Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (305 page)

He walked along a passage lighted by a lonely gas-jet, then up a flight of winding stairs, and through a glazed and cheerful corridor on the first floor.  The footman threw open a door, and stood aside.  The feet of Mr Verloc felt a thick carpet.  The room was large, with three windows; and a young man with a shaven, big face, sitting in a roomy arm-chair before a vast mahogany writing-table, said in French to the Chancelier d’Ambassade, who was going out with the papers in his hand:

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

Mr Vladimir, First Secretary, had a drawing-room reputation as an agreeable and entertaining man.  He was something of a favourite in society.  His wit consisted in discovering droll connections between incongruous ideas; and when talking in that strain he sat well forward of his seat, with his left hand raised, as if exhibiting his funny demonstrations between the thumb and forefinger, while his round and clean-shaven face wore an expression of merry perplexity.

But there was no trace of merriment or perplexity in the way he looked at Mr Verloc.  Lying far back in the deep arm-chair, with squarely spread elbows, and throwing one leg over a thick knee, he had with his smooth and rosy countenance the air of a preternaturally thriving baby that will not stand nonsense from anybody.

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

Mr Verloc stated huskily that he did.  His whole vast bulk had a forward inclination.  He stood on the carpet in the middle of the room, clutching his hat and stick in one hand; the other hung lifelessly by his side.  He muttered unobtrusively somewhere deep down in his throat something about having done his military service in the French artillery.  At once, with contemptuous perversity, Mr Vladimir changed the language, and began to speak idiomatic English without the slightest trace of a foreign accent.

“Ah!  Yes.  Of course.  Let’s see.  How much did you get for obtaining the design of the improved breech-block of their new field-gun?”

“Five years’ rigorous confinement in a fortress,” Mr Verloc answered unexpectedly, but without any sign of feeling.

“You got off easily,” was Mr Vladimir’s comment.  “And, anyhow, it served you right for letting yourself get caught.  What made you go in for that sort of thing — eh?”

Mr Verloc’s husky conversational voice was heard speaking of youth, of a fatal infatuation for an unworthy —

“Aha!  Cherchez la femme,” Mr Vladimir deigned to interrupt, unbending, but without affability; there was, on the contrary, a touch of grimness in his condescension.  “How long have you been employed by the Embassy here?” he asked.

“Ever since the time of the late Baron Stott-Wartenheim,” Mr Verloc answered in subdued tones, and protruding his lips sadly, in sign of sorrow for the deceased diplomat.  The First Secretary observed this play of physiognomy steadily.

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

Mr Verloc answered with some surprise that he was not aware of having anything special to say.  He had been summoned by a letter — And he plunged his hand busily into the side pocket of his overcoat, but before the mocking, cynical watchfulness of Mr Vladimir, concluded to leave it there.

“Bah!” said that latter.  “What do you mean by getting out of condition like this?  You haven’t got even the physique of your profession.  You — a member of a starving proletariat — never!  You — a desperate socialist or anarchist — which is it?”

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

“Bosh!” went on Mr Vladimir, without raising his voice.  “You startled old Wurmt himself.  You wouldn’t deceive an idiot.  They all are that by-the-by, but you seem to me simply impossible.  So you began your connection with us by stealing the French gun designs.  And you got yourself caught.  That must have been very disagreeable to our Government.  You don’t seem to be very smart.”

Mr Verloc tried to exculpate himself huskily.

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

Mr Vladimir raised a large white, plump hand.  “Ah, yes.  The unlucky attachment — of your youth.  She got hold of the money, and then sold you to the police — eh?”

The doleful change in Mr Verloc’s physiognomy, the momentary drooping of his whole person, confessed that such was the regrettable case.  Mr Vladimir’s hand clasped the ankle reposing on his knee.  The sock was of dark blue silk.

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

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

“Oh!  That’s a failing which age does not cure,” Mr Vladimir remarked, with sinister familiarity.  “But no!  You are too fat for that.  You could not have come to look like this if you had been at all susceptible.  I’ll tell you what I think is the matter: you are a lazy fellow.  How long have you been drawing pay from this Embassy?”

“Eleven years,” was the answer, after a moment of sulky hesitation.  “I’ve been charged with several missions to London while His Excellency Baron Stott-Wartenheim was still Ambassador in Paris.  Then by his Excellency’s instructions I settled down in London.  I am English.”

“You are!  Are you?  Eh?”

“A natural-born British subject,” Mr Verloc said stolidly.  “But my father was French, and so — ”

“Never mind explaining,” interrupted the other.  “I daresay you could have been legally a Marshal of France and a Member of Parliament in England — and then, indeed, you would have been of some use to our Embassy.”

This flight of fancy provoked something like a faint smile on Mr Verloc’s face.  Mr Vladimir retained an imperturbable gravity.

“But, as I’ve said, you are a lazy fellow; you don’t use your opportunities.  In the time of Baron Stott-Wartenheim we had a lot of soft-headed people running this Embassy.  They caused fellows of your sort to form a false conception of the nature of a secret service fund.  It is my business to correct this misapprehension by telling you what the secret service is not.  It is not a philanthropic institution.  I’ve had you called here on purpose to tell you this.”

Mr Vladimir observed the forced expression of bewilderment on Verloc’s face, and smiled sarcastically.

“I see that you understand me perfectly.  I daresay you are intelligent enough for your work.  What we want now is activity — activity.”

On repeating this last word Mr Vladimir laid a long white forefinger on the edge of the desk.  Every trace of huskiness disappeared from Verloc’s voice.  The nape of his gross neck became crimson above the velvet collar of his overcoat.  His lips quivered before they came widely open.

“If you’ll only be good enough to look up my record,” he boomed out in his great, clear oratorical bass, “you’ll see I gave a warning only three months ago, on the occasion of the Grand Duke Romuald’s visit to Paris, which was telegraphed from here to the French police, and — ”

“Tut, tut!” broke out Mr Vladimir, with a frowning grimace.  “The French police had no use for your warning.  Don’t roar like this.  What the devil do you mean?”

With a note of proud humility Mr Verloc apologised for forgetting himself.  His voice, — famous for years at open-air meetings and at workmen’s assemblies in large halls, had contributed, he said, to his reputation of a good and trustworthy comrade.  It was, therefore, a part of his usefulness.  It had inspired confidence in his principles.  “I was always put up to speak by the leaders at a critical moment,” Mr Verloc declared, with obvious satisfaction.  There was no uproar above which he could not make himself heard, he added; and suddenly he made a demonstration.

“Allow me,” he said.  With lowered forehead, without looking up, swiftly and ponderously he crossed the room to one of the French windows.  As if giving way to an uncontrollable impulse, he opened it a little.  Mr Vladimir, jumping up amazed from the depths of the arm-chair, looked over his shoulder; and below, across the courtyard of the Embassy, well beyond the open gate, could be seen the broad back of a policeman watching idly the gorgeous perambulator of a wealthy baby being wheeled in state across the Square.

“Constable!” said Mr Verloc, with no more effort than if he were whispering; and Mr Vladimir burst into a laugh on seeing the policeman spin round as if prodded by a sharp instrument.  Mr Verloc shut the window quietly, and returned to the middle of the room.

“With a voice like that,” he said, putting on the husky conversational pedal, “I was naturally trusted.  And I knew what to say, too.”

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

“I daresay you have the social revolutionary jargon by heart well enough,” he said contemptuously.  “Vox et. . . You haven’t ever studied Latin — have you?”

“No,” growled Mr Verloc.  “You did not expect me to know it.  I belong to the million.  Who knows Latin?  Only a few hundred imbeciles who aren’t fit to take care of themselves.”

For some thirty seconds longer Mr Vladimir studied in the mirror the fleshy profile, the gross bulk, of the man behind him.  And at the same time he had the advantage of seeing his own face, clean-shaved and round, rosy about the gills, and with the thin sensitive lips formed exactly for the utterance of those delicate witticisms which had made him such a favourite in the very highest society.  Then he turned, and advanced into the room with such determination that the very ends of his quaintly old-fashioned bow necktie seemed to bristle with unspeakable menaces.  The movement was so swift and fierce that Mr Verloc, casting an oblique glance, quailed inwardly.

“Aha!  You dare be impudent,” Mr Vladimir began, with an amazingly guttural intonation not only utterly un-English, but absolutely un-European, and startling even to Mr Verloc’s experience of cosmopolitan slums.  “You dare!  Well, I am going to speak plain English to you.  Voice won’t do.  We have no use for your voice.  We don’t want a voice.  We want facts — startling facts — damn you,” he added, with a sort of ferocious discretion, right into Mr Verloc’s face.

“Don’t you try to come over me with your Hyperborean manners,” Mr Verloc defended himself huskily, looking at the carpet.  At this his interlocutor, smiling mockingly above the bristling bow of his necktie, switched the conversation into French.

“You give yourself for an ‘agent provocateur.’  The proper business of an ‘agent provocateur’ is to provoke.  As far as I can judge from your record kept here, you have done nothing to earn your money for the last three years.”

“Nothing!” exclaimed Verloc, stirring not a limb, and not raising his eyes, but with the note of sincere feeling in his tone.  “I have several times prevented what might have been — ”

“There is a proverb in this country which says prevention is better than cure,” interrupted Mr Vladimir, throwing himself into the arm-chair.  “It is stupid in a general way.  There is no end to prevention.  But it is characteristic.  They dislike finality in this country.  Don’t you be too English.  And in this particular instance, don’t be absurd.  The evil is already here.  We don’t want prevention — we want cure.”

He paused, turned to the desk, and turning over some papers lying there, spoke in a changed business-like tone, without looking at Mr Verloc.

“You know, of course, of the International Conference assembled in Milan?”

Mr Verloc intimated hoarsely that he was in the habit of reading the daily papers.  To a further question his answer was that, of course, he understood what he read.  At this Mr Vladimir, smiling faintly at the documents he was still scanning one after another, murmured “As long as it is not written in Latin, I suppose.”

“Or Chinese,” added Mr Verloc stolidly.

“H’m.  Some of your revolutionary friends’ effusions are written in a charabia every bit as incomprehensible as Chinese — ”  Mr Vladimir let fall disdainfully a grey sheet of printed matter.  “What are all these leaflets headed F. P., with a hammer, pen, and torch crossed?  What does it mean, this F. P.?”  Mr Verloc approached the imposing writing-table.

“The Future of the Proletariat.  It’s a society,” he explained, standing ponderously by the side of the arm-chair, “not anarchist in principle, but open to all shades of revolutionary opinion.”

“Are you in it?”

“One of the Vice-Presidents,” Mr Verloc breathed out heavily; and the First Secretary of the Embassy raised his head to look at him.

“Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself,” he said incisively.  “Isn’t your society capable of anything else but printing this prophetic bosh in blunt type on this filthy paper eh?  Why don’t you do something?  Look here.  I’ve this matter in hand now, and I tell you plainly that you will have to earn your money.  The good old Stott-Wartenheim times are over.  No work, no pay.”

Mr Verloc felt a queer sensation of faintness in his stout legs.  He stepped back one pace, and blew his nose loudly.

He was, in truth, startled and alarmed.  The rusty London sunshine struggling clear of the London mist shed a lukewarm brightness into the First Secretary’s private room; and in the silence Mr Verloc heard against a window-pane the faint buzzing of a fly — his first fly of the year — heralding better than any number of swallows the approach of spring.  The useless fussing of that tiny energetic organism affected unpleasantly this big man threatened in his indolence.

In the pause Mr Vladimir formulated in his mind a series of disparaging remarks concerning Mr Verloc’s face and figure.  The fellow was unexpectedly vulgar, heavy, and impudently unintelligent.  He looked uncommonly like a master plumber come to present his bill.  The First Secretary of the Embassy, from his occasional excursions into the field of American humour, had formed a special notion of that class of mechanic as the embodiment of fraudulent laziness and incompetency.

This was then the famous and trusty secret agent, so secret that he was never designated otherwise but by the symbol [delta] in the late Baron Stott-Wartenheim’s official, semi-official, and confidential correspondence; the celebrated agent [delta], whose warnings had the power to change the schemes and the dates of royal, imperial, grand ducal journeys, and sometimes caused them to be put off altogether!  This fellow!  And Mr Vladimir indulged mentally in an enormous and derisive fit of merriment, partly at his own astonishment, which he judged naive, but mostly at the expense of the universally regretted Baron Stott-Wartenheim.  His late Excellency, whom the august favour of his Imperial master had imposed as Ambassador upon several reluctant Ministers of Foreign Affairs, had enjoyed in his lifetime a fame for an owlish, pessimistic gullibility.  His Excellency had the social revolution on the brain.  He imagined himself to be a diplomatist set apart by a special dispensation to watch the end of diplomacy, and pretty nearly the end of the world, in a horrid democratic upheaval.  His prophetic and doleful despatches had been for years the joke of Foreign Offices.  He was said to have exclaimed on his deathbed (visited by his Imperial friend and master): “Unhappy Europe!  Thou shalt perish by the moral insanity of thy children!”  He was fated to be the victim of the first humbugging rascal that came along, thought Mr Vladimir, smiling vaguely at Mr Verloc.