Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (329 page)

He observed another slight shudder of his wife, which affected his sensibility.  As she persisted in hiding her face in her hands, he thought he had better leave her alone for a while.  On this delicate impulse Mr Verloc withdrew into the parlour again, where the gas jet purred like a contented cat.  Mrs Verloc’s wifely forethought had left the cold beef on the table with carving knife and fork and half a loaf of bread for Mr Verloc’s supper.  He noticed all these things now for the first time, and cutting himself a piece of bread and meat, began to eat.

His appetite did not proceed from callousness.  Mr Verloc had not eaten any breakfast that day.  He had left his home fasting.  Not being an energetic man, he found his resolution in nervous excitement, which seemed to hold him mainly by the throat.  He could not have swallowed anything solid.  Michaelis’ cottage was as destitute of provisions as the cell of a prisoner.  The ticket-of-leave apostle lived on a little milk and crusts of stale bread.  Moreover, when Mr Verloc arrived he had already gone upstairs after his frugal meal.  Absorbed in the toil and delight of literary composition, he had not even answered Mr Verloc’s shout up the little staircase.

“I am taking this young fellow home for a day or two.”

And, in truth, Mr Verloc did not wait for an answer, but had marched out of the cottage at once, followed by the obedient Stevie.

Now that all action was over and his fate taken out of his hands with unexpected swiftness, Mr Verloc felt terribly empty physically.  He carved the meat, cut the bread, and devoured his supper standing by the table, and now and then casting a glance towards his wife.  Her prolonged immobility disturbed the comfort of his refection.  He walked again into the shop, and came up very close to her.  This sorrow with a veiled face made Mr Verloc uneasy.  He expected, of course, his wife to be very much upset, but he wanted her to pull herself together.  He needed all her assistance and all her loyalty in these new conjunctures his fatalism had already accepted.

“Can’t be helped,” he said in a tone of gloomy sympathy.  “Come, Winnie, we’ve got to think of to-morrow.  You’ll want all your wits about you after I am taken away.”

He paused.  Mrs Verloc’s breast heaved convulsively.  This was not reassuring to Mr Verloc, in whose view the newly created situation required from the two people most concerned in it calmness, decision, and other qualities incompatible with the mental disorder of passionate sorrow.  Mr Verloc was a humane man; he had come home prepared to allow every latitude to his wife’s affection for her brother.

Only he did not understand either the nature or the whole extent of that sentiment.  And in this he was excusable, since it was impossible for him to understand it without ceasing to be himself.  He was startled and disappointed, and his speech conveyed it by a certain roughness of tone.

“You might look at a fellow,” he observed after waiting a while.

As if forced through the hands covering Mrs Verloc’s face the answer came, deadened, almost pitiful.

“I don’t want to look at you as long as I live.”

“Eh?  What!”  Mr Verloc was merely startled by the superficial and literal meaning of this declaration.  It was obviously unreasonable, the mere cry of exaggerated grief.  He threw over it the mantle of his marital indulgence.  The mind of Mr Verloc lacked profundity.  Under the mistaken impression that the value of individuals consists in what they are in themselves, he could not possibly comprehend the value of Stevie in the eyes of Mrs Verloc.  She was taking it confoundedly hard, he thought to himself.  It was all the fault of that damned Heat.  What did he want to upset the woman for?  But she mustn’t be allowed, for her own good, to carry on so till she got quite beside herself.

“Look here!  You can’t sit like this in the shop,” he said with affected severity, in which there was some real annoyance; for urgent practical matters must be talked over if they had to sit up all night.  “Somebody might come in at any minute,” he added, and waited again.  No effect was produced, and the idea of the finality of death occurred to Mr Verloc during the pause.  He changed his tone.  “Come.  This won’t bring him back,” he said gently, feeling ready to take her in his arms and press her to his breast, where impatience and compassion dwelt side by side.  But except for a short shudder Mrs Verloc remained apparently unaffected by the force of that terrible truism.  It was Mr Verloc himself who was moved.  He was moved in his simplicity to urge moderation by asserting the claims of his own personality.

“Do be reasonable, Winnie.  What would it have been if you had lost me!”

He had vaguely expected to hear her cry out.  But she did not budge.  She leaned back a little, quieted down to a complete unreadable stillness.  Mr Verloc’s heart began to beat faster with exasperation and something resembling alarm.  He laid his hand on her shoulder, saying:

“Don’t be a fool, Winnie.”

She gave no sign.  It was impossible to talk to any purpose with a woman whose face one cannot see.  Mr Verloc caught hold of his wife’s wrists.  But her hands seemed glued fast.  She swayed forward bodily to his tug, and nearly went off the chair.  Startled to feel her so helplessly limp, he was trying to put her back on the chair when she stiffened suddenly all over, tore herself out of his hands, ran out of the shop, across the parlour, and into the kitchen.  This was very swift.  He had just a glimpse of her face and that much of her eyes that he knew she had not looked at him.

It all had the appearance of a struggle for the possession of a chair, because Mr Verloc instantly took his wife’s place in it.  Mr Verloc did not cover his face with his hands, but a sombre thoughtfulness veiled his features.  A term of imprisonment could not be avoided.  He did not wish now to avoid it.  A prison was a place as safe from certain unlawful vengeances as the grave, with this advantage, that in a prison there is room for hope.  What he saw before him was a term of imprisonment, an early release and then life abroad somewhere, such as he had contemplated already, in case of failure.  Well, it was a failure, if not exactly the sort of failure he had feared.  It had been so near success that he could have positively terrified Mr Vladimir out of his ferocious scoffing with this proof of occult efficiency.  So at least it seemed now to Mr Verloc.  His prestige with the Embassy would have been immense if — if his wife had not had the unlucky notion of sewing on the address inside Stevie’s overcoat.  Mr Verloc, who was no fool, had soon perceived the extraordinary character of the influence he had over Stevie, though he did not understand exactly its origin — the doctrine of his supreme wisdom and goodness inculcated by two anxious women.  In all the eventualities he had foreseen Mr Verloc had calculated with correct insight on Stevie’s instinctive loyalty and blind discretion.  The eventuality he had not foreseen had appalled him as a humane man and a fond husband.  From every other point of view it was rather advantageous.  Nothing can equal the everlasting discretion of death.  Mr Verloc, sitting perplexed and frightened in the small parlour of the Cheshire Cheese, could not help acknowledging that to himself, because his sensibility did not stand in the way of his judgment.  Stevie’s violent disintegration, however disturbing to think about, only assured the success; for, of course, the knocking down of a wall was not the aim of Mr Vladimir’s menaces, but the production of a moral effect.  With much trouble and distress on Mr Verloc’s part the effect might be said to have been produced.  When, however, most unexpectedly, it came home to roost in Brett Street, Mr Verloc, who had been struggling like a man in a nightmare for the preservation of his position, accepted the blow in the spirit of a convinced fatalist.  The position was gone through no one’s fault really.  A small, tiny fact had done it.  It was like slipping on a bit of orange peel in the dark and breaking your leg.

Mr Verloc drew a weary breath.  He nourished no resentment against his wife.  He thought: She will have to look after the shop while they keep me locked up.  And thinking also how cruelly she would miss Stevie at first, he felt greatly concerned about her health and spirits.  How would she stand her solitude — absolutely alone in that house?  It would not do for her to break down while he was locked up?  What would become of the shop then?  The shop was an asset.  Though Mr Verloc’s fatalism accepted his undoing as a secret agent, he had no mind to be utterly ruined, mostly, it must be owned, from regard for his wife.

Silent, and out of his line of sight in the kitchen, she frightened him.  If only she had had her mother with her.  But that silly old woman — An angry dismay possessed Mr Verloc.  He must talk with his wife.  He could tell her certainly that a man does get desperate under certain circumstances.  But he did not go incontinently to impart to her that information.  First of all, it was clear to him that this evening was no time for business.  He got up to close the street door and put the gas out in the shop.

Having thus assured a solitude around his hearthstone Mr Verloc walked into the parlour, and glanced down into the kitchen.  Mrs Verloc was sitting in the place where poor Stevie usually established himself of an evening with paper and pencil for the pastime of drawing these coruscations of innumerable circles suggesting chaos and eternity.  Her arms were folded on the table, and her head was lying on her arms.  Mr Verloc contemplated her back and the arrangement of her hair for a time, then walked away from the kitchen door.  Mrs Verloc’s philosophical, almost disdainful incuriosity, the foundation of their accord in domestic life made it extremely difficult to get into contact with her, now this tragic necessity had arisen.  Mr Verloc felt this difficulty acutely.  He turned around the table in the parlour with his usual air of a large animal in a cage.

Curiosity being one of the forms of self-revelation, — a systematically incurious person remains always partly mysterious.  Every time he passed near the door Mr Verloc glanced at his wife uneasily.  It was not that he was afraid of her.  Mr Verloc imagined himself loved by that woman.  But she had not accustomed him to make confidences.  And the confidence he had to make was of a profound psychological order.  How with his want of practice could he tell her what he himself felt but vaguely: that there are conspiracies of fatal destiny, that a notion grows in a mind sometimes till it acquires an outward existence, an independent power of its own, and even a suggestive voice?  He could not inform her that a man may be haunted by a fat, witty, clean-shaved face till the wildest expedient to get rid of it appears a child of wisdom.

On this mental reference to a First Secretary of a great Embassy, Mr Verloc stopped in the doorway, and looking down into the kitchen with an angry face and clenched fists, addressed his wife.

“You don’t know what a brute I had to deal with.”

He started off to make another perambulation of the table; then when he had come to the door again he stopped, glaring in from the height of two steps.

“A silly, jeering, dangerous brute, with no more sense than — After all these years!  A man like me!  And I have been playing my head at that game.  You didn’t know.  Quite right, too.  What was the good of telling you that I stood the risk of having a knife stuck into me any time these seven years we’ve been married?  I am not a chap to worry a woman that’s fond of me.  You had no business to know.”  Mr Verloc took another turn round the parlour, fuming.

“A venomous beast,” he began again from the doorway.  “Drive me out into a ditch to starve for a joke.  I could see he thought it was a damned good joke.  A man like me!  Look here!  Some of the highest in the world got to thank me for walking on their two legs to this day.  That’s the man you’ve got married to, my girl!”

He perceived that his wife had sat up.  Mrs Verloc’s arms remained lying stretched on the table.  Mr Verloc watched at her back as if he could read there the effect of his words.

“There isn’t a murdering plot for the last eleven years that I hadn’t my finger in at the risk of my life.  There’s scores of these revolutionists I’ve sent off, with their bombs in their blamed pockets, to get themselves caught on the frontier.  The old Baron knew what I was worth to his country.  And here suddenly a swine comes along — an ignorant, overbearing swine.”

Mr Verloc, stepping slowly down two steps, entered the kitchen, took a tumbler off the dresser, and holding it in his hand, approached the sink, without looking at his wife.  “It wasn’t the old Baron who would have had the wicked folly of getting me to call on him at eleven in the morning.  There are two or three in this town that, if they had seen me going in, would have made no bones about knocking me on the head sooner or later.  It was a silly, murderous trick to expose for nothing a man — like me.”

Mr Verloc, turning on the tap above the sink, poured three glasses of water, one after another, down his throat to quench the fires of his indignation.  Mr Vladimir’s conduct was like a hot brand which set his internal economy in a blaze.  He could not get over the disloyalty of it.  This man, who would not work at the usual hard tasks which society sets to its humbler members, had exercised his secret industry with an indefatigable devotion.  There was in Mr Verloc a fund of loyalty.  He had been loyal to his employers, to the cause of social stability, — and to his affections too — as became apparent when, after standing the tumbler in the sink, he turned about, saying:

“If I hadn’t thought of you I would have taken the bullying brute by the throat and rammed his head into the fireplace.  I’d have been more than a match for that pink-faced, smooth-shaved — ”

Mr Verloc, neglected to finish the sentence, as if there could be no doubt of the terminal word.  For the first time in his life he was taking that incurious woman into his confidence.  The singularity of the event, the force and importance of the personal feelings aroused in the course of this confession, drove Stevie’s fate clean out of Mr Verloc’s mind.  The boy’s stuttering existence of fears and indignations, together with the violence of his end, had passed out of Mr Verloc’s mental sight for a time.  For that reason, when he looked up he was startled by the inappropriate character of his wife’s stare.  It was not a wild stare, and it was not inattentive, but its attention was peculiar and not satisfactory, inasmuch that it seemed concentrated upon some point beyond Mr Verloc’s person.  The impression was so strong that Mr Verloc glanced over his shoulder.  There was nothing behind him: there was just the whitewashed wall.  The excellent husband of Winnie Verloc saw no writing on the wall.  He turned to his wife again, repeating, with some emphasis: