Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (323 page)

She had an equable soul.  She felt profoundly that things do not stand much looking into.  She made her force and her wisdom of that instinct.  But the taciturnity of Mr Verloc had been lying heavily upon her for a good many days.  It was, as a matter of fact, affecting her nerves.  Recumbent and motionless, she said placidly:

“You’ll catch cold walking about in your socks like this.”

This speech, becoming the solicitude of the wife and the prudence of the woman, took Mr Verloc unawares.  He had left his boots downstairs, but he had forgotten to put on his slippers, and he had been turning about the bedroom on noiseless pads like a bear in a cage.  At the sound of his wife’s voice he stopped and stared at her with a somnambulistic, expressionless gaze so long that Mrs Verloc moved her limbs slightly under the bed-clothes.  But she did not move her black head sunk in the white pillow one hand under her cheek and the big, dark, unwinking eyes.

Under her husband’s expressionless stare, and remembering her mother’s empty room across the landing, she felt an acute pang of loneliness.  She had never been parted from her mother before.  They had stood by each other.  She felt that they had, and she said to herself that now mother was gone — gone for good.  Mrs Verloc had no illusions.  Stevie remained, however.  And she said:

“Mother’s done what she wanted to do.  There’s no sense in it that I can see.  I’m sure she couldn’t have thought you had enough of her.  It’s perfectly wicked, leaving us like that.”

Mr Verloc was not a well-read person; his range of allusive phrases was limited, but there was a peculiar aptness in circumstances which made him think of rats leaving a doomed ship.  He very nearly said so.  He had grown suspicious and embittered.  Could it be that the old woman had such an excellent nose?  But the unreasonableness of such a suspicion was patent, and Mr Verloc held his tongue.  Not altogether, however.  He muttered heavily:

“Perhaps it’s just as well.”

He began to undress.  Mrs Verloc kept very still, perfectly still, with her eyes fixed in a dreamy, quiet stare.  And her heart for the fraction of a second seemed to stand still too.  That night she was “not quite herself,” as the saying is, and it was borne upon her with some force that a simple sentence may hold several diverse meanings — mostly disagreeable.  How was it just as well?  And why?  But she did not allow herself to fall into the idleness of barren speculation.  She was rather confirmed in her belief that things did not stand being looked into.  Practical and subtle in her way, she brought Stevie to the front without loss of time, because in her the singleness of purpose had the unerring nature and the force of an instinct.

“What I am going to do to cheer up that boy for the first few days I’m sure I don’t know.  He’ll be worrying himself from morning till night before he gets used to mother being away.  And he’s such a good boy.  I couldn’t do without him.”

Mr Verloc went on divesting himself of his clothing with the unnoticing inward concentration of a man undressing in the solitude of a vast and hopeless desert.  For thus inhospitably did this fair earth, our common inheritance, present itself to the mental vision of Mr Verloc.  All was so still without and within that the lonely ticking of the clock on the landing stole into the room as if for the sake of company.

Mr Verloc, getting into bed on his own side, remained prone and mute behind Mrs Verloc’s back.  His thick arms rested abandoned on the outside of the counterpane like dropped weapons, like discarded tools.  At that moment he was within a hair’s breadth of making a clean breast of it all to his wife.  The moment seemed propitious.  Looking out of the corners of his eyes, he saw her ample shoulders draped in white, the back of her head, with the hair done for the night in three plaits tied up with black tapes at the ends.  And he forbore.  Mr Verloc loved his wife as a wife should be loved — that is, maritally, with the regard one has for one’s chief possession.  This head arranged for the night, those ample shoulders, had an aspect of familiar sacredness — the sacredness of domestic peace.  She moved not, massive and shapeless like a recumbent statue in the rough; he remembered her wide-open eyes looking into the empty room.  She was mysterious, with the mysteriousness of living beings.  The far-famed secret agent [delta] of the late Baron Stott-Wartenheim’s alarmist despatches was not the man to break into such mysteries.  He was easily intimidated.  And he was also indolent, with the indolence which is so often the secret of good nature.  He forbore touching that mystery out of love, timidity, and indolence.  There would be always time enough.  For several minutes he bore his sufferings silently in the drowsy silence of the room.  And then he disturbed it by a resolute declaration.

“I am going on the Continent to-morrow.”

His wife might have fallen asleep already.  He could not tell.  As a matter of fact, Mrs Verloc had heard him.  Her eyes remained very wide open, and she lay very still, confirmed in her instinctive conviction that things don’t bear looking into very much.  And yet it was nothing very unusual for Mr Verloc to take such a trip.  He renewed his stock from Paris and Brussels.  Often he went over to make his purchases personally.  A little select connection of amateurs was forming around the shop in Brett Street, a secret connection eminently proper for any business undertaken by Mr Verloc, who, by a mystic accord of temperament and necessity, had been set apart to be a secret agent all his life.

He waited for a while, then added: “I’ll be away a week or perhaps a fortnight.  Get Mrs Neale to come for the day.”

Mrs Neale was the charwoman of Brett Street.  Victim of her marriage with a debauched joiner, she was oppressed by the needs of many infant children.  Red-armed, and aproned in coarse sacking up to the arm-pits, she exhaled the anguish of the poor in a breath of soap-suds and rum, in the uproar of scrubbing, in the clatter of tin pails.

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.”

CHAPTER 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, blackleading the parlour grate, had looked through the door, and rising from her knees had gone, aproned, and grimy with everlasting toll, 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 oil-cloth 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 room 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 and 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 ash-bins 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 formulated 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.