Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (304 page)

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

CHAPTER II

Such was the house, the household, and the business Mr Verloc left behind him on his way westward at the hour of half-past ten in the morning.  It was unusually early for him; his whole person exhaled the charm of almost dewy freshness; he wore his blue cloth overcoat unbuttoned; his boots were shiny; his cheeks, freshly shaven, had a sort of gloss; and even his heavy-lidded eyes, refreshed by a night of peaceful slumber, sent out glances of comparative alertness.  Through the park railings these glances beheld men and women riding in the Row, couples cantering past harmoniously, others advancing sedately at a walk, loitering groups of three or four, solitary horsemen looking unsociable, and solitary women followed at a long distance by a groom with a cockade to his hat and a leather belt over his tight-fitting coat.  Carriages went bowling by, mostly two-horse broughams, with here and there a victoria with the skin of some wild beast inside and a woman’s face and hat emerging above the folded hood.  And a peculiarly London sun — against which nothing could be said except that it looked bloodshot — glorified all this by its stare.  It hung at a moderate elevation above Hyde Park Corner with an air of punctual and benign vigilance.  The very pavement under Mr Verloc’s feet had an old-gold tinge in that diffused light, in which neither wall, nor tree, nor beast, nor man cast a shadow.  Mr Verloc was going westward through a town without shadows in an atmosphere of powdered old gold.  There were red, coppery gleams on the roofs of houses, on the corners of walls, on the panels of carriages, on the very coats of the horses, and on the broad back of Mr Verloc’s overcoat, where they produced a dull effect of rustiness.  But Mr Verloc was not in the least conscious of having got rusty.  He surveyed through the park railings the evidences of the town’s opulence and luxury with an approving eye.  All these people had to be protected.  Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury.  They had to be protected; and their horses, carriages, houses, servants had to be protected; and the source of their wealth had to be protected in the heart of the city and the heart of the country; the whole social order favourable to their hygienic idleness had to be protected against the shallow enviousness of unhygienic labour.  It had to — and Mr Verloc would have rubbed his hands with satisfaction had he not been constitutionally averse from every superfluous exertion.  His idleness was not hygienic, but it suited him very well.  He was in a manner devoted to it with a sort of inert fanaticism, or perhaps rather with a fanatical inertness.  Born of industrious parents for a life of toil, he had embraced indolence from an impulse as profound as inexplicable and as imperious as the impulse which directs a man’s preference for one particular woman in a given thousand.  He was too lazy even for a mere demagogue, for a workman orator, for a leader of labour.  It was too much trouble.  He required a more perfect form of ease; or it might have been that he was the victim of a philosophical unbelief in the effectiveness of every human effort.  Such a form of indolence requires, implies, a certain amount of intelligence.  Mr Verloc was not devoid of intelligence — and at the notion of a menaced social order he would perhaps have winked to himself if there had not been an effort to make in that sign of scepticism.  His big, prominent eyes were not well adapted to winking.  They were rather of the sort that closes solemnly in slumber with majestic effect.

Undemonstrative and burly in a fat-pig style, Mr Verloc, without either rubbing his hands with satisfaction or winking sceptically at his thoughts, proceeded on his way.  He trod the pavement heavily with his shiny boots, and his general get-up was that of a well-to-do mechanic in business for himself.  He might have been anything from a picture-frame maker to a lock-smith; an employer of labour in a small way.  But there was also about him an indescribable air which no mechanic could have acquired in the practice of his handicraft however dishonestly exercised: the air common to men who live on the vices, the follies, or the baser fears of mankind; the air of moral nihilism common to keepers of gambling hells and disorderly houses; to private detectives and inquiry agents; to drink sellers and, I should say, to the sellers of invigorating electric belts and to the inventors of patent medicines.  But of that last I am not sure, not having carried my investigations so far into the depths.  For all I know, the expression of these last may be perfectly diabolic.  I shouldn’t be surprised.  What I want to affirm is that Mr Verloc’s expression was by no means diabolic.

Before reaching Knightsbridge, Mr Verloc took a turn to the left out of the busy main thoroughfare, uproarious with the traffic of swaying omnibuses and trotting vans, in the almost silent, swift flow of hansoms.  Under his hat, worn with a slight backward tilt, his hair had been carefully brushed into respectful sleekness; for his business was with an Embassy.  And Mr Verloc, steady like a rock — a soft kind of rock — marched now along a street which could with every propriety be described as private.  In its breadth, emptiness, and extent it had the majesty of inorganic nature, of matter that never dies.  The only reminder of mortality was a doctor’s brougham arrested in august solitude close to the curbstone.  The polished knockers of the doors gleamed as far as the eye could reach, the clean windows shone with a dark opaque lustre.  And all was still.  But a milk cart rattled noisily across the distant perspective; a butcher boy, driving with the noble recklessness of a charioteer at Olympic Games, dashed round the corner sitting high above a pair of red wheels.  A guilty-looking cat issuing from under the stones ran for a while in front of Mr Verloc, then dived into another basement; and a thick police constable, looking a stranger to every emotion, as if he too were part of inorganic nature, surging apparently out of a lamp-post, took not the slightest notice of Mr Verloc.  With a turn to the left Mr Verloc pursued his way along a narrow street by the side of a yellow wall which, for some inscrutable reason, had No. 1 Chesham Square written on it in black letters.  Chesham Square was at least sixty yards away, and Mr Verloc, cosmopolitan enough not to be deceived by London’s topographical mysteries, held on steadily, without a sign of surprise or indignation.  At last, with business-like persistency, he reached the Square, and made diagonally for the number 10.  This belonged to an imposing carriage gate in a high, clean wall between two houses, of which one rationally enough bore the number 9 and the other was numbered 37; but the fact that this last belonged to Porthill Street, a street well known in the neighbourhood, was proclaimed by an inscription placed above the ground-floor windows by whatever highly efficient authority is charged with the duty of keeping track of London’s strayed houses.  Why powers are not asked of Parliament (a short act would do) for compelling those edifices to return where they belong is one of the mysteries of municipal administration.  Mr Verloc did not trouble his head about it, his mission in life being the protection of the social mechanism, not its perfectionment or even its criticism.

It was so early that the porter of the Embassy issued hurriedly out of his lodge still struggling with the left sleeve of his livery coat.  His waistcoat was red, and he wore knee-breeches, but his aspect was flustered.  Mr Verloc, aware of the rush on his flank, drove it off by simply holding out an envelope stamped with the arms of the Embassy, and passed on.  He produced the same talisman also to the footman who opened the door, and stood back to let him enter the hall.

A clear fire burned in a tall fireplace, and an elderly man standing with his back to it, in evening dress and with a chain round his neck, glanced up from the newspaper he was holding spread out in both hands before his calm and severe face.  He didn’t move; but another lackey, in brown trousers and claw-hammer coat edged with thin yellow cord, approaching Mr Verloc listened to the murmur of his name, and turning round on his heel in silence, began to walk, without looking back once.  Mr Verloc, thus led along a ground-floor passage to the left of the great carpeted staircase, was suddenly motioned to enter a quite small room furnished with a heavy writing-table and a few chairs.  The servant shut the door, and Mr Verloc remained alone.  He did not take a seat.  With his hat and stick held in one hand he glanced about, passing his other podgy hand over his uncovered sleek head.

Another door opened noiselessly, and Mr Verloc immobilising his glance in that direction saw at first only black clothes, the bald top of a head, and a drooping dark grey whisker on each side of a pair of wrinkled hands.  The person who had entered was holding a batch of papers before his eyes and walked up to the table with a rather mincing step, turning the papers over the while.  Privy Councillor Wurmt, Chancelier d’Ambassade, was rather short-sighted.  This meritorious official laying the papers on the table, disclosed a face of pasty complexion and of melancholy ugliness surrounded by a lot of fine, long dark grey hairs, barred heavily by thick and bushy eyebrows.  He put on a black-framed pince-nez upon a blunt and shapeless nose, and seemed struck by Mr Verloc’s appearance.  Under the enormous eyebrows his weak eyes blinked pathetically through the glasses.

He made no sign of greeting; neither did Mr Verloc, who certainly knew his place; but a subtle change about the general outlines of his shoulders and back suggested a slight bending of Mr Verloc’s spine under the vast surface of his overcoat.  The effect was of unobtrusive deference.

“I have here some of your reports,” said the bureaucrat in an unexpectedly soft and weary voice, and pressing the tip of his forefinger on the papers with force.  He paused; and Mr Verloc, who had recognised his own handwriting very well, waited in an almost breathless silence.  “We are not very satisfied with the attitude of the police here,” the other continued, with every appearance of mental fatigue.

The shoulders of Mr Verloc, without actually moving, suggested a shrug.  And for the first time since he left his home that morning his lips opened.

“Every country has its police,” he said philosophically.  But as the official of the Embassy went on blinking at him steadily he felt constrained to add: “Allow me to observe that I have no means of action upon the police here.”

“What is desired,” said the man of papers, “is the occurrence of something definite which should stimulate their vigilance.  That is within your province — is it not so?”

Mr Verloc made no answer except by a sigh, which escaped him involuntarily, for instantly he tried to give his face a cheerful expression.  The official blinked doubtfully, as if affected by the dim light of the room.  He repeated vaguely.

“The vigilance of the police — and the severity of the magistrates.  The general leniency of the judicial procedure here, and the utter absence of all repressive measures, are a scandal to Europe.  What is wished for just now is the accentuation of the unrest — of the fermentation which undoubtedly exists — ”

“Undoubtedly, undoubtedly,” broke in Mr Verloc in a deep deferential bass of an oratorical quality, so utterly different from the tone in which he had spoken before that his interlocutor remained profoundly surprised.  “It exists to a dangerous degree.  My reports for the last twelve months make it sufficiently clear.”

“Your reports for the last twelve months,” State Councillor Wurmt began in his gentle and dispassionate tone, “have been read by me.  I failed to discover why you wrote them at all.”

A sad silence reigned for a time.  Mr Verloc seemed to have swallowed his tongue, and the other gazed at the papers on the table fixedly.  At last he gave them a slight push.

“The state of affairs you expose there is assumed to exist as the first condition of your employment.  What is required at present is not writing, but the bringing to light of a distinct, significant fact — I would almost say of an alarming fact.”

“I need not say that all my endeavours shall be directed to that end,” Mr Verloc said, with convinced modulations in his conversational husky tone.  But the sense of being blinked at watchfully behind the blind glitter of these eye-glasses on the other side of the table disconcerted him.  He stopped short with a gesture of absolute devotion.  The useful, hard-working, if obscure member of the Embassy had an air of being impressed by some newly-born thought.

“You are very corpulent,” he said.

This observation, really of a psychological nature, and advanced with the modest hesitation of an officeman more familiar with ink and paper than with the requirements of active life, stung Mr Verloc in the manner of a rude personal remark.  He stepped back a pace.

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

The Chancelier d’Ambassade entrusted with the conduct of this interview seemed to find it too much for him.

“I think,” he said, “that you had better see Mr Vladimir.  Yes, decidedly I think you ought to see Mr Vladimir.  Be good enough to wait here,” he added, and went out with mincing steps.

At once Mr Verloc passed his hand over his hair.  A slight perspiration had broken out on his forehead.  He let the air escape from his pursed-up lips like a man blowing at a spoonful of hot soup.  But when the servant in brown appeared at the door silently, Mr Verloc had not moved an inch from the place he had occupied throughout the interview.  He had remained motionless, as if feeling himself surrounded by pitfalls.