigilance the young man
pricked up his ears at the sound. “He’s ready
to go now,” he exclaimed in a whisper, snatched up his hat,
and vanished from the room.

The Assistant Commissioner went out by another door in a less
elastic manner. Again he crossed the wide thoroughfare,
walked along a narrow street, and re-entered hastily his own
departmental buildings. He kept up this accelerated pace to
the door of his private room. Before he had closed it
fairly his eyes sought his desk. He stood still for a
moment, then walked up, looked all round on the floor, sat down
in his chair, rang a bell, and waited.

“Chief Inspector Heat gone yet?”

“Yes, sir. Went away half-an-hour ago.”

He nodded. “That will do.” And sitting
still, with his hat pushed off his forehead, he thought that it
was just like Heat’s confounded cheek to carry off quietly
the only piece of material evidence. But he thought this
without animosity. Old and valued servants will take
liberties. The piece of overcoat with the address sewn on
was certainly not a thing to leave about. Dismissing from
his mind this manifestation of Chief Inspector Heat’s
mistrust, he wrote and despatched a note to his wife, charging
her to make his apologies to Michaelis’ great lady, with
whom they were engaged to dine that evening.

The short jacket and the low, round hat he assumed in a sort
of curtained alcove containing a washstand, a row of wooden pegs
and a shelf, brought out wonderfully the length of his grave,
brown face. He stepped back into the full light of the
room, looking like the vision of a cool, reflective Don Quixote,
with the sunken eyes of a dark enthusiast and a very deliberate
manner. He left the scene of his daily labours quickly like
an unobtrusive shadow. His descent into the street was like
the descent into a slimy aquarium from which the water had been
run off. A murky, gloomy dampness enveloped him. The
walls of the houses were wet, the mud of the roadway glistened
with an effect of phosphorescence, and when he emerged into the
Strand out of a narrow street by the side of Charing Cross
Station the genius of the locality assimilated him. He
might have been but one more of the queer foreign fish that can
be seen of an evening about there flitting round the dark
corners.

He came to a stand on the very edge of the pavement, and
waited. His exercised eyes had made out in the confused
movements of lights and shadows thronging the roadway the
crawling approach of a hansom. He gave no sign; but when
the low step gliding along the curbstone came to his feet he
dodged in skilfully in front of the big turning wheel, and spoke
up through the little trap door almost before the man gazing
supinely ahead from his perch was aware of having been boarded by
a fare.

It was not a long drive. It ended by signal abruptly,
nowhere in particular, between two lamp-posts before a large
drapery establishment—a long range of shops already lapped
up in sheets of corrugated iron for the night. Tendering a
coin through the trap door the fare slipped out and away, leaving
an effect of uncanny, eccentric ghastliness upon the
driver’s mind. But the size of the coin was
satisfactory to his touch, and his education not being literary,
he remained untroubled by the fear of finding it presently turned
to a dead leaf in his pocket. Raised above the world of
fares by the nature of his calling, he contemplated their actions
with a limited interest. The sharp pulling of his horse
right round expressed his philosophy.

Meantime the Assistant Commissioner was already giving his
order to a waiter in a little Italian restaurant round the
corner—one of those traps for the hungry, long and narrow,
baited with a perspective of mirrors and white napery; without
air, but with an atmosphere of their own—an atmosphere of
fraudulent cookery mocking an abject mankind in the most pressing
of its miserable necessities. In this immoral atmosphere
the Assistant Commissioner, reflecting upon his enterprise,
seemed to lose some more of his identity. He had a sense of
loneliness, of evil freedom. It was rather pleasant.
When, after paying for his short meal, he stood up and waited for
his change, he saw himself in the sheet of glass, and was struck
by his foreign appearance. He contemplated his own image
with a melancholy and inquisitive gaze, then by sudden
inspiration raised the collar of his jacket. This
arrangement appeared to him commendable, and he completed it by
giving an upward twist to the ends of his black moustache.
He was satisfied by the subtle modification of his personal
aspect caused by these small changes. “That’ll
do very well,” he thought. “I’ll get a
little wet, a little splashed—”

He became aware of the waiter at his elbow and of a small pile
of silver coins on the edge of the table before him. The
waiter kept one eye on it, while his other eye followed the long
back of a tall, not very young girl, who passed up to a distant
table looking perfectly sightless and altogether
unapproachable. She seemed to be a habitual customer.

On going out the Assistant Commissioner made to himself the
observation that the patrons of the place had lost in the
frequentation of fraudulent cookery all their national and
private characteristics. And this was strange, since the
Italian restaurant is such a peculiarly British
institution. But these people were as denationalised as the
dishes set before them with every circumstance of unstamped
respectability. Neither was their personality stamped in
any way, professionally, socially or racially. They seemed
created for the Italian restaurant, unless the Italian restaurant
had been perchance created for them. But that last
hypothesis was unthinkable, since one could not place them
anywhere outside those special establishments. One never
met these enigmatical persons elsewhere. It was impossible
to form a precise idea what occupations they followed by day and
where they went to bed at night. And he himself had become
unplaced. It would have been impossible for anybody to
guess his occupation. As to going to bed, there was a doubt
even in his own mind. Not indeed in regard to his domicile
itself, but very much so in respect of the time when he would be
able to return there. A pleasurable feeling of independence
possessed him when he heard the glass doors swing to behind his
back with a sort of imperfect baffled thud. He advanced at
once into an immensity of greasy slime and damp plaster
interspersed with lamps, and enveloped, oppressed, penetrated,
choked, and suffocated by the blackness of a wet London night,
which is composed of soot and drops of water.

Brett Street was not very far away. It branched off,
narrow, from the side of an open triangular space surrounded by
dark and mysterious houses, temples of petty commerce emptied of
traders for the night. Only a fruiterer’s stall at
the corner made a violent blaze of light and colour. Beyond
all was black, and the few people passing in that direction
vanished at one stride beyond the glowing heaps of oranges and
lemons. No footsteps echoed. They would never be
heard of again. The adventurous head of the Special Crimes
Department watched these disappearances from a distance with an
interested eye. He felt light-hearted, as though he had
been ambushed all alone in a jungle many thousands of miles away
from departmental desks and official inkstands. This
joyousness and dispersion of thought before a task of some
importance seems to prove that this world of ours is not such a
very serious affair after all. For the Assistant
Commissioner was not constitutionally inclined to levity.

The policeman on the beat projected his sombre and moving form
against the luminous glory of oranges and lemons, and entered
Brett Street without haste. The Assistant Commissioner, as
though he were a member of the criminal classes, lingered out of
sight, awaiting his return. But this constable seemed to be
lost for ever to the force. He never returned: must have
gone out at the other end of Brett Street.

The Assistant Commissioner, reaching this conclusion, entered
the street in his turn, and came upon a large van arrested in
front of the dimly lit window-panes of a carter’s
eating-house. The man was refreshing himself inside, and
the horses, their big heads lowered to the ground, fed out of
nose-bags steadily. Farther on, on the opposite side of the
street, another suspect patch of dim light issued from Mr
Verloc’s shop front, hung with papers, heaving with vague
piles of cardboard boxes and the shapes of books. The
Assistant Commissioner stood observing it across the
roadway. There could be no mistake. By the side of
the front window, encumbered by the shadows of nondescript
things, the door, standing ajar, let escape on the pavement a
narrow, clear streak of gas-light within.

Behind the Assistant Commissioner the van and horses, merged
into one mass, seemed something alive—a square-backed black
monster blocking half the street, with sudden iron-shod
stampings, fierce jingles, and heavy, blowing sighs. The
harshly festive, ill-omened glare of a large and prosperous
public-house faced the other end of Brett Street across a wide
road. This barrier of blazing lights, opposing the shadows
gathered about the humble abode of Mr Verloc’s domestic
happiness, seemed to drive the obscurity of the street back upon
itself, make it more sullen, brooding, and sinister.

CHAPTER VIII

Having infused by persistent importunities some sort of heat
into the chilly interest of several licensed victuallers (the
acquaintances once upon a time of her late unlucky husband), Mrs
Verloc’s mother had at last secured her admission to
certain almshouses founded by a wealthy innkeeper for the
destitute widows of the trade.

This end, conceived in the astuteness of her uneasy heart, the
old woman had pursued with secrecy and determination. That
was the time when her daughter Winnie could not help passing a
remark to Mr Verloc that “mother has been spending
half-crowns and five shillings almost every day this last week in
cab fares.” But the remark was not made
grudgingly. Winnie respected her mother’s
infirmities. She was only a little surprised at this sudden
mania for locomotion. Mr Verloc, who was sufficiently
magnificent in his way, had grunted the remark impatiently aside
as interfering with his meditations. These were frequent,
deep, and prolonged; they bore upon a matter more important than
five shillings. Distinctly more important, and beyond all
comparison more difficult to consider in all its aspects with
philosophical serenity.

Her object attained in astute secrecy, the heroic old woman
had made a clean breast of it to Mrs Verloc. Her soul was
triumphant and her heart tremulous. Inwardly she quaked,
because she dreaded and admired the calm, self-contained
character of her daughter Winnie, whose displeasure was made
redoubtable by a diversity of dreadful silences. But she
did not allow her inward apprehensions to rob her of the
advantage of venerable placidity conferred upon her outward
person by her triple chin, the floating ampleness of her ancient
form, and the impotent condition of her legs.

The shock of the information was so unexpected that Mrs
Verloc, against her usual practice when addressed, interrupted
the domestic occupation she was engaged upon. It was the
dusting of the furniture in the parlour behind the shop.
She turned her head towards her mother.

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

The shock must have been severe to make her depart from that
distant and uninquiring acceptance of facts which was her force
and her safeguard in life.

“Weren’t you made comfortable enough
here?”

She had lapsed into these inquiries, but next moment she saved
the consistency of her conduct by resuming her dusting, while the
old woman sat scared and dumb under her dingy white cap and
lustreless dark wig.

Winnie finished the chair, and ran the duster along the
mahogany at the back of the horse-hair sofa on which Mr Verloc
loved to take his ease in hat and overcoat. She was intent
on her work, but presently she permitted herself another
question.

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

As not affecting the inwardness of things, which it was Mrs
Verloc’s principle to ignore, this curiosity was
excusable. It bore merely on the methods. The old
woman welcomed it eagerly as bringing forward something that
could be talked about with much sincerity.

She favoured her daughter by an exhaustive answer, full of
names and enriched by side comments upon the ravages of time as
observed in the alteration of human countenances. The names
were principally the names of licensed
victuallers—“poor daddy’s friends, my
dear.” She enlarged with special appreciation on the
kindness and condescension of a large brewer, a Baronet and an M.
P., the Chairman of the Governors of the Charity. She
expressed herself thus warmly because she had been allowed to
interview by appointment his Private Secretary—“a
very polite gentleman, all in black, with a gentle, sad voice,
but so very, very thin and quiet. He was like a shadow, my
dear.”

Winnie, prolonging her dusting operations till the tale was
told to the end, walked out of the parlour into the kitchen (down
two steps) in her usual manner, without the slightest
comment.

Shedding a few tears in sign of rejoicing at her
daughter’s mansuetude in this terrible affair, Mrs
Verloc’s mother gave play to her astuteness in the
direction of her furniture, because it was her own; and sometimes
she wished it hadn’t been. Heroism is all very well,
but there are circumstances when the disposal of a few tables and
chairs, brass bedsteads, and so on, may be big with remote and
disastrous consequences. She required a few pieces herself,
the Foundation which, after many importunities, had gathered her
to its charitable breast, giving nothing but bare planks and
cheaply papered bricks to the objects of its solicitude.
The delicacy guiding her choice to the least valuable and most
dilapidated articles passed unacknowledged, because
Winnie’s philosophy consisted in not taking notice of the
inside of facts; she assumed that mother took what suited her
best. As to Mr Verloc, his intense meditation, like a sort
of Chinese wall, isolated him completely from the phenomena of
this world of vain effort and illusory appearances.

Her selection made, the disposal of the rest became a
perplexing question in a particular way. She was leaving it
in Brett Street, of course. But she had two children.
Winnie was provided for by her sensible union with that excellent
husband, Mr Verloc. Stevie was destitute—and a little
peculiar. His position had to be considered before the
claims of legal justice and even the promptings of
partiality. The possession of the furniture would not be in
any sense a provision. He ought to have it—the poor
boy. But to give it to him would be like tampering with his
position of complete dependence. It was a sort of claim
which she feared to weaken. Moreover, the susceptibilities
of Mr Verloc would perhaps not brook being beholden to his
brother-in-law for the chairs he sat on. In a long
experience of gentlemen lodgers, Mrs Verloc’s mother had
acquired a dismal but resigned notion of the fantastic side of
human nature. What if Mr Verloc suddenly took it into his
head to tell Stevie to take his blessed sticks somewhere out of
that? A division, on the other hand, however carefully
made, might give some cause of offence to Winnie. No,
Stevie must remain destitute and dependent. And at the
moment of leaving Brett Street she had said to her daughter:
“No use waiting till I am dead, is there? Everything
I leave here is altogether your own now, my dear.”

Winnie, with her hat on, silent behind her mother’s
back, went on arranging the collar of the old woman’s
cloak. She got her hand-bag, an umbrella, with an impassive
face. The time had come for the expenditure of the sum of
three-and-sixpence on what might well be supposed the last cab
drive of Mrs Verloc’s mother’s life. They went
out at the shop door.

The conveyance awaiting them would have illustrated the
proverb that “truth can be more cruel than
caricature,” if such a proverb existed. Crawling
behind an infirm horse, a metropolitan hackney carriage drew up
on wobbly wheels and with a maimed driver on the box. This
last peculiarity caused some embarrassment. Catching sight
of a hooked iron contrivance protruding from the left sleeve of
the man’s coat, Mrs Verloc’s mother lost suddenly the
heroic courage of these days. She really couldn’t
trust herself. “What do you think,
Winnie?” She hung back. The passionate
expostulations of the big-faced cabman seemed to be squeezed out
of a blocked throat. Leaning over from his box, he
whispered with mysterious indignation. What was the matter
now? Was it possible to treat a man so? His enormous
and unwashed countenance flamed red in the muddy stretch of the
street. Was it likely they would have given him a licence,
he inquired desperately, if—

The police constable of the locality quieted him by a friendly
glance; then addressing himself to the two women without marked
consideration, said:

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

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

The policeman’s testimony settled it. The modest
assemblage of seven people, mostly under age, dispersed.
Winnie followed her mother into the cab. Stevie climbed on
the box. His vacant mouth and distressed eyes depicted the
state of his mind in regard to the transactions which were taking
place. In the narrow streets the progress of the journey
was made sensible to those within by the near fronts of the
houses gliding past slowly and shakily, with a great rattle and
jingling of glass, as if about to collapse behind the cab; and
the infirm horse, with the harness hung over his sharp backbone
flapping very loose about his thighs, appeared to be dancing
mincingly on his toes with infinite patience. Later on, in
the wider space of Whitehall, all visual evidences of motion
became imperceptible. The rattle and jingle of glass went
on indefinitely in front of the long Treasury building—and
time itself seemed to stand still.

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

Her eyes gleamed in the shadow of the cab straight ahead,
immovable. On the box, Stevie shut his vacant mouth first,
in order to ejaculate earnestly: “Don’t.”

The driver, holding high the reins twisted around the hook,
took no notice. Perhaps he had not heard.
Stevie’s breast heaved.

“Don’t whip.”

The man turned slowly his bloated and sodden face of many
colours bristling with white hairs. His little red eyes
glistened with moisture. His big lips had a violet
tint. They remained closed. With the dirty back of
his whip-hand he rubbed the stubble sprouting on his enormous
chin.

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

“Mustn’t whip,” queried the other in a
thoughtful whisper, and immediately whipped. He did this,
not because his soul was cruel and his heart evil, but because he
had to earn his fare. And for a time the walls of St
Stephen’s, with its towers and pinnacles, contemplated in
immobility and silence a cab that jingled. It rolled too,
however. But on the bridge there was a commotion.
Stevie suddenly proceeded to get down from the box. There
were shouts on the pavement, people ran forward, the driver
pulled up, whispering curses of indignation and
astonishment. Winnie lowered the window, and put her head
out, white as a ghost. In the depths of the cab, her mother
was exclaiming, in tones of anguish: “Is that boy
hurt? Is that boy hurt?”

Stevie was not hurt, he had not even fallen, but excitement as
usual had robbed him of the power of connected speech. He
could do no more than stammer at the window. “Too
heavy. Too heavy.” Winnie put out her hand on
to his shoulder.

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

“No. No. Walk. Must walk.”

In trying to state the nature of that necessity he stammered
himself into utter incoherence. No physical impossibility
stood in the way of his whim. Stevie could have managed
easily to keep pace with the infirm, dancing horse without
getting out of breath. But his sister withheld her consent
decisively. “The idea! Whoever heard of such a
thing! Run after a cab!” Her mother, frightened
and helpless in the depths of the conveyance, entreated:
“Oh, don’t let him, Winnie. He’ll get
lost. Don’t let him.”

“Certainly not. What next! Mr Verloc will be
sorry to hear of this nonsense, Stevie,—I can tell
you. He won’t be happy at all.”

The idea of Mr Verloc’s grief and unhappiness acting as
usual powerfully upon Stevie’s fundamentally docile
disposition, he abandoned all resistance, and climbed up again on
the box, with a face of despair.

The cabby turned at him his enormous and inflamed countenance
truculently. “Don’t you go for trying this
silly game again, young fellow.”

After delivering himself thus in a stern whisper, strained
almost to extinction, he drove on, ruminating solemnly. To
his mind the incident remained somewhat obscure. But his
intellect, though it had lost its pristine vivacity in the
benumbing years of sedentary exposure to the weather, lacked not
independence or sanity. Gravely he dismissed the hypothesis
of Stevie being a drunken young nipper.

Inside the cab the spell of silence, in which the two women
had endured shoulder to shoulder the jolting, rattling, and
jingling of the journey, had been broken by Stevie’s
outbreak. Winnie raised her voice.

“You’ve done what you wanted, mother.
You’ll have only yourself to thank for it if you
aren’t happy afterwards. And I don’t think
you’ll be. That I don’t. Weren’t
you comfortable enough in the house? Whatever
people’ll think of us—you throwing yourself like this
on a Charity?”

“My dear,” screamed the old woman earnestly above
the noise, “you’ve been the best of daughters to
me. As to Mr Verloc—there—”

Words failing her on the subject of Mr Verloc’s
excellence, she turned her old tearful eyes to the roof of the
cab. Then she averted her head on the pretence of looking
out of the window, as if to judge of their progress. It was
insignificant, and went on close to the curbstone. Night,
the early dirty night, the sinister, noisy, hopeless and rowdy
night of South London, had overtaken her on her last cab
drive. In the gas-light of the low-fronted shops her big
cheeks glowed with an orange hue under a black and mauve
bonnet.

Mrs Verloc’s mother’s complexion had become yellow
by the effect of age and from a natural predisposition to
biliousness, favoured by the trials of a difficult and worried
existence, first as wife, then as widow. It was a
complexion, that under the influence of a blush would take on an
orange tint. And this woman, modest indeed but hardened in
the fires of adversity, of an age, moreover, when blushes are not
expected, had positively blushed before her daughter. In
the privacy of a four-wheeler, on her way to a charity cottage
(one of a row) which by the exiguity of its dimensions and the
simplicity of its accommodation, might well have been devised in
kindness as a place of training for the still more straitened
circumstances of the grave, she was forced to hide from her own
child a blush of remorse and shame.

Whatever people will think? She knew very well what they
did think, the people Winnie had in her mind—the old
friends of her husband, and others too, whose interest she had
solicited with such flattering success. She had not known
before what a good beggar she could be. But she guessed
very well what inference was drawn from her application. On
account of that shrinking delicacy, which exists side by side
with aggressive brutality in masculine nature, the inquiries into
her circumstances had not been pushed very far. She had
checked them by a visible compression of the lips and some
display of an emotion determined to be eloquently silent.
And the men would become suddenly incurious, after the manner of
their kind. She congratulated herself more than once on
having nothing to do with women, who being naturally more callous
and avid of details, would have been anxious to be exactly
informed by what sort of unkind conduct her daughter and
son-in-law had driven her to that sad extremity. It was
only before the Secretary of the great brewer M. P. and Chairman
of the Charity, who, acting for his principal, felt bound to be
conscientiously inquisitive as to the real circumstances of the
applicant, that she had burst into tears outright and aloud, as a
cornered woman will weep. The thin and polite gentleman,
after contemplating her with an air of being “struck all of
a heap,” abandoned his position under the cover of soothing
remarks. She must not distress herself. The deed of
the Charity did not absolutely specify “childless
widows.” In fact, it did not by any means disqualify
her. But the discretion of the Committee must be an
informed discretion. One could understand very well her
unwillingness to be a burden, etc. etc. Thereupon, to his
profound disappointment, Mrs Verloc’s mother wept some more
with an augmented vehemence.

The tears of that large female in a dark, dusty wig, and
ancient silk dress festooned with dingy white cotton lace, were
the tears of genuine distress. She had wept because she was
heroic and unscrupulous and full of love for both her
children. Girls frequently get sacrificed to the welfare of
the boys. In this case she was sacrificing Winnie. By
the suppression of truth she was slandering her. Of course,
Winnie was independent, and need not care for the opinion of
people that she would never see and who would never see her;
whereas poor Stevie had nothing in the world he could call his
own except his mother’s heroism and unscrupulousness.

The first sense of security following on Winnie’s
marriage wore off in time (for nothing lasts), and Mrs
Verloc’s mother, in the seclusion of the back bedroom, had
recalled the teaching of that experience which the world
impresses upon a widowed woman. But she had recalled it
without vain bitterness; her store of resignation amounted almost
to dignity. She reflected stoically that everything decays,
wears out, in this world; that the way of kindness should be made
easy to the well disposed; that her daughter Winnie was a most
devoted sister, and a very self-confident wife indeed. As
regards Winnie’s sisterly devotion, her stoicism
flinched. She excepted that sentiment from the rule of
decay affecting all things human and some things divine.
She could not help it; not to do so would have frightened her too
much. But in considering the conditions of her
daughter’s married state, she rejected firmly all
flattering illusions. She took the cold and reasonable view
that the less strain put on Mr Verloc’s kindness the longer
its effects were likely to last. That excellent man loved
his wife, of course, but he would, no doubt, prefer to keep as
few of her relations as was consistent with the proper display of
that sentiment. It would be better if its whole effect were
concentrated on poor Stevie. And the heroic old woman
resolved on going away from her children as an act of devotion
and as a move of deep policy.

The “virtue” of this policy consisted in this (Mrs
Verloc’s mother was subtle in her way), that Stevie’s
moral claim would be strengthened. The poor boy—a
good, useful boy, if a little peculiar—had not a sufficient
standing. He had been taken over with his mother, somewhat
in the same way as the furniture of the Belgravian mansion had
been taken over, as if on the ground of belonging to her
exclusively. What will happen, she asked herself (for Mrs
Verloc’s mother was in a measure imaginative), when I
die? And when she asked herself that question it was with
dread. It was also terrible to think that she would not
then have the means of knowing what happened to the poor
boy. But by making him over to his sister, by going thus
away, she gave him the advantage of a directly dependent
position. This was the more subtle sanction of Mrs
Verloc’s mother’s heroism and unscrupulousness.
Her act of abandonment was really an arrangement for settling her
son permanently in life. Other people made material
sacrifices for such an object, she in that way. It was the
only way. Moreover, she would be able to see how it
worked. Ill or well she would avoid the horrible
incertitude on the death-bed. But it was hard, hard,
cruelly hard.

The cab rattled, jingled, jolted; in fact, the last was quite
extraordinary. By its disproportionate violence and
magnitude it obliterated every sensation of onward movement; and
the effect was of being shaken in a stationary apparatus like a
mediæval device for the punishment of crime, or some very
newfangled invention for the cure of a sluggish liver. It
was extremely distressing; and the raising of Mrs Verloc’s
mother’s voice sounded like a wail of pain.

“I know, my dear, you’ll come to see me as often
as you can spare the time. Won’t you?”

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

And the cab jolted in front of a steamy, greasy shop in a
blaze of gas and in the smell of fried fish.

The old woman raised a wail again.

“And, my dear, I must see that poor boy every
Sunday. He won’t mind spending the day with his old
mother—”

Winnie screamed out stolidly:

“Mind! I should think not. That poor boy
will miss you something cruel. I wish you had thought a
little of that, mother.”

Not think of it! The heroic woman swallowed a playful
and inconvenient object like a billiard ball, which had tried to
jump out of her throat. Winnie sat mute for a while,
pouting at the front of the cab, then snapped out, which was an
unusual tone with her:

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

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

Thus they discussed on familiar lines the bearings of a new
situation. And the cab jolted. Mrs Verloc’s
mother expressed some misgivings. Could Stevie be trusted
to come all that way alone? Winnie maintained that he was
much less “absent-minded” now. They agreed as
to that. It could not be denied. Much
less—hardly at all. They shouted at each other in the
jingle with comparative cheerfulness. But suddenly the
maternal anxiety broke out afresh. There were two omnibuses
to take, and a short walk between. It was too
difficult! The old woman gave way to grief and
consternation.

Winnie stared forward.

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

“No, my dear. I’ll try not to.”

She mopped her streaming eyes.

“But you can’t spare the time to come with him,
and if he should forget himself and lose his way and somebody
spoke to him sharply, his name and address may slip his memory,
and he’ll remain lost for days and days—”

The vision of a workhouse infirmary for poor Stevie—if
only during inquiries—wrung her heart. For she was a
proud woman. Winnie’s stare had grown hard, intent,
inventive.

“I can’t bring him to you myself every
week,” she cried. “But don’t you worry,
mother. I’ll see to it that he don’t get lost
for long.”

They felt a peculiar bump; a vision of brick pillars lingered
before the rattling windows of the cab; a sudden cessation of
atrocious jolting and uproarious jingling dazed the two
women. What had happened? They sat motionless and
scared in the profound stillness, till the door came open, and a
rough, strained whispering was heard:

“Here you are!”

A range of gabled little houses, each with one dim yellow
window, on the ground floor, surrounded the dark open space of a
grass plot planted with shrubs and railed off from the patchwork
of lights and shadows in the wide road, resounding with the dull
rumble of traffic. Before the door of one of these tiny
houses—one without a light in the little downstairs
window—the cab had come to a standstill. Mrs
Verloc’s mother got out first, backwards, with a key in her
hand. Winnie lingered on the flagstone path to pay the
cabman. Stevie, after helping to carry inside a lot of
small parcels, came out and stood under the light of a gas-lamp
belonging to the Charity. The cabman looked at the pieces
of silver, which, appearing very minute in his big, grimy palm,
symbolised the insignificant results which reward the ambitious
courage and toil of a mankind whose day is short on this earth of
evil.

He had been paid decently—four one-shilling
pieces—and he contemplated them in perfect stillness, as if
they had been the surprising terms of a melancholy problem.
The slow transfer of that treasure to an inner pocket demanded
much laborious groping in the depths of decayed clothing.
His form was squat and without flexibility. Stevie,
slender, his shoulders a little up, and his hands thrust deep in
the side pockets of his warm overcoat, stood at the edge of the
path, pouting.

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

“Oh! ’Ere you are, young fellow,” he
whispered. “You’ll know him
again—won’t you?”

Stevie was staring at the horse, whose hind quarters appeared
unduly elevated by the effect of emaciation. The little
stiff tail seemed to have been fitted in for a heartless joke;
and at the other end the thin, flat neck, like a plank covered
with old horse-hide, drooped to the ground under the weight of an
enormous bony head. The ears hung at different angles,
negligently; and the macabre figure of that mute dweller on the
earth steamed straight up from ribs and backbone in the muggy
stillness of the air.

The cabman struck lightly Stevie’s breast with the iron
hook protruding from a ragged, greasy sleeve.

“Look ’ere, young feller. ’Ow’d
you like to sit behind this ’oss up to two
o’clock in the morning p’raps?”

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

“He ain’t lame,” pursued the other,
whispering with energy. “He ain’t got no sore
places on ’im. ’Ere he is. ’Ow
would you like—”

His strained, extinct voice invested his utterance with a
character of vehement secrecy. Stevie’s vacant gaze
was changing slowly into dread.

“You may well look! Till three and four
o’clock in the morning. Cold and ’ungry.
Looking for fares. Drunks.”

His jovial purple cheeks bristled with white hairs; and like
Virgil’s Silenus, who, his face smeared with the juice of
berries, discoursed of Olympian Gods to the innocent shepherds of
Sicily, he talked to Stevie of domestic matters and the affairs
of men whose sufferings are great and immortality by no means
assured.

“I am a night cabby, I am,” he whispered, with a
sort of boastful exasperation. “I’ve got to
take out what they will blooming well give me at the yard.
I’ve got my missus and four kids at ’ome.”

The monstrous nature of that declaration of paternity seemed
to strike the world dumb. A silence reigned during which
the flanks of the old horse, the steed of apocalyptic misery,
smoked upwards in the light of the charitable gas-lamp.

The cabman grunted, then added in his mysterious whisper:

“This ain’t an easy world.”
Stevie’s face had been twitching for some time, and at last
his feelings burst out in their usual concise form.

“Bad! Bad!”

His gaze remained fixed on the ribs of the horse,
self-conscious and sombre, as though he were afraid to look about
him at the badness of the world. And his slenderness, his
rosy lips and pale, clear complexion, gave him the aspect of a
delicate boy, notwithstanding the fluffy growth of golden hair on
his cheeks. He pouted in a scared way like a child.
The cabman, short and broad, eyed him with his fierce little eyes
that seemed to smart in a clear and corroding liquid.

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

“Poor! Poor!” stammered out Stevie, pushing
his hands deeper into his pockets with convulsive sympathy.
He could say nothing; for the tenderness to all pain and all
misery, the desire to make the horse happy and the cabman happy,
had reached the point of a bizarre longing to take them to bed
with him. And that, he knew, was impossible. For
Stevie was not mad. It was, as it were, a symbolic longing;
and at the same time it was very distinct, because springing from
experience, the mother of wisdom. Thus when as a child he
cowered in a dark corner scared, wretched, sore, and miserable
with the black, black misery of the soul, his sister Winnie used
to come along, and carry him off to bed with her, as into a
heaven of consoling peace. Stevie, though apt to forget
mere facts, such as his name and address for instance, had a
faithful memory of sensations. To be taken into a bed of
compassion was the supreme remedy, with the only one disadvantage
of being difficult of application on a large scale. And
looking at the cabman, Stevie perceived this clearly, because he
was reasonable.

The cabman went on with his leisurely preparations as if
Stevie had not existed. He made as if to hoist himself on
the box, but at the last moment from some obscure motive, perhaps
merely from disgust with carriage exercise, desisted. He
approached instead the motionless partner of his labours, and
stooping to seize the bridle, lifted up the big, weary head to
the height of his shoulder with one effort of his right arm, like
a feat of strength.

“Come on,” he whispered secretly.

Limping, he led the cab away. There was an air of
austerity in this departure, the scrunched gravel of the drive
crying out under the slowly turning wheels, the horse’s
lean thighs moving with ascetic deliberation away from the light
into the obscurity of the open space bordered dimly by the
pointed roofs and the feebly shining windows of the little
alms-houses. The plaint of the gravel travelled slowly all
round the drive. Between the lamps of the charitable
gateway the slow cortege reappeared, lighted up for a moment, the
short, thick man limping busily, with the horse’s head held
aloft in his fist, the lank animal walking in stiff and forlorn
dignity, the dark, low box on wheels rolling behind comically
with an air of waddling. They turned to the left.
There was a pub down the street, within fifty yards of the
gate.

Stevie left alone beside the private lamp-post of the Charity,
his hands thrust deep into his pockets, glared with vacant
sulkiness. At the bottom of his pockets his incapable weak
hands were clinched hard into a pair of angry fists. In the
face of anything which affected directly or indirectly his morbid
dread of pain, Stevie ended by turning vicious. A
magnanimous indignation swelled his frail chest to bursting, and
caused his candid eyes to squint. Supremely wise in knowing
his own powerlessness, Stevie was not wise enough to restrain his
passions. The tenderness of his universal charity had two
phases as indissolubly joined and connected as the reverse and
obverse sides of a medal. The anguish of immoderate
compassion was succeeded by the pain of an innocent but pitiless
rage. Those two states expressing themselves outwardly by
the same signs of futile bodily agitation, his sister Winnie
soothed his excitement without ever fathoming its twofold
character. Mrs Verloc wasted no portion of this transient
life in seeking for fundamental information. This is a sort
of economy having all the appearances and some of the advantages
of prudence. Obviously it may be good for one not to know
too much. And such a view accords very well with
constitutional indolence.

On that evening on which it may be said that Mrs
Verloc’s mother having parted for good from her children
had also departed this life, Winnie Verloc did not investigate
her brother’s psychology. The poor boy was excited,
of course. After once more assuring the old woman on the
threshold that she would know how to guard against the risk of
Stevie losing himself for very long on his pilgrimages of filial
piety, she took her brother’s arm to walk away.
Stevie did not even mutter to himself, but with the special sense
of sisterly devotion developed in her earliest infancy, she felt
that the boy was very much excited indeed. Holding tight to
his arm, under the appearance of leaning on it, she thought of
some words suitable to the occasion.

“Now, Stevie, you must look well after me at the
crossings, and get first into the ’bus, like a good
brother.”

This appeal to manly protection was received by Stevie with
his usual docility. It flattered him. He raised his
head and threw out his chest.

“Don’t be nervous, Winnie. Mustn’t be
nervous! ’Bus all right,” he answered in a
brusque, slurring stammer partaking of the timorousness of a
child and the resolution of a man. He advanced fearlessly
with the woman on his arm, but his lower lip dropped.
Nevertheless, on the pavement of the squalid and wide
thoroughfare, whose poverty in all the amenities of life stood
foolishly exposed by a mad profusion of gas-lights, their
resemblance to each other was so pronounced as to strike the
casual passers-by.

Before the doors of the public-house at the corner, where the
profusion of gas-light reached the height of positive wickedness,
a four-wheeled cab standing by the curbstone with no one on the
box, seemed cast out into the gutter on account of irremediable
decay. Mrs Verloc recognised the conveyance. Its
aspect was so profoundly lamentable, with such a perfection of
grotesque misery and weirdness of macabre detail, as if it were
the Cab of Death itself, that Mrs Verloc, with that ready
compassion of a woman for a horse (when she is not sitting behind
him), exclaimed vaguely:

“Poor brute!”

Hanging back suddenly, Stevie inflicted an arresting jerk upon
his sister.

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

The contemplation of the infirm and lonely steed overcame
him. Jostled, but obstinate, he would remain there, trying
to express the view newly opened to his sympathies of the human
and equine misery in close association. But it was very
difficult. “Poor brute, poor people!” was all
he could repeat. It did not seem forcible enough, and he
came to a stop with an angry splutter: “Shame!”
Stevie was no master of phrases, and perhaps for that very reason
his thoughts lacked clearness and precision. But he felt
with greater completeness and some profundity. That little
word contained all his sense of indignation and horror at one
sort of wretchedness having to feed upon the anguish of the
other—at the poor cabman beating the poor horse in the
name, as it were, of his poor kids at home. And Stevie knew
what it was to be beaten. He knew it from experience.
It was a bad world. Bad! Bad!

Mrs Verloc, his only sister, guardian, and protector, could
not pretend to such depths of insight. Moreover, she had
not experienced the magic of the cabman’s eloquence.
She was in the dark as to the inwardness of the word
“Shame.” And she said placidly:

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

The docile Stevie went along; but now he went along without
pride, shamblingly, and muttering half words, and even words that
would have been whole if they had not been made up of halves that
did not belong to each other. It was as though he had been
trying to fit all the words he could remember to his sentiments
in order to get some sort of corresponding idea. And, as a
matter of fact, he got it at last. He hung back to utter it
at once.

“Bad world for poor people.”

Directly he had expressed that thought he became aware that it
was familiar to him already in all its consequences. This
circumstance strengthened his conviction immensely, but also
augmented his indignation. Somebody, he felt, ought to be
punished for it—punished with great severity. Being
no sceptic, but a moral creature, he was in a manner at the mercy
of his righteous passions.

“Beastly!” he added concisely.

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

“Nobody can help that,” she said. “Do
come along. Is that the way you’re taking care of
me?”

Stevie mended his pace obediently. He prided himself on
being a good brother. His morality, which was very
complete, demanded that from him. Yet he was pained at the
information imparted by his sister Winnie who was good.
Nobody could help that! He came along gloomily, but
presently he brightened up. Like the rest of mankind,
perplexed by the mystery of the universe, he had his moments of
consoling trust in the organised powers of the earth.

“Police,” he suggested confidently.

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

Stevie’s face lengthened considerably. He was
thinking. The more intense his thinking, the slacker was
the droop of his lower jaw.

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

“Not for that?” he mumbled, resigned but
surprised. “Not for that?” He had formed
for himself an ideal conception of the metropolitan police as a
sort of benevolent institution for the suppression of evil.
The notion of benevolence especially was very closely associated
with his sense of the power of the men in blue. He had
liked all police constables tenderly, with a guileless
trustfulness. And he was pained. He was irritated,
too, by a suspicion of duplicity in the members of the
force. For Stevie was frank and as open as the day
himself. What did they mean by pretending then?
Unlike his sister, who put her trust in face values, he wished to
go to the bottom of the matter. He carried on his inquiry
by means of an angry challenge.

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

Winnie disliked controversy. But fearing most a fit of
black depression consequent on Stevie missing his mother very
much at first, she did not altogether decline the
discussion. Guiltless of all irony, she answered yet in a
form which was not perhaps unnatural in the wife of Mr Verloc,
Delegate of the Central Red Committee, personal friend of certain
anarchists, and a votary of social revolution.

“Don’t you know what the police are for,
Stevie? They are there so that them as have nothing
shouldn’t take anything away from them who have.”

She avoided using the verb “to steal,” because it
always made her brother uncomfortable. For Stevie was
delicately honest. Certain simple principles had been
instilled into him so anxiously (on account of his
“queerness”) that the mere names of certain
transgressions filled him with horror. He had been always
easily impressed by speeches. He was impressed and startled
now, and his intelligence was very alert.

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

The two had paused in their walk.

“Not if they were ever so,” said Mrs Verloc, with
the equanimity of a person untroubled by the problem of the
distribution of wealth, and exploring the perspective of the
roadway for an omnibus of the right colour.
“Certainly not. But what’s the use of talking
about all that? You aren’t ever hungry.”

She cast a swift glance at the boy, like a young man, by her
side. She saw him amiable, attractive, affectionate, and
only a little, a very little, peculiar. And she could not
see him otherwise, for he was connected with what there was of
the salt of passion in her tasteless life—the passion of
indignation, of courage, of pity, and even of
self-sacrifice. She did not add: “And you
aren’t likely ever to be as long as I live.”
But she might very well have done so, since she had taken
effectual steps to that end. Mr Verloc was a very good
husband. It was her honest impression that nobody could
help liking the boy. She cried out suddenly:

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

And Stevie, tremulous and important with his sister Winnie on
his arm, flung up the other high above his head at the
approaching ’bus, with complete success.

An hour afterwards Mr Verloc raised his eyes from a newspaper
he was reading, or at any rate looking at, behind the counter,
and in the expiring clatter of the door-bell beheld Winnie, his
wife, enter and cross the shop on her way upstairs, followed by
Stevie, his brother-in-law. The sight of his wife was
agreeable to Mr Verloc. It was his idiosyncrasy. The
figure of his brother-in-law remained imperceptible to him
because of the morose thoughtfulness that lately had fallen like
a veil between Mr Verloc and the appearances of the world of
senses. He looked after his wife fixedly, without a word,
as though she had been a phantom. His voice for home use
was husky and placid, but now it was heard not at all. It
was not heard at supper, to which he was called by his wife in
the usual brief manner: “Adolf.” He sat down to
consume it without conviction, wearing his hat pushed far back on
his head. It was not devotion to an outdoor life, but the
frequentation of foreign cafés which was responsible for
that habit, investing with a character of unceremonious
impermanency Mr Verloc’s steady fidelity to his own
fireside. Twice at the clatter of the cracked bell he arose
without a word, disappeared into the shop, and came back
silently. During these absences Mrs Verloc, becoming
acutely aware of the vacant place at her right hand, missed her
mother very much, and stared stonily; while Stevie, from the same
reason, kept on shuffling his feet, as though the floor under the
table were uncomfortably hot. When Mr Verloc returned to
sit in his place, like the very embodiment of silence, the
character of Mrs Verloc’s stare underwent a subtle change,
and Stevie ceased to fidget with his feet, because of his great
and awed regard for his sister’s husband. He directed
at him glances of respectful compassion. Mr Verloc was
sorry. His sister Winnie had impressed upon him (in the
omnibus) that Mr Verloc would be found at home in a state of
sorrow, and must not be worried. His father’s anger,
the irritability of gentlemen lodgers, and Mr Verloc’s
predisposition to immoderate grief, had been the main sanctions
of Stevie’s self-restraint. Of these sentiments, all
easily provoked, but not always easy to understand, the last had
the greatest moral efficiency—because Mr Verloc was
good. His mother and his sister had established that
ethical fact on an unshakable foundation. They had
established, erected, consecrated it behind Mr Verloc’s
back, for reasons that had nothing to do with abstract
morality. And Mr Verloc was not aware of it. It is
but bare justice to him to say that he had no notion of appearing
good to Stevie. Yet so it was. He was even the only
man so qualified in Stevie’s knowledge, because the
gentlemen lodgers had been too transient and too remote to have
anything very distinct about them but perhaps their boots; and as
regards the disciplinary measures of his father, the desolation
of his mother and sister shrank from setting up a theory of
goodness before the victim. It would have been too
cruel. And it was even possible that Stevie would not have
believed them. As far as Mr Verloc was concerned, nothing
could stand in the way of Stevie’s belief. Mr Verloc
was obviously yet mysteriously good. And the grief
of a good man is august.

Stevie gave glances of reverential compassion to his
brother-in-law. Mr Verloc was sorry. The brother of
Winnie had never before felt himself in such close communion with
the mystery of that man’s goodness. It was an
understandable sorrow. And Stevie himself was sorry.
He was very sorry. The same sort of sorrow. And his
attention being drawn to this unpleasant state, Stevie shuffled
his feet. His feelings were habitually manifested by the
agitation of his limbs.

“Keep your feet quiet, dear,” said Mrs Verloc,
with authority and tenderness; then turning towards her husband
in an indifferent voice, the masterly achievement of instinctive
tact: “Are you going out to-night?” she asked.

The mere suggestion seemed repugnant to Mr Verloc. He
shook his head moodily, and then sat still with downcast eyes,
looking at the piece of cheese on his plate for a whole
minute. At the end of that time he got up, and went
out—went right out in the clatter of the shop-door
bell. He acted thus inconsistently, not from any desire to
make himself unpleasant, but because of an unconquerable
restlessness. It was no earthly good going out. He
could not find anywhere in London what he wanted. But he
went out. He led a cortege of dismal thoughts along dark
streets, through lighted streets, in and out of two flash bars,
as if in a half-hearted attempt to make a night of it, and
finally back again to his menaced home, where he sat down
fatigued behind the counter, and they crowded urgently round him,
like a pack of hungry black hounds. After locking up the
house and putting out the gas he took them upstairs with
him—a dreadful escort for a man going to bed. His
wife had preceded him some time before, and with her ample form
defined vaguely under the counterpane, her head on the pillow,
and a hand under the cheek offered to his distraction the view of
early drowsiness arguing the possession of an equable soul.
Her big eyes stared wide open, inert and dark against the snowy
whiteness of the linen. She did not move.

She had an equable soul. She felt profoundly that things
do not stand much looking into. She made her force and her
wisdom of that instinct. But the taciturnity of Mr Verloc
had been lying heavily upon her for a good many days. It
was, as a matter of fact, affecting her nerves. Recumbent
and motionless, she said placidly:

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

This speech, becoming the solicitude of the wife and the
prudence of the woman, took Mr Verloc unawares. He had left
his boots downstairs, but he had forgotten to put on his
slippers, and he had been turning about the bedroom on noiseless
pads like a bear in a cage. At the sound of his
wife’s voice he stopped and stared at her with a
somnambulistic, expressionless gaze so long that Mrs Verloc moved
her limbs slightly under the bed-clothes. But she did not
move her black head sunk in the white pillow one hand under her
cheek and the big, dark, unwinking eyes.

Under her husband’s expressionless stare, and
remembering her mother’s empty room across the landing, she
felt an acute pang of loneliness. She had never been parted
from her mother before. They had stood by each other.
She felt that they had, and she said to herself that now mother
was gone—gone for good. Mrs Verloc had no
illusions. Stevie remained, however. And she
said:

“Mother’s done what she wanted to do.
There’s no sense in it that I can see. I’m sure
she couldn’t have thought you had enough of her.
It’s perfectly wicked, leaving us like that.”

Mr Verloc was not a well-read person; his range of allusive
phrases was limited, but there was a peculiar aptness in
circumstances which made him think of rats leaving a doomed
ship. He very nearly said so. He had grown suspicious
and embittered. Could it be that the old woman had such an
excellent nose? But the unreasonableness of such a
suspicion was patent, and Mr Verloc held his tongue. Not
altogether, however. He muttered heavily:

“Perhaps it’s just as well.”

He began to undress. Mrs Verloc kept very still,
perfectly still, with her eyes fixed in a dreamy, quiet
stare. And her heart for the fraction of a second seemed to
stand still too. That night she was “not quite
herself,” as the saying is, and it was borne upon her with
some force that a simple sentence may hold several diverse
meanings—mostly disagreeable. How was it just as
well? And why? But she did not allow herself to fall
into the idleness of barren speculation. She was rather
confirmed in her belief that things did not stand being looked
into. Practical and subtle in her way, she brought Stevie
to the front without loss of time, because in her the singleness
of purpose had the unerring nature and the force of an
instinct.

“What I am going to do to cheer up that boy for the
first few days I’m sure I don’t know.
He’ll be worrying himself from morning till night before he
gets used to mother being away. And he’s such a good
boy. I couldn’t do without him.”

Mr Verloc went on divesting himself of his clothing with the
unnoticing inward concentration of a man undressing in the
solitude of a vast and hopeless desert. For thus
inhospitably did this fair earth, our common inheritance, present
itself to the mental vision of Mr Verloc. All was so still
without and within that the lonely ticking of the clock on the
landing stole into the room as if for the sake of company.

Mr Verloc, getting into bed on his own side, remained prone
and mute behind Mrs Verloc’s back. His thick arms
rested abandoned on the outside of the counterpane like dropped
weapons, like discarded tools. At that moment he was within
a hair’s breadth of making a clean breast of it all to his
wife. The moment seemed propitious. Looking out of
the corners of his eyes, he saw her ample shoulders draped in
white, the back of her head, with the hair done for the night in
three plaits tied up with black tapes at the ends. And he
forbore. Mr Verloc loved his wife as a wife should be
loved—that is, maritally, with the regard one has for
one’s chief possession. This head arranged for the
night, those ample shoulders, had an aspect of familiar
sacredness—the sacredness of domestic peace. She
moved not, massive and shapeless like a recumbent statue in the
rough; he remembered her wide-open eyes looking into the empty
room. She was mysterious, with the mysteriousness of living
beings. The far-famed secret agent [delta] of the late
Baron Stott-Wartenheim’s alarmist despatches was not the
man to break into such mysteries. He was easily
intimidated. And he was also indolent, with the indolence
which is so often the secret of good nature. He forbore
touching that mystery out of love, timidity, and indolence.
There would be always time enough. For several minutes he
bore his sufferings silently in the drowsy silence of the
room. And then he disturbed it by a resolute
declaration.

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

His wife might have fallen asleep already. He could not
tell. As a matter of fact, Mrs Verloc had heard him.
Her eyes remained very wide open, and she lay very still,
confirmed in her instinctive conviction that things don’t
bear looking into very much. And yet it was nothing very
unusual for Mr Verloc to take such a trip. He renewed his
stock from Paris and Brussels. Often he went over to make
his purchases personally. A little select connection of
amateurs was forming around the shop in Brett Street, a secret
connection eminently proper for any business undertaken by Mr
Verloc, who, by a mystic accord of temperament and necessity, had
been set apart to be a secret agent all his life.

He waited for a while, then added: “I’ll be away a
week or perhaps a fortnight. Get Mrs Neale to come for the
day.”

Mrs Neale was the charwoman of Brett Street. Victim of
her marriage with a debauched joiner, she was oppressed by the
needs of many infant children. Red-armed, and aproned in
coarse sacking up to the arm-pits, she exhaled the anguish of the
poor in a breath of soap-suds and rum, in the uproar of
scrubbing, in the clatter of tin pails.

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

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

She let the lonely clock on the landing count off fifteen
ticks into the abyss of eternity, and asked:

“Shall I put the light out?”

Mr Verloc snapped at his wife huskily.

“Put it out.”

CHAPTER IX

Mr Verloc returning from the Continent at the end of ten days,
brought back a mind evidently unrefreshed by the wonders of
foreign travel and a countenance unlighted by the joys of
home-coming. He entered in the clatter of the shop bell
with an air of sombre and vexed exhaustion. His bag in
hand, his head lowered, he strode straight behind the counter,
and let himself fall into the chair, as though he had tramped all
the way from Dover. It was early morning. Stevie,
dusting various objects displayed in the front windows, turned to
gape at him with reverence and awe.

“Here!” said Mr Verloc, giving a slight kick to
the gladstone bag on the floor; and Stevie flung himself upon it,
seized it, bore it off with triumphant devotion. He was so
prompt that Mr Verloc was distinctly surprised.

Already at the clatter of the shop bell Mrs Neale,
blackleading the parlour grate, had looked through the door, and
rising from her knees had gone, aproned, and grimy with
everlasting toil, to tell Mrs Verloc in the kitchen that
“there was the master come back.”

Winnie came no farther than the inner shop door.

“You’ll want some breakfast,” she said from
a distance.

Mr Verloc moved his hands slightly, as if overcome by an
impossible suggestion. But once enticed into the parlour he
did not reject the food set before him. He ate as if in a
public place, his hat pushed off his forehead, the skirts of his
heavy overcoat hanging in a triangle on each side of the
chair. And across the length of the table covered with
brown oil-cloth Winnie, his wife, talked evenly at him the wifely
talk, as artfully adapted, no doubt, to the circumstances of this
return as the talk of Penelope to the return of the wandering
Odysseus. Mrs Verloc, however, had done no weaving during
her husband’s absence. But she had had all the
upstairs room cleaned thoroughly, had sold some wares, had seen
Mr Michaelis several times. He had told her the last time
that he was going away to live in a cottage in the country,
somewhere on the London, Chatham, and Dover line. Karl
Yundt had come too, once, led under the arm by that “wicked
old housekeeper of his.” He was “a disgusting
old man.” Of Comrade Ossipon, whom she had received
curtly, entrenched behind the counter with a stony face and a
faraway gaze, she said nothing, her mental reference to the
robust anarchist being marked by a short pause, with the faintest
possible blush. And bringing in her brother Stevie as soon
as she could into the current of domestic events, she mentioned
that the boy had moped a good deal.

“It’s all along of mother leaving us like
this.”

Mr Verloc neither said, “Damn!” nor yet
“Stevie be hanged!” And Mrs Verloc, not let
into the secret of his thoughts, failed to appreciate the
generosity of this restraint.

“It isn’t that he doesn’t work as well as
ever,” she continued. “He’s been making
himself very useful. You’d think he couldn’t do
enough for us.”

Mr Verloc directed a casual and somnolent glance at Stevie,
who sat on his right, delicate, pale-faced, his rosy mouth open
vacantly. It was not a critical glance. It had no
intention. And if Mr Verloc thought for a moment that his
wife’s brother looked uncommonly useless, it was only a
dull and fleeting thought, devoid of that force and durability
which enables sometimes a thought to move the world.
Leaning back, Mr Verloc uncovered his head. Before his
extended arm could put down the hat Stevie pounced upon it, and
bore it off reverently into the kitchen. And again Mr
Verloc was surprised.

“You could do anything with that boy, Adolf,” Mrs
Verloc said, with her best air of inflexible calmness.
“He would go through fire for you.
He—”

She paused attentive, her ear turned towards the door of the
kitchen.

There Mrs Neale was scrubbing the floor. At
Stevie’s appearance she groaned lamentably, having observed
that he could be induced easily to bestow for the benefit of her
infant children the shilling his sister Winnie presented him with
from time to time. On all fours amongst the puddles, wet
and begrimed, like a sort of amphibious and domestic animal
living in ash-bins and dirty water, she uttered the usual
exordium: “It’s all very well for you, kept doing
nothing like a gentleman.” And she followed it with
the everlasting plaint of the poor, pathetically mendacious,
miserably authenticated by the horrible breath of cheap rum and
soap-suds. She scrubbed hard, snuffling all the time, and
talking volubly. And she was sincere. And on each
side of her thin red nose her bleared, misty eyes swam in tears,
because she felt really the want of some sort of stimulant in the
morning.

In the parlour Mrs Verloc observed, with knowledge:

“There’s Mrs Neale at it again with her harrowing
tales about her little children. They can’t be all so
little as she makes them out. Some of them must be big
enough by now to try to do something for themselves. It
only makes Stevie angry.”

These words were confirmed by a thud as of a fist striking the
kitchen table. In the normal evolution of his sympathy
Stevie had become angry on discovering that he had no shilling in
his pocket. In his inability to relieve at once Mrs
Neale’s “little ’uns’” privations,
he felt that somebody should be made to suffer for it. Mrs
Verloc rose, and went into the kitchen to “stop that
nonsense.” And she did it firmly but gently.
She was well aware that directly Mrs Neale received her money she
went round the corner to drink ardent spirits in a mean and musty
public-house—the unavoidable station on the via
dolorosa of her life. Mrs Verloc’s comment upon
this practice had an unexpected profundity, as coming from a
person disinclined to look under the surface of things.
“Of course, what is she to do to keep up? If I were
like Mrs Neale I expect I wouldn’t act any
different.”

In the afternoon of the same day, as Mr Verloc, coming with a
start out of the last of a long series of dozes before the
parlour fire, declared his intention of going out for a walk,
Winnie said from the shop:

“I wish you would take that boy out with you,
Adolf.”

For the third time that day Mr Verloc was surprised. He
stared stupidly at his wife. She continued in her steady
manner. The boy, whenever he was not doing anything, moped
in the house. It made her uneasy; it made her nervous, she
confessed. And that from the calm Winnie sounded like
exaggeration. But, in truth, Stevie moped in the striking
fashion of an unhappy domestic animal. He would go up on
the dark landing, to sit on the floor at the foot of the tall
clock, with his knees drawn up and his head in his hands.
To come upon his pallid face, with its big eyes gleaming in the
dusk, was discomposing; to think of him up there was
uncomfortable.

Mr Verloc got used to the startling novelty of the idea.
He was fond of his wife as a man should be—that is,
generously. But a weighty objection presented itself to his
mind, and he formulated it.

“He’ll lose sight of me perhaps, and get lost in
the street,” he said.

Mrs Verloc shook her head competently.

“He won’t. You don’t know him.
That boy just worships you. But if you should miss
him—”

Mrs Verloc paused for a moment, but only for a moment.

“You just go on, and have your walk out.
Don’t worry. He’ll be all right.
He’s sure to turn up safe here before very long.”

This optimism procured for Mr Verloc his fourth surprise of
the day.

“Is he?” he grunted doubtfully. But perhaps
his brother-in-law was not such an idiot as he looked. His
wife would know best. He turned away his heavy eyes, saying
huskily: “Well, let him come along, then,” and
relapsed into the clutches of black care, that perhaps prefers to
sit behind a horseman, but knows also how to tread close on the
heels of people not sufficiently well off to keep
horses—like Mr Verloc, for instance.

Winnie, at the shop door, did not see this fatal attendant
upon Mr Verloc’s walks. She watched the two figures
down the squalid street, one tall and burly, the other slight and
short, with a thin neck, and the peaked shoulders raised slightly
under the large semi-transparent ears. The material of
their overcoats was the same, their hats were black and round in
shape. Inspired by the similarity of wearing apparel, Mrs
Verloc gave rein to her fancy.

“Might be father and son,” she said to
herself. She thought also that Mr Verloc was as much of a
father as poor Stevie ever had in his life. She was aware
also that it was her work. And with peaceful pride she
congratulated herself on a certain resolution she had taken a few
years before. It had cost her some effort, and even a few
tears.

She congratulated herself still more on observing in the
course of days that Mr Verloc seemed to be taking kindly to
Stevie’s companionship. Now, when ready to go out for
his walk, Mr Verloc called aloud to the boy, in the spirit, no
doubt, in which a man invites the attendance of the household
dog, though, of course, in a different manner. In the house
Mr Verloc could be detected staring curiously at Stevie a good
deal. His own demeanour had changed. Taciturn still,
he was not so listless. Mrs Verloc thought that he was
rather jumpy at times. It might have been regarded as an
improvement. As to Stevie, he moped no longer at the foot
of the clock, but muttered to himself in corners instead in a
threatening tone. When asked “What is it you’re
saying, Stevie?” he merely opened his mouth, and squinted
at his sister. At odd times he clenched his fists without
apparent cause, and when discovered in solitude would be scowling
at the wall, with the sheet of paper and the pencil given him for
drawing circles lying blank and idle on the kitchen table.
This was a change, but it was no improvement. Mrs Verloc
including all these vagaries under the general definition of
excitement, began to fear that Stevie was hearing more than was
good for him of her husband’s conversations with his
friends. During his “walks” Mr Verloc, of
course, met and conversed with various persons. It could
hardly be otherwise. His walks were an integral part of his
outdoor activities, which his wife had never looked deeply
into. Mrs Verloc felt that the position was delicate, but
she faced it with the same impenetrable calmness which impressed
and even astonished the customers of the shop and made the other
visitors keep their distance a little wonderingly.
No! She feared that there were things not good for Stevie
to hear of, she told her husband. It only excited the poor
boy, because he could not help them being so. Nobody
could.

It was in the shop. Mr Verloc made no comment. He
made no retort, and yet the retort was obvious. But he
refrained from pointing out to his wife that the idea of making
Stevie the companion of his walks was her own, and nobody
else’s. At that moment, to an impartial observer, Mr
Verloc would have appeared more than human in his
magnanimity. He took down a small cardboard box from a
shelf, peeped in to see that the contents were all right, and put
it down gently on the counter. Not till that was done did
he break the silence, to the effect that most likely Stevie would
profit greatly by being sent out of town for a while; only he
supposed his wife could not get on without him.

“Could not get on without him!” repeated Mrs
Verloc slowly. “I couldn’t get on without him
if it were for his good! The idea! Of course, I can
get on without him. But there’s nowhere for him to
go.”

Mr Verloc got out some brown paper and a ball of string; and
meanwhile he muttered that Michaelis was living in a little
cottage in the country. Michaelis wouldn’t mind
giving Stevie a room to sleep in. There were no visitors
and no talk there. Michaelis was writing a book.

Mrs Verloc declared her affection for Michaelis; mentioned her
abhorrence of Karl Yundt, “nasty old man”; and of
Ossipon she said nothing. As to Stevie, he could be no
other than very pleased. Mr Michaelis was always so nice
and kind to him. He seemed to like the boy. Well, the
boy was a good boy.

“You too seem to have grown quite fond of him of
late,” she added, after a pause, with her inflexible
assurance.

Mr Verloc tying up the cardboard box into a parcel for the
post, broke the string by an injudicious jerk, and muttered
several swear words confidentially to himself. Then raising
his tone to the usual husky mutter, he announced his willingness
to take Stevie into the country himself, and leave him all safe
with Michaelis.

He carried out this scheme on the very next day. Stevie
offered no objection. He seemed rather eager, in a
bewildered sort of way. He turned his candid gaze
inquisitively to Mr Verloc’s heavy countenance at frequent
intervals, especially when his sister was not looking at
him. His expression was proud, apprehensive, and
concentrated, like that of a small child entrusted for the first
time with a box of matches and the permission to strike a
light. But Mrs Verloc, gratified by her brother’s
docility, recommended him not to dirty his clothes unduly in the
country. At this Stevie gave his sister, guardian and
protector a look, which for the first time in his life seemed to
lack the quality of perfect childlike trustfulness. It was
haughtily gloomy. Mrs Verloc smiled.

“Goodness me! You needn’t be offended.
You know you do get yourself very untidy when you get a chance,
Stevie.”

Mr Verloc was already gone some way down the street.

Thus in consequence of her mother’s heroic proceedings,
and of her brother’s absence on this villegiature, Mrs
Verloc found herself oftener than usual all alone not only in the
shop, but in the house. For Mr Verloc had to take his
walks. She was alone longer than usual on the day of the
attempted bomb outrage in Greenwich Park, because Mr Verloc went
out very early that morning and did not come back till nearly
dusk. She did not mind being alone. She had no desire
to go out. The weather was too bad, and the shop was cosier
than the streets. Sitting behind the counter with some
sewing, she did not raise her eyes from her work when Mr Verloc
entered in the aggressive clatter of the bell. She had
recognised his step on the pavement outside.

She did not raise her eyes, but as Mr Verloc, silent, and with
his hat rammed down upon his forehead, made straight for the
parlour door, she said serenely:

“What a wretched day. You’ve been perhaps to
see Stevie?”

“No! I haven’t,” said Mr Verloc
softly, and slammed the glazed parlour door behind him with
unexpected energy.

For some time Mrs Verloc remained quiescent, with her work
dropped in her lap, before she put it away under the counter and
got up to light the gas. This done, she went into the
parlour on her way to the kitchen. Mr Verloc would want his
tea presently. Confident of the power of her charms, Winnie
did not expect from her husband in the daily intercourse of their
married life a ceremonious amenity of address and courtliness of
manner; vain and antiquated forms at best, probably never very
exactly observed, discarded nowadays even in the highest spheres,
and always foreign to the standards of her class. She did
not look for courtesies from him. But he was a good
husband, and she had a loyal respect for his rights.

Mrs Verloc would have gone through the parlour and on to her
domestic duties in the kitchen with the perfect serenity of a
woman sure of the power of her charms. But a slight, very
slight, and rapid rattling sound grew upon her hearing.
Bizarre and incomprehensible, it arrested Mrs Verloc’s
attention. Then as its character became plain to the ear
she stopped short, amazed and concerned. Striking a match
on the box she held in her hand, she turned on and lighted, above
the parlour table, one of the two gas-burners, which, being
defective, first whistled as if astonished, and then went on
purring comfortably like a cat.

Mr Verloc, against his usual practice, had thrown off his
overcoat. It was lying on the sofa. His hat, which he
must also have thrown off, rested overturned under the edge of
the sofa. He had dragged a chair in front of the fireplace,
and his feet planted inside the fender, his head held between his
hands, he was hanging low over the glowing grate. His teeth
rattled with an ungovernable violence, causing his whole enormous
back to tremble at the same rate. Mrs Verloc was
startled.

“You’ve been getting wet,” she said.

“Not very,” Mr Verloc managed to falter out, in a
profound shudder. By a great effort he suppressed the
rattling of his teeth.

“I’ll have you laid up on my hands,” she
said, with genuine uneasiness.

“I don’t think so,” remarked Mr Verloc,
snuffling huskily.

He had certainly contrived somehow to catch an abominable cold
between seven in the morning and five in the afternoon. Mrs
Verloc looked at his bowed back.

“Where have you been to-day?” she asked.

“Nowhere,” answered Mr Verloc in a low, choked
nasal tone. His attitude suggested aggrieved sulks or a
severe headache. The unsufficiency and uncandidness of his
answer became painfully apparent in the dead silence of the
room. He snuffled apologetically, and added:
“I’ve been to the bank.”

Mrs Verloc became attentive.

“You have!” she said dispassionately.
“What for?”

Mr Verloc mumbled, with his nose over the grate, and with
marked unwillingness.

“Draw the money out!”

“What do you mean? All of it?”

“Yes. All of it.”

Mrs Verloc spread out with care the scanty table-cloth, got
two knives and two forks out of the table drawer, and suddenly
stopped in her methodical proceedings.

“What did you do that for?”

“May want it soon,” snuffled vaguely Mr Verloc,
who was coming to the end of his calculated indiscretions.

“I don’t know what you mean,” remarked his
wife in a tone perfectly casual, but standing stock still between
the table and the cupboard.

“You know you can trust me,” Mr Verloc remarked to
the grate, with hoarse feeling.

Mrs Verloc turned slowly towards the cupboard, saying with
deliberation:

“Oh yes. I can trust you.”

And she went on with her methodical proceedings. She
laid two plates, got the bread, the butter, going to and fro
quietly between the table and the cupboard in the peace and
silence of her home. On the point of taking out the jam,
she reflected practically: “He will be feeling hungry,
having been away all day,” and she returned to the cupboard
once more to get the cold beef. She set it under the
purring gas-jet, and with a passing glance at her motionless
husband hugging the fire, she went (down two steps) into the
kitchen. It was only when coming back, carving knife and
fork in hand, that she spoke again.

“If I hadn’t trusted you I wouldn’t have
married you.”

Bowed under the overmantel, Mr Verloc, holding his head in
both hands, seemed to have gone to sleep. Winnie made the
tea, and called out in an undertone:

“Adolf.”

Mr Verloc got up at once, and staggered a little before he sat
down at the table. His wife examining the sharp edge of the
carving knife, placed it on the dish, and called his attention to
the cold beef. He remained insensible to the suggestion,
with his chin on his breast.

“You should feed your cold,” Mrs Verloc said
dogmatically.

He looked up, and shook his head. His eyes were
bloodshot and his face red. His fingers had ruffled his
hair into a dissipated untidiness. Altogether he had a
disreputable aspect, expressive of the discomfort, the irritation
and the gloom following a heavy debauch. But Mr Verloc was
not a debauched man. In his conduct he was
respectable. His appearance might have been the effect of a
feverish cold. He drank three cups of tea, but abstained
from food entirely. He recoiled from it with sombre
aversion when urged by Mrs Verloc, who said at last:

“Aren’t your feet wet? You had better put on
your slippers. You aren’t going out any more this
evening.”

Mr Verloc intimated by morose grunts and signs that his feet
were not wet, and that anyhow he did not care. The proposal
as to slippers was disregarded as beneath his notice. But
the question of going out in the evening received an unexpected
development. It was not of going out in the evening that Mr
Verloc was thinking. His thoughts embraced a vaster
scheme. From moody and incomplete phrases it became
apparent that Mr Verloc had been considering the expediency of
emigrating. It was not very clear whether he had in his
mind France or California.

The utter unexpectedness, improbability, and inconceivableness
of such an event robbed this vague declaration of all its
effect. Mrs Verloc, as placidly as if her husband had been
threatening her with the end of the world, said:

“The idea!”

Mr Verloc declared himself sick and tired of everything, and
besides—She interrupted him.

“You’ve a bad cold.”

It was indeed obvious that Mr Verloc was not in his usual
state, physically and even mentally. A sombre irresolution
held him silent for a while. Then he murmured a few ominous
generalities on the theme of necessity.

“Will have to,” repeated Winnie, sitting calmly
back, with folded arms, opposite her husband. “I
should like to know who’s to make you. You
ain’t a slave. No one need be a slave in this
country—and don’t you make yourself one.”
She paused, and with invincible and steady candour.
“The business isn’t so bad,” she went on.
“You’ve a comfortable home.”

She glanced all round the parlour, from the corner cupboard to
the good fire in the grate. Ensconced cosily behind the
shop of doubtful wares, with the mysteriously dim window, and its
door suspiciously ajar in the obscure and narrow street, it was
in all essentials of domestic propriety and domestic comfort a
respectable home. Her devoted affection missed out of it
her brother Stevie, now enjoying a damp villegiature in the
Kentish lanes under the care of Mr Michaelis. She missed
him poignantly, with all the force of her protecting
passion. This was the boy’s home too—the roof,
the cupboard, the stoked grate. On this thought Mrs Verloc
rose, and walking to the other end of the table, said in the
fulness of her heart:

“And you are not tired of me.”

Mr Verloc made no sound. Winnie leaned on his shoulder
from behind, and pressed her lips to his forehead. Thus she
lingered. Not a whisper reached them from the outside
world.

The sound of footsteps on the pavement died out in the
discreet dimness of the shop. Only the gas-jet above the
table went on purring equably in the brooding silence of the
parlour.

During the contact of that unexpected and lingering kiss Mr
Verloc, gripping with both hands the edges of his chair,
preserved a hieratic immobility. When the pressure was
removed he let go the chair, rose, and went to stand before the
fireplace. He turned no longer his back to the room.
With his features swollen and an air of being drugged, he
followed his wife’s movements with his eyes.

Mrs Verloc went about serenely, clearing up the table.
Her tranquil voice commented the idea thrown out in a reasonable
and domestic tone. It wouldn’t stand
examination. She condemned it from every point of
view. But her only real concern was Stevie’s
welfare. He appeared to her thought in that connection as
sufficiently “peculiar” not to be taken rashly
abroad. And that was all. But talking round that
vital point, she approached absolute vehemence in her
delivery. Meanwhile, with brusque movements, she arrayed
herself in an apron for the washing up of cups. And as if
excited by the sound of her uncontradicted voice, she went so far
as to say in a tone almost tart:

“If you go abroad you’ll have to go without
me.”

“You know I wouldn’t,” said Mr Verloc
huskily, and the unresonant voice of his private life trembled
with an enigmatical emotion.

Already Mrs Verloc was regretting her words. They had
sounded more unkind than she meant them to be. They had
also the unwisdom of unnecessary things. In fact, she had
not meant them at all. It was a sort of phrase that is
suggested by the demon of perverse inspiration. But she
knew a way to make it as if it had not been.

She turned her head over her shoulder and gave that man
planted heavily in front of the fireplace a glance, half arch,
half cruel, out of her large eyes—a glance of which the
Winnie of the Belgravian mansion days would have been incapable,
because of her respectability and her ignorance. But the
man was her husband now, and she was no longer ignorant.
She kept it on him for a whole second, with her grave face
motionless like a mask, while she said playfully:

“You couldn’t. You would miss me too
much.”

Mr Verloc started forward.

“Exactly,” he said in a louder tone, throwing his
arms out and making a step towards her. Something wild and
doubtful in his expression made it appear uncertain whether he
meant to strangle or to embrace his wife. But Mrs
Verloc’s attention was called away from that manifestation
by the clatter of the shop bell.

“Shop, Adolf. You go.”

He stopped, his arms came down slowly.

“You go,” repeated Mrs Verloc.
“I’ve got my apron on.”

Mr Verloc obeyed woodenly, stony-eyed, and like an automaton
whose face had been painted red. And this resemblance to a
mechanical figure went so far that he had an automaton’s
absurd air of being aware of the machinery inside of him.

He closed the parlour door, and Mrs Verloc moving briskly,
carried the tray into the kitchen. She washed the cups and
some other things before she stopped in her work to listen.
No sound reached her. The customer was a long time in the
shop. It was a customer, because if he had not been Mr
Verloc would have taken him inside. Undoing the strings of
her apron with a jerk, she threw it on a chair, and walked back
to the parlour slowly.

At that precise moment Mr Verloc entered from the shop.

He had gone in red. He came out a strange papery
white. His face, losing its drugged, feverish stupor, had
in that short time acquired a bewildered and harassed
expression. He walked straight to the sofa, and stood
looking down at his overcoat lying there, as though he were
afraid to touch it.

“What’s the matter?” asked Mrs Verloc in a
subdued voice. Through the door left ajar she could see
that the customer was not gone yet.

“I find I’ll have to go out this evening,”
said Mr Verloc. He did not attempt to pick up his outer
garment.

Without a word Winnie made for the shop, and shutting the door
after her, walked in behind the counter. She did not look
overtly at the customer till she had established herself
comfortably on the chair. But by that time she had noted
that he was tall and thin, and wore his moustaches twisted
up. In fact, he gave the sharp points a twist just
then. His long, bony face rose out of a turned-up
collar. He was a little splashed, a little wet. A
dark man, with the ridge of the cheek-bone well defined under the
slightly hollow temple. A complete stranger. Not a
customer either.

Mrs Verloc looked at him placidly.

“You came over from the Continent?” she said after
a time.

The long, thin stranger, without exactly looking at Mrs
Verloc, answered only by a faint and peculiar smile.

Mrs Verloc’s steady, incurious gaze rested on him.

“You understand English, don’t you?”

“Oh yes. I understand English.”

There was nothing foreign in his accent, except that he seemed
in his slow enunciation to be taking pains with it. And Mrs
Verloc, in her varied experience, had come to the conclusion that
some foreigners could speak better English than the
natives. She said, looking at the door of the parlour
fixedly:

“You don’t think perhaps of staying in England for
good?”

The stranger gave her again a silent smile. He had a
kindly mouth and probing eyes. And he shook his head a
little sadly, it seemed.

“My husband will see you through all right.
Meantime for a few days you couldn’t do better than take
lodgings with Mr Giugliani. Continental Hotel it’s
called. Private. It’s quiet. My husband
will take you there.”

“A good idea,” said the thin, dark man, whose
glance had hardened suddenly.

“You knew Mr Verloc before—didn’t you?
Perhaps in France?”

“I have heard of him,” admitted the visitor in his
slow, painstaking tone, which yet had a certain curtness of
intention.

There was a pause. Then he spoke again, in a far less
elaborate manner.

“Your husband has not gone out to wait for me in the
street by chance?”

“In the street!” repeated Mrs Verloc,
surprised. “He couldn’t. There’s no
other door to the house.”

For a moment she sat impassive, then left her seat to go and
peep through the glazed door. Suddenly she opened it, and
disappeared into the parlour.

Mr Verloc had done no more than put on his overcoat. But
why he should remain afterwards leaning over the table propped up
on his two arms as though he were feeling giddy or sick, she
could not understand. “Adolf,” she called out
half aloud; and when he had raised himself:

“Do you know that man?” she asked rapidly.

“I’ve heard of him,” whispered uneasily Mr
Verloc, darting a wild glance at the door.

Mrs Verloc’s fine, incurious eyes lighted up with a
flash of abhorrence.

“One of Karl Yundt’s friends—beastly old
man.”

“No! No!” protested Mr Verloc, busy fishing
for his hat. But when he got it from under the sofa he held
it as if he did not know the use of a hat.

“Well—he’s waiting for you,” said Mrs
Verloc at last. “I say, Adolf, he ain’t one of
them Embassy people you have been bothered with of
late?”

“Bothered with Embassy people,” repeated Mr
Verloc, with a heavy start of surprise and fear.
“Who’s been talking to you of the Embassy
people?”

“Yourself.”

“I! I! Talked of the Embassy to
you!”

Mr Verloc seemed scared and bewildered beyond measure.
His wife explained:

“You’ve been talking a little in your sleep of
late, Adolf.”

“What—what did I say? What do you
know?”

“Nothing much. It seemed mostly nonsense.
Enough to let me guess that something worried you.”

Mr Verloc rammed his hat on his head. A crimson flood of
anger ran over his face.

“Nonsense—eh? The Embassy people! I
would cut their hearts out one after another. But let them
look out. I’ve got a tongue in my head.”

He fumed, pacing up and down between the table and the sofa,
his open overcoat catching against the angles. The red
flood of anger ebbed out, and left his face all white, with
quivering nostrils. Mrs Verloc, for the purposes of
practical existence, put down these appearances to the cold.

“Well,” she said, “get rid of the man,
whoever he is, as soon as you can, and come back home to
me. You want looking after for a day or two.”

Mr Verloc calmed down, and, with resolution imprinted on his
pale face, had already opened the door, when his wife called him
back in a whisper:

“Adolf! Adolf!” He came back
startled. “What about that money you drew out?”
she asked. “You’ve got it in your pocket?
Hadn’t you better—”

Mr Verloc gazed stupidly into the palm of his wife’s
extended hand for some time before he slapped his brow.

“Money! Yes! Yes! I didn’t know
what you meant.”

He drew out of his breast pocket a new pigskin
pocket-book. Mrs Verloc received it without another word,
and stood still till the bell, clattering after Mr Verloc and Mr
Verloc’s visitor, had quieted down. Only then she
peeped in at the amount, drawing the notes out for the
purpose. After this inspection she looked round
thoughtfully, with an air of mistrust in the silence and solitude
of the house. This abode of her married life appeared to
her as lonely and unsafe as though it had been situated in the
midst of a forest. No receptacle she could think of amongst
the solid, heavy furniture seemed other but flimsy and
particularly tempting to her conception of a house-breaker.
It was an ideal conception, endowed with sublime faculties and a
miraculous insight. The till was not to be thought
of. It was the first spot a thief would make for. Mrs
Verloc unfastening hastily a couple of hooks, slipped the
pocket-book under the bodice of her dress. Having thus
disposed of her husband’s capital, she was rather glad to
hear the clatter of the door bell, announcing an arrival.
Assuming the fixed, unabashed stare and the stony expression
reserved for the casual customer, she walked in behind the
counter.

A man standing in the middle of the shop was inspecting it
with a swift, cool, all-round glance. His eyes ran over the
walls, took in the ceiling, noted the floor—all in a
moment. The points of a long fair moustache fell below the
line of the jaw. He smiled the smile of an old if distant
acquaintance, and Mrs Verloc remembered having seen him
before. Not a customer. She softened her
“customer stare” to mere indifference, and faced him
across the counter.

He approached, on his side, confidentially, but not too
markedly so.

“Husband at home, Mrs Verloc?” he asked in an
easy, full tone.

“No. He’s gone out.”

“I am sorry for that. I’ve called to get
from him a little private information.”

This was the exact truth. Chief Inspector Heat had been
all the way home, and had even gone so far as to think of getting
into his slippers, since practically he was, he told himself,
chucked out of that case. He indulged in some scornful and
in a few angry thoughts, and found the occupation so
unsatisfactory that he resolved to seek relief out of
doors. Nothing prevented him paying a friendly call to Mr
Verloc, casually as it were. It was in the character of a
private citizen that walking out privately he made use of his
customary conveyances. Their general direction was towards
Mr Verloc’s home. Chief Inspector Heat respected his
own private character so consistently that he took especial pains
to avoid all the police constables on point and patrol duty in
the vicinity of Brett Street. This precaution was much more
necessary for a man of his standing than for an obscure Assistant
Commissioner. Private Citizen Heat entered the street,
manoeuvring in a way which in a member of the criminal classes
would have been stigmatised as slinking. The piece of cloth
picked up in Greenwich was in his pocket. Not that he had
the slightest intention of producing it in his private
capacity. On the contrary, he wanted to know just what Mr
Verloc would be disposed to say voluntarily. He hoped Mr
Verloc’s talk would be of a nature to incriminate
Michaelis. It was a conscientiously professional hope in
the main, but not without its moral value. For Chief
Inspector Heat was a servant of justice. Finding Mr Verloc
from home, he felt disappointed.

“I would wait for him a little if I were sure he
wouldn’t be long,” he said.

Mrs Verloc volunteered no assurance of any kind.

“The information I need is quite private,” he
repeated. “You understand what I mean? I wonder
if you could give me a notion where he’s gone
to?”

Mrs Verloc shook her head.

“Can’t say.”

She turned away to range some boxes on the shelves behind the
counter. Chief Inspector Heat looked at her thoughtfully
for a time.

“I suppose you know who I am?” he said.

Mrs Verloc glanced over her shoulder. Chief Inspector
Heat was amazed at her coolness.

“Come! You know I am in the police,” he said
sharply.

“I don’t trouble my head much about it,” Mrs
Verloc remarked, returning to the ranging of her boxes.

“My name is Heat. Chief Inspector Heat of the
Special Crimes section.”

Mrs Verloc adjusted nicely in its place a small cardboard box,
and turning round, faced him again, heavy-eyed, with idle hands
hanging down. A silence reigned for a time.

“So your husband went out a quarter of an hour
ago! And he didn’t say when he would be
back?”

“He didn’t go out alone,” Mrs Verloc let
fall negligently.

“A friend?”

Mrs Verloc touched the back of her hair. It was in
perfect order.

“A stranger who called.”

“I see. What sort of man was that stranger?
Would you mind telling me?”

Mrs Verloc did not mind. And when Chief Inspector Heat
heard of a man dark, thin, with a long face and turned up
moustaches, he gave signs of perturbation, and exclaimed:

“Dash me if I didn’t think so! He
hasn’t lost any time.”

He was intensely disgusted in the secrecy of his heart at the
unofficial conduct of his immediate chief. But he was not
quixotic. He lost all desire to await Mr Verloc’s
return. What they had gone out for he did not know, but he
imagined it possible that they would return together. The
case is not followed properly, it’s being tampered with, he
thought bitterly.

“I am afraid I haven’t time to wait for your
husband,” he said.

Mrs Verloc received this declaration listlessly. Her
detachment had impressed Chief Inspector Heat all along. At
this precise moment it whetted his curiosity. Chief
Inspector Heat hung in the wind, swayed by his passions like the
most private of citizens.

“I think,” he said, looking at her steadily,
“that you could give me a pretty good notion of
what’s going on if you liked.”

Forcing her fine, inert eyes to return his gaze, Mrs Verloc
murmured:

“Going on! What is going on?”

“Why, the affair I came to talk about a little with your
husband.”

That day Mrs Verloc had glanced at a morning paper as
usual. But she had not stirred out of doors. The
newsboys never invaded Brett Street. It was not a street
for their business. And the echo of their cries drifting
along the populous thoroughfares, expired between the dirty brick
walls without reaching the threshold of the shop. Her
husband had not brought an evening paper home. At any rate
she had not seen it. Mrs Verloc knew nothing whatever of
any affair. And she said so, with a genuine note of wonder
in her quiet voice.

Chief Inspector Heat did not believe for a moment in so much
ignorance. Curtly, without amiability, he stated the bare
fact.

Mrs Verloc turned away her eyes.

“I call it silly,” she pronounced slowly.
She paused. “We ain’t downtrodden slaves
here.”

The Chief Inspector waited watchfully. Nothing more
came.

“And your husband didn’t mention anything to you
when he came home?”

Mrs Verloc simply turned her face from right to left in sign
of negation. A languid, baffling silence reigned in the
shop. Chief Inspector Heat felt provoked beyond
endurance.

“There was another small matter,” he began in a
detached tone, “which I wanted to speak to your husband
about. There came into our hands a—a—what we
believe is—a stolen overcoat.”

Mrs Verloc, with her mind specially aware of thieves that
evening, touched lightly the bosom of her dress.

“We have lost no overcoat,” she said calmly.

“That’s funny,” continued Private Citizen
Heat. “I see you keep a lot of marking ink
here—”

He took up a small bottle, and looked at it against the
gas-jet in the middle of the shop.

“Purple—isn’t it?” he remarked,
setting it down again. “As I said, it’s
strange. Because the overcoat has got a label sewn on the
inside with your address written in marking ink.”

Mrs Verloc leaned over the counter with a low exclamation.

“That’s my brother’s, then.”

“Where’s your brother? Can I see him?”
asked the Chief Inspector briskly. Mrs Verloc leaned a
little more over the counter.

“No. He isn’t here. I wrote that label
myself.”

“Where’s your brother now?”

“He’s been away living with—a
friend—in the country.”

“The overcoat comes from the country. And
what’s the name of the friend?”

“Michaelis,” confessed Mrs Verloc in an awed
whisper.

The Chief Inspector let out a whistle. His eyes
snapped.

“Just so. Capital. And your brother now,
what’s he like—a sturdy, darkish
chap—eh?”

“Oh no,” exclaimed Mrs Verloc fervently.
“That must be the thief. Stevie’s slight and
fair.”

“Good,” said the Chief Inspector in an approving
tone. And while Mrs Verloc, wavering between alarm and
wonder, stared at him, he sought for information. Why have
the address sewn like this inside the coat? And he heard
that the mangled remains he had inspected that morning with
extreme repugnance were those of a youth, nervous, absent-minded,
peculiar, and also that the woman who was speaking to him had had
the charge of that boy since he was a baby.

“Easily excitable?” he suggested.

“Oh yes. He is. But how did he come to lose
his coat—”

Chief Inspector Heat suddenly pulled out a pink newspaper he
had bought less than half-an-hour ago. He was interested in
horses. Forced by his calling into an attitude of doubt and
suspicion towards his fellow-citizens, Chief Inspector Heat
relieved the instinct of credulity implanted in the human breast
by putting unbounded faith in the sporting prophets of that
particular evening publication. Dropping the extra special
on to the counter, he plunged his hand again into his pocket, and
pulling out the piece of cloth fate had presented him with out of
a heap of things that seemed to have been collected in shambles
and rag shops, he offered it to Mrs Verloc for inspection.

“I suppose you recognise this?”

She took it mechanically in both her hands. Her eyes
seemed to grow bigger as she looked.

“Yes,” she whispered, then raised her head, and
staggered backward a little.

“Whatever for is it torn out like this?”

The Chief Inspector snatched across the counter the cloth out
of her hands, and she sat heavily on the chair. He thought:
identification’s perfect. And in that moment he had a
glimpse into the whole amazing truth. Verloc was the
“other man.”

“Mrs Verloc,” he said, “it strikes me that
you know more of this bomb affair than even you yourself are
aware of.”

Mrs Verloc sat still, amazed, lost in boundless
astonishment. What was the connection? And she became
so rigid all over that she was not able to turn her head at the
clatter of the bell, which caused the private investigator Heat
to spin round on his heel. Mr Verloc had shut the door, and
for a moment the two men looked at each other.

Mr Verloc, without looking at his wife, walked up to the Chief
Inspector, who was relieved to see him return alone.

“You here!” muttered Mr Verloc heavily.
“Who are you after?”

“No one,” said Chief Inspector Heat in a low
tone. “Look here, I would like a word or two with
you.”

Mr Verloc, still pale, had brought an air of resolution with
him. Still he didn’t look at his wife. He
said:

“Come in here, then.” And he led the way
into the parlour.

The door was hardly shut when Mrs Verloc, jumping up from the
chair, ran to it as if to fling it open, but instead of doing so
fell on her knees, with her ear to the keyhole. The two men
must have stopped directly they were through, because she heard
plainly the Chief Inspector’s voice, though she could not
see his finger pressed against her husband’s breast
emphatically.

“You are the other man, Verloc. Two men were seen
entering the park.”

And the voice of Mr Verloc said:

“Well, take me now. What’s to prevent
you? You have the right.”

“Oh no! I know too well who you have been giving
yourself away to. He’ll have to manage this little
affair all by himself. But don’t you make a mistake,
it’s I who found you out.”

Then she heard only muttering. Inspector Heat must have
been showing to Mr Verloc the piece of Stevie’s overcoat,
because Stevie’s sister, guardian, and protector heard her
husband a little louder.

“I never noticed that she had hit upon that
dodge.”

Again for a time Mrs Verloc heard nothing but murmurs, whose
mysteriousness was less nightmarish to her brain than the
horrible suggestions of shaped words. Then Chief Inspector
Heat, on the other side of the door, raised his voice.

“You must have been mad.”

And Mr Verloc’s voice answered, with a sort of gloomy
fury:

“I have been mad for a month or more, but I am not mad
now. It’s all over. It shall all come out of my
head, and hang the consequences.”

There was a silence, and then Private Citizen Heat
murmured:

“What’s coming out?”

“Everything,” exclaimed the voice of Mr Verloc,
and then sank very low.

After a while it rose again.

“You have known me for several years now, and
you’ve found me useful, too. You know I was a
straight man. Yes, straight.”

This appeal to old acquaintance must have been extremely
distasteful to the Chief Inspector.

His voice took on a warning note.

“Don’t you trust so much to what you have been
promised. If I were you I would clear out. I
don’t think we will run after you.”

Mr Verloc was heard to laugh a little.

“Oh yes; you hope the others will get rid of me for
you—don’t you? No, no; you don’t shake me
off now. I have been a straight man to those people too
long, and now everything must come out.”

“Let it come out, then,” the indifferent voice of
Chief Inspector Heat assented. “But tell me now how
did you get away.”

“I was making for Chesterfield Walk,” Mrs Verloc
heard her husband’s voice, “when I heard the
bang. I started running then. Fog. I saw no one
till I was past the end of George Street. Don’t think
I met anyone till then.”

“So easy as that!” marvelled the voice of Chief
Inspector Heat. “The bang startled you,
eh?”

“Yes; it came too soon,” confessed the gloomy,
husky voice of Mr Verloc.

Mrs Verloc pressed her ear to the keyhole; her lips were blue,
her hands cold as ice, and her pale face, in which the two eyes
seemed like two black holes, felt to her as if it were enveloped
in flames.

On the other side of the door the voices sank very low.
She caught words now and then, sometimes in her husband’s
voice, sometimes in the smooth tones of the Chief
Inspector. She heard this last say:

“We believe he stumbled against the root of a
tree?”

There was a husky, voluble murmur, which lasted for some time,
and then the Chief Inspector, as if answering some inquiry, spoke
emphatically.

“Of course. Blown to small bits: limbs, gravel,
clothing, bones, splinters—all mixed up together. I
tell you they had to fetch a shovel to gather him up
with.”

Mrs Verloc sprang up suddenly from her crouching position, and
stopping her ears, reeled to and fro between the counter and the
shelves on the wall towards the chair. Her crazed eyes
noted the sporting sheet left by the Chief Inspector, and as she
knocked herself against the counter she snatched it up, fell into
the chair, tore the optimistic, rosy sheet right across in trying
to open it, then flung it on the floor. On the other side
of the door, Chief Inspector Heat was saying to Mr Verloc, the
secret agent:

“So your defence will be practically a full
confession?”

“It will. I am going to tell the whole
story.”

“You won’t be believed as much as you fancy you
will.”

And the Chief Inspector remained thoughtful. The turn
this affair was taking meant the disclosure of many
things—the laying waste of fields of knowledge, which,
cultivated by a capable man, had a distinct value for the
individual and for the society. It was sorry, sorry
meddling. It would leave Michaelis unscathed; it would drag
to light the Professor’s home industry; disorganise the
whole system of supervision; make no end of a row in the papers,
which, from that point of view, appeared to him by a sudden
illumination as invariably written by fools for the reading of
imbeciles. Mentally he agreed with the words Mr Verloc let
fall at last in answer to his last remark.

“Perhaps not. But it will upset many things.
I have been a straight man, and I shall keep straight in
this—”

“If they let you,” said the Chief Inspector
cynically. “You will be preached to, no doubt, before
they put you into the dock. And in the end you may yet get
let in for a sentence that will surprise you. I
wouldn’t trust too much the gentleman who’s been
talking to you.”

Mr Verloc listened, frowning.

“My advice to you is to clear out while you may. I
have no instructions. There are some of them,”
continued Chief Inspector Heat, laying a peculiar stress on the
word “them,” “who think you are already out of
the world.”

“Indeed!” Mr Verloc was moved to say. Though
since his return from Greenwich he had spent most of his time
sitting in the tap-room of an obscure little public-house, he
could hardly have hoped for such favourable news.

“That’s the impression about you.” The
Chief Inspector nodded at him. “Vanish. Clear
out.”

“Where to?” snarled Mr Verloc. He raised his
head, and gazing at the closed door of the parlour, muttered
feelingly: “I only wish you would take me away
to-night. I would go quietly.”

“I daresay,” assented sardonically the Chief
Inspector, following the direction of his glance.

The brow of Mr Verloc broke into slight moisture. He
lowered his husky voice confidentially before the unmoved Chief
Inspector.

“The lad was half-witted, irresponsible. Any court
would have seen that at once. Only fit for the
asylum. And that was the worst that would’ve happened
to him if—”

The Chief Inspector, his hand on the door handle, whispered
into Mr Verloc’s face.

“He may’ve been half-witted, but you must have
been crazy. What drove you off your head like
this?”

Mr Verloc, thinking of Mr Vladimir, did not hesitate in the
choice of words.

“A Hyperborean swine,” he hissed forcibly.
“A what you might call a—a gentleman.”

The Chief Inspector, steady-eyed, nodded briefly his
comprehension, and opened the door. Mrs Verloc, behind the
counter, might have heard but did not see his departure, pursued
by the aggressive clatter of the bell. She sat at her post
of duty behind the counter. She sat rigidly erect in the
chair with two dirty pink pieces of paper lying spread out at her
feet. The palms of her hands were pressed convulsively to
her face, with the tips of the fingers contracted against the
forehead, as though the skin had been a mask which she was ready
to tear off violently. The perfect immobility of her pose
expressed the agitation of rage and despair, all the potential
violence of tragic passions, better than any shallow display of
shrieks, with the beating of a distracted head against the walls,
could have done. Chief Inspector Heat, crossing the shop at
his busy, swinging pace, gave her only a cursory glance.
And when the cracked bell ceased to tremble on its curved ribbon
of steel nothing stirred near Mrs Verloc, as if her attitude had
the locking power of a spell. Even the butterfly-shaped gas
flames posed on the ends of the suspended T-bracket burned
without a quiver. In that shop of shady wares fitted with
deal shelves painted a dull brown, which seemed to devour the
sheen of the light, the gold circlet of the wedding ring on Mrs
Verloc’s left hand glittered exceedingly with the
untarnished glory of a piece from some splendid treasure of
jewels, dropped in a dust-bin.

CHAPTER X

The Assistant Commissioner, driven rapidly in a hansom from
the neighbourhood of Soho in the direction of Westminster, got
out at the very centre of the Empire on which the sun never
sets. Some stalwart constables, who did not seem
particularly impressed by the duty of watching the august spot,
saluted him. Penetrating through a portal by no means lofty
into the precincts of the House which is the House, par
excellence in the minds of many millions of men, he was met
at last by the volatile and revolutionary Toodles.

That neat and nice young man concealed his astonishment at the
early appearance of the Assistant Commissioner, whom he had been
told to look out for some time about midnight. His turning
up so early he concluded to be the sign that things, whatever
they were, had gone wrong. With an extremely ready
sympathy, which in nice youngsters goes often with a joyous
temperament, he felt sorry for the great Presence he called
“The Chief,” and also for the Assistant Commissioner,
whose face appeared to him more ominously wooden than ever
before, and quite wonderfully long. “What a queer,
foreign-looking chap he is,” he thought to himself, smiling
from a distance with friendly buoyancy. And directly they
came together he began to talk with the kind intention of burying
the awkwardness of failure under a heap of words. It looked
as if the great assault threatened for that night were going to
fizzle out. An inferior henchman of “that brute
Cheeseman” was up boring mercilessly a very thin House with
some shamelessly cooked statistics. He, Toodles, hoped he
would bore them into a count out every minute. But then he
might be only marking time to let that guzzling Cheeseman dine at
his leisure. Anyway, the Chief could not be persuaded to go
home.

“He will see you at once, I think. He’s
sitting all alone in his room thinking of all the fishes of the
sea,” concluded Toodles airily. “Come
along.”

Notwithstanding the kindness of his disposition, the young
private secretary (unpaid) was accessible to the common failings
of humanity. He did not wish to harrow the feelings of the
Assistant Commissioner, who looked to him uncommonly like a man
who has made a mess of his job. But his curiosity was too
strong to be restrained by mere compassion. He could not
help, as they went along, to throw over his shoulder lightly:

“And your sprat?”

“Got him,” answered the Assistant Commissioner
with a concision which did not mean to be repellent in the
least.

“Good. You’ve no idea how these great men
dislike to be disappointed in small things.”

After this profound observation the experienced Toodles seemed
to reflect. At any rate he said nothing for quite two
seconds. Then:

“I’m glad. But—I say—is it
really such a very small thing as you make it out?”

“Do you know what may be done with a sprat?” the
Assistant Commissioner asked in his turn.

“He’s sometimes put into a sardine box,”
chuckled Toodles, whose erudition on the subject of the fishing
industry was fresh and, in comparison with his ignorance of all
other industrial matters, immense. “There are sardine
canneries on the Spanish coast which—”

The Assistant Commissioner interrupted the apprentice
statesman.

“Yes. Yes. But a sprat is also thrown away
sometimes in order to catch a whale.”

“A whale. Phew!” exclaimed Toodles, with
bated breath. “You’re after a whale,
then?”

“Not exactly. What I am after is more like a
dog-fish. You don’t know perhaps what a dog-fish is
like.”

“Yes; I do. We’re buried in special books up
to our necks—whole shelves full of them—with plates.
. . . It’s a noxious, rascally-looking, altogether
detestable beast, with a sort of smooth face and
moustaches.”

“Described to a T,” commended the Assistant
Commissioner. “Only mine is clean-shaven
altogether. You’ve seen him. It’s a witty
fish.”

“I have seen him!” said Toodles
incredulously. “I can’t conceive where I could
have seen him.”

“At the Explorers, I should say,” dropped the
Assistant Commissioner calmly. At the name of that
extremely exclusive club Toodles looked scared, and stopped
short.

“Nonsense,” he protested, but in an awe-struck
tone. “What do you mean? A member?”

“Honorary,” muttered the Assistant Commissioner
through his teeth.

“Heavens!”

Toodles looked so thunderstruck that the Assistant
Commissioner smiled faintly.

“That’s between ourselves strictly,” he
said.

“That’s the beastliest thing I’ve ever heard
in my life,” declared Toodles feebly, as if astonishment
had robbed him of all his buoyant strength in a second.

The Assistant Commissioner gave him an unsmiling glance.
Till they came to the door of the great man’s room, Toodles
preserved a scandalised and solemn silence, as though he were
offended with the Assistant Commissioner for exposing such an
unsavoury and disturbing fact. It revolutionised his idea
of the Explorers’ Club’s extreme selectness, of its
social purity. Toodles was revolutionary only in politics;
his social beliefs and personal feelings he wished to preserve
unchanged through all the years allotted to him on this earth
which, upon the whole, he believed to be a nice place to live
on.

He stood aside.

“Go in without knocking,” he said.

Shades of green silk fitted low over all the lights imparted
to the room something of a forest’s deep gloom. The
haughty eyes were physically the great man’s weak
point. This point was wrapped up in secrecy. When an
opportunity offered, he rested them conscientiously.

The Assistant Commissioner entering saw at first only a big
pale hand supporting a big head, and concealing the upper part of
a big pale face. An open despatch-box stood on the
writing-table near a few oblong sheets of paper and a scattered
handful of quill pens. There was absolutely nothing else on
the large flat surface except a little bronze statuette draped in
a toga, mysteriously watchful in its shadowy immobility.
The Assistant Commissioner, invited to take a chair, sat
down. In the dim light, the salient points of his
personality, the long face, the black hair, his lankness, made
him look more foreign than ever.

The great man manifested no surprise, no eagerness, no
sentiment whatever. The attitude in which he rested his
menaced eyes was profoundly meditative. He did not alter it
the least bit. But his tone was not dreamy.

“Well! What is it that you’ve found out
already? You came upon something unexpected on the first
step.”

“Not exactly unexpected, Sir Ethelred. What I
mainly came upon was a psychological state.”

The Great Presence made a slight movement. “You
must be lucid, please.”

“Yes, Sir Ethelred. You know no doubt that most
criminals at some time or other feel an irresistible need of
confessing—of making a clean breast of it to
somebody—to anybody. And they do it often to the
police. In that Verloc whom Heat wished so much to screen
I’ve found a man in that particular psychological
state. The man, figuratively speaking, flung himself on my
breast. It was enough on my part to whisper to him who I
was and to add ‘I know that you are at the bottom of this
affair.’ It must have seemed miraculous to him that
we should know already, but he took it all in the stride.
The wonderfulness of it never checked him for a moment.
There remained for me only to put to him the two questions: Who
put you up to it? and Who was the man who did it? He
answered the first with remarkable emphasis. As to the
second question, I gather that the fellow with the bomb was his
brother-in-law—quite a lad—a weak-minded creature. .
. . It is rather a curious affair—too long perhaps to state
fully just now.”

“What then have you learned?” asked the great
man.

“First, I’ve learned that the ex-convict Michaelis
had nothing to do with it, though indeed the lad had been living
with him temporarily in the country up to eight o’clock
this morning. It is more than likely that Michaelis knows
nothing of it to this moment.”

“You are positive as to that?” asked the great
man.

“Quite certain, Sir Ethelred. This fellow Verloc
went there this morning, and took away the lad on the pretence of
going out for a walk in the lanes. As it was not the first
time that he did this, Michaelis could not have the slightest
suspicion of anything unusual. For the rest, Sir Ethelred,
the indignation of this man Verloc had left nothing in
doubt—nothing whatever. He had been driven out of his
mind almost by an extraordinary performance, which for you or me
it would be difficult to take as seriously meant, but which
produced a great impression obviously on him.”

The Assistant Commissioner then imparted briefly to the great
man, who sat still, resting his eyes under the screen of his
hand, Mr Verloc’s appreciation of Mr Vladimir’s
proceedings and character. The Assistant Commissioner did
not seem to refuse it a certain amount of competency. But
the great personage remarked:

“All this seems very fantastic.”

“Doesn’t it? One would think a ferocious
joke. But our man took it seriously, it appears. He
felt himself threatened. In the time, you know, he was in
direct communication with old Stott-Wartenheim himself, and had
come to regard his services as indispensable. It was an
extremely rude awakening. I imagine that he lost his
head. He became angry and frightened. Upon my word,
my impression is that he thought these Embassy people quite
capable not only to throw him out but, to give him away too in
some manner or other—”

“How long were you with him,” interrupted the
Presence from behind his big hand.

“Some forty minutes, Sir Ethelred, in a house of bad
repute called Continental Hotel, closeted in a room which
by-the-by I took for the night. I found him under the
influence of that reaction which follows the effort of
crime. The man cannot be defined as a hardened
criminal. It is obvious that he did not plan the death of
that wretched lad—his brother-in-law. That was a
shock to him—I could see that. Perhaps he is a man of
strong sensibilities. Perhaps he was even fond of the
lad—who knows? He might have hoped that the fellow
would get clear away; in which case it would have been almost
impossible to bring this thing home to anyone. At any rate
he risked consciously nothing more but arrest for him.”

The Assistant Commissioner paused in his speculations to
reflect for a moment.

“Though how, in that last case, he could hope to have
his own share in the business concealed is more than I can
tell,” he continued, in his ignorance of poor
Stevie’s devotion to Mr Verloc (who was good), and
of his truly peculiar dumbness, which in the old affair of
fireworks on the stairs had for many years resisted entreaties,
coaxing, anger, and other means of investigation used by his
beloved sister. For Stevie was loyal. . . .
“No, I can’t imagine. It’s possible that
he never thought of that at all. It sounds an extravagant
way of putting it, Sir Ethelred, but his state of dismay
suggested to me an impulsive man who, after committing suicide
with the notion that it would end all his troubles, had
discovered that it did nothing of the kind.”

The Assistant Commissioner gave this definition in an
apologetic voice. But in truth there is a sort of lucidity
proper to extravagant language, and the great man was not
offended. A slight jerky movement of the big body half lost
in the gloom of the green silk shades, of the big head leaning on
the big hand, accompanied an intermittent stifled but powerful
sound. The great man had laughed.

“What have you done with him?”

The Assistant Commissioner answered very readily:

“As he seemed very anxious to get back to his wife in
the shop I let him go, Sir Ethelred.”

“You did? But the fellow will
disappear.”

“Pardon me. I don’t think so. Where
could he go to? Moreover, you must remember that he has got
to think of the danger from his comrades too. He’s
there at his post. How could he explain leaving it?
But even if there were no obstacles to his freedom of action he
would do nothing. At present he hasn’t enough moral
energy to take a resolution of any sort. Permit me also to
point out that if I had detained him we would have been committed
to a course of action on which I wished to know your precise
intentions first.”

The great personage rose heavily, an imposing shadowy form in
the greenish gloom of the room.

“I’ll see the Attorney-General to-night, and will
send for you to-morrow morning. Is there anything more
you’d wish to tell me now?”

The Assistant Commissioner had stood up also, slender and
flexible.

“I think not, Sir Ethelred, unless I were to enter into
details which—”

“No. No details, please.”

The great shadowy form seemed to shrink away as if in physical
dread of details; then came forward, expanded, enormous, and
weighty, offering a large hand. “And you say that
this man has got a wife?”

“Yes, Sir Ethelred,” said the Assistant
Commissioner, pressing deferentially the extended hand.
“A genuine wife and a genuinely, respectably, marital
relation. He told me that after his interview at the
Embassy he would have thrown everything up, would have tried to
sell his shop, and leave the country, only he felt certain that
his wife would not even hear of going abroad. Nothing could
be more characteristic of the respectable bond than that,”
went on, with a touch of grimness, the Assistant Commissioner,
whose own wife too had refused to hear of going abroad.
“Yes, a genuine wife. And the victim was a genuine
brother-in-law. From a certain point of view we are here in
the presence of a domestic drama.”

The Assistant Commissioner laughed a little; but the great
man’s thoughts seemed to have wandered far away, perhaps to
the questions of his country’s domestic policy, the
battle-ground of his crusading valour against the paynim
Cheeseman. The Assistant Commissioner withdrew quietly,
unnoticed, as if already forgotten.

He had his own crusading instincts. This affair, which,
in one way or another, disgusted Chief Inspector Heat, seemed to
him a providentially given starting-point for a crusade. He
had it much at heart to begin. He walked slowly home,
meditating that enterprise on the way, and thinking over Mr
Verloc’s psychology in a composite mood of repugnance and
satisfaction. He walked all the way home. Finding the
drawing-room dark, he went upstairs, and spent some time between
the bedroom and the dressing-room, changing his clothes, going to
and fro with the air of a thoughtful somnambulist. But he
shook it off before going out again to join his wife at the house
of the great lady patroness of Michaelis.

He knew he would be welcomed there. On entering the
smaller of the two drawing-rooms he saw his wife in a small group
near the piano. A youngish composer in pass of becoming
famous was discoursing from a music stool to two thick men whose
backs looked old, and three slender women whose backs looked
young. Behind the screen the great lady had only two
persons with her: a man and a woman, who sat side by side on
arm-chairs at the foot of her couch. She extended her hand
to the Assistant Commissioner.

“I never hoped to see you here to-night. Annie
told me—”

“Yes. I had no idea myself that my work would be
over so soon.”

The Assistant Commissioner added in a low tone: “I
am glad to tell you that Michaelis is altogether clear of
this—”

The patroness of the ex-convict received this assurance
indignantly.

“Why? Were your people stupid enough to connect
him with—”

“Not stupid,” interrupted the Assistant
Commissioner, contradicting deferentially. “Clever
enough—quite clever enough for that.”

A silence fell. The man at the foot of the couch had
stopped speaking to the lady, and looked on with a faint
smile.

“I don’t know whether you ever met before,”
said the great lady.

Mr Vladimir and the Assistant Commissioner, introduced,
acknowledged each other’s existence with punctilious and
guarded courtesy.

“He’s been frightening me,” declared
suddenly the lady who sat by the side of Mr Vladimir, with an
inclination of the head towards that gentleman. The
Assistant Commissioner knew the lady.

“You do not look frightened,” he pronounced, after
surveying her conscientiously with his tired and equable
gaze. He was thinking meantime to himself that in this
house one met everybody sooner or later. Mr
Vladimir’s rosy countenance was wreathed in smiles, because
he was witty, but his eyes remained serious, like the eyes of
convinced man.

“Well, he tried to at least,” amended the
lady.

“Force of habit perhaps,” said the Assistant
Commissioner, moved by an irresistible inspiration.

“He has been threatening society with all sorts of
horrors,” continued the lady, whose enunciation was
caressing and slow, “apropos of this explosion in Greenwich
Park. It appears we all ought to quake in our shoes at
what’s coming if those people are not suppressed all over
the world. I had no idea this was such a grave
affair.”

Mr Vladimir, affecting not to listen, leaned towards the
couch, talking amiably in subdued tones, but he heard the
Assistant Commissioner say:

“I’ve no doubt that Mr Vladimir has a very precise
notion of the true importance of this affair.”

Mr Vladimir asked himself what that confounded and intrusive
policeman was driving at. Descended from generations
victimised by the instruments of an arbitrary power, he was
racially, nationally, and individually afraid of the
police. It was an inherited weakness, altogether
independent of his judgment, of his reason, of his
experience. He was born to it. But that sentiment,
which resembled the irrational horror some people have of cats,
did not stand in the way of his immense contempt for the English
police. He finished the sentence addressed to the great
lady, and turned slightly in his chair.

“You mean that we have a great experience of these
people. Yes; indeed, we suffer greatly from their activity,
while you”—Mr Vladimir hesitated for a moment, in
smiling perplexity—“while you suffer their presence
gladly in your midst,” he finished, displaying a dimple on
each clean-shaven cheek. Then he added more gravely:
“I may even say—because you do.”

When Mr Vladimir ceased speaking the Assistant Commissioner
lowered his glance, and the conversation dropped. Almost
immediately afterwards Mr Vladimir took leave.

Directly his back was turned on the couch the Assistant
Commissioner rose too.

“I thought you were going to stay and take Annie
home,” said the lady patroness of Michaelis.

“I find that I’ve yet a little work to do
to-night.”

“In connection—?”

“Well, yes—in a way.”

“Tell me, what is it really—this
horror?”

“It’s difficult to say what it is, but it may yet
be a cause célèbre,” said the
Assistant Commissioner.

He left the drawing-room hurriedly, and found Mr Vladimir
still in the hall, wrapping up his throat carefully in a large
silk handkerchief. Behind him a footman waited, holding his
overcoat. Another stood ready to open the door. The
Assistant Commissioner was duly helped into his coat, and let out
at once. After descending the front steps he stopped, as if
to consider the way he should take. On seeing this through
the door held open, Mr Vladimir lingered in the hall to get out a
cigar and asked for a light. It was furnished to him by an
elderly man out of livery with an air of calm solicitude.
But the match went out; the footman then closed the door, and Mr
Vladimir lighted his large Havana with leisurely care.

When at last he got out of the house, he saw with disgust the
“confounded policeman” still standing on the
pavement.

“Can he be waiting for me,” thought Mr Vladimir,
looking up and down for some signs of a hansom. He saw
none. A couple of carriages waited by the curbstone, their
lamps blazing steadily, the horses standing perfectly still, as
if carved in stone, the coachmen sitting motionless under the big
fur capes, without as much as a quiver stirring the white thongs
of their big whips. Mr Vladimir walked on, and the
“confounded policeman” fell into step at his
elbow. He said nothing. At the end of the fourth
stride Mr Vladimir felt infuriated and uneasy. This could
not last.

“Rotten weather,” he growled savagely.

“Mild,” said the Assistant Commissioner without
passion. He remained silent for a little while.
“We’ve got hold of a man called Verloc,” he
announced casually.

Mr Vladimir did not stumble, did not stagger back, did not
change his stride. But he could not prevent himself from
exclaiming: “What?” The Assistant Commissioner
did not repeat his statement. “You know him,”
he went on in the same tone.

Mr Vladimir stopped, and became guttural. “What
makes you say that?”

“I don’t. It’s Verloc who says
that.”

“A lying dog of some sort,” said Mr Vladimir in
somewhat Oriental phraseology. But in his heart he was
almost awed by the miraculous cleverness of the English
police. The change of his opinion on the subject was so
violent that it made him for a moment feel slightly sick.
He threw away his cigar, and moved on.

“What pleased me most in this affair,” the
Assistant went on, talking slowly, “is that it makes such
an excellent starting-point for a piece of work which I’ve
felt must be taken in hand—that is, the clearing out of
this country of all the foreign political spies, police, and that
sort of—of—dogs. In my opinion they are a
ghastly nuisance; also an element of danger. But we
can’t very well seek them out individually. The only
way is to make their employment unpleasant to their
employers. The thing’s becoming indecent. And
dangerous too, for us, here.”

Mr Vladimir stopped again for a moment.

“What do you mean?”

“The prosecution of this Verloc will demonstrate to the
public both the danger and the indecency.”

“Nobody will believe what a man of that sort
says,” said Mr Vladimir contemptuously.

“The wealth and precision of detail will carry
conviction to the great mass of the public,” advanced the
Assistant Commissioner gently.

“So that is seriously what you mean to do.”

“We’ve got the man; we have no choice.”

“You will be only feeding up the lying spirit of these
revolutionary scoundrels,” Mr Vladimir protested.
“What do you want to make a scandal for?—from
morality—or what?”

Mr Vladimir’s anxiety was obvious. The Assistant
Commissioner having ascertained in this way that there must be
some truth in the summary statements of Mr Verloc, said
indifferently:

“There’s a practical side too. We have
really enough to do to look after the genuine article. You
can’t say we are not effective. But we don’t
intend to let ourselves be bothered by shams under any pretext
whatever.”

Mr Vladimir’s tone became lofty.

“For my part, I can’t share your view. It is
selfish. My sentiments for my own country cannot be
doubted; but I’ve always felt that we ought to be good
Europeans besides—I mean governments and men.”

“Yes,” said the Assistant Commissioner
simply. “Only you look at Europe from its other
end. But,” he went on in a good-natured tone,
“the foreign governments cannot complain of the
inefficiency of our police. Look at this outrage; a case
specially difficult to trace inasmuch as it was a sham. In
less than twelve hours we have established the identity of a man
literally blown to shreds, have found the organiser of the
attempt, and have had a glimpse of the inciter behind him.
And we could have gone further; only we stopped at the limits of
our territory.”

“So this instructive crime was planned abroad,” Mr
Vladimir said quickly. “You admit it was planned
abroad?”

“Theoretically. Theoretically only, on foreign
territory; abroad only by a fiction,” said the Assistant
Commissioner, alluding to the character of Embassies, which are
supposed to be part and parcel of the country to which they
belong. “But that’s a detail. I talked to
you of this business because it’s your government that
grumbles most at our police. You see that we are not so
bad. I wanted particularly to tell you of our
success.”

“I’m sure I’m very grateful,” muttered
Mr Vladimir through his teeth.

“We can put our finger on every anarchist here,”
went on the Assistant Commissioner, as though he were quoting
Chief Inspector Heat. “All that’s wanted now is
to do away with the agent provocateur to make everything
safe.”

Mr Vladimir held up his hand to a passing hansom.

“You’re not going in here,” remarked the
Assistant Commissioner, looking at a building of noble
proportions and hospitable aspect, with the light of a great hall
falling through its glass doors on a broad flight of steps.

But Mr Vladimir, sitting, stony-eyed, inside the hansom, drove
off without a word.

The Assistant Commissioner himself did not turn into the noble
building. It was the Explorers’ Club. The
thought passed through his mind that Mr Vladimir, honorary
member, would not be seen very often there in the future.
He looked at his watch. It was only half-past ten. He
had had a very full evening.

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.”