
                                 Conrad, Joseph

                        The Secret Agent. A Simple Tale

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                                 Joseph Conrad

                                The Secret Agent

                                 A Simple Tale

                                 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
 

                                 Author's Note

The origin of »The Secret Agent«: subject, treatment, artistic purpose and every
other motive that may induce an author to take up his pen, can, I believe, be
traced to a period of mental and emotional reaction.
    The actual facts are that I began this book impulsively and wrote it
continuously. When in due course it was bound and delivered to the public gaze I
found myself reproved for having produced it at all. Some of the admonitions
were severe, others had a sorrowful note. I have not got them textually before
me but I remember perfectly the general argument, which was very simple; and
also my surprise at its nature. All this sounds a very old story now! And yet it
is not such a long time ago. I must conclude that I had still preserved much of
my pristine innocence in the year 1907. It seems to me now that even an artless
person might have foreseen that some criticisms would be based on the ground of
sordid surroundings and the moral squalor of the tale.
    That of course is a serious objection. It was not universal. In fact it
seems ungracious to remember so little reproof amongst so much intelligent and
sympathetic appreciation; and I trust that the readers of this Preface will not
hasten to put it down to wounded vanity or a natural disposition to ingratitude.
I suggest that a charitable heart could very well ascribe my choice to natural
modesty. Yet it isn't exactly modesty that makes me select reproof for the
illustration of my case. No, it isn't exactly modesty. I am not at all certain
that I am modest; but those who have read so far through my work will credit me
with enough decency, tact, savoir faire, what you will, to prevent me from
making a song for my own glory out of the words of other people. No! The true
motive of my selection lies in quite a different trait. I have always had a
propensity to justify my action. Not to defend. To justify. Not to insist that I
was right but simply to explain that there was no perverse intention, no secret
scorn for the natural sensibilities of mankind at the bottom of my impulses.
    That kind of weakness is dangerous only so far that it exposes one to the
risk of becoming a bore; for the world generally is not interested in the
motives of any overt act but in its consequences. Man may smile and smile but he
is not an investigating animal. He loves the obvious. He shrinks from
explanations. Yet I will go on with mine. It's obvious that I need not have
written that book. I was under no necessity to deal with that subject; using the
word subject both in the sense of the tale itself and in the larger one of a
special manifestation in the life of mankind. This I fully admit. But the
thought of elaborating mere ugliness in order to shock, or even simply to
surprise my readers by a change of front, has never entered my head. In making
this statement I expect to be believed, not only on the evidence of my general
character but also for the reason, which anybody can see, that the whole
treatment of the tale, its inspiring indignation and underlying pity and
contempt, prove my detachment from the squalor and sordidness which lie simply
in the outward circumstances of the setting.
    The inception of »The Secret Agent« followed immediately on a two years'
period of intense absorption in the task of writing that remote novel,
»Nostromo,« with its far off Latin-American atmosphere; and the profoundly
personal »Mirror of the Sea.« The first an intense creative effort on what I
suppose will always remain my largest canvas, the second an unreserved attempt
to unveil for a moment the profounder intimacies of the sea and the formative
influences of nearly half my life-time. It was a period, too, in which my sense
of the truth of things was attended by a very intense imaginative and emotional
readiness which, all genuine and faithful to facts as it was, yet made me feel
(the task once done) as if I were left behind, aimless amongst mere husks of
sensations and lost in a world of other, of inferior, values.
    I don't know whether I really felt that I wanted a change, change in my
imagination, in my vision and in my mental attitude. I rather think that a
change in the fundamental mood had already stolen over me unawares. I don't
remember anything definite happening. With »The Mirror of the Sea« finished in
the full consciousness that I had dealt honestly with myself and my readers in
every line of that book, I gave myself up to a not unhappy pause. Then, while I
was yet standing still, as it were, and certainly not thinking of going out of
my way to look for anything ugly, the subject of »The Secret Agent« - I mean the
tale - came to me in the shape of a few words uttered by a friend in a casual
conversation about anarchists or rather anarchist activities; how brought about
I don't remember now.
    I remember, however, remarking on the criminal futility of the whole thing,
doctrine, action, mentality; and on the contemptible aspect of the half-crazy
pose as of a brazen cheat exploiting the poignant miseries and passionate
credulities of a mankind always so tragically eager for self-destruction. That
was what made for me its philosophical pretences so unpardonable. Presently,
passing to particular instances, we recalled the already old story of the
attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory; a blood-stained inanity of so
fatuous a kind that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or
even unreasonable process of thought. For perverse unreason has its own logical
processes. But that outrage could not be laid hold of mentally in any sort of
way, so that one remained faced by the fact of a man blown to bits for nothing
even most remotely resembling an idea, anarchistic or other. As to the outer
wall of the Observatory it did not show as much as the faintest crack.
    I pointed all this out to my friend who remained silent for a while and then
remarked in his characteristically casual and omniscient manner: »Oh, that
fellow was half an idiot. His sister committed suicide afterwards.« These were
absolutely the only words that passed between us; for extreme surprise at this
unexpected piece of information kept me dumb for a moment and he began at once
to talk of something else. It never occurred to me later to ask how he arrived
at his knowledge. I am sure that if he had seen once in his life the back of an
anarchist that must have been the whole extent of his connection with the
underworld. He was, however, a man who liked to talk with all sorts of people,
and he may have gathered those illuminating facts at second or third hand, from
a crossing-sweeper, from a retired police officer, from some vague man in his
club, or even, perhaps, from a Minister of State met at some public or private
reception.
    Of the illuminating quality there could be no doubt whatever. One felt like
walking out of a forest on to a plain - there was not much to see but one had
plenty of light. No, there was not much to see and, frankly, for a considerable
time I didn't even attempt to perceive anything. It was only the illuminating
impression that remained. It remained satisfactory but in a passive way. Then,
about a week later, I came upon a book which as far as I know had never attained
any prominence, the rather summary recollections of an Assistant Commissioner of
Police, an obviously able man with a strong religious strain in his character
who was appointed to his post at the time of the dynamite outrages in London,
away back in the eighties. The book was fairly interesting, very discreet of
course; and I have by now forgotten the bulk of its contents. It contained no
revelations, it ran over the surface agreeably, and that was all. I won't even
try to explain why I should have been arrested by a little passage of about
seven lines, in which the author (I believe his name was Anderson) reproduced a
short dialogue held in the Lobby of the House of Commons after some unexpected
anarchist outrage, with the Home Secretary. I think it was Sir William Harcourt
then. He was very much irritated and the official was very apologetic. The
phrase, amongst the three which passed between them, that struck me most was Sir
W. Harcourt's angry sally: »All that's very well. But your idea of secrecy over
there seems to consist of keeping the Home Secretary in the dark.«
Characteristic enough of Sir W. Harcourt's temper but not much in itself. There
must have been, however, some sort of atmosphere in the whole incident because
all of a sudden I felt myself stimulated. And then ensued in my mind what a
student of chemistry would best understand from the analogy of the addition of
the tiniest little drop of the right kind, precipitating the process of
crystallization in a test tube containing some colourless solution.
    It was at first for me a mental change, disturbing a quieted-down
imagination, in which strange forms, sharp in outline but imperfectly
apprehended, appeared and claimed attention as crystals will do by their bizarre
and unexpected shapes. One fell to musing before the phenomenon - even of the
past: of South America, a continent of crude sunshine and brutal revolutions, of
the sea, the vast expanse of salt waters, the mirror of heaven's frowns and
smiles, the reflector of the world's light. Then the vision of an enormous town
presented itself, of a monstrous town more populous than some continents and in
its man-made might as if indifferent to heaven's frowns and smiles; a cruel
devourer of the world's light. There was room enough there to place any story,
depth enough there for any passion, variety enough there for any setting,
darkness enough to bury five millions of lives.
    Irresistibly the town became the background for the ensuing period of deep
and tentative meditations. Endless vistas opened before me in various
directions. It would take years to find the right way! It seemed to take years!
... Slowly the dawning conviction of Mrs. Verloc's maternal passion grew up to a
flame between me and that background, tingeing it with its secret ardour and
receiving from it in exchange some of its own sombre colouring. At last the
story of Winnie Verloc stood out complete from the days of her childhood to the
end, unproportioned as yet, with everything still on the first plan, as it were;
but ready now to be dealt with. It was a matter of about three days.
    This book is that story, reduced to manageable proportions, its whole course
suggested and centred round the absurd cruelty of the Greenwich Park explosion.
I had there a task I will not say arduous but of the most absorbing difficulty.
But it had to be done. It was a necessity. The figures grouped about Mrs. Verloc
and related directly or indirectly to her tragic suspicion that life doesn't't
stand much looking into, are the outcome of that very necessity. Personally I
have never had any doubt of the reality of Mrs. Verloc's story; but it had to be
disengaged from its obscurity in that immense town, it had to be made credible,
I don't mean so much as to her soul but as to her surroundings, not so much as
to her psychology but as to her humanity. For the surroundings hints were not
lacking. I had to fight hard to keep at arms-length the memories of my solitary
and nocturnal walks all over London in my early days, lest they should rush in
and overwhelm each page of the story as these emerged one after another from a
mood as serious in feeling and thought as any in which I ever wrote a line. In
that respect I really think that »The Secret Agent« is a perfectly genuine piece
of work. Even the purely artistic purpose, that of applying an ironic method to
a subject of that kind, was formulated with deliberation and in the earnest
belief that ironic treatment alone would enable me to say all I felt I would
have to say in scorn as well as in pity. It is one of the minor satisfactions of
my writing life that having taken that resolve I did manage, it seems to me, to
carry it right through to the end. As to the personages whom the absolute
necessity of the case - Mrs. Verloc's case - brings out in front of the London
background, from them, too, I obtained those little satisfactions which really
count for so much against the mass of oppressive doubts that haunt so
persistently every attempt at creative work. For instance, of Mr. Vladimir
himself (who was fair game for a caricatural presentation) I was gratified to
hear that an experienced man of the world had said »that Conrad must have been
in touch with that sphere or else has an excellent intuition of things,« because
Mr. Vladimir was »not only possible in detail but quite right in essentials.«
Then a visitor from America informed me that all sorts of revolutionary refugees
in New York would have it that the book was written by somebody who knew a lot
about them. This seemed to me a very high compliment, considering that, as a
matter of hard fact, I had seen even less of their kind than the omniscient
friend who gave me the first suggestion for the novel. I have no doubt, however,
that there had been moments during the writing of the book when I was an extreme
revolutionist, I won't say more convinced than they but certainly cherishing a
more concentrated purpose than any of them had ever done in the whole course of
his life. I don't say this to boast. I was simply attending to my business. In
the matter of all my books I have always attended to my business. I have
attended to it with complete self-surrender. And this statement, too, is not a
boast. I could not have done otherwise. It would have bored me too much to
make-believe.
    The suggestions for certain personages of the tale, both law-abiding and
lawless, came from various sources which, perhaps, here and there, some reader
may have recognized. They are not very recondite. But I am not concerned here to
legitimize any of those people, and even as to my general view of the moral
reactions as between the criminal and the police all I will venture to say is
that it seems to me to be at least arguable.
    The twelve years that have elapsed since the publication of the book have
not changed my attitude. I do not regret having written it. Lately,
circumstances, which have nothing to do with the general tenor of this preface,
have compelled me to strip this tale of the literary robe of indignant scorn it
has cost me so much to fit on it decently, years ago. I have been forced, so to
speak, to look upon its bare bones. I confess that it makes a grisly skeleton.
But still I will submit that telling Winnie Verloc's story to its anarchistic
end of utter desolation, madness and despair, and telling it as I have told it
here, I have not intended to commit a gratuitous outrage on the feelings of
mankind.
    
                                                                           J. C.
1920.

                                       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 aesthetic 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-six-pence), 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 lodger's 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 piercingly 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 patronizing 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.
 

                                       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 locksmith; 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
clawhammer 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 immobilizing 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 shortsighted. 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 recognized 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
eyeglasses 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 office-man 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 on 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 the 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 apologized 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 armchair, 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 armchair. »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 armchair, »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 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 D. in the late Baron
Stott-Wartenheim's official, semi-official, and confidential correspondence; the
celebrated agent D. whose warnings had the power to change the schemes and the
dates of royal, imperial, grand-ducal journeys, and sometimes cause 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 naïve, 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 organization 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 recognize - 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 civilized man. I
would never dream of directing you to organize 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 armchair
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 the 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 necktie. 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 civilized 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 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.
 

                                      III

» ... All idealization 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 organization 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 armchair 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 dullness 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, nick-named 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-aggrandizement only preparing, organizing, 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 signs 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 recognized 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, businesslike
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 was
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.
 

                                       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
medieval 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 tec 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,
organized 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 revolutionize 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 foolproof.«
    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 is 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 harmonized 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.
 

                                       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
appetities, 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
Crime 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
tablecloth, 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 broadcloth. 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 recognize 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 authorized 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 armchair, 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 organization. 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.
 

                                       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 armchairs 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 armchair 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 semiprivate nook of the drawing- 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 realized 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 fullness 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 organized 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 scandalized
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 cut 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 armchair, 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 recognized 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 businesslike 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 shinbones 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 had 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 implicitly. 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.
 

                                      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'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 extended 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 authorized 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 Nationalization 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 any one 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 statesmanlike 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 ghostliness 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 action 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 an 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 denationalized 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 enigmatic
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 gaslight 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.
 

                                      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 scandalized
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 horsehair 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 handbag, 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 cab man
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! Who ever 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 medieval device for the punishment of crime, or some very new-fangled
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:
    »'Ere 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 cab man. 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 cab man looked at the pieces of
silver, which, appearing very minute in his big, grimy palm, symbolized 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 cab man, 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 emancipation. 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 cab man 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 cab man 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 cab man, 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 pocket
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 cab man 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 cab man, Stevie perceived this clearly, because he was reasonable.
    The cab man 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 almshouses. The plaint of the
gravel travelled slowly all round the drive. Between the lamps of the charitable
gateway the slow cortège 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 bother'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 recognized 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 cab man 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
cab man'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 organized 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 intelectual 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 are they for 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 cortège 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 bedclothes. 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
D 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.«
 

                                       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 oilcloth 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 far-away 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'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 if 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 semitransparent 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
recognized 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 tablecloth, 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 fullness 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 on 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 enigmatic 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 cheekbone 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. Guigliani. 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 on 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 stigmatized 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 recognize 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 any one 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; disorganize 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.
 

                                       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 awestruck 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 scandalized and solemn
silence, as though he were offended with the Assistant Commissioner for exposing
such an unsavoury and disturbing fact. It revolutionized 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. Formerly, 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 any one. 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 armchairs 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 victimized 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 in 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 organizer 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.
 

                                       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- 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 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 hearth-stone 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 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'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 careworn 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 under ground. 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'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 recognized, 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 not sufficient command over her voice. She
did not see any alternative between screaming and silence, and instinctively she
chose the silence. Winnie Verloc was temperamentally a silent person. And there
was the paralysing atrocity of the thought which occupied her. Her cheeks were
blanched, her lips ashy, her immobility amazing. And she thought without looking
at Mr. Verloc: »This man took the boy away to murder him. He took the boy away
from his home to murder him. He took the boy away from me to murder him!«
    Mrs. Verloc's whole being was racked by that inconclusive and maddening
thought. It was in her veins, in her bones, in the roots of her hair. Mentally
she assumed the biblical attitude of mourning - the covered face, the rent
garments; the sound of wailing and lamentation filled her head. But her teeth
were violently clenched, and her tearless eyes were hot with rage, because she
was not a submissive creature. The protection she had extended over her brother
had been in its origin of a fierce and indignant complexion. She had to love him
with a militant love. She had battled for him - even against herself. His loss
had the bitterness of defeat, with the anguish of a baffled passion. It was not
an ordinary stroke of death. Moreover, it was not death that took Stevie from
her. It was Mr. Verloc who took him away. She had seen him. She had watched him,
without raising a hand, take the boy away. And she had let him go, like - like a
fool - a blind fool. Then after he had murdered the boy he came home to her.
Just came home like any other man would come home to his wife. ...
    Through her set teeth Mrs. Verloc muttered at the wall:
    »And I thought he had caught a cold.«
    Mr. Verloc heard these words and appropriated them.
    »It was nothing,« he said, moodily. »I was upset. I was upset on your
account.«
    Mrs. Verloc, turning her head slowly, transferred her stare from the wall to
her husband's person. Mr. Verloc, with the tips of his fingers between his lips,
was looking on the ground.
    »Can't be helped,« he mumbled, letting his hand fall. »You must pull
yourself together. You'll want all your wits about you. It is you who brought
the police about our ears. Never mind, I won't say anything more about it,«
continued Mr. Verloc, magnanimously. »You couldn't know.«
    »I couldn't,« breathed out Mrs. Verloc. It was as if a corpse had spoken.
Mr. Verloc took up the thread of his discourse.
    »I don't blame you. I'll make them sit up. Once under lock and key it will
be safe enough for me to talk - you understand. You must reckon on me being two
years away from you,« he continued, in a tone of sincere concern. »It will be
easier for you than for me. You'll have something to do, while I -- Look here,
Winnie, what you must do is to keep this business going for two years. You know
enough for that. You've a good head on you. I'll send you word when it's time to
go about trying to sell. You'll have to be extra careful. The comrades will be
keeping an eye on you all the time. You'll have to be as artful as you know how,
and as close as the grave. No one must know what you are going to do. I have no
mind to get a knock on the head or a stab in the back directly I am let out.«
    Thus spoke Mr. Verloc, applying his mind with ingenuity and forethought to
the problems of the future. His voice was sombre, because he had a correct
sentiment of the situation. Everything which he did not wish to pass had come to
pass. The future had become precarious. His judgment, perhaps, had been
momentarily obscured by his dread of Mr. Vladimir's truculent folly. A man
somewhat over forty may be excusably thrown into considerable disorder by the
prospect of losing his employment, especially if the man is a secret agent of
political police, dwelling secure in the consciousness of his high value and in
the esteem of high personages. He was excusable.
    Now the thing had ended in a crash. Mr. Verloc was cool; but he was not
cheerful. A secret agent who throws his secrecy to the winds from desire of
vengeance, and flaunts his achievements before the public eye, becomes the mark
for desperate and bloodthirsty indignations. Without unduly exaggerating the
danger, Mr. Verloc tried to bring it clearly before his wife's mind. He repeated
that he had no intention of letting the revolutionists do away with him.
    He looked straight into his wife's eyes. The enlarged pupils of the woman
received his stare into their unfathomable depths.
    »I am too fond of you for that,« he said, with a little nervous laugh.
    A faint flush coloured Mrs. Verloc's ghastly and motionless face. Having
done with the visions of the past, she had not only heard, but had also
understood the words uttered by her husband. By their extreme disaccord with her
mental condition these words produced on her a slightly suffocating effect. Mrs.
Verloc's mental condition had the merit of simplicity; but it was not sound. It
was governed too much by a fixed idea. Every nook and cranny of her brain was
filled with the thought that this man, with whom she had lived without distaste
for seven years, had taken the poor boy away from her in order to kill him - the
man to whom she had grown accustomed in body and mind; the man whom she had
trusted, took the boy away to kill him! In its form, in its substance, in its
effect, which was universal, altering even the aspect of inanimate things, it
was a thought to sit still and marvel at for ever and ever. Mrs. Verloc sat
still. And across that thought (not across the kitchen) the form of Mr. Verloc
went to and fro, familiarly in hat and overcoat, stamping with his boots upon
her brain. He was probably talking, too; but Mrs. Verloc's thought for the most
part covered the voice.
    Now and then, however, the voice would make itself heard. Several connected
words emerged at times. Their purport was generally hopeful. On each of these
occasions Mrs. Verloc's dilated pupils, losing their far-off fixity, followed
her husband's movements with the effect of black care and impenetrable
attention. Well informed upon all matters, relating to his secret calling, Mr.
Verloc augured well for the success of his plans and combinations. He really
believed that it would be upon the whole easy for him to escape the knife of
infuriated revolutionists. He had exaggerated the strength of their fury and the
length of their arm (for professional purposes) too often to have many illusions
one way or the other. For to exaggerate with judgment one must begin by
measuring with nicety. He knew also how much virtue and how much infamy is
forgotten in two years - two long years. His first really confidential discourse
to his wife was optimistic from conviction. He also thought it good policy to
display all the assurance he could muster. It would put heart into the poor
woman. On his liberation, which, harmonizing with the whole tenor of his life,
would be secret, of course, they would vanish together without loss of time. As
to covering up the tracks, he begged his wife to trust him for that. He knew how
it was to be done so that the devil himself -
    He waved his hand. He seemed to boast. He wished only to put heart into her.
It was a benevolent intention, but Mr. Verloc had the misfortune not to be in
accord with his audience.
    The self-confident tone grew upon Mrs. Verloc's ear which let most of the
words go by; for what were words to her now? What could words do to her for good
or evil in the face of her fixed idea? Her black glance followed that man who
was asserting his impunity - the man who had taken poor Stevie from home to kill
him somewhere. Mrs. Verloc could not remember exactly where, but her heart began
to beat very perceptibly.
    Mr. Verloc, in a soft and conjugal tone, was now expressing his firm belief
that there were yet a good few years of quiet life before them both. He did not
go into the question of means. A quiet life it must be and, as it were, nestling
in the shade, concealed among men whose flesh is grass; modest, like the life of
violets. The words used by Mr. Verloc were: »Lie low for a bit.« And far from
England, of course. It was not clear whether Mr. Verloc had in his mind Spain or
South America; but at any rate somewhere abroad.
    This last word, falling into Mrs. Verloc's ear, produced a definite
impression. This man was talking of going abroad. The impression was completely
disconnected; and such is the force of mental habit that Mrs. Verloc at once and
automatically asked herself: »And what of Stevie?«
    It was a sort of forgetfulness; but instantly she became aware that there
was no longer any occasion for anxiety on that score. There would never be any
occasion any more. The poor boy had been taken out and killed. The poor boy was
dead.
    This shaking piece of forgetfulness stimulated Mrs. Verloc's intelligence.
She began to perceive certain consequences which would have surprised Mr.
Verloc. There was no need for her now to stay there, in that kitchen, in that
house, with that man - since the boy was gone for ever. No need whatever. And on
that Mrs. Verloc rose as if raised by a spring. But neither could she see what
there was to keep her in the world at all. And this inability arrested her. Mr.
Verloc watched her with marital solicitude.
    »You're looking more like yourself,« he said, uneasily. Something peculiar
in the blackness of his wife's eyes disturbed his optimism. At that precise
moment Mrs. Verloc began to look upon herself as released from all earthly ties.
She had her freedom. Her contract with existence, as represented by that man
standing over there, was at an end. She was a free woman. Had this view become
in some way perceptible to Mr. Verloc he would have been extremely shocked. In
his affairs of the heart Mr. Verloc had been always carelessly generous, yet
always with no other idea than that of being loved for himself. Upon this
matter, his ethical notions being in agreement with his vanity, he was
completely incorrigible. That this should be so in the case of his virtuous and
legal connection he was perfectly certain. He had grown older, fatter, heavier,
in the belief that he lacked no fascination for being loved for his own sake.
When he saw Mrs. Verloc starting to walk out of the kitchen without a word he
was disappointed.
    »Where are you going to?« he called out rather sharply. »Upstairs?«
    Mrs. Verloc in the doorway turned at the voice. An instinct of prudence born
of fear, the excessive fear of being approached and touched by that man, induced
her to nod at him slightly (from the height of two steps), with a stir of the
lips which the conjugal optimism of Mr. Verloc took for a wan and uncertain
smile.
    »That's right,« he encouraged her gruffly. »Rest and quiet's what you want.
Go on. It won't be long before I am with you.«
    Mrs. Verloc, the free woman who had had really no idea where she was going
to, obeyed the suggestion with rigid steadiness.
    Mr. Verloc watched her. She disappeared up the stairs. He was disappointed.
There was that within him which would have been more satisfied if she had been
moved to throw herself upon his breast. But he was generous and indulgent.
Winnie was always undemonstrative and silent. Neither was Mr. Verloc himself
prodigal of endearments and words as a rule. But this was not an ordinary
evening. It was an occasion when a man wants to be fortified and strengthened by
open proofs of sympathy and affection. Mr. Verloc sighed, and put out the gas in
the kitchen. Mr. Verloc's sympathy with his wife was genuine and intense. It
almost brought tears into his eyes as he stood in the parlour reflecting on the
loneliness hanging over her head. In this mood Mr. Verloc missed Stevie very
much out of a difficult world. He thought mournfully of his end. If only that
lad had not stupidly destroyed himself!
    The sensation of unappeasable hunger, not unknown after the strain of a
hazardous enterprise to adventurers of tougher fibre than Mr. Verloc, overcame
him again. The piece of roast beef, laid out in the likeness of funereal baked
meats for Stevie's obsequies, offered itself largely to his notice. And Mr.
Verloc again partook. He partook ravenously, without restraint and decency,
cutting thick slices with the sharp carving knife, and swallowing them without
bread. In the course of that refection it occurred to Mr. Verloc that he was not
hearing his wife move about the bedroom as he should have done. The thought of
finding her perhaps sitting on the bed in the dark not only cut Mr. Verloc's
appetite, but also took from him the inclination to follow her upstairs just
yet. Laying down the carving knife, Mr. Verloc listened with careworn attention.
    He was comforted by hearing her move at last. She walked suddenly across the
room, and threw the window up. After a period of stillness up there, during
which he figured her to himself with her head out, he heard the sash being
lowered slowly. Then she made a few steps, and sat down. Every resonance of his
house was familiar to Mr. Verloc, who was thoroughly domesticated. When next he
heard his wife's footsteps overheard he knew, as well as if he had seen her
doing it, that she had been putting on her walking shoes. Mr. Verloc wriggled
his shoulders slightly at this ominous symptom, and moving away from the table,
stood with his back to the fireplace, his head on one side, and gnawing
perplexedly at the tips of his fingers. He kept track of her movements by the
sound. She walked here and there violently, with abrupt stoppages, now before
the chest of drawers, then in front of the wardrobe. An immense load of
weariness, the harvest of a day of shocks and surprises, weighed Mr. Verloc's
energies to the ground.
    He did not raise his eyes till he heard his wife descending the stairs. It
was as he had guessed, she was dressed for going out.
    Mrs. Verloc was a free woman. She had thrown open the window of the bedroom
either with the intention of screaming Murder! Help! or of throwing herself out.
For she did not exactly know what use to make of her freedom. Her personality
seemed to have been torn into two pieces, whose mental operations did not adjust
themselves very well to each other. The street, silent and deserted from end to
end, repelled her by taking sides with that man who was so certain of his
impunity. She was afraid to shout lest no one should come. Obviously no one
would come. Her instinct of self-preservation recoiled from the depth of the
fall into that sort of slimy, deep trench. Mrs. Verloc closed the window, and
dressed herself to go out into the street by another way. She was a free woman.
She had dressed herself thoroughly, down to the tying of a black veil over her
face. As she appeared before him in the light of the parlour, Mr. Verloc
observed that she had even her little handbag hanging from her left wrist. ...
Flying off to her mother, of course.
    The thought that women were wearisome creatures after all presented itself
to his fatigued brain. But he was too generous to harbour it for more than an
instant. This man, hurt cruelly in his vanity, remained magnanimous in his
conduct, allowing himself no satisfaction of a bitter smile or of a contemptuous
gesture. With true greatness of soul, he only glanced at the wooden clock on the
wall, and said in a perfectly calm but forcible manner:
    »Five and twenty minutes past eight, Winnie. There's no sense in going over
there so late. You will never manage to get back to-night.«
    Before his extended hand Mrs. Verloc had stopped short. He added, heavily:
»Your mother will be gone to bed before you get there. This is the sort of news
that can wait.«
    Nothing was further from Mrs. Verloc's thoughts than going to her mother.
She recoiled at the mere idea, and feeling a chair behind her, she obeyed the
suggestion of the touch, and sat down. Her intention had been simply to get
outside the door for ever. And if this feeling was correct, its mental form took
an unrefined shape corresponding to her origin and station. »I would rather walk
the streets all the days of my life,« she thought. But this creature, whose
moral nature had been subjected to a shock of which, in the physical order, the
most violent earthquake of history could only be a faint and languid rendering,
was at the mercy of mere trifles, of casual contacts. She sat down. With her hat
and veil she had the air of a visitor, of having looked in on Mr. Verloc for a
moment. Her instant docility encouraged him, whilst her aspect of only temporary
and silent acquiescence provoked him a little.
    »Let me tell you, Winnie,« he said with authority, »that your place is here
this evening. Hang it all! you brought the damned police high and low about my
ears. I don't blame you - but it's your doing all the same. You'd better take
this confounded hat off. I can't let you go out, old girl,« he added in a
softened voice.
    Mrs. Verloc's mind got hold of that declaration with morbid tenacity. The
man who had taken Stevie out from under her very eyes to murder him in a
locality whose name was at the moment not present to her memory would not allow
her to go out. Of course he wouldn't. Now he had murdered Stevie he would never
let her go. He would want to keep her for nothing. And on this characteristic
reasoning, having all the force of insane logic, Mrs. Verloc's disconnected wits
went to work practically. She could slip by him, open the door, run out. But he
would dash out after her, seize her round the body, drag her back into the shop.
She could scratch, kick, and bite - and stab, too; but for stabbing she wanted a
knife. Mrs. Verloc sat still under her black veil, in her own house, like a
masked and mysterious visitor of impenetrable intentions.
    Mr. Verloc's magnanimity was not more than human. She had exasperated him at
last.
    »Can't you say something? You have your own dodges for vexing a man. Oh,
yes! I know your deaf-and-dumb trick. I've seen you at it before to-day. But
just now it won't do. And to begin with, take this damned thing off. One can't
tell whether one is talking to a dummy or to a live woman.«
    He advanced, and stretching out his hand, dragged the veil off, unmasking a
still unreadable face, against which his nervous exasperation was shattered like
a glass bubble flung against a rock. »That's better,« he said, to cover his
momentary uneasiness, and retreated back to his old station by the mantelpiece.
It never entered his head that his wife could give him up. He felt a little
ashamed of himself, for he was fond and generous. What could he do? Everything
had been said already. He protested vehemently.
    »By heavens! You know that I hunted high and low. I ran the risk of giving
myself away to find somebody for that accursed job. And I tell you again I
couldn't find any one crazy enough or hungry enough. What do you take me for - a
murderer, or what? The boy is gone. Do you think I wanted him to blow himself
up? He's gone. His troubles are over. Ours are just going to begin, I tell you,
precisely because he did blow himself up. I don't blame you. But just try to
understand that it was a pure accident; as much an accident as if he had been
run over by a 'bus while crossing the street.«
    His generosity was not infinite, because he was a human being - and not a
monster, as Mrs. Verloc believed him to be. He paused, and a snarl lifting his
moustaches above a gleam of white teeth gave him the expression of a reflective
beast, not very dangerous - a slow beast with a sleek head, gloomier than a
seal, and with a husky voice.
    »And when it comes to that, it's as much your doing as mine. That's so. You
may glare as much as you like. I know what you can do in that way. Strike me
dead if I ever would have thought of the lad for that purpose. It was you who
kept on shoving him in my way when I was half distracted with the worry of
keeping the lot of us out of trouble. What the devil made you? One would think
you were doing it on purpose. And I am damned if I know that you didn't. There's
no saying how much of what's going on you have got hold of on the sly with your
infernal don't- way of looking nowhere in particular, and saying nothing at all.
...«
    His husky, domestic voice ceased for a while. Mrs. Verloc made no reply.
Before that silence he felt ashamed of what he had said. But as often happens to
peaceful men in domestic tiffs, being ashamed he pushed another point.
    »You have a devilish way of holding your tongue sometimes,« he began again,
without raising his voice. »Enough to make some men go mad. It's lucky for you
that I am not so easily put out as some of them would be by your deaf-and-dumb
sulks. I am fond of you. But don't you go too far. This isn't the time for it.
We ought to be thinking of what we've got to do. And I can't let you go out
to-night, galloping off to your mother with some crazy tale or other about me. I
won't have it. Don't you make any mistake about it: if you will have it that I
killed the boy, then you've killed him as much as I.«
    In sincerity of feeling and openness of statement, these words went far
beyond anything that had ever been said in this home, kept up on the wages of a
secret industry eked out by the sale of more or less secret wares: the poor
expedients devised by a mediocre mankind for preserving an imperfect society
from the dangers of moral and physical corruption, both secret, too, of their
kind. They were spoken because Mr. Verloc had felt himself really outraged; but
the reticent decencies of this home life, nestling in a shady street behind a
shop where the sun never shone, remained apparently undisturbed. Mrs. Verloc
heard him out with perfect propriety, and then rose from her chair in her hat
and jacket like a visitor at the end of a call. She advanced towards her
husband, one arm extended as if for a silent leave-taking. Her net veil dangling
down by one end on the left side of her face gave an air of disorderly formality
to her restrained movements. But when she arrived as far as the hearthrug, Mr.
Verloc was no longer standing there. He had moved off in the direction of the
sofa, without raising his eyes to watch the effect of his tirade. He was tired,
resigned in a truly marital spirit. But he felt hurt in the tender spot of his
secret weakness. If she would go on sulking in that dreadful overcharged silence
- why then she must. She was a master in that domestic art. Mr. Verloc flung
himself heavily upon the sofa, disregarding as usual the fate of his hat, which,
as if accustomed to take care of itself, made for a safe shelter under the
table.
    He was tired. The last particle of his nervous force had been expended in
the wonders and agonies of this day full of surprising failures coming at the
end of a harassing month of scheming and insomnia. He was tired. A man isn't
made of stone. Hang everything! Mr. Verloc reposed characteristically, clad in
his outdoor garments. One side of his open overcoat was lying partly on the
ground. Mr. Verloc wallowed on his back. But he longed for a more perfect rest -
for sleep - for a few hours of delicious forgetfulness. That would come later.
Provisionally he rested. And he thought: »I wish she would give over this damned
nonsense. It's exasperating.«
    There must have been something imperfect in Mrs. Verloc's sentiment of
regained freedom. Instead of taking the way of the door she leaned back, with
her shoulders against the tablet of the mantelpiece, as a wayfarer rests against
a fence. A tinge of wildness in her aspect was derived from the black veil
hanging like a rag against her cheek, and from the fixity of her black gaze
where the light of the room was absorbed and lost without the trace of a single
gleam. This woman, capable of a bargain the mere suspicion of which would have
been infinitely shocking to Mr. Verloc's idea of love, remained irresolute, as
if scrupulously aware of something wanting on her part for the formal closing of
the transaction.
    On the sofa Mr. Verloc wriggled his shoulders into perfect comfort, and from
the fullness of his heart emitted a wish which was certainly as pious as anything
likely to come from such a source.
    »I wish to goodness,« he growled, huskily, »I had never seen Greenwich Park
or anything belonging to it.«
    The veiled sound filled the small room with its moderate volume, well
adapted to the modest nature of the wish. The waves of air of the proper length,
propagated in accordance with correct mathematical formulas, flowed around all
the inanimate things in the room, lapped against Mrs. Verloc's head as if it had
been a head of stone. And incredible as it may appear, the eyes of Mrs. Verloc
seemed to grow still larger. The audible wish of Mr. Verloc's overflowing heart
flowed into an empty place in his wife's memory. Greenwich Park. A park! That's
where the boy was killed. A park - smashed branches, torn leaves, gravel, bits
of brotherly flesh and bone, all spouting up together in the manner of a
firework. She remembered now what she had heard, and she remembered it
pictorially. They had to gather him up with the shovel. Trembling all over with
irrepressible shudders, she saw before her the very implement with its ghastly
load scraped up from the ground. Mrs. Verloc closed her eyes desperately,
throwing upon that vision the night of her eyelids, where after a rainlike fall
of mangled limbs the decapitated head of Stevie lingered suspended alone, and
fading out slowly like the last star of a pyrotechnic display. Mrs. Verloc
opened her eyes.
    Her face was no longer stony. Anybody could have noted the subtle change on
her features, in the stare of her eyes, giving her a new and startling
expression; an expression seldom observed by competent persons under the
conditions of leisure and security demanded for thorough analysis, but whose
meaning could not he mistaken at a glance. Mrs. Verloc's doubts as to the end of
the bargain no longer existed; her wits, no longer disconnected, were working
under the control of her will. But Mr. Verloc observed nothing. He was reposing
in that pathetic condition of optimism induced by excess of fatigue. He did not
want any more trouble - with his wife, too - of all people in the world. He had
been unanswerable in his vindication. He was loved for himself. The present
phase of her silence he interpreted favourably. This was the time to make it up
with her. The silence had lasted long enough. He broke it by calling to her in
an undertone:
    »Winnie.«
    »Yes,« answered obediently Mrs. Verloc the free woman. She commanded her
wits now, her vocal organs; she felt herself to be in an almost preternaturally
perfect control of every fibre of her body. It was all her own, because the
bargain was at an end. She was clear sighted. She had become cunning. She chose
to answer him so readily for a purpose. She did not wish that man to change his
position on the sofa which was very suitable to the circumstances. She
succeeded. The man did not stir. But after answering him she remained leaning
negligently against the mantelpiece in the attitude of a resting wayfarer. She
was unhurried. Her brow was smooth. The head and shoulders of Mr. Verloc were
hidden from her by the high side of the sofa. She kept her eyes fixed on his
feet.
    She remained thus mysteriously still and suddenly collected till Mr. Verloc
was heard with an accent of marital authority, and moving slightly to make room
for her to sit on the edge of the sofa.
    »Come here,« he said in a peculiar tone, which might have been the tone of
brutality, but was intimately known to Mrs. Verloc as the note of wooing.
    She started forward at once, as if she were still a loyal woman bound to
that man by an unbroken contract. Her right hand skimmed slightly the end of the
table, and when she had passed on towards the sofa the carving knife had
vanished without the slightest sound from the side of the dish. Mr. Verloc heard
the creaky plank in the floor, and was content. He waited. Mrs. Verloc was
coming. As if the homeless soul of Stevie had flown for shelter straight to the
breast of his sister, guardian, and protector, the resemblance of her face with
that of her brother grew at every step, even to the droop of the lower lip, even
to the slight divergence of the eyes. But Mr. Verloc did not see that. He was
lying on his back and staring upwards. He saw partly on the ceiling and partly
on the wall the moving shadow of an arm with a clenched hand holding a carving
knife. It flickered up and down. Its movements were leisurely. They were
leisurely enough for Mr. Verloc to recognize the limb and the weapon.
    They were leisurely enough for him to take in the full meaning of the
portent, and to taste the flavour of death rising in his gorge. His wife had
gone raving mad - murdering mad. They were leisurely enough for the first
paralysing effect of this discovery to pass away before a resolute determination
to come out victorious from the ghastly struggle with that armed lunatic. They
were leisurely enough for Mr. Verloc to elaborate a plan of defence involving a
dash behind the table, and the felling of the woman to the ground with a heavy
wooden chair. But they were not leisurely enough to allow Mr. Verloc the time to
move either hand or foot. The knife was already planted in his breast. It met no
resistance on its way. Hazard has such accuracies. Into that plunging blow,
delivered over the side of the couch, Mrs. Verloc had put all the inheritance of
her immemorial and obscure descent, the simple ferocity of the age of caverns,
and the unbalanced nervous fury of the age of bar-rooms. Mr. Verloc, the Secret
Agent, turning slightly on his side with the force of the blow, expired without
stirring a limb, in the muttered sound of the word Don't by way of protest.
    Mrs. Verloc had let go the knife, and her extraordinary resemblance to her
late brother had faded, had become very ordinary now. She drew a deep breath,
the first easy breath since Chief Inspector Heat had exhibited to her the
labelled piece of Stevie's overcoat. She leaned forward on her folded arms over
the side of the sofa. She adopted that easy attitude not in order to watch or
gloat over the body of Mr. Verloc, but because of the undulatory and swinging
movements of the parlour, which for some time behaved as though it were at sea
in a tempest. She was giddy but calm. She had become a free woman with a
perfection of freedom which left her nothing to desire and absolutely nothing to
do, since Stevie's urgent claim on her devotion no longer existed. Mrs. Verloc,
who thought in images, was not troubled now by visions, because she did not
think at all. And she did not move. She was a woman enjoying her complete
irresponsibility and endless leisure, almost in the manner of a corpse. She did
not move, she did not think. Neither did the mortal envelope of the late Mr.
Verloc reposing on the sofa. Except for the fact that Mrs. Verloc breathed these
two would have been perfectly in accord: that accord of prudent reserve without
superfluous words, and sparing of signs, which had been the foundation of their
respectable home life. For it had been respectable, covering by a decent
reticence the problems that may arise in the practice of a secret profession and
the commerce of shady wares. To the last its decorum had remained undisturbed by
unseemly shrieks and other misplaced sincerities of conduct. And after the
striking of the blow, this respectability was continued in immobility and
silence.
    Nothing moved in the parlour till Mrs. Verloc raised her head slowly and
looked at the clock with inquiring mistrust. She had become aware of a ticking
sound in the room. It grew upon her ear, while she remembered clearly that the
clock on the wall was silent, had no audible tick. What did it mean by beginning
to tick so loudly all of a sudden? Its face indicated ten minutes to nine. Mrs.
Verloc cared nothing for time, and the ticking went on. She concluded it could
not be the clock, and her sullen gaze moved along the walls, wavered, and became
vague, while she strained her hearing to locate the sound. Tic, tic, tic.
    After listening for some time Mrs. Verloc lowered her gaze deliberately on
her husband's body. Its attitude of repose was so homelike and familiar that she
could do so without feeling embarrassed by any pronounced novelty in the
phenomena of her home life. Mr. Verloc was taking his habitual ease. He looked
comfortable.
    By the position of the body the face of Mr. Verloc was not visible to Mrs.
Verloc, his widow. Her fine, sleepy eyes, travelling downward on the track of
the sound, became contemplative on meeting a flat object of bone which protruded
a little beyond the edge of the sofa. It was the handle of the domestic carving
knife with nothing strange about it but its position at right angles to Mr.
Verloc's waistcoat and the fact that something dripped from it. Dark drops fell
on the floorcloth one after another, with a sound of ticking growing fast and
furious like the pulse of an insane clock. At its highest speed this ticking
changed into a continuous sound of trickling. Mrs. Verloc watched that
transformation with shadows of anxiety coming and going on her face. It was a
trickle, dark, swift, thin. ... Blood!
    At this unforeseen circumstance Mrs. Verloc abandoned her pose of idleness
and irresponsibility.
    With a sudden snatch at her skirts and a faint shriek she ran to the door,
as if the trickle had been the first sign of a destroying flood. Finding the
table in her way she gave it a push with both hands as though it had been alive,
with such force that it went for some distance on its four legs, making a loud,
scraping racket, whilst the big dish with the joint crashed heavily on the
floor.
    Then all became still. Mrs. Verloc on reaching the door had stopped. A round
hat disclosed in the middle of the floor by the moving of the table rocked
slightly on its crown in the wind of her flight.
 

                                      XII

Winnie Verloc, the widow of Mr. Verloc, the sister of the late faithful Stevie
(blown to fragments in a state of innocence and in the conviction of being
engaged in a humanitarian enterprise), did not run beyond the door of the
parlour. She had indeed run away so far from a mere trickle of blood, but that
was a movement of instinctive repulsion. And there she had paused, with staring
eyes and lowered head. As though she had run through long years in her flight
across the small parlour, Mrs. Verloc by the door was quite a different person
from the woman who had been leaning over the sofa, a little swimmy in her head,
but otherwise free to enjoy the profound calm of idleness and irresponsibility.
Mrs. Verloc was no longer giddy. Her head was steady. On the other hand, she was
no longer calm. She was afraid.
    If she avoided looking in the direction of her reposing husband it was not
because she was afraid of him. Mr. Verloc was not frightful to behold. He looked
comfortable. Moreover, he was dead. Mrs. Verloc entertained no vain delusions on
the subject of the dead. Nothing brings them back, neither love nor hate. They
can do nothing to you. They are as nothing. Her mental state was tinged by a
sort of austere contempt for that man who had let himself be killed so easily.
He had been the master of a house, the husband of a woman, and the murderer of
her Stevie. And now he was of no account in every respect. He was of less
practical account than the clothing on his body, than his overcoat, than his
boots - than that hat lying on the floor. He was nothing. He was not worth
looking at. He was even no longer the murderer of poor Stevie. The only murderer
that would be found in the room when people came to look for Mr. Verloc would be
- herself!
    Her hands shook so that she failed twice in the task of refastening her
veil. Mrs. Verloc was no longer a person of leisure and irresponsibility. She
was afraid. The stabbing of Mr. Verloc had been only a blow. It had relieved the
pent-up agony of shrieks strangled in her throat, of tears dried up in her hot
eyes, of the maddening and indignant rage at the atrocious part played by that
man, who was less than nothing now, in robbing her of the boy. It had been an
obscurely prompted blow. The blood trickling on the floor off the handle of the
knife had turned it into an extremely plain case of murder. Mrs Verloc, who
always refrained from looking deep into things, was compelled to look into the
very bottom of this thing. She saw there no haunting face, no reproachful shade,
no vision of remorse, no sort of ideal conception. She saw there an object. That
object was the gallows. Mrs. Verloc was afraid of the gallows.
    She was terrified of them ideally. Having never set eyes on that last
argument of men's justice except in illustrative woodcuts to a certain type of
tales, she first saw them erect against a black and stormy background, festooned
with chains and human bones, circled about by birds that peck at dead men's
eyes. This was frightful enough, but Mrs. Verloc, though not a well-informed
woman, had a sufficient knowledge of the institutions of her country to know
that gallows are no longer erected romantically on the banks of dismal rivers or
on wind-swept headlands, but in the yards of jails. There within four high
walls, as if into a pit, at dawn of day, the murderer was brought out to be
executed, with a horrible quietness and, as the reports in the newspapers always
said, »in the presence of the authorities.« With her eyes staring on the floor,
her nostrils quivering with anguish and shame, she imagined herself all alone
amongst a lot of strange gentlemen in silk hats who were calmly proceeding about
the business of hanging her by the neck. That - never! Never! And how was it
done? The impossibility of imagining the details of such quiet execution added
something maddening to her abstract terror. The newspapers never gave any
details except one, but that one with some affectation was always there at the
end of a meagre report. Mrs. Verloc remembered its nature. It came with a cruel
burning pain into her head, as if the words »The drop given was fourteen feet«
had been scratched on her brain with a hot needle. »The drop given was fourteen
feet.«
    These words affected her physically, too. Her throat became convulsed in
waves to resist strangulation; and the apprehension of the jerk was so vivid
that she seized her head in both hands as if to save it from being torn off her
shoulders. »The drop given was fourteen feet.« No! that must never be. She could
not stand that. The thought of it even was not bearable. She could not stand
thinking of it. Therefore Mrs. Verloc formed the resolution to go at once and
throw herself into the river off one of the bridges.
    This time she managed to refasten her veil. With her face as if masked, all
black from head to foot except for some flowers in her hat, she looked up
mechanically at the clock. She thought it must have stopped. She could not
believe that only two minutes had passed since she had looked at it last. Of
course not. It had been stopped all the time. As a matter of fact, only three
minutes had elapsed from the moment she had drawn the first deep, easy breath
after the blow, to this moment when Mrs. Verloc formed the resolution to drown
herself in the Thames. But Mrs. Verloc could not believe that. She seemed to
have heard or read that clocks and watches always stopped at the moment of
murder for the undoing of the murderer. She did not care. »To the bridge - and
over I go.« ... But her movements were slow.
    She dragged herself painfully across the shop, and had to hold on to the
handle of the door before she found the necessary fortitude to open it. The
street frightened her, since it led either to the gallows or to the river. She
floundered over the doorstep head forward, arms thrown out, like a person
falling over the parapet of a bridge. This entrance into the open air had a
foretaste of drowning; a slimy dampness enveloped her, entered her nostrils,
clung to her hair. It was not actually raining, but each gas lamp had a rusty
little halo of mist. The van and horses were gone, and in the black street the
curtained window of the carters' eating-house made a square patch of soiled
blood-red light glowing faintly very near the level of the pavement. Mrs.
Verloc, dragging herself slowly towards it, thought that she was a very
friendless woman. It was true. It was so true that, in a sudden longing to see
some friendly face, she could think of no one else but of Mrs. Neale, the
charwoman. She had no acquaintances of her own. Nobody would miss her in a
social way. It must not be imagined that the Widow Verloc had forgotten her
mother. This was not so. Winnie had been a good daughter because she had been a
devoted sister. Her mother had always leaned on her for support. No consolation
or advice could be expected there. Now that Stevie was dead the bond seemed to
be broken. She could not face the old woman with the horrible tale. Moreover, it
was too far. The river was her present destination. Mrs. Verloc tried to forget
her mother.
    Each step cost her an effort of will which seemed the last possible. Mrs.
Verloc had dragged herself past the red glow of the eating-house window. »To the
bridge - and over I go,« she repeated to herself with fierce obstinacy. She put
out her hand just in time to steady herself against a lamp-post. »I'll never get
there before morning,« she thought. The fear of death paralysed her efforts to
escape the gallows. It seemed to her she had been staggering in that street for
hours. »I'll never get there,« she thought. »They'll find me knocking about the
streets. It's too far.« She held on, panting under her black veil.
    »The drop given was fourteen feet.«
    She pushed the lamp-post away from her violently, and found herself walking.
But another wave of faintness overtook her like a great sea, washing away her
heart clean out of her breast. »I will never get there,« she muttered, suddenly
arrested, swaying lightly where she stood. »Never.«
    And perceiving the utter impossibility of walking as far as the nearest
bridge, Mrs. Verloc thought of a flight abroad.
    It came to her suddenly. Murderers escaped. They escaped abroad. Spain or
California. Mere names. The vast world created for the glory of man was only a
vast blank to Mrs. Verloc. She did not know which way to turn. Murderers had
friends, relations, helpers - they had knowledge. She had nothing. She was the
most lonely of murderers that ever struck a mortal blow. She was alone in
London: and the whole town of marvels and mud, with its maze of streets and its
mass of lights, was sunk in a hopeless night, rested at the bottom of a black
abyss from which no unaided woman could hope to scramble out.
    She swayed forward, and made a fresh start blindly, with an awful dread of
falling down; but at the end of a few steps, unexpectedly, she found a sensation
of support, of security. Raising her head, she saw a man's face peering closely
at her veil. Comrade Ossipon was not afraid of strange women, and no feeling of
false delicacy could prevent him from striking an acquaintance with a woman
apparently very much intoxicated. Comrade Ossipon was interested in women. He
held up this one between his two large palms, peering at her in a businesslike
way till he heard her say faintly »Mr. Ossipon!« and then he very nearly let her
drop to the ground.
    »Mrs. Verloc!« he exclaimed. »You here!«
    It seemed impossible to him that she should have been drinking. But one
never knows. He did not go into that question, but attentive not to discourage
kind fate surrendering to him the widow of Comrade Verloc, he tried to draw her
to his breast. To his astonishment she came quite easily, and even rested on his
arm for a moment before she attempted to disengage herself. Comrade Ossipon
would not be brusque with kind fate. He withdrew his arm in a natural way.
    »You recognized me,« she faltered out, standing before him, fairly steady on
her legs.
    »Of course I did,« said Ossipon with perfect readiness. »I was afraid you
were going to fall. I've thought of you too often lately not to recognize you
anywhere, at any time. I've always thought of you - ever since I first set eyes
on you.«
    Mrs. Verloc seemed not to hear. »You were coming to the shop?« she said,
nervously.
    »Yes; at once,« answered Ossipon. »Directly I read the paper.«
    In fact, Comrade Ossipon had been skulking for a good two hours in the
neighbourhood of Brett Street, unable to make up his mind for a bold move. The
robust anarchist was not exactly a bold conqueror. He remembered that Mrs.
Verloc had never responded to his glances by the slightest sign of
encouragement. Besides, he thought the shop might be watched by the police, and
Comrade Ossipon did not wish the police to form an exaggerated notion of his
revolutionary sympathies. Even now he did not know precisely what to do. In
comparison with his usual amatory speculations this was a big and serious
undertaking. He ignored how much there was in it and how far he would have to go
in order to get hold of what there was to get - supposing there was a chance at
all. These perplexities checking his elation imparted to his tone a soberness
well in keeping with the circumstances.
    »May I ask you where you were going?« he inquired in a subdued voice.
    »Don't ask me!« cried Mrs. Verloc with a shuddering, repressed violence. All
her strong vitality recoiled from the idea of death. »Never mind where I was
going. ...«
    Ossipon concluded that she was very much excited but perfectly sober. She
remained silent by his side for a moment, then all at once she did something
which he did not expect. She slipped her hand under his arm. He was startled by
the act itself certainly, and quite as much, too, by the palpably resolute
character of this movement. But this being a delicate affair, Comrade Ossipon
behaved with delicacy. He contented himself by pressing the hand slightly
against his robust ribs. At the same time he felt himself being impelled
forward, and yielded to the impulse. At the end of Brett Street he became aware
of being directed to the left. He submitted.
    The fruiterer at the corner had put out the blazing glory of his oranges and
lemons, and Brett Place was all darkness, interspersed with the misty halos of
the few lamps defining its triangular shape, with a cluster of three lights on
one stand in the middle. The dark forms of the man and woman glided slowly arm
in arm along the walls with a loverlike and homeless aspect in the miserable
night.
    »What would you say if I were to tell you that I was going to find you?«
Mrs. Verloc asked, gripping his arm with force.
    »I would say that you couldn't find any one more ready to help you in your
trouble,« answered Ossipon, with a notion of making tremendous headway. In fact,
the progress of this delicate affair was almost taking his breath away.
    »In my trouble!« Mrs. Verloc repeated, slowly.
    »Yes.«
    »And do you know what my trouble is?« she whispered with strange intensity.
    »Ten minutes after seeing the evening paper,« explained Ossipon with ardour,
»I met a fellow whom you may have seen once or twice at the shop perhaps, and I
had a talk with him which left no doubt whatever in my mind. Then I started for
here, wondering whether you -- I've been fond of you beyond words ever since I
set eyes on your face,« he cried, as if unable to command his feelings.
    Comrade Ossipon assumed correctly that no woman was capable of wholly
disbelieving such a statement. But he did not know that Mrs. Verloc accepted it
with all the fierceness the instinct of self-preservation imparts to the grip of
a drowning person. To the widow of Mr. Verloc the robust anarchist was like a
radiant messenger of life.
    They walked slowly, in step. »I thought so,« Mrs. Verloc murmured, faintly.
    »You've read it in my eyes,« suggested Ossipon with great assurance.
    »Yes,« she breathed out into his inclined ear.
    »A love like mine could not be concealed from a woman like you,« he went on,
trying to detach his mind from material considerations such as the business
value of the shop, and the amount of money Mr. Verloc might have left in the
bank. He applied himself to the sentimental side of the affair. In his heart of
hearts he was a little shocked at his success. Verloc had been a good fellow,
and certainly a very decent husband as far as one could see. However, Comrade
Ossipon was not going to quarrel with his luck for the sake of a dead man.
Resolutely he suppressed his sympathy for the ghost of Comrade Verloc, and went
on:
    »I could not conceal it. I was too full of you. I daresay you could not help
seeing it in my eyes. But I could not guess it. You were always so distant. ...«
    »What else did you expect?« burst out Mrs. Verloc. »I was a respectable
woman -«
    She paused, then added, as if speaking to herself, in sinister resentment:
»Till he made me what I am.«
    Ossipon let that pass, and took up his running.
    »He never did seem to me to be quite worthy of you,« be began, throwing
loyalty to the winds. »You were worthy of a better fate.«
    Mrs. Verloc interrupted bitterly:
    »Better fate! He cheated me out of seven years of life.«
    »You seemed to live so happily with him.« Ossipon tried to exculpate the
lukewarmness of his past conduct. »It's that what's made me timid. You seemed to
love him. I was surprised - and jealous,« he added.
    »Love him!« Mrs. Verloc cried out in a whisper full of scorn and rage. »Love
him! I was a good wife to him. I am a respectable woman. You thought I loved
him! You did! Look here, Tom -«
    The sound of this name thrilled Comrade Ossipon with pride. For his name was
Alexander, and he was called Tom by arrangement with the most familiar of his
intimates. It was a name of friendship - of moments of expansion. He had no idea
that she had ever heard it used by anybody. It was apparent that she had not
only caught it, but had treasured it in her memory - perhaps in her heart.
    »Look here, Tom! I was a young girl. I was done up. I was tired. I had two
people depending on what I could do, and it did seem as if I couldn't do any
more. Two people - mother and the boy. He was much more mine than mother's. I
sat up nights and nights with him on my lap, all alone upstairs, when I wasn't't
more than eight years old myself. And then -- He was mine, I tell you. ... You
can't understand that. No man can understand it. What was I to do? There was a
young fellow -«
    The memory of the early romance with the young butcher survived, tenacious,
like the image of a glimpsed ideal in that heart quailing before the fear of the
gallows and full of revolt against death.
    »That was the man I loved then,« went on the widow of Mr. Verloc. »I suppose
he could see it in my eyes, too. Five and twenty shillings a week, and his
father threatened to kick him out of the business if he made such a fool of
himself as to marry a girl with a crippled mother and a crazy idiot of a boy on
her hands. But he would hang about me, till one evening I found the courage to
slam the door in his face. I had to do it. I loved him dearly. Five and twenty
shillings a week! There was that other man - a good lodger. What is a girl to
do? Could I've gone on the streets? He seemed kind. He wanted me, anyhow. What
was I to do with mother and that poor boy? Eh? I said yes. He seemed
good-natured, he was freehanded, he had money, he never said anything. Seven
years - seven years a good wife to him, the kind, the good, the generous, the --
And he loved me. Oh, yes. He loved me till I sometimes wished myself -- Seven
years. Seven years a wife to him. And do you know what he was, that dear friend
of yours? Do you know what he was? ... He was a devil!«
    The superhuman vehemence of that whispered statement completely stunned
Comrade Ossipon. Winnie Verloc turning about held him by both arms, facing him
under the falling mist in the darkness and solitude of Brett Place, in which all
sounds of life seemed lost as if in a triangular well of asphalt and bricks, of
blind houses and unfeeling stones.
    »No; I didn't know,« he declared, with a sort of flabby stupidity, whose
comical aspect was lost upon a woman haunted by the fear of the gallows, »but I
do now. I - I understand,« he floundered on, his mind speculating as to what
sort of atrocities Verloc could have practised under the sleepy, placid
appearances of his married estate. It was positively awful. »I understand,« he
repeated, and then by a sudden inspiration uttered an »Unhappy woman!« of lofty
commiseration instead of the more familiar »Poor darling!« of his usual
practice. This was no usual case. He felt conscious of something abnormal going
on, while he never lost sight of the greatness of the stake. »Unhappy, brave
woman!«
    He was glad to have discovered that variation; but he could discover nothing
else. »Ah, but he is dead now,« was the best he could do. And he put a
remarkable amount of animosity into his guarded exclamation. Mrs. Verloc caught
at his arm with a sort of frenzy. »You guessed then he was dead,« she murmured,
as if beside herself. »You! You guessed what I had to do. Had to!«
    There were suggestions of triumph, relief, gratitude in the indefinable tone
of these words. It engrossed the whole attention of Ossipon to the detriment of
mere literal sense. He wondered what was up with her, why she had worked herself
into this state of wild excitement. He even began to wonder whether the hidden
causes of that Greenwich Park affair did not lie deep in the unhappy
circumstances of the Verlocs' married life. He went so far as to suspect Mr.
Verloc of having selected that extraordinary manner of committing suicide. By
Jove! that would account for the utter inanity and wrong-headedness of the
thing. No anarchist manifestation was required by the circumstances. Quite the
contrary; and Verloc was as well aware of that as any other revolutionist of his
standing. What an immense joke if Verloc had simply made fools of the whole of
Europe, of the revolutionary world, of the police, of the press, and of the
cocksure Professor as well. Indeed, thought Ossipon, in astonishment, it seemed
almost certain that he did! Poor beggar! It struck him as very possible that of
that household of two it wasn't't precisely the man who was the devil.
    Alexander Ossipon, nicknamed the Doctor, was naturally inclined to think
indulgently of his men friends. He eyed Mrs. Verloc hanging on his arm. Of his
women friends he thought in a specially practical way. Why Mrs. Verloc should
exclaim at his knowledge of Mr. Verloc's death, which was no guess at all, did
not disturb him beyond measure. Women often talked like lunatics. But he was
curious to know how she had been informed. The papers could tell her nothing
beyond the mere fact: the man blown to pieces in Greenwich Park not having been
identified. It was inconceivable on any theory that Verloc should have given her
an inkling of his intention - whatever it was. This problem interested Comrade
Ossipon immensely. He stopped short. They had gone then along the three sides of
Brett Place, and were near the end of Brett Street again.
    »How did you first come to hear of it?« he asked in a tone he tried to
render appropriate to the character of the revelations which had been made to
him by the woman at his side.
    She shook violently for a while before she answered in a listless voice:
    »From the police. A chief inspector came. Chief Inspector Heat he said he
was. He showed me -«
    Mrs. Verloc choked. »Oh, Tom, they had to gather him up with a shovel.«
    Her breast heaved with dry sobs. In a moment Ossipon found his tongue.
    »The police! Do you mean to say the police came already? That Chief
Inspector Heat himself actually came to tell you.«
    »Yes,« she confirmed in the same listless tone. »He came. Just like this. He
came. I didn't know. He showed me a piece of overcoat, and -- Just like that. Do
you know this? he says.«
    »Heat! Heat! And what did he do?«
    Mrs. Verloc's head dropped. »Nothing. He did nothing. He went away. The
police were on that man's side,« she murmured, tragically. »Another one came,
too.«
    »Another - another inspector, do you mean?« asked Ossipon, in great
excitement, and very much in the tone of a scared child.
    »I don't know. He came. He looked like a foreigner. He may have been one of
them Embassy people.«
    Comrade Ossipon nearly collapsed under this new shock.
    »Embassy! Are you aware what you are saying? What Embassy? What on earth do
you mean by Embassy?«
    »It's that place in Chesham Square. The people he cursed so. I don't know.
What does it matter!«
    »And that fellow, what did he do or say to you?«
    »I don't remember. ... Nothing. ... I don't care. Don't ask me,« she pleaded
in a weary voice.
    »All right. I won't,« assented Ossipon, tenderly. And he meant it, too, not
because he was touched by the pathos of the pleading voice, but because he felt
himself losing his footing in the depths of this tenebrous affair. Police!
Embassy! Phew! For fear of adventuring his intelligence into ways where its
natural lights might fail to guide it safely he dismissed resolutely all
suppositions, surmises, and theories out of his mind. He had the woman there,
absolutely flinging herself at him, and that was the principal consideration.
But after what he had heard nothing could astonish him any more. And when Mrs.
Verloc, as if startled suddenly out of a dream of safety, began to urge upon him
wildly the necessity of an immediate flight on the Continent, he did not exclaim
in the least. He simply said with unaffected regret that there was no train till
the morning, and stood looking thoughtfully at her face, veiled in black net, in
the light of a gas-lamp veiled in a gauze of mist.
    Near him, her black form merged in the night, like a figure half chiselled
out of a block of black stone. It was impossible to say what she knew, how deep
she was involved with policemen and Embassies. But if she wanted to get away, it
was not for him to object. He was anxious to be off himself. He felt that the
business, the shop so strangely familiar to chief inspectors and members of
foreign Embassies, was not the place for him. That must be dropped. But there
was the rest. These savings. The money!
    »You must hide me till the morning somewhere,« she said in a dismayed voice.
    »Fact is, my dear, I can't take you where I live. I share the room with a
friend.«
    He was somewhat dismayed himself. In the morning the blessed 'tecs will be
out in all the stations, no doubt. And if they once got hold of her, for one
reason or another she would be lost to him indeed.
    »But you must. Don't you care for me at all - at all? What are you thinking
of?«
    She said this violently, but she let her clasped hands fall in
discouragement. There was a silence, while the mist fell, and darkness reigned
undisturbed over Brett Place. Not a soul, not even the vagabond, lawless, and
amorous soul of a cat, came near the man and the woman facing each other.
    »It would be possible perhaps to find a safe lodging somewhere,« Ossipon
spoke at last. »But the truth is, my dear, I have not enough money to go and try
with - only a few pence. We revolutionists are not rich.«
    He had fifteen shillings in his pocket. He added:
    »And there's the journey before us, too - first thing in the morning at
that.«
    She did not move, made no sound, and Comrade Ossipon's heart sank a little.
Apparently she had no suggestion to offer. Suddenly she clutched at her breast,
as if she had felt a sharp pain there.
    »But I have,« she gasped. »I have the money. I have enough money. Tom! Let
us go from here.«
    »How much have you got?« he inquired, without stirring to her tug; for he
was a cautious man.
    »I have the money, I tell you. All the money.«
    »What do you mean by it? All the money there was in the bank, or what?« he
asked, incredulously, but ready not to be surprised at anything in the way of
luck.
    »Yes, yes!« she said, nervously. »All there was. I've it all.«
    »How on earth did you manage to get hold of it already?« he marvelled.
    »He gave it to me,« she murmured, suddenly subdued and trembling. Comrade
Ossipon put down his rising surprise with a firm hand.
    »Why, then - we are saved,« he uttered, slowly.
    She leaned forward, and sank against his breast. He welcomed her there. She
had all the money. Her hat was in the way of very marked effusion; her veil,
too. He was adequate in his manifestations, but no more. She received them
without resistance and without abandonment, passively, as if only half-sensible.
She freed herself from his lax embrace without difficulty.
    »You will save me, Tom,« she broke out, recoiling, but still keeping her
hold on him by the two lapels of his damp coat. »Save me. Hide me. Don't let
them have me. You must kill me first. I couldn't do it myself - I couldn't, I
couldn't - not even for what I am afraid of.«
    She was confoundedly bizarre, he thought. She was beginning to inspire him
with an indefinite uneasiness. He said surlily, for he was busy with important
thoughts:
    »What the devil are you afraid of?«
    »Haven't you guessed what I was driven to do!« cried the woman. Distracted
by the vividness of her dreadful apprehensions, her head ringing with forceful
words, that kept the horror of her position before her mind, she had imagined
her incoherence to be clearness itself. She had no conscience of how little she
had audibly said in the disjointed phrases completed only in her thought. She
had felt the relief of a full confession, and she gave a special meaning to
every sentence spoken by Comrade Ossipon, whose knowledge did not in the least
resemble her own. »Haven't you guessed what I was driven to do!« Her voice fell.
»You needn't be long in guessing then what I am afraid of,« she continued, in a
bitter and sombre murmur. »I won't have it. I won't. I won't. I won't. You must
promise to kill me first!« She shook the lapels of his coat. »It must never be!«
    He assured her curtly that no promises on his part were necessary, but he
took good care not to contradict her in set terms, because he had had much to do
with excited women, and he was inclined in general to let his experience guide
his conduct in preference to applying his sagacity to each special case. His
sagacity in this case was busy in other directions. Women's words fell into
water, but the shortcomings of time-tables remained. The insular nature of Great
Britain obtruded itself upon his notice in an odious form. »Might just as well
be put under lock and key every night,« he thought irritably, as non-plussed as
though he had a wall to scale with the woman on his back. Suddenly he slapped
his forehead. He had by dint of cudgelling his brains just thought of the
Southampton-St. Malo service. The boat left about midnight. There was a train at
10:30. He became cheery and ready to act.
    »From Waterloo. Plenty of time. We are all right after all ... What's the
matter now? This isn't the way,« he protested.
    Mrs. Verloc, having hooked her arm into his, was trying to drag him into
Brett Street again.
    »I've forgotten to shut the shop door as I went out,« she whispered,
terribly agitated.
    The shop and all that was in it had ceased to interest Comrade Ossipon. He
knew how to limit his desires. He was on the point of saying »What of that? Let
it be,« but he refrained. He disliked argument about trifles. He even mended his
pace considerably on the thought that she might have left the money in the
drawer. But his willingness lagged behind her feverish impatience.
    The shop seemed to be quite dark at first. The door stood ajar. Mrs. Verloc,
leaning against the front, grasped out:
    »Nobody has been in. Look! The light - the light in the parlour.«
    Ossipon, stretching his head forward, saw a faint gleam in the darkness of
the shop.
    »There is,« he said.
    »I forgot it.« Mrs. Verloc's voice came from behind her veil faintly. And as
he stood waiting for her to enter first, she said louder: »Go in and put it out
- or I'll go mad.«
    He made no immediate objection to this proposal, so strangely motived.
»Where's all that money?« he asked.
    »On me! Go, Tom. Quick! Put it out. ... Go in!« she cried, seizing him by
both shoulders from behind.
    Not prepared for a display of physical force, Comrade Ossipon stumbled far
into the shop before her push. He was astonished at the strength of the woman
and scandalized by her proceedings. But he did not retrace his steps in order to
remonstrate with her severely in the street. He was beginning to be disagreeably
impressed by her fantastic behaviour. Moreover, this or never was the time to
humour the woman. Comrade Ossipon avoided easily the end of the counter, and
approached calmly the glazed door of the parlour. The curtain over the panes
being drawn back a little he, by a very natural impulse, looked in, just as he
made ready to turn the handle. He looked in without a thought, without
intention, without curiosity of any sort. He looked in because he could not help
looking in. He looked in, and discovered Mr. Verloc reposing quietly on the
sofa.
    A yell coming from the innermost depths of his chest died out unheard and
transformed into a sort of greasy, sickly taste on his lips. At the same time
the mental personality of Comrade Ossipon executed a frantic leap backwards. But
his body, left thus without intellectual guidance, held on to the door handle
with the unthinking force of an instinct. The robust anarchist did not even
totter. And he stared, his face close to the glass, his eyes protruding out of
his head. He would have given anything to get away, but his returning reason
informed him that it would not do to let go the door handle. What was it -
madness, a nightmare, or a trap into which he had been decoyed with fiendish
artfulness? Why - what for? He did not know. Without any sense of guilt in his
breast, in the full peace of his conscience as far as these people were
concerned, the idea that he would be murdered for mysterious reasons by the
couple Verloc passed not so much across his mind as across the pit of his
stomach, and went out, leaving behind a trail of sickly faintness - an
indisposition. Comrade Ossipon did not feel very well in a very special way for
a moment - a long moment. And he stared. Mr. Verloc lay very still meanwhile,
simulating sleep for reasons of his own, while that savage woman of his was
guarding the door - invisible and silent in the dark and deserted street. Was
all this some sort of terrifying arrangement invented by the police for his
especial benefit? His modesty shrank from that explanation.
    But the true sense of the scene he was beholding came to Ossipon through the
contemplation of the hat. It seemed an extraordinary thing, an ominous object, a
sign. Black, and rim upward, it lay on the floor before the couch as if prepared
to receive the contributions of pence from people who would come presently to
behold Mr. Verloc in the fullness of his domestic ease reposing on a sofa. From
the hat the eyes of the robust anarchist wandered to the displaced table, gazed
at the broken dish for a time, received a kind of optical shock from observing a
white gleam under the imperfectly closed eyelids of the man on the couch. Mr.
Verloc did not seem so much asleep now as lying down with a bent head and
looking insistently at his left breast. And when Comrade Ossipon had made out
the handle of the knife he turned away from the glazed door, and retched
violently.
    The crash of the street door flung to made his very soul leap in a panic.
This house with its harmless tenant could still be made a trap of - a trap of a
terrible kind. Comrade Ossipon had no settled conception now of what was
happening to him. Catching his thigh against the end of the counter, he spun
round, staggered with a cry of pain, felt in the distracting clatter of the bell
his arms pinned to his side by a convulsive hug, while the cold lips of a woman
moved creepily on his very ear to form the words:
    »Policeman! He has seen me!«
    He ceased to struggle; she never let him go. Her hands had locked themselves
with an inseparable twist of fingers on his robust back. While the footsteps
approached, they breathed quickly, breast to breast, with hard, laboured
breaths, as if theirs had been the attitude of a deadly struggle, while, in
fact, it was the attitude of deadly fear. And the time was long.
    The constable on the beat had in truth seen something of Mrs. Verloc; only
coming from the lighted thoroughfare at the other end of Brett Street, she had
been no more to him than a flutter in the darkness. And he was not even quite
sure that there had been a flutter. He had no reason to hurry up. On coming
abreast of the shop he observed that it had been closed early. There was nothing
very unusual in that. The men on duty had special instructions about that shop:
what went on about there was not to be meddled with unless absolutely
disorderly, but any observations made were to be reported. There were no
observations to make; but from a sense of duty and for the peace of his
conscience, owing also to that doubtful flutter of the darkness, the constable
crossed the road, and tried the door. The spring latch, whose key was reposing
for ever off duty in the late Mr. Verloc's waistcoat pocket, held as well as
usual. While the conscientious officer was shaking the handle, Ossipon felt the
cold lips of the woman stirring again creepily against his very ear:
    »If he comes in kill me - kill me, Tom.«
    The constable moved away, flashing as he passed the light of his dark
lantern, merely for form's sake, at the shop window. For a moment longer the man
and the woman inside stood motionless, panting, breast to breast; then her
fingers came unlocked, her arms fell by her side slowly. Ossipon leaned against
the counter. The robust anarchist wanted support badly. This was awful. He was
almost too disgusted for speech. Yet he managed to utter a plaintive thought,
showing at least that he realized his position.
    »Only a couple of minutes later and you'd have made me blunder against the
fellow poking about here with his damned dark lantern.«
    The widow of Mr. Verloc, motionless in the middle of the shop, said
insistently:
    »Go in and put that light out, Tom. It will drive me crazy.«
    She saw vaguely his vehement gesture of refusal. Nothing in the world would
have induced Ossipon to go into the parlour. He was not superstitious, but there
was too much blood on the floor; a beastly pool of it all round the hat. He
judged he had been already too near that corpse for his peace of mind - for the
safety of his neck, perhaps!
    »At the meter then! There. Look. In that corner.«
    The robust form of Comrade Ossipon, striding brusque and shadowy across the
shop, squatted in a corner obediently; but this obedience was without grace. He
fumbled nervously - and suddenly in the sound of a muttered curse the light
behind the glazed door flicked out to a gasping, hysterical sigh of a woman.
Night, the inevitable reward of men's faithful labours on this earth, night had
fallen on Mr. Verloc, the tried revolutionist - one of the old lot - the humble
guardian of society; the invaluable Secret Agent D of Baron Stott-Wartenheim's
despatches; a servant of law and order, faithful, trusted, accurate, admirable,
with perhaps one single amiable weakness: the idealistic belief in being loved
for himself.
    Ossipon groped his way back through the stuffy atmosphere, as black as ink
now, to the counter. The voice of Mrs. Verloc, standing in the middle of the
shop, vibrated after him in that blackness with a desperate protest.
    »I will not be hanged, Tom. I will not -«
    She broke off. Ossipon from the counter issued a warning: »Don't shout like
this,« then seemed to reflect profoundly. »You did this thing quite by
yourself?« he inquired in a hollow voice, but with an appearance of masterful
calmness which filled Mrs. Verloc's heart with grateful confidence in his
protecting strength.
    »Yes,« she whispered, invisible.
    »I wouldn't have believed it possible,« he muttered. »Nobody would.« She
heard him move about and the snapping of a lock in the parlour door. Comrade
Ossipon had turned the key on Mr. Verloc's repose; and this he did not from
reverence for its eternal nature or any other obscurely sentimental
consideration, but for the precise reason that he was not at all sure that there
was not someone else hiding somewhere in the house. He did not believe the
woman, or rather he was incapable by now of judging what could be true,
possible, or even probable on this astounding universe. He was terrified out of
all capacity for belief or disbelief in regard to this extraordinary affair,
which began with police inspectors and Embassies and would end goodness knows
where - on the scaffold for someone. He was terrified at the thought that he
could not prove the use he made of his time ever since seven o'clock, for he had
been skulking about Brett Street. He was terrified at this savage woman who had
brought him in there, and would probably saddle him with complicity, at least if
he were not careful. He was terrified at the rapidity with which he had been
involved in such danger - decoyed into it. It was some twenty minutes since he
had met her - not more.
    The voice of Mrs. Verloc rose subdued, pleading piteously: »Don't let them
hang me, Tom! Take me out of the country. I'll work for you. I'll slave for you.
I'll love you. I've no one in the world. ... Who would look at me if you don't!«
She ceased for a moment; then in the depths of the loneliness made round her by
an insignificant thread of blood trickling off the handle of a knife, she found
a dreadful inspiration to her - who had been the respectable girl of the
Belgravian mansion, the loyal, respectable wife of Mr. Verloc. »I won't ask you
to marry me,« she breathed out in shamefaced accents.
    She moved a step forward in the darkness. He was terrified at her. He would
not have been surprised if she had suddenly produced another knife destined for
his breast. He certainly would have made no resistance. He had really not enough
fortitude in him just then to tell her to keep back. But he inquired in a
cavernous, strange tone: »Was he asleep?«
    »No,« she cried, and went on rapidly: »He wasn't't. Not he. He had been
telling me that nothing could touch him. After taking the boy away from under my
very eyes to kill him - the loving, innocent, harmless lad. My own, I tell you.
He was lying on the couch quite easy - after killing the boy - my boy. I would
have gone on the streets to get out of his sight. And he says to me like this:
Come here, after telling me I had helped to kill the boy. You hear, Tom? He says
like this: Come here, after taking my very heart out of me along with the boy to
smash in the dirt.«
    She ceased, then dreamily repeated twice: »Blood and dirt. Blood and dirt.«
A great light broke upon Comrade Ossipon. It was that half-witted lad then who
had perished in the park. And the fooling of everybody all round appeared more
complete than ever - colossal. He exclaimed scientifically, in the extremity of
his astonishment: »The degenerate - by heavens!«
    »Come here.« The voice of Mrs. Verloc rose again. »What did he think I was
made of? Tell me, Tom. Come here! Me! Like this! I had been looking at the
knife, and I thought I would come then if he wanted me so much. Oh, yes! I came
- for the last time. ... With the knife.«
    He was excessively terrified at her - the sister of the degenerate - a
degenerate herself of a murdering type ... or else of the lying type. Comrade
Ossipon might have been said to be terrified scientifically in addition to all
other kinds of fear. It was an immeasurable and composite funk, which from its
very excess gave him in the dark a false appearance of calm and thoughtful
deliberation. For he moved and spoke with difficulty, being as if half frozen in
his will and mind - and no one could see his ghastly face. He felt half dead.
    He leaped a foot high. Unexpectedly Mrs. Verloc had desecrated the unbroken,
reserved decency of her home by a shrill and terrible shriek.
    »Help, Tom! Save me. I won't be hanged!«
    He rushed forward, groping for her mouth with a silencing hand, and the
shriek died out. But in his rush he had knocked her over. He felt her now
clinging round his legs, and his terror reached its culminating point, became a
sort of intoxication, entertained delusions, acquired the characteristics of
delirium tremens. He positively saw snakes now. He saw the woman twined round
him like a snake, not to be shaken off. She was not deadly. She was death itself
- the companion of life.
    Mrs. Verloc, as if relieved by the outburst, was very far from behaving
noisily now. She was pitiful.
    »Tom, you can't throw me off now,« she murmured from the floor. »Not unless
you crush my head under your heel. I won't leave you.«
    »Get up,« said Ossipon.
    His face was so pale as to be quite visible in the profound black darkness
of the shop; while Mrs. Verloc, veiled, had no face, almost no discernible form.
The trembling of something small and white, a flower in her hat, marked her
place, her movements.
    It rose in the blackness. She had got up from the floor, and Ossipon
regretted not having run out at once into the street. But he perceived easily
that it would not do. It would not do. She would run after him. She would pursue
him shrieking till she sent every policeman within hearing in chase. And then
goodness only knew what she would say of him. He was so frightened that for a
moment the insane notion of strangling her in the dark passed through his mind.
And he became more frightened than ever! She had him! He saw himself living in
abject terror in some obscure hamlet in Spain or Italy; till some fine morning
they found him dead, too, with a knife in his breast - like Mr. Verloc. He
sighed deeply. He dared not move. And Mrs. Verloc waited in silence the good
pleasure of her saviour, deriving comfort from his reflective silence.
    Suddenly he spoke up in an almost natural voice. His reflections had come to
an end.
    »Let's get out, or we will lose the train.«
    »Where are we going to, Tom?« she asked, timidly. Mrs. Verloc was no longer
a free woman.
    »Let's get to Paris first, the best way we can. ... Go out first, and see if
the way's clear.«
    She obeyed. Her voice came subdued through the cautiously opened door.
    »It's all right.«
    Ossipon came out. Notwithstanding his endeavours to be gentle, the cracked
bell clattered behind the closed door in the empty shop, as if trying in vain to
warn the reposing Mr. Verloc of the final departure of his wife - accompanied by
his friend.
    In the hansom, they presently picked up, the robust anarchist became
explanatory. He was still awfully pale, with eyes that seemed to have sunk a
whole half-inch into his tense face. But he seemed to have thought of everything
with extraordinary method.
    »When we arrive,« he discoursed in a queer, monotonous tone, »you must go
into the station ahead of me, as if we did not know each other. I will take the
tickets, and slip yours into your hand as I pass you. Then you will go into the
first-class ladies' waiting-room, and sit there till ten minutes before the
train starts. Then you come out. I will be outside. You go in first on the
platform, as if you did not know me. There may be eyes watching there that know
what's what. Alone you are only a woman going off by train. I am known. With me,
you may be guessed at as Mrs. Verloc running away. Do you understand, my dear?«
he added, with an effort.
    »Yes,« said Mrs. Verloc, sitting there against him in the hansom all rigid
with the dread of the gallows and the fear of death. »Yes, Tom.« And she added
to herself, like an awful refrain: »The drop given was fourteen feet.«
    Ossipon, not looking at her, and with a face like a fresh plaster cast of
himself after a wasting illness, said: »By-the-by, I ought to have the money for
the tickets now.«
    Mrs. Verloc, undoing some hooks of her bodice, while she went on staring
ahead beyond the splashboard, handed over to him the new pigskin pocket-book. He
received it without a word, and seemed to plunge it deep somewhere into his very
breast. Then he slapped his coat on the outside.
    All this was done without the exchange of a single glance; they were like
two people looking out for the first sight of a desired goal. It was not till
the hansom swung round a corner and towards the bridge that Ossipon opened his
lips again.
    »Do you know how much money there is in that thing?« he asked, as if
addressing slowly some hobgoblin sitting between the ears of the horse.
    »No,« said Mrs. Verloc. »He gave it to me. I didn't count. I thought nothing
of it at the time. Afterwards -«
    She moved her right hand a little. It was so expressive that little movement
of that right hand which had struck the deadly blow into a man's heart less than
an hour before that Ossipon could not repress a shudder. He exaggerated it then
purposely, and muttered:
    »I am cold. I got chilled through.«
    Mrs. Verloc looked straight ahead at the perspective of her escape. Now and
then, like a sable streamer blown across a road, the words »The drop given was
fourteen feet« got in the way of her tense stare. Through her black veil the
whites of her big eyes gleamed lustrously like the eyes of a masked woman.
    Ossipon's rigidity had something businesslike, a queer official expression.
He was heard again all of a sudden, as though he had released a catch in order
to speak.
    »Look here! Do you know whether your - whether he kept his account at the
bank in his own name or in some other name.«
    Mrs. Verloc turned upon him her masked face and the big white gleam of her
eyes.
    »Other name?« she said, thoughtfully.
    »Be exact in what you say,« Ossipon lectured in the swift motion of the
hansom. »It's extremely important. I will explain to you. The bank has the
numbers of these notes. If they were paid to him in his own name, then when his
- his death becomes known, the notes may serve to track us since we have no
other money. You have no other money on you?«
    She shook her head negatively.
    »None whatever?« he insisted.
    »A few coppers.«
    »It would be dangerous in that case. The money would have then to be dealt
specially with. Very specially. We'd have perhaps to lose more than half the
amount in order to get these notes changed in a certain safe place I know of in
Paris. In the other case - I mean if he had his account and got paid out under
some other name - say Smith, for instance - the money is perfectly safe to use.
You understand? The bank has no means of knowing that Mr. Verloc and, say, Smith
are one and the same person. Do you see how important it is that you should make
no mistake in answering me? Can you answer that query at all? Perhaps not. Eh?«
    She said composedly:
    »I remember now! He didn't bank in his own name. He told me once that it was
on deposit in the name of Prozor.«
    »You are sure?«
    »Certain.«
    »You don't think the bank had any knowledge of his real name? Or anybody in
the bank or -«
    She shrugged her shoulders.
    »How can I know? Is it likely, Tom?«
    »No. I suppose it's not likely. It would have been more comfortable to know.
... Here we are. Get out first, and walk straight in. Move smartly.«
    He remained behind, and paid the cab man out of his own loose silver. The
programme traced by his minute foresight was carried out. When Mrs. Verloc, with
her ticket for St. Malo in her hand, entered the ladies' waiting-room, Comrade
Ossipon walked into the bar, and in seven minutes absorbed three goes of hot
brandy and water.
    »Trying to drive out a cold,« he explained to the bar-maid, with a friendly
nod and a grimacing smile. Then he came out, bringing out from that festive
interlude the face of a man who had drunk at the very Fountain of Sorrow. He
raised his eyes to the clock. It was time. He waited.
    Punctual, Mrs. Verloc came out, with her veil down, and all black - black as
commonplace death itself, crowned with a few cheap and pale flowers. She passed
close to a little group of men who were laughing, but whose laughter could have
been struck dead by a single word. Her walk was indolent, but her back was
straight, and Comrade Ossipon looked after it in terror before making a start
himself.
    The train was drawn up, with hardly anybody about its row of open doors.
Owing to the time of the year and to the abominable weather there were but few
passengers. Mrs. Verloc walked slowly along the line of empty compartments till
Ossipon touched her elbow from behind.
    »In here.«
    She got in, and he remained on the platform looking about. She bent forward,
and in a whisper:
    »What is it, Tom? Is there any danger?«
    »Wait a moment. There's the guard.«
    She saw him accost the man in uniform. They talked for a while. She heard
the guard say »Very well, sir,« and saw him touch his cap. Then Ossipon came
back, saying: »I told him not to let anybody get into our compartment.«
    She was leaning forward on her seat. »You think of everything. ... You'll
get me off, Tom?« she asked in a gust of anguish, lifting her veil brusquely to
look at her saviour.
    She had uncovered a face like adamant. And out of this face the eyes looked
on, big, dry, enlarged, lightless, burnt out like two black holes in the white,
shining globes.
    »There is no danger,« he said, gazing into them with an earnestness almost
rapt, which to Mrs. Verloc, flying from the gallows, seemed to be full of force
and tenderness. This devotion deeply moved her - and the adamantine face lost
the stern rigidity of its terror. Comrade Ossipon gazed at it as no lover ever
gazed at his mistress's face. Alexander Ossipon, anarchist, nick-named the
Doctor, author of a medical (and improper) pamphlet, late lecturer on the social
aspects of hygiene to working men's clubs, was free from the trammels of
conventional morality - but he submitted to the rule of science. He was
scientific, and he gazed scientifically at that woman, the sister of a
degenerate, a degenerate herself - of a murdering type. He gazed at her, and
invoked Lombroso, as an Italian peasant recommends himself to his favourite
saint. He gazed scientifically. He gazed at her cheeks, at her nose, at her
eyes, at her ears. ... Bad! ... Fatal! Mrs. Verloc's pale lips parting, slightly
relaxed under his passionately attentive gaze, he gazed also at her teeth. ...
Not a doubt remained ... a murdering type. ... If Comrade Ossipon did not
recommend his terrified soul to Lombroso, it was only because on scientific
grounds he could not believe that he carried about him such a thing as a soul.
But he had in him the scientific spirit, which moved him to testify on the
platform of a railway station in nervous, jerky phrases.
    »He was an extraordinary lad, that brother of yours. Most interesting to
study. A perfect type in a way. Perfect!«
    He spoke scientifically in his secret fear. And Mrs. Verloc, hearing these
words of commendation vouchsafed to her beloved dead, swayed forward with a
flicker of light in her sombre eyes, like a ray of sunshine heralding a tempest
of rain.
    »He was that indeed,« she whispered, softly, with quivering lips. »You took
a lot of notice of him, Tom. I loved you for it.«
    »It's almost incredible the resemblance there was between you two,« pursued
Ossipon, giving a voice to his abiding dread, and trying to conceal his nervous,
sickening impatience for the train to start. »Yes, he resembled you.«
    These words were not especially touching or sympathetic. But the fact of
that resemblance insisted upon was enough in itself to act upon her emotions
powerfully. With a little faint cry, and throwing her arms out, Mrs. Verloc
burst into tears at last.
    Ossipon entered the carriage, hastily closed the door and looked out to see
the time by the station clock. Eight minutes more. For the first three of these
Mrs. Verloc wept violently and helplessly without pause or interruption. Then
she recovered somewhat, and sobbed gently in an abundant fall of tears. She
tried to talk to her saviour, to the man who was the messenger of life.
    »Oh, Tom! How could I fear to die after he was taken away from me so
cruelly! How could I! How could I be such a coward!«
    She lamented aloud her love of life, that life without grace or charm, and
almost without decency, but of an exalted faithfulness of purpose, even unto
murder. And, as often happens in the lament of poor humanity rich in suffering
but indigent in words, the truth - the very cry of truth - was found in a worn
and artificial shape picked up somewhere among the phrases of sham sentiment.
    »How could I be so afraid of death! Tom, I tried. But I am afraid. I tried
to do away with myself. And I couldn't. Am I hard? I suppose the cup of horrors
was not full enough for such as me. Then when you came. ...«
    She paused. Then in a gust of confidence and gratitude, »I will live all my
days for you, Tom!« she sobbed out.
    »Go over into the other corner of the carriage, away from the platform,«
said Ossipon, solicitously. She let her saviour settle her comfortably, and he
watched the coming on of another crisis of weeping, still more violent than the
first. He watched the symptoms with a sort of medical air, as if counting
seconds. He heard the guard's whistle at last. An involuntary contraction of the
upper lip bared his teeth with all the aspect of savage resolution as he felt
the train beginning to move. Mrs. Verloc heard and felt nothing, and Ossipon,
her saviour, stood still. He felt the train roll quicker, rumbling heavily to
the sound of the woman's loud sobs, and then crossing the carriage in two long
strides he opened the door deliberately, and leaped out.
    He had leaped out at the very end of the platform; and such was his
determination in sticking to his desperate plan that he managed by a sort of
miracle, performed almost in the air, to slam to the door of the carriage. Only
then did he find himself rolling head over heels like a shot rabbit. He was
bruised, shaken, pale as death, and out of breath when he got up. But he was
calm, and perfectly able to meet the excited crowd of railway men who had
gathered round him in a moment. He explained, in gentle and convincing tones,
that his wife had started at a moment's notice for Brittany to her dying mother;
that, of course, she was greatly upset, and he considerably concerned at her
state; that he was trying to cheer her up, and had absolutely failed to notice
at first that the train was moving out. To the general exclamation »Why didn't
you go on to Southampton, then, sir?« he objected the inexperience of a young
sister-in-law left alone in the house with three small children, and her alarm
at his absence, the telegraph offices being closed. He had acted on impulse.
»But I don't think I'll ever try that again,« he concluded; smiled all round;
distributed some small change, and marched without a limp out of the station.
    Outside, Comrade Ossipon, flush of safe banknotes as never before in his
life, refused the offer of a cab.
    »I can walk,« he said, with a little friendly laugh to the civil driver.
    He could walk. He walked. He crossed the bridge. Later on the towers of the
Abbey saw in their massive immobility the yellow bush of his hair passing under
the lamps. The lights of Victoria saw him, too, and Sloane Square, and the
railings of the park. And Comrade Ossipon once more found himself on a bridge.
The river, a sinister marvel of still shadows and flowing gleams mingling below
in a black silence, arrested his attention. He stood looking over the parapet
for a long time. The clock tower boomed a brazen blast above his drooping head.
He looked up at the dial. ... Half-past twelve of a wild night in the Channel.
    And again Comrade Ossipon walked. His robust form was seen that night in
distant parts of the enormous town slumbering monstrously on a carpet of mud
under a veil of raw mist. It was seen crossing the streets without life and
sound, or diminishing in the interminable straight perspectives of shadowy
houses bordering empty roadways lined by strings of gas-lamps. He walked through
Squares, Places, Ovals, Commons, through monotonous streets with unknown names
where the dust of humanity settles inert and hopeless out of the stream of life.
He walked. And suddenly turning into a strip of a front garden with a mangy
grass plot, he let himself into a small grimy house with a latchkey he took out
of his pocket.
    He threw himself down on his bed all dressed, and lay still for a whole
quarter of an hour. Then he sat up suddenly, drawing up his knees, and clasping
his legs. The first dawn found him open-eyed, in that same posture. This man who
could walk so long, so far, so aimlessly, without showing a sign of fatigue,
could also remain sitting still for hours without stirring a limb or an eyelid.
But when the late sun sent its rays into the room he unclasped his hands, and
fell back on the pillow. His eyes stared at the ceiling. And suddenly they
closed. Comrade Ossipon slept in the sunlight.
 

                                      XIII

The enormous iron padlock on the doors of the wall cupboard was the only object
in the room on which the eye could rest without becoming afflicted by the
miserable unloveliness of forms and the poverty of material. Unsaleable in the
ordinary course of business on account of its noble proportions, it had been
ceded to the Professor for a few pence by a marine dealer in the east of London.
The room was large, clean, respectable, and poor with that poverty suggesting
the starvation of every human need except mere bread. There was nothing on the
walls but the paper, an expanse of arsenical green, soiled with indelible
smudges here and there, and with stains resembling faded maps of uninhabited
continents.
    At a deal table near a window sat Comrade Ossipon, holding his head between
his fists. The Professor, dressed in his only suit of shoddy tweeds, but
flapping to and fro on the bare boards a pair of incredibly dilapidated
slippers, had thrust his hands deep into the overstrained pockets of his jacket.
He was relating to his robust guest a visit he had lately been paying to the
Apostle Michaelis. The Perfect Anarchist had even been unbending a little.
    »The fellow didn't know anything of Verloc's death. Of course! He never
looks at the newspapers. They make him too sad, he says. But never mind. I
walked into his cottage. Not a soul anywhere. I had to shout half-a-dozen times
before he answered me. I thought he was fast asleep yet, in bed. But not at all.
He had been writing his book for four hours already. He sat in that tiny cage in
a litter of manuscript. There was a half-eaten raw carrot on the table near him.
His breakfast. He lives on a diet of raw carrots and a little milk now.«
    »How does he look on it?« asked Comrade Ossipon, listlessly.
    »Angelic. ... I picked up a handful of his pages from the floor. The poverty
of reasoning is astonishing. He has no logic. He can't think consecutively. But
that's nothing. He has divided his biography into three parts, entitled - Faith,
Hope, Charity. He is elaborating now the idea of a world planned out like an
immense and nice hospital, with gardens and flowers, in which the strong are to
devote themselves to the nursing of the weak.«
    The Professor paused.
    »Conceive you this folly, Ossipon? The weak! The source of all evil on this
earth!« he continued with his grim assurance. »I told him that I dreamt of a
world like shambles, where the weak would be taken in hand for utter
extermination.
    Do you understand, Ossipon? The source of all evil! They are our sinister
masters - the weak, the flabby, the silly, the cowardly, the faint of heart, and
the slavish of mind. They have power. They are the multitude. Theirs is the
kingdom of the earth. Exterminate, exterminate! That is the only way of
progress. It is! Follow me, Ossipon. First the great multitude of the weak must
go, then the only relatively strong. You see? First the blind, then the deaf and
the dumb, then the halt and the lame - and so on. Every taint, every vice, every
prejudice, every convention must meet its doom.«
    »And what remains?« asked Ossipon in a stifled voice.
    »I remain - if I am strong enough,« asserted the sallow little Professor,
whose large ears, thin like membranes, and standing far out from the sides of
his frail skull, took on suddenly a deep red tint.
    »Haven't I suffered enough from this oppression of the weak?« he continued,
forcibly. Then tapping the breast-pocket of his jacket: »And yet I am the
force,« he went on. »But the time! The time! Give me time! Ah! that multitude,
too stupid to feel either pity or fear. Sometimes I think they have everything
on their side. Everything - even death - my own weapon.«
    »Come and drink some beer with me at the Silenus,« said the robust Ossipon
after an interval of silence pervaded by the rapid flap, flap of the slippers on
the feet of the Perfect Anarchist. This last accepted. He was jovial that day in
his own peculiar way. He slapped Ossipon's shoulder.
    »Beer! So be it! Let us drink and be merry, for we are strong, and to-morrow
we die.«
    He busied himself with putting on his boots, and talked meanwhile in his
curt, resolute tones.
    »What's the matter with you, Ossipon? You look glum and seek even my
company. I hear that you are seen constantly in places where men utter foolish
things over glasses of liquor. Why? Have you abandoned your collection of women?
They are the weak who feed the strong - eh?«
    He stamped one foot, and picked up his other laced boot, heavy, thick-soled,
unblacked, mended many times. He smiled to himself grimly.
    »Tell me, Ossipon, terrible man, has ever one of your victims killed herself
for you - or are your triumphs so far incomplete - for blood alone puts a seal
on greatness? Blood. Death. Look at history.«
    »You be damned,« said Ossipon, without turning his head.
    »Why? Let that be the hope of the weak, whose theology has invented hell for
the strong. Ossipon, my feeling for you is amicable contempt. You couldn't kill
a fly.«
    But rolling to the feast on the top of the omnibus the Professor lost his
high spirits. The contemplation of the multitudes thronging the pavements
extinguished his assurance under a load of doubt and uneasiness which he could
shake off after a period of seclusion in the room with the large cupboard closed
by an enormous padlock.
    »And so,« said over his shoulder Comrade Ossipon, who sat on the seat
behind. »And so Michaelis dreams of a world like a beautiful and cheery
hospital.«
    »Just so. An immense charity for the healing of the weak,« assented the
Professor, sardonically.
    »That's silly,« admitted Ossipon. »You can't heal weakness. But after all
Michaelis may not be so far wrong. In two hundred years doctors will rule the
world. Science reigns already. It reigns in the shade maybe - but it reigns. And
all science must culminate at last in the science of healing - not the weak, but
the strong. Mankind wants to live - to live.«
    »Mankind,« asserted the Professor with a self-confident glitter of his
iron-rimmed spectacles, »does not know what it wants.«
    »But you do,« growled Ossipon. »Just now you've been crying for time - time.
Well, the doctors will serve you out your time - if you are good. You profess
yourself to be one of the strong - because you carry in your pocket enough stuff
to send yourself and, say, twenty other people into eternity. But eternity is a
damned hole. It's time that you need. You - if you met a man who could give you
for certain ten years of time, you would call him your master.«
    »My device is: No God! No master,« said the Professor, sententiously, as he
rose to get off the 'bus.
    Ossipon followed. »Wait till you are lying flat on your back at the end of
your time,« he retorted, jumping off the footboard after the other. »Your
scurvy, shabby, mangy little bit of time,« he continued across the street, and
hopping on to the curbstone.
    »Ossipon, I think that you are a humbug,« the Professor said, opening
masterfully the doors of the renowned Silenus. And when they had established
themselves at a little table he developed further this gracious thought. »You
are not even a doctor. But you are funny. Your notion of a humanity universally
putting out the tongue and taking the pill from pole to pole at the bidding of a
few solemn jokers is worthy of the prophet. Prophecy! What's the good of
thinking of what will be!« He raised his glass. »To the destruction of what is,«
he said, calmly.
    He drank and relapsed into his peculiarly close manner of silence. The
thought of a mankind as numerous as the sands of the seashore, as
indestructible, as difficult to handle, oppressed him. The sound of exploding
bombs was lost in their immensity of passive grains without an echo. For
instance, this Verloc affair. Who thought of it now?
    Ossipon, as if suddenly compelled by some mysterious force, pulled a
much-folded newspaper out of his pocket. The Professor raised his head at the
rustle.
    »What's that paper? Anything in it?« he asked.
    Ossipon started like a scared somnambulist.
    »Nothing. Nothing whatever. The thing's ten days old. I forgot it in my
pocket, I suppose.«
    But he did not throw the old thing away. Before returning it to his pocket
he stole a glance at the last lines of a paragraph. They ran thus: »An
impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this act of madness or
despair.«
    Such were the end words of an item of news headed:
    »Suicide of Lady Passenger from a cross-Channel Boat.« Comrade Ossipon was
familiar with the beauties of its journalistic style. »An impenetrable mystery
seems destined to hang for ever. ...« He knew every word by heart. »An
impenetrable mystery. ...« And the robust anarchist, hanging his head on his
breast, fell into a long reverie.
    He was menaced by this thing in the very sources of his existence. He could
not issue forth to meet his various conquests, those that he courted on benches
in Kensington Gardens, and those he met near area railings, without the dread of
beginning to talk to them of an impenetrable mystery destined. ... He was
becoming scientifically afraid of insanity lying in wait for him amongst these
lines. »To hang for ever over.« It was an obsession, a torture. He had lately
failed to keep several of these appointments, whose note used to be an unbounded
trustfulness in the language of sentiment and manly tenderness. The confiding
disposition of various classes of women satisfied the needs of his self-love,
and put some material means into his hand. He needed it to live. It was there.
But if he could no longer make use of it, he ran the risk of starving his ideals
and his body ... »This act of madness or despair.«
    An impenetrable mystery was sure to hang for ever as far as all mankind was
concerned. But what of that if he alone of all men could never get rid of the
cursed knowledge? And Comrade Ossipon's knowledge was as precise as the
newspaper man could make it - up to the very threshold of the »mystery destined
to hang for ever. ...«
    Comrade Ossipon was well informed. He knew what the gangway man of the
steamer had seen: »A lady in a black dress and a black veil, wandering at
midnight alongside, on the quay. Are you going by the boat, ma'am, he had asked
her, encouragingly. This way. She seemed not to know what to do. He helped her
on board. She seemed weak.«
    And Ossipon knew also what the stewardess had seen: A lady in black with a
white face standing in the middle of the empty ladies' cabin. The stewardess
induced her to lie down there. The lady seemed quite unwilling to speak, and as
if she were in some awful trouble. The next the stewardess knew she was gone
from the ladies' cabin. The stewardess then went on deck to look for her, and
Comrade Ossipon was informed that the good woman found the unhappy lady lying
down in one of the hooded seats. Her eyes were open, but she would not answer
anything that was said to her. She seemed very ill. The stewardess fetched the
chief steward, and those two people stood by the side of the hooded seat
consulting over their extraordinary and tragic passenger. They talked in audible
whispers (for she seemed past hearing) of St. Malo and the Consul there, of
communicating with her people in England. Then they went away to arrange for her
removal down below, for indeed by what they could see of her face she seemed to
them to be dying. But Comrade Ossipon knew that behind that white mask of
despair there was struggling against terror and despair a vigour of vitality, a
love of life that could resist the furious anguish which drives to murder and
the fear, the blind, mad fear of the gallows. He knew. But the stewardess and
the chief steward knew nothing, except that when they came back for her in less
than five minutes the lady in black was no longer in the hooded seat. She was
nowhere. She was gone. It was then five o'clock in the morning, and it was no
accident either. An hour afterwards one of the steamer's hands found a wedding
ring left lying on the seat. It had stuck to the wood in a bit of wet, and its
glitter caught the man's eye. There was a date, 24th June, 1879, engraved
inside. »An impenetrable mystery is destined to hang for ever. ...«
    And Comrade Ossipon raised his bowed head, beloved of various humble women
of these isles, Apollo-like in the sunniness of its bush of hair.
    The Professor had grown restless meantime. He rose.
    »Stay,« said Ossipon, hurriedly. »Here, what do you know of madness and
despair?«
    The Professor passed the tip of his tongue on his dry, thin lips, and said
doctorally:
    »There are no such things. All passion is lost now. The world is mediocre,
limp, without force. And madness and despair are a force. And force is a crime
in the eyes of the fools, the weak and the silly who rule the roost. You are
mediocre. Verloc, whose affair the police has managed to smother so nicely, was
mediocre. And the police murdered him. He was mediocre. Everybody is mediocre.
Madness and despair! Give me that for a lever, and I'll move the world. Ossipon,
you have my cordial scorn. You are incapable of conceiving even what the fat-fed
citizen would call a crime. You have no force.« He paused, smiling sardonically
under the fierce glitter of his thick glasses.
    »And let me tell you that this little legacy they say you've come into has
not improved your intelligence. You sit at your beer like a dummy. Good-bye.«
    »Will you have it?« said Ossipon, looking up with an idiotic grin.
    »Have what?«
    »The legacy. All of it.«
    The incorruptible Professor only smiled. His clothes were all but falling
off him, his boots, shapeless with repairs, heavy like lead, let water in at
every step. He said:
    »I will send you by-and-by a small bill for certain chemicals which I shall
order to-morrow. I need them badly. Understood - eh?«
    Ossipon lowered his head slowly. He was alone. »An impenetrable mystery. ...
« It seemed to him that suspended in the air before him he saw his own brain
pulsating to the rhythm of an impenetrable mystery. It was diseased clearly. ...
»This act of madness or despair.«
    The mechanical piano near the door played through a valse cheekily, then
fell silent all at once, as if gone grumpy.
    Comrade Ossipon, nicknamed the Doctor, went out of the Silenus beer-hall. At
the door he hesitated, blinking at a not too splendid sunlight - and the paper
with the report of the suicide of a lady was in his pocket. His heart was
beating against it. The suicide of a lady - this act of madness or despair.
    He walked along the street without looking where he put his feet; and he
walked in a direction which would not bring him to the place of appointment with
another lady (an elderly nursery governess putting her trust in an Apollo-like
ambrosial head). He was walking away from it. He could face no woman. It was
ruin. He could neither think, work, sleep, nor eat. But he was beginning to
drink with pleasure, with anticipation, with hope. It was ruin. His
revolutionary career, sustained by the sentiment and trustfulness of many women,
was menaced by an impenetrable mystery - the mystery of a human brain pulsating
wrongfully to the rhythm of journalistic phrases. » ...Will hang for ever over
this act. ... It was inclining towards the gutter ... of madness or despair. ...
«
    »I am seriously ill,« he muttered to himself with scientific insight.
Already his robust form, with an Embassy's secret-service money (inherited from
Mr. Verloc) in his pockets, was marching in the gutter as if in training for the
task of an inevitable future. Already he bowed his broad shoulders, his head of
ambrosial locks, as if ready to receive the leather yoke of the sandwich board.
As on that night, more than a week ago, Comrade Ossipon walked without looking
where he put his feet, feeling no fatigue, feeling nothing, seeing nothing,
hearing not a sound. »An impenetrable mystery. ...« He walked disregarded. ... »
This act of madness or despair.«
    And the incorruptible Professor walked, too, averting his eyes from the
odious multitude of mankind. He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force.
His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He walked frail,
insignificant, shabby, miserable - and terrible in the simplicity of his idea
calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at
him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.
