Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (328 page)

“I never hoped to see you here to-night.  Annie told me — ”

“Yes.  I had no idea myself that my work would be over so soon.”

The Assistant Commissioner added in a low tone.  “I am glad to tell you that Michaelis is altogether clear of this — ”

The patroness of the ex-convict received this assurance indignantly.

“Why?  Were your people stupid enough to connect him with — ”

“Not stupid,” interrupted the Assistant Commissioner, contradicting deferentially.  “Clever enough — quite clever enough for that.”

A silence fell.  The man at the foot of the couch had stopped speaking to the lady, and looked on with a faint smile.

“I don’t know whether you ever met before,” said the great lady.

Mr Vladimir and the Assistant Commissioner, introduced, acknowledged each other’s existence with punctilious and guarded courtesy.

“He’s been frightening me,” declared suddenly the lady who sat by the side of Mr Vladimir, with an inclination of the head towards that gentleman.  The Assistant Commissioner knew the lady.

“You do not look frightened,” he pronounced, after surveying her conscientiously with his tired and equable gaze.  He was thinking meantime to himself that in this house one met everybody sooner or later.  Mr Vladimir’s rosy countenance was wreathed in smiles, because he was witty, but his eyes remained serious, like the eyes of convinced man.

“Well, he tried to at least,” amended the lady.

“Force of habit perhaps,” said the Assistant Commissioner, moved by an irresistible inspiration.

“He has been threatening society with all sorts of horrors,” continued the lady, whose enunciation was caressing and slow, “apropos of this explosion in Greenwich Park.  It appears we all ought to quake in our shoes at what’s coming if those people are not suppressed all over the world.  I had no idea this was such a grave affair.”

Mr Vladimir, affecting not to listen, leaned towards the couch, talking amiably in subdued tones, but he heard the Assistant Commissioner say:

“I’ve no doubt that Mr Vladimir has a very precise notion of the true importance of this affair.”

Mr Vladimir asked himself what that confounded and intrusive policeman was driving at.  Descended from generations victimised by the instruments of an arbitrary power, he was racially, nationally, and individually afraid of the police.  It was an inherited weakness, altogether independent of his judgment, of his reason, of his experience.  He was born to it.  But that sentiment, which resembled the irrational horror some people have of cats, did not stand in the way of his immense contempt for the English police.  He finished the sentence addressed to the great lady, and turned slightly in his chair.

“You mean that we have a great experience of these people.  Yes; indeed, we suffer greatly from their activity, while you” — Mr Vladimir hesitated for a moment, in smiling perplexity — ”while you suffer their presence gladly in your midst,” he finished, displaying a dimple on each clean-shaven cheek.  Then he added more gravely: “I may even say — because you do.”

When Mr Vladimir ceased speaking the Assistant Commissioner lowered his glance, and the conversation dropped.  Almost immediately afterwards Mr Vladimir took leave.

Directly his back was turned on the couch the Assistant Commissioner rose too.

“I thought you were going to stay and take Annie home,” said the lady patroness of Michaelis.

“I find that I’ve yet a little work to do to-night.”

“In connection — ?”

“Well, yes — in a way.”

“Tell me, what is it really — this horror?”

“It’s difficult to say what it is, but it may yet be a cause célèbre,” said the Assistant Commissioner.

He left the drawing-room hurriedly, and found Mr Vladimir still in the hall, wrapping up his throat carefully in a large silk handkerchief.  Behind him a footman waited, holding his overcoat.  Another stood ready to open the door.  The Assistant Commissioner was duly helped into his coat, and let out at once.  After descending the front steps he stopped, as if to consider the way he should take.  On seeing this through the door held open, Mr Vladimir lingered in the hall to get out a cigar and asked for a light.  It was furnished to him by an elderly man out of livery with an air of calm solicitude.  But the match went out; the footman then closed the door, and Mr Vladimir lighted his large Havana with leisurely care.

When at last he got out of the house, he saw with disgust the “confounded policeman” still standing on the pavement.

“Can he be waiting for me,” thought Mr Vladimir, looking up and down for some signs of a hansom.  He saw none.  A couple of carriages waited by the curbstone, their lamps blazing steadily, the horses standing perfectly still, as if carved in stone, the coachmen sitting motionless under the big fur capes, without as much as a quiver stirring the white thongs of their big whips.  Mr Vladimir walked on, and the “confounded policeman” fell into step at his elbow.  He said nothing.  At the end of the fourth stride Mr Vladimir felt infuriated and uneasy.  This could not last.

“Rotten weather,” he growled savagely.

“Mild,” said the Assistant Commissioner without passion.  He remained silent for a little while.  “We’ve got hold of a man called Verloc,” he announced casually.

Mr Vladimir did not stumble, did not stagger back, did not change his stride.  But he could not prevent himself from exclaiming: “What?”  The Assistant Commissioner did not repeat his statement.  “You know him,” he went on in the same tone.

Mr Vladimir stopped, and became guttural.  “What makes you say that?”

“I don’t.  It’s Verloc who says that.”

“A lying dog of some sort,” said Mr Vladimir in somewhat Oriental phraseology.  But in his heart he was almost awed by the miraculous cleverness of the English police.  The change of his opinion on the subject was so violent that it made him for a moment feel slightly sick.  He threw away his cigar, and moved on.

“What pleased me most in this affair,” the Assistant went on, talking slowly, “is that it makes such an excellent starting-point for a piece of work which I’ve felt must be taken in hand — that is, the clearing out of this country of all the foreign political spies, police, and that sort of — of — dogs.  In my opinion they are a ghastly nuisance; also an element of danger.  But we can’t very well seek them out individually.  The only way is to make their employment unpleasant to their employers.  The thing’s becoming indecent.  And dangerous too, for us, here.”

Mr Vladimir stopped again for a moment.

“What do you mean?”

“The prosecution of this Verloc will demonstrate to the public both the danger and the indecency.”

“Nobody will believe what a man of that sort says,” said Mr Vladimir contemptuously.

“The wealth and precision of detail will carry conviction to the great mass of the public,” advanced the Assistant Commissioner gently.

“So that is seriously what you mean to do.”

“We’ve got the man; we have no choice.”

“You will be only feeding up the lying spirit of these revolutionary scoundrels,” Mr Vladimir protested.  “What do you want to make a scandal for? — from morality — or what?”

Mr Vladimir’s anxiety was obvious.  The Assistant Commissioner having ascertained in this way that there must be some truth in the summary statements of Mr Verloc, said indifferently:

“There’s a practical side too.  We have really enough to do to look after the genuine article.  You can’t say we are not effective.  But we don’t intend to let ourselves be bothered by shams under any pretext whatever.”

Mr Vladimir’s tone became lofty.

“For my part, I can’t share your view.  It is selfish.  My sentiments for my own country cannot be doubted; but I’ve always felt that we ought to be good Europeans besides — I mean governments and men.”

“Yes,” said the Assistant Commissioner simply.  “Only you look at Europe from its other end.  But,” he went on in a good-natured tone, “the foreign governments cannot complain of the inefficiency of our police.  Look at this outrage; a case specially difficult to trace inasmuch as it was a sham.  In less than twelve hours we have established the identity of a man literally blown to shreds, have found the organiser of the attempt, and have had a glimpse of the inciter behind him.  And we could have gone further; only we stopped at the limits of our territory.”

“So this instructive crime was planned abroad,” Mr Vladimir said quickly.  “You admit it was planned abroad?”

“Theoretically.  Theoretically only, on foreign territory; abroad only by a fiction,” said the Assistant Commissioner, alluding to the character of Embassies, which are supposed to be part and parcel of the country to which they belong.  “But that’s a detail.  I talked to you of this business because it’s your government that grumbles most at our police.  You see that we are not so bad.  I wanted particularly to tell you of our success.”

“I’m sure I’m very grateful,” muttered Mr Vladimir through his teeth.

“We can put our finger on every anarchist here,” went on the Assistant Commissioner, as though he were quoting Chief Inspector Heat.  “All that’s wanted now is to do away with the agent provocateur to make everything safe.”

Mr Vladimir held up his hand to a passing hansom.

“You’re not going in here,” remarked the Assistant Commissioner, looking at a building of noble proportions and hospitable aspect, with the light of a great hall falling through its glass doors on a broad flight of steps.

But Mr Vladimir, sitting, stony-eyed, inside the hansom, drove off without a word.

The Assistant Commissioner himself did not turn into the noble building.  It was the Explorers’ Club.  The thought passed through his mind that Mr Vladimir, honorary member, would not be seen very often there in the future.  He looked at his watch.  It was only half-past ten.  He had had a very full evening.

CHAPTER XI

After Chief Inspector Heat had left him Mr Verloc moved about the parlour.

From time to time he eyed his wife through the open door.  “She knows all about it now,” he thought to himself with commiseration for her sorrow and with some satisfaction as regarded himself.  Mr Verloc’s soul, if lacking greatness perhaps, was capable of tender sentiments.  The prospect of having to break the news to her had put him into a fever.  Chief Inspector Heat had relieved him of the task.  That was good as far as it went.  It remained for him now to face her grief.

Mr Verloc had never expected to have to face it on account of death, whose catastrophic character cannot be argued away by sophisticated reasoning or persuasive eloquence.  Mr Verloc never meant Stevie to perish with such abrupt violence.  He did not mean him to perish at all.  Stevie dead was a much greater nuisance than ever he had been when alive.  Mr Verloc had augured a favourable issue to his enterprise, basing himself not on Stevie’s intelligence, which sometimes plays queer tricks with a man, but on the blind docility and on the blind devotion of the boy.  Though not much of a psychologist, Mr Verloc had gauged the depth of Stevie’s fanaticism.  He dared cherish the hope of Stevie walking away from the walls of the Observatory as he had been instructed to do, taking the way shown to him several times previously, and rejoining his brother-in-law, the wise and good Mr Verloc, outside the precincts of the park.  Fifteen minutes ought to have been enough for the veriest fool to deposit the engine and walk away.  And the Professor had guaranteed more than fifteen minutes.  But Stevie had stumbled within five minutes of being left to himself.  And Mr Verloc was shaken morally to pieces.  He had foreseen everything but that.  He had foreseen Stevie distracted and lost — sought for — found in some police station or provincial workhouse in the end.  He had foreseen Stevie arrested, and was not afraid, because Mr Verloc had a great opinion of Stevie’s loyalty, which had been carefully indoctrinated with the necessity of silence in the course of many walks.  Like a peripatetic philosopher, Mr Verloc, strolling along the streets of London, had modified Stevie’s view of the police by conversations full of subtle reasonings.  Never had a sage a more attentive and admiring disciple.  The submission and worship were so apparent that Mr Verloc had come to feel something like a liking for the boy.  In any case, he had not foreseen the swift bringing home of his connection.  That his wife should hit upon the precaution of sewing the boy’s address inside his overcoat was the last thing Mr Verloc would have thought of.  One can’t think of everything.  That was what she meant when she said that he need not worry if he lost Stevie during their walks.  She had assured him that the boy would turn up all right.  Well, he had turned up with a vengeance!

“Well, well,” muttered Mr Verloc in his wonder.  What did she mean by it?  Spare him the trouble of keeping an anxious eye on Stevie?  Most likely she had meant well.  Only she ought to have told him of the precaution she had taken.

Mr Verloc walked behind the counter of the shop.  His intention was not to overwhelm his wife with bitter reproaches.  Mr Verloc felt no bitterness.  The unexpected march of events had converted him to the doctrine of fatalism.  Nothing could be helped now.  He said:

“I didn’t mean any harm to come to the boy.”

Mrs Verloc shuddered at the sound of her husband’s voice.  She did not uncover her face.  The trusted secret agent of the late Baron Stott-Wartenheim looked at her for a time with a heavy, persistent, undiscerning glance.  The torn evening paper was lying at her feet.  It could not have told her much.  Mr Verloc felt the need of talking to his wife.

“It’s that damned Heat — eh?” he said.  “He upset you.  He’s a brute, blurting it out like this to a woman.  I made myself ill thinking how to break it to you.  I sat for hours in the little parlour of Cheshire Cheese thinking over the best way.  You understand I never meant any harm to come to that boy.”

Mr Verloc, the Secret Agent, was speaking the truth.  It was his marital affection that had received the greatest shock from the premature explosion.  He added:

“I didn’t feel particularly gay sitting there and thinking of you.”