Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (309 page)

At this point, by a simple association of ideas, Mr Verloc was brought face to face with the necessity of going to bed some time or other that evening.  Then why not go now — at once?  He sighed.  The necessity was not so normally pleasurable as it ought to have been for a man of his age and temperament.  He dreaded the demon of sleeplessness, which he felt had marked him for its own.  He raised his arm, and turned off the flaring gas-jet above his head.

A bright band of light fell through the parlour door into the part of the shop behind the counter.  It enabled Mr Verloc to ascertain at a glance the number of silver coins in the till.  These were but few; and for the first time since he opened his shop he took a commercial survey of its value.  This survey was unfavourable.  He had gone into trade for no commercial reasons.  He had been guided in the selection of this peculiar line of business by an instinctive leaning towards shady transactions, where money is picked up easily.  Moreover, it did not take him out of his own sphere — the sphere which is watched by the police.  On the contrary, it gave him a publicly confessed standing in that sphere, and as Mr Verloc had unconfessed relations which made him familiar with yet careless of the police, there was a distinct advantage in such a situation.  But as a means of livelihood it was by itself insufficient.

He took the cash-box out of the drawer, and turning to leave the shop, became aware that Stevie was still downstairs.

What on earth is he doing there?  Mr Verloc asked himself.  What’s the meaning of these antics?  He looked dubiously at his brother-in-law, but he did not ask him for information.  Mr Verloc’s intercourse with Stevie was limited to the casual mutter of a morning, after breakfast, “My boots,” and even that was more a communication at large of a need than a direct order or request.  Mr Verloc perceived with some surprise that he did not know really what to say to Stevie.  He stood still in the middle of the parlour, and looked into the kitchen in silence.  Nor yet did he know what would happen if he did say anything.  And this appeared very queer to Mr Verloc in view of the fact, borne upon him suddenly, that he had to provide for this fellow too.  He had never given a moment’s thought till then to that aspect of Stevie’s existence.

Positively he did not know how to speak to the lad.  He watched him gesticulating and murmuring in the kitchen.  Stevie prowled round the table like an excited animal in a cage.  A tentative “Hadn’t you better go to bed now?” produced no effect whatever; and Mr Verloc, abandoning the stony contemplation of his brother-in-law’s behaviour, crossed the parlour wearily, cash-box in hand.  The cause of the general lassitude he felt while climbing the stairs being purely mental, he became alarmed by its inexplicable character.  He hoped he was not sickening for anything.  He stopped on the dark landing to examine his sensations.  But a slight and continuous sound of snoring pervading the obscurity interfered with their clearness.  The sound came from his mother-in-law’s room.  Another one to provide for, he thought — and on this thought walked into the bedroom.

Mrs Verloc had fallen asleep with the lamp (no gas was laid upstairs) turned up full on the table by the side of the bed.  The light thrown down by the shade fell dazzlingly on the white pillow sunk by the weight of her head reposing with closed eyes and dark hair done up in several plaits for the night.  She woke up with the sound of her name in her ears, and saw her husband standing over her.

“Winnie!  Winnie!”

At first she did not stir, lying very quiet and looking at the cash-box in Mr Verloc’s hand.  But when she understood that her brother was “capering all over the place downstairs” she swung out in one sudden movement on to the edge of the bed.  Her bare feet, as if poked through the bottom of an unadorned, sleeved calico sack buttoned tightly at neck and wrists, felt over the rug for the slippers while she looked upward into her husband’s face.

“I don’t know how to manage him,” Mr Verloc explained peevishly.  “Won’t do to leave him downstairs alone with the lights.”

She said nothing, glided across the room swiftly, and the door closed upon her white form.

Mr Verloc deposited the cash-box on the night table, and began the operation of undressing by flinging his overcoat on to a distant chair.  His coat and waistcoat followed.  He walked about the room in his stockinged feet, and his burly figure, with the hands worrying nervously at his throat, passed and repassed across the long strip of looking-glass in the door of his wife’s wardrobe.  Then after slipping his braces off his shoulders he pulled up violently the venetian blind, and leaned his forehead against the cold window-pane — a fragile film of glass stretched between him and the enormity of cold, black, wet, muddy, inhospitable accumulation of bricks, slates, and stones, things in themselves unlovely and unfriendly to man.

Mr Verloc felt the latent unfriendliness of all out of doors with a force approaching to positive bodily anguish.  There is no occupation that fails a man more completely than that of a secret agent of police.  It’s like your horse suddenly falling dead under you in the midst of an uninhabited and thirsty plain.  The comparison occurred to Mr Verloc because he had sat astride various army horses in his time, and had now the sensation of an incipient fall.  The prospect was as black as the window-pane against which he was leaning his forehead.  And suddenly the face of Mr Vladimir, clean-shaved and witty, appeared enhaloed in the glow of its rosy complexion like a sort of pink seal, impressed on the fatal darkness.

This luminous and mutilated vision was so ghastly physically that Mr Verloc started away from the window, letting down the venetian blind with a great rattle.  Discomposed and speechless with the apprehension of more such visions, he beheld his wife re-enter the room and get into bed in a calm business-like manner which made him feel hopelessly lonely in the world.  Mrs Verloc expressed her surprise at seeing him up yet.

“I don’t feel very well,” he muttered, passing his hands over his moist brow.

“Giddiness?”

“Yes.  Not at all well.”

Mrs Verloc, with all the placidity of an experienced wife, expressed a confident opinion as to the cause, and suggested the usual remedies; but her husband, rooted in the middle of the room, shook his lowered head sadly.

“You’ll catch cold standing there,” she observed.

Mr Verloc made an effort, finished undressing, and got into bed.  Down below in the quiet, narrow street measured footsteps approached the house, then died away unhurried and firm, as if the passer-by had started to pace out all eternity, from gas-lamp to gas-lamp in a night without end; and the drowsy ticking of the old clock on the landing became distinctly audible in the bedroom.

Mrs Verloc, on her back, and staring at the ceiling, made a remark.

“Takings very small to-day.”

Mr Verloc, in the same position, cleared his throat as if for an important statement, but merely inquired:

“Did you turn off the gas downstairs?”

“Yes; I did,” answered Mrs Verloc conscientiously.  “That poor boy is in a very excited state to-night,” she murmured, after a pause which lasted for three ticks of the clock.

Mr Verloc cared nothing for Stevie’s excitement, but he felt horribly wakeful, and dreaded facing the darkness and silence that would follow the extinguishing of the lamp.  This dread led him to make the remark that Stevie had disregarded his suggestion to go to bed.  Mrs Verloc, falling into the trap, started to demonstrate at length to her husband that this was not “impudence” of any sort, but simply “excitement.”  There was no young man of his age in London more willing and docile than Stephen, she affirmed; none more affectionate and ready to please, and even useful, as long as people did not upset his poor head.  Mrs Verloc, turning towards her recumbent husband, raised herself on her elbow, and hung over him in her anxiety that he should believe Stevie to be a useful member of the family.  That ardour of protecting compassion exalted morbidly in her childhood by the misery of another child tinged her sallow cheeks with a faint dusky blush, made her big eyes gleam under the dark lids.  Mrs Verloc then looked younger; she looked as young as Winnie used to look, and much more animated than the Winnie of the Belgravian mansion days had ever allowed herself to appear to gentlemen lodgers.  Mr Verloc’s anxieties had prevented him from attaching any sense to what his wife was saying.  It was as if her voice were talking on the other side of a very thick wall.  It was her aspect that recalled him to himself.

He appreciated this woman, and the sentiment of this appreciation, stirred by a display of something resembling emotion, only added another pang to his mental anguish.  When her voice ceased he moved uneasily, and said:

“I haven’t been feeling well for the last few days.”

He might have meant this as an opening to a complete confidence; but Mrs Verloc laid her head on the pillow again, and staring upward, went on:

“That boy hears too much of what is talked about here.  If I had known they were coming to-night I would have seen to it that he went to bed at the same time I did.  He was out of his mind with something he overheard about eating people’s flesh and drinking blood.  What’s the good of talking like that?”

There was a note of indignant scorn in her voice.  Mr Verloc was fully responsive now.

“Ask Karl Yundt,” he growled savagely.

Mrs Verloc, with great decision, pronounced Karl Yundt “a disgusting old man.”  She declared openly her affection for Michaelis.  Of the robust Ossipon, in whose presence she always felt uneasy behind an attitude of stony reserve, she said nothing whatever.  And continuing to talk of that brother, who had been for so many years an object of care and fears:

“He isn’t fit to hear what’s said here.  He believes it’s all true.  He knows no better.  He gets into his passions over it.”

Mr Verloc made no comment.

“He glared at me, as if he didn’t know who I was, when I went downstairs.  His heart was going like a hammer.  He can’t help being excitable.  I woke mother up, and asked her to sit with him till he went to sleep.  It isn’t his fault.  He’s no trouble when he’s left alone.”

Mr Verloc made no comment.

“I wish he had never been to school,” Mrs Verloc began again brusquely.  “He’s always taking away those newspapers from the window to read.  He gets a red face poring over them.  We don’t get rid of a dozen numbers in a month.  They only take up room in the front window.  And Mr Ossipon brings every week a pile of these F. P. tracts to sell at a halfpenny each.  I wouldn’t give a halfpenny for the whole lot.  It’s silly reading — that’s what it is.  There’s no sale for it.  The other day Stevie got hold of one, and there was a story in it of a German soldier officer tearing half-off the ear of a recruit, and nothing was done to him for it.  The brute!  I couldn’t do anything with Stevie that afternoon.  The story was enough, too, to make one’s blood boil.  But what’s the use of printing things like that?  We aren’t German slaves here, thank God.  It’s not our business — is it?”

Mr Verloc made no reply.

“I had to take the carving knife from the boy,” Mrs Verloc continued, a little sleepily now.  “He was shouting and stamping and sobbing.  He can’t stand the notion of any cruelty.  He would have stuck that officer like a pig if he had seen him then.  It’s true, too!  Some people don’t deserve much mercy.”  Mrs Verloc’s voice ceased, and the expression of her motionless eyes became more and more contemplative and veiled during the long pause.  “Comfortable, dear?” she asked in a faint, far-away voice.  “Shall I put out the light now?”

The dreary conviction that there was no sleep for him held Mr Verloc mute and hopelessly inert in his fear of darkness.  He made a great effort.

“Yes.  Put it out,” he said at last in a hollow tone.

CHAPTER IV

Most of the thirty or so little tables covered by red cloths with a white design stood ranged at right angles to the deep brown wainscoting of the underground hall.  Bronze chandeliers with many globes depended from the low, slightly vaulted ceiling, and the fresco paintings ran flat and dull all round the walls without windows, representing scenes of the chase and of outdoor revelry in mediæval costumes.  Varlets in green jerkins brandished hunting knives and raised on high tankards of foaming beer.

“Unless I am very much mistaken, you are the man who would know the inside of this confounded affair,” said the robust Ossipon, leaning over, his elbows far out on the table and his feet tucked back completely under his chair.  His eyes stared with wild eagerness.

An upright semi-grand piano near the door, flanked by two palms in pots, executed suddenly all by itself a valse tune with aggressive virtuosity.  The din it raised was deafening.  When it ceased, as abruptly as it had started, the be-spectacled, dingy little man who faced Ossipon behind a heavy glass mug full of beer emitted calmly what had the sound of a general proposition.

“In principle what one of us may or may not know as to any given fact can’t be a matter for inquiry to the others.”

“Certainly not,” Comrade Ossipon agreed in a quiet undertone.  “In principle.”

With his big florid face held between his hands he continued to stare hard, while the dingy little man in spectacles coolly took a drink of beer and stood the glass mug back on the table.  His flat, large ears departed widely from the sides of his skull, which looked frail enough for Ossipon to crush between thumb and forefinger; the dome of the forehead seemed to rest on the rim of the spectacles; the flat cheeks, of a greasy, unhealthy complexion, were merely smudged by the miserable poverty of a thin dark whisker.  The lamentable inferiority of the whole physique was made ludicrous by the supremely self-confident bearing of the individual.  His speech was curt, and he had a particularly impressive manner of keeping silent.

Ossipon spoke again from between his hands in a mutter.

“Have you been out much to-day?”

“No.  I stayed in bed all the morning,” answered the other.  “Why?”

“Oh!  Nothing,” said Ossipon, gazing earnestly and quivering inwardly with the desire to find out something, but obviously intimidated by the little man’s overwhelming air of unconcern.  When talking with this comrade — which happened but rarely — the big Ossipon suffered from a sense of moral and even physical insignificance.  However, he ventured another question.  “Did you walk down here?”