Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (335 page)

“From Waterloo.  Plenty of time.  We are all right after all. . . . What’s the matter now?  This isn’t the way,” he protested.

Mrs Verloc, having hooked her arm into his, was trying to drag him into Brett Street again.

“I’ve forgotten to shut the shop door as I went out,” she whispered, terribly agitated.

The shop and all that was in it had ceased to interest Comrade Ossipon.  He knew how to limit his desires.  He was on the point of saying “What of that?  Let it be,” but he refrained.  He disliked argument about trifles.  He even mended his pace considerably on the thought that she might have left the money in the drawer.  But his willingness lagged behind her feverish impatience.

The shop seemed to be quite dark at first.  The door stood ajar.  Mrs Verloc, leaning against the front, gasped out:

“Nobody has been in.  Look!  The light — the light in the parlour.”

Ossipon, stretching his head forward, saw a faint gleam in the darkness of the shop.

“There is,” he said.

“I forgot it.” Mrs Verloc’s voice came from behind her veil faintly.  And as he stood waiting for her to enter first, she said louder: “Go in and put it out — or I’ll go mad.”

He made no immediate objection to this proposal, so strangely motived.  “Where’s all that money?” he asked.

“On me!  Go, Tom.  Quick!  Put it out. . . . Go in!” she cried, seizing him by both shoulders from behind.

Not prepared for a display of physical force, Comrade Ossipon stumbled far into the shop before her push.  He was astonished at the strength of the woman and scandalised by her proceedings.  But he did not retrace his steps in order to remonstrate with her severely in the street.  He was beginning to be disagreeably impressed by her fantastic behaviour.  Moreover, this or never was the time to humour the woman.  Comrade Ossipon avoided easily the end of the counter, and approached calmly the glazed door of the parlour.  The curtain over the panes being drawn back a little he, by a very natural impulse, looked in, just as he made ready to turn the handle.  He looked in without a thought, without intention, without curiosity of any sort.  He looked in because he could not help looking in.  He looked in, and discovered Mr Verloc reposing quietly on the sofa.

A yell coming from the innermost depths of his chest died out unheard and transformed into a sort of greasy, sickly taste on his lips.  At the same time the mental personality of Comrade Ossipon executed a frantic leap backward.  But his body, left thus without intellectual guidance, held on to the door handle with the unthinking force of an instinct.  The robust anarchist did not even totter.  And he stared, his face close to the glass, his eyes protruding out of his head.  He would have given anything to get away, but his returning reason informed him that it would not do to let go the door handle.  What was it — madness, a nightmare, or a trap into which he had been decoyed with fiendish artfulness?  Why — what for?  He did not know.  Without any sense of guilt in his breast, in the full peace of his conscience as far as these people were concerned, the idea that he would be murdered for mysterious reasons by the couple Verloc passed not so much across his mind as across the pit of his stomach, and went out, leaving behind a trail of sickly faintness — an indisposition.  Comrade Ossipon did not feel very well in a very special way for a moment — a long moment.  And he stared.  Mr Verloc lay very still meanwhile, simulating sleep for reasons of his own, while that savage woman of his was guarding the door — invisible and silent in the dark and deserted street.  Was all this a some sort of terrifying arrangement invented by the police for his especial benefit?  His modesty shrank from that explanation.

But the true sense of the scene he was beholding came to Ossipon through the contemplation of the hat.  It seemed an extraordinary thing, an ominous object, a sign.  Black, and rim upward, it lay on the floor before the couch as if prepared to receive the contributions of pence from people who would come presently to behold Mr Verloc in the fullness of his domestic ease reposing on a sofa.  From the hat the eyes of the robust anarchist wandered to the displaced table, gazed at the broken dish for a time, received a kind of optical shock from observing a white gleam under the imperfectly closed eyelids of the man on the couch.  Mr Verloc did not seem so much asleep now as lying down with a bent head and looking insistently at his left breast.  And when Comrade Ossipon had made out the handle of the knife he turned away from the glazed door, and retched violently.

The crash of the street door flung to made his very soul leap in a panic.  This house with its harmless tenant could still be made a trap of — a trap of a terrible kind.  Comrade Ossipon had no settled conception now of what was happening to him.  Catching his thigh against the end of the counter, he spun round, staggered with a cry of pain, felt in the distracting clatter of the bell his arms pinned to his side by a convulsive hug, while the cold lips of a woman moved creepily on his very ear to form the words:

“Policeman!  He has seen me!”

He ceased to struggle; she never let him go.  Her hands had locked themselves with an inseparable twist of fingers on his robust back.  While the footsteps approached, they breathed quickly, breast to breast, with hard, laboured breaths, as if theirs had been the attitude of a deadly struggle, while, in fact, it was the attitude of deadly fear.  And the time was long.

The constable on the beat had in truth seen something of Mrs Verloc; only coming from the lighted thoroughfare at the other end of Brett Street, she had been no more to him than a flutter in the darkness.  And he was not even quite sure that there had been a flutter.  He had no reason to hurry up.  On coming abreast of the shop he observed that it had been closed early.  There was nothing very unusual in that.  The men on duty had special instructions about that shop: what went on about there was not to be meddled with unless absolutely disorderly, but any observations made were to be reported.  There were no observations to make; but from a sense of duty and for the peace of his conscience, owing also to that doubtful flutter of the darkness, the constable crossed the road, and tried the door.  The spring latch, whose key was reposing for ever off duty in the late Mr Verloc’s waistcoat pocket, held as well as usual.  While the conscientious officer was shaking the handle, Ossipon felt the cold lips of the woman stirring again creepily against his very ear:

“If he comes in kill me — kill me, Tom.”

The constable moved away, flashing as he passed the light of his dark lantern, merely for form’s sake, at the shop window.  For a moment longer the man and the woman inside stood motionless, panting, breast to breast; then her fingers came unlocked, her arms fell by her side slowly.  Ossipon leaned against the counter.  The robust anarchist wanted support badly.  This was awful.  He was almost too disgusted for speech.  Yet he managed to utter a plaintive thought, showing at least that he realised his position.

“Only a couple of minutes later and you’d have made me blunder against the fellow poking about here with his damned dark lantern.”

The widow of Mr Verloc, motionless in the middle of the shop, said insistently:

“Go in and put that light out, Tom.  It will drive me crazy.”

She saw vaguely his vehement gesture of refusal.  Nothing in the world would have induced Ossipon to go into the parlour.  He was not superstitious, but there was too much blood on the floor; a beastly pool of it all round the hat.  He judged he had been already far too near that corpse for his peace of mind — for the safety of his neck, perhaps!

“At the meter then!  There.  Look.  In that corner.”

The robust form of Comrade Ossipon, striding brusque and shadowy across the shop, squatted in a corner obediently; but this obedience was without grace.  He fumbled nervously — and suddenly in the sound of a muttered curse the light behind the glazed door flicked out to a gasping, hysterical sigh of a woman.  Night, the inevitable reward of men’s faithful labours on this earth, night had fallen on Mr Verloc, the tried revolutionist — ”one of the old lot” — the humble guardian of society; the invaluable Secret Agent [delta] of Baron Stott-Wartenheim’s despatches; a servant of law and order, faithful, trusted, accurate, admirable, with perhaps one single amiable weakness: the idealistic belief in being loved for himself.

Ossipon groped his way back through the stuffy atmosphere, as black as ink now, to the counter.  The voice of Mrs Verloc, standing in the middle of the shop, vibrated after him in that blackness with a desperate protest.

“I will not be hanged, Tom.  I will not — ”

She broke off.  Ossipon from the counter issued a warning: “Don’t shout like this,” then seemed to reflect profoundly.  “You did this thing quite by yourself?” he inquired in a hollow voice, but with an appearance of masterful calmness which filled Mrs Verloc’s heart with grateful confidence in his protecting strength.

“Yes,” she whispered, invisible.

“I wouldn’t have believed it possible,” he muttered.  “Nobody would.”  She heard him move about and the snapping of a lock in the parlour door.  Comrade Ossipon had turned the key on Mr Verloc’s repose; and this he did not from reverence for its eternal nature or any other obscurely sentimental consideration, but for the precise reason that he was not at all sure that there was not someone else hiding somewhere in the house.  He did not believe the woman, or rather he was incapable by now of judging what could be true, possible, or even probable in this astounding universe.  He was terrified out of all capacity for belief or disbelief in regard of this extraordinary affair, which began with police inspectors and Embassies and would end goodness knows where — on the scaffold for someone.  He was terrified at the thought that he could not prove the use he made of his time ever since seven o’clock, for he had been skulking about Brett Street.  He was terrified at this savage woman who had brought him in there, and would probably saddle him with complicity, at least if he were not careful.  He was terrified at the rapidity with which he had been involved in such dangers — decoyed into it.  It was some twenty minutes since he had met her — not more.

The voice of Mrs Verloc rose subdued, pleading piteously: “Don’t let them hang me, Tom!  Take me out of the country.  I’ll work for you.  I’ll slave for you.  I’ll love you.  I’ve no one in the world. . . .  Who would look at me if you don’t!”  She ceased for a moment; then in the depths of the loneliness made round her by an insignificant thread of blood trickling off the handle of a knife, she found a dreadful inspiration to her — who had been the respectable girl of the Belgravian mansion, the loyal, respectable wife of Mr Verloc.  “I won’t ask you to marry me,” she breathed out in shame-faced accents.

She moved a step forward in the darkness.  He was terrified at her.  He would not have been surprised if she had suddenly produced another knife destined for his breast.  He certainly would have made no resistance.  He had really not enough fortitude in him just then to tell her to keep back.  But he inquired in a cavernous, strange tone: “Was he asleep?”

“No,” she cried, and went on rapidly.  “He wasn’t.  Not he.  He had been telling me that nothing could touch him.  After taking the boy away from under my very eyes to kill him — the loving, innocent, harmless lad.  My own, I tell you.  He was lying on the couch quite easy — after killing the boy — my boy.  I would have gone on the streets to get out of his sight.  And he says to me like this: ‘Come here,’ after telling me I had helped to kill the boy.  You hear, Tom?  He says like this: ‘Come here,’ after taking my very heart out of me along with the boy to smash in the dirt.”

She ceased, then dreamily repeated twice: “Blood and dirt.  Blood and dirt.”  A great light broke upon Comrade Ossipon.  It was that half-witted lad then who had perished in the park.  And the fooling of everybody all round appeared more complete than ever — colossal.  He exclaimed scientifically, in the extremity of his astonishment: “The degenerate — by heavens!”

“Come here.”  The voice of Mrs Verloc rose again.  “What did he think I was made of?  Tell me, Tom.  Come here!  Me!  Like this!  I had been looking at the knife, and I thought I would come then if he wanted me so much.  Oh yes!  I came — for the last time. . . . With the knife.”

He was excessively terrified at her — the sister of the degenerate — a degenerate herself of a murdering type . . . or else of the lying type.  Comrade Ossipon might have been said to be terrified scientifically in addition to all other kinds of fear.  It was an immeasurable and composite funk, which from its very excess gave him in the dark a false appearance of calm and thoughtful deliberation.  For he moved and spoke with difficulty, being as if half frozen in his will and mind — and no one could see his ghastly face.  He felt half dead.

He leaped a foot high.  Unexpectedly Mrs Verloc had desecrated the unbroken reserved decency of her home by a shrill and terrible shriek.

“Help, Tom!  Save me.  I won’t be hanged!”

He rushed forward, groping for her mouth with a silencing hand, and the shriek died out.  But in his rush he had knocked her over.  He felt her now clinging round his legs, and his terror reached its culminating point, became a sort of intoxication, entertained delusions, acquired the characteristics of delirium tremens.  He positively saw snakes now.  He saw the woman twined round him like a snake, not to be shaken off.  She was not deadly.  She was death itself — the companion of life.

Mrs Verloc, as if relieved by the outburst, was very far from behaving noisily now.  She was pitiful.

“Tom, you can’t throw me off now,” she murmured from the floor.  “Not unless you crush my head under your heel.  I won’t leave you.”

“Get up,” said Ossipon.

His face was so pale as to be quite visible in the profound black darkness of the shop; while Mrs Verloc, veiled, had no face, almost no discernible form.  The trembling of something small and white, a flower in her hat, marked her place, her movements.

It rose in the blackness.  She had got up from the floor, and Ossipon regretted not having, run out at once into the street.  But he perceived easily that it would not do.  It would not do.  She would run after him.  She would pursue him shrieking till she sent every policeman within hearing in chase.  And then goodness only knew what she would say of him.  He was so frightened that for a moment the insane notion of strangling her in the dark passed through his mind.  And he became more frightened than ever!  She had him!  He saw himself living in abject terror in some obscure hamlet in Spain or Italy; till some fine morning they found him dead too, with a knife in his breast — like Mr Verloc.  He sighed deeply.  He dared not move.  And Mrs Verloc waited in silence the good pleasure of her saviour, deriving comfort from his reflective silence.