Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (322 page)

“Come on,” he whispered secretly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Poor brute!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bad world for poor people.”

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

“Beastly!” he added concisely.

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

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

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

“Police,” he suggested confidently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The two had paused in their walk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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