The Secret Agent

by Joseph Conrad

  “I am afraid I haven’t time to wait for your husband,” he said.

  Mrs. Verloc received this declaration listlessly. Her detachment had impressed Chief Inspector Heat all along. At this precise moment it whetted his curiosity. Chief Inspector Heat hung in the wind, swayed by his passions like the most private of citizens.

  “I think,” he said, looking at her steadily, “that you could give me a pretty good notion of what’s going on if you liked.”

  Forcing her fine, inert eyes to return his gaze, Mrs. Verloc murmured:

  “Going on! What is going on?”

  “Why, the affair I came to talk about a little with your husband.”

  That day Mrs. Verloc had glanced at a morning paper as usual. But she had not stirred out of doors. The newsboys never invaded Brett Street. It was not a street for their business. And the echo of their cries drifting along the populous thoroughfares, expired between the dirty brick walls without reaching the threshold of the shop. Her husband had not brought an evening paper home. At any rate she had not seen it. Mrs. Verloc knew nothing whatever of any affair. And she said so, with a genuine note of wonder in her quiet voice.

  Chief Inspector Heat did not believe for a moment in so much ignorance. Curtly, without amiability, he stated the bare fact.

  Mrs. Verloc turned away her eyes.

  “I call it silly,” she pronounced, slowly. She paused. “We ain’t downtrodden slaves here.”

  The Chief Inspector waited watchfully. Nothing more came.

  “And your husband didn’t mention anything to you when he came home?”

  Mrs. Verloc simply turned her face from right to left in sign of negation. A languid, baffling silence reigned in the shop. Chief Inspector Heat felt provoked beyond endurance.

  “There was another small matter,” he began in a detached tone, “which I wanted to speak to your husband about. There came into our hands a—a—what we believe is—a stolen overcoat.”

  Mrs. Verloc, with her mind specially aware of thieves that evening, touched lightly the bosom of her dress.

  “We have lost no overcoat,” she said, calmly.

  “That’s funny,” continued Private Citizen Heat. “I see you keep a lot of marking ink here——”

  He took up a small bottle, and looked at it against the gas-jet in the middle of the shop.

  “Purple—isn’t it?” he remarked, setting it down again. “As I said, it’s strange. Because the overcoat has got a label sewn on the inside with your address written in marking ink.”

  Mrs. Verloc leaned over the counter with a low exclamation.

  “That’s my brother’s, then.”

  “Where’s your brother? Can I see him?” asked the Chief Inspector, briskly. Mrs. Verloc leaned a little more over the counter.

  “No. He isn’t here. I wrote that label myself.”

  “Where’s your brother now?”

  “He’s been away living with—a friend—in the country.”

  “The overcoat comes from the country. And what’s the name of the friend?”

  “Michaelis,” confessed Mrs. Verloc in an awed whisper.

  The Chief Inspector let out a whistle. His eyes snapped.

  “Just so. Capital. And your brother now, what’s he like—a sturdy, darkish chap—eh?”

  “Oh, no,” exclaimed Mrs. Verloc, fervently. “That must be the thief. Stevie’s slight and fair.”

  “Good,” said the Chief Inspector in an approving tone. And while Mrs. Verloc, wavering between alarm and wonder, stared at him, he sought for information. Why have the address sewn like this inside the coat? And he heard that the mangled remains he had inspected that morning with extreme repugnance were those of a youth, nervous, absent-minded, peculiar, and also that the woman who was speaking to him had had the charge of that boy since he was a baby.

  “Easily excitable?” he suggested.

  “Oh, yes. He is. But how did he come to lose his coat——”

  Chief Inspector Heat suddenly pulled out a pink newspaper he had bought less than half-an-hour ago. He was interested in horses. Forced by his calling into an attitude of doubt and suspicion towards his fellow-citizens, Chief Inspector Heat relieved the instinct of credulity implanted in the human breast by putting unbounded faith in the sporting prophets of that particular evening publication. Dropping the extra special on to the counter, he plunged his hand again into his pocket, and pulling out the piece of cloth fate had presented him with out of a heap of things that seemed to have been collected in shambles and rag shops, he offered it to Mrs. Verloc for inspection.

  “I suppose you recognize this?”

  She took it mechanically in both her hands. Her eyes seemed to grow bigger as she looked.

  “Yes,” she whispered, then raised her head, and staggered backward a little.

  “Whatever for is it torn out like this?”

  The Chief Inspector snatched across the counter the cloth out of her hands, and she sat heavily on the chair. He thought: identification’s perfect. And in that moment he had a glimpse into the whole amazing truth. Verloc was the “other man.”

  “Mrs. Verloc,” he said, “it strikes me that you know more of this bomb affair than even you yourself are aware of.”

  Mrs. Verloc sat still, amazed, lost in boundless astonishment. What was the connection? And she became so rigid all over that she was not able to turn her head at the clatter of the bell, which caused the private investigator Heat to spin round on his heel. Mr. Verloc had shut the door, and for a moment the two men looked at each other.

  Mr. Verloc, without looking at his wife, walked up to the Chief Inspector, who was relieved to see him return alone.

  “You here!” muttered Mr. Verloc, heavily. “Who are you after?”

  “No one,” said Chief Inspector Heat in a low tone. “Look here, I would like a word or two with you.”

  Mr. Verloc, still pale, had brought an air of resolution with him. Still he didn’t look at his wife. He said:

  “Come in here, then.” And he led the way into the parlour.

  The door was hardly shut when Mrs. Verloc, jumping up from the chair, ran to it as if to fling it open, but instead of doing so fell on her knees, with her ear to the keyhole. The two men must have stopped directly they were through, because she heard plainly the Chief Inspector’s voice, though she could not see his finger pressed against her husband’s breast emphatically.

  “You are the other man, Verloc. Two men were seen entering the park.”

  And the voice of Mr. Verloc said:

  “Well, take me now. What’s to prevent you? You have the right.”

  “Oh, no! I know too well whom you have been giving yourself away to. He’ll have to manage this little affair all by himself. But don’t you make a mistake, it’s I who found you out.”

  Then she heard only muttering. Inspector Heat must have been showing to Mr. Verloc the piece of Stevie’s overcoat, because Stevie’s sister, guardian, and protector heard her husband a little louder.

  “I never noticed that she had hit upon that dodge.”

  Again for a time Mrs. Verloc heard nothing but murmurs, whose mysteriousness was less nightmarish to her brain than the horrible suggestions of shaped words. Then Chief Inspector Heat, on the other side of the door, raised his voice:

  “You must have been mad.”

  And Mr. Verloc’s voice answered, with a sort of gloomy fury:

  “I have been mad for a month or more, but I am not mad now. It’s all over. It shall all come out of my head, and hang the consequences.”

  There was a silence, and then Private Citizen Heat murmured:

  “What’s coming out?”

  “Everything,” exclaimed the voice of Mr. Verloc, and then sank very low.

  After a while it rose again.

  “You have known me for several years now, and you’ve found me useful, too. You know I was a straight man. Yes, straight.”

  This appeal to old acquaintance must have been extremely di
stasteful to the Chief Inspector.

  His voice took on a warning note.

  “Don’t you trust so much to what you have been promised. If I were you I would clear out. I don’t think we will run after you.”

  Mr. Verloc was heard to laugh a little.

  “Oh, yes; you hope the others will get rid of me for you—don’t you? No, no; you don’t shake me off now. I have been a straight man to those people too long, and now everything must come out.”

  “Let it come out, then,” the indifferent voice of Chief Inspector Heat assented. “But tell me now how did you get away?”

  “I was making for Chesterfield Walk,” Mrs. Verloc heard her husband’s voice, “when I heard the bang. I started running then. Fog. I saw no one till I was past the end of George Street. Don’t think I met any one till then.”

  “So easy as that!” marvelled the voice of Chief Inspector Heat. “The bang startled you, eh?”

  “Yes; it came too soon,” confessed the gloomy, husky voice of Mr. Verloc.

  Mrs. Verloc pressed her ear to the keyhole; her lips were blue, her hands cold as ice, and her pale face, in which the two eyes seemed like two black holes, felt to her as if it were enveloped in flames.

  On the other side of the door the voices sank very low. She caught words now and then, sometimes in her husband’s voice, sometimes in the smooth tones of the Chief Inspector. She heard this last say:

  “We believe he stumbled against the root of a tree?”

  There was a husky, voluble murmur, which lasted for some time, and then the Chief Inspector, as if answering some inquiry, spoke emphatically:

  “Of course. Blown to small bits: limbs, gravel, clothing, bones, splinters—all mixed up together. I tell you they had to fetch a shovel to gather him up with.”

  Mrs. Verloc sprang up suddenly from her crouching position, and stopping her ears, reeled to and fro between the counter and the shelves on the wall towards the chair. Her crazed eyes noted the sporting sheet left by the Chief Inspector, and as she knocked herself against the counter she snatched it up, fell into the chair, tore the optimistic, rosy sheet right across in trying to open it, then flung it on the floor. On the other side of the door, Chief Inspector Heat was saying to Mr. Verloc, the secret agent:

  “So your defence will be practically a full confession?”

  “It will. I am going to tell the whole story.”

  “You won’t be believed as much as you fancy you will.”

  And the Chief Inspector remained thoughtful. The turn this affair was taking meant the disclosure of many things—the laying waste of fields of knowledge, which, cultivated by a capable man, had a distinct value for the individual and for the society. It was sorry, sorry meddling. It would leave Michaelis unscathed; it would drag to light the Professor’s home industry; disorganize the whole system of supervision; make no end of a row in the papers, which, from that point of view, appeared to him by a sudden illumination as invariably written by fools for the reading of imbeciles. Mentally he agreed with the words Mr. Verloc let fall at last in answer to his last remark.

  “Perhaps not. But it will upset many things. I have been a straight man, and I shall keep straight in this——”

  “If they let you,” said the Chief Inspector, cynically. “You will be preached to, no doubt, before they put you into the dock. And in the end you may yet get let in for a sentence that will surprise you. I wouldn’t trust too much the gentleman who’s been talking to you.”

  Mr. Verloc listened, frowning.

  “My advice to you is to clear out while you may. I have no instructions. There are some of them,” continued Chief Inspector Heat, laying a peculiar stress on the word “them,” “who think you are already out of the world.”

  “Indeed!” Mr. Verloc was moved to say. Though since his return from Greenwich he had spent most of his time sitting in the tap-room of an obscure little public-house, he could hardly have hoped for such favourable news.

  “That’s the impression about you.” The Chief Inspector nodded at him. “Vanish. Clear out.”

  “Where to?” snarled Mr. Verloc. He raised his head, and gazing at the closed door of the parlour, muttered feelingly: “I only wish you would take me away to-night. I would go quietly.”

  “I daresay,” assented sardonically the Chief Inspector, following the direction of his glance.

  The brow of Mr. Verloc broke into slight moisture. He lowered his husky voice confidentially before the unmoved Chief Inspector.

  “The lad was half-witted, irresponsible. Any court would have seen that at once. Only fit for the asylum. And that was the worst that would’ve happened to him if——”

  The Chief Inspector, his hand on the door handle, whispered into Mr. Verloc’s face:

  “He may’ve been half-witted, but you must have been crazy. What drove you off your head like this?”

  Mr. Verloc, thinking of Mr. Vladimir, did not hesitate in the choice of words.

  “A Hyperborean swine,” he hissed, forcibly. “A what you might call a—a gentleman.”

  The Chief Inspector, steady-eyed, nodded briefly his comprehension, and opened the door. Mrs. Verloc, behind the counter, might have heard but did not see his departure, pursued by the aggressive clatter of the bell. She sat at her post of duty behind the counter. She sat rigidly erect in the chair with two dirty pink pieces of paper lying spread at her feet. The palms of her hands were pressed convulsively in her face, with the tips of her fingers contracted against the forehead, as though the skin had been a mask which she was ready to tear off violently. The perfect immobility of her pose expressed the agitation of rage and despair, all the potential violence of tragic passions, better than any shallow display of shrieks, with the beating of a distracted head against the walls, could have done. Chief Inspector Heat, crossing the shop at his busy, swinging pace, gave her only a cursory glance. And when the cracked bell ceased to tremble on its curved ribbon of steel nothing stirred near Mrs. Verloc, as if her attitude had the locking power of a spell. Even the butterfly-shaped gas flames posed on the ends of the suspended T-bracket burned without a quiver. In that shop of shady wares fitted with deal shelves painted a dull brown, which seemed to devour the sheen of the light, the gold circlet of the wedding ring on Mrs. Verloc’s left hand glittered exceedingly with the untarnished glory of a piece from some splendid treasure of jewels, dropped in a dust-bin.

  X

  The Assistant Commissioner, driven rapidly in a hansom from the neighbourhood of Soho in the direction of Westminster, got out at the very centre of the Empire on which the sun never sets. Some stalwart constables, who did not seem particularly impressed by the duty of watching the august spot, saluted him. Penetrating through a portal by no means lofty into the precincts of the House which is the House, par excellence, in the minds of many millions of men, he was met at last by the volatile and revolutionary Toodles.

  That neat and nice young man concealed his astonishment at the early appearance of the Assistant Commissioner, whom he had been told to look out for some time about midnight. His turning up so early he concluded to be the sign that things, whatever they were, had gone wrong. With an extremely ready sympathy, which in nice youngsters goes often with a joyous temperament, he felt sorry for the Great Presence he called “The Chief,” and also for the Assistant Commissioner, whose face appeared to him more ominously wooden than ever before, and quite wonderfully long. “What a queer, foreign-looking chap he is,” he thought to himself, smiling from a distance with friendly buoyancy. And directly they came together he began to talk with the kind intention of burying the awkwardness of failure under a heap of words. It looked as if the great assault threatened for that night were going to fizzle out. An inferior henchman of “that brute Cheeseman” was up boring mercilessly a very thin House with some shamelessly cooked statistics. He, Toodles, hoped he would bore them into a count out every minute. But then he might be only marking time to let that guzzling Cheeseman dine at his leisure. Anyway, the
Chief could not be persuaded to go home.

  “He will see you at once, I think. He’s sitting all alone in his room thinking of all the fishes of the sea,” concluded Toodles, airily. “Come along.”

  Notwithstanding the kindness of his disposition, the young private secretary (unpaid) was accessible to the common failings of humanity. He did not wish to harrow the feelings of the Assistant Commissioner, who looked to him uncommonly like a man who has made a mess of his job. But his curiosity was too strong to be restrained by mere compassion. He could not help, as they went along, throwing over his shoulder lightly:

  “And your sprat?”

  “Got him,” answered the Assistant Commissioner with a concision which did not mean to be repellent in the least.

  “Good. You’ve no idea how these great men dislike to be disappointed in small things.”

  After this profound observation the experienced Toodles seemed to reflect. At any rate he said nothing for quite two seconds. Then:

  “I’m glad. But—I say—is it really such a very small thing as you make it out?”

  “Do you know what may be done with a sprat?” the Assistant Commissioner asked in his turn.

  “He’s sometimes put into a sardine box,” chuckled Toodles, whose erudition on the subject of the fishing industry was fresh and, in comparison with his ignorance of all other industrial matters, immense. “There are sardine canneries on the Spanish coast which——”

  The Assistant Commissioner interrupted the apprentice statesman.

  “Yes. Yes. But a sprat is also thrown away sometimes in order to catch a whale.”

  “A whale. Phew!” exclaimed Toodles, with bated breath. “You’re after a whale, then?”

  “Not exactly. What I am after is more like a dog-fish. You don’t know perhaps what a dog-fish is like.”

  “Yes; I do. We’re buried in special books up to our necks—whole shelves full of them—with plates. . . . It’s a noxious, rascally-looking, altogether detestable beast, with a sort of smooth face and moustaches.”