Secret Agent

by Joseph Conrad

  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, black-leading 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 rooms 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 faraway 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 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 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 it 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 ashbins 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 formu-lated 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 semi-transparent 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 villeggiatura, 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 insufficiency 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.”