Section 30

The voice of Mrs Verloc rose subdued, plead- ing 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 respect- able 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
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had really not enough fortitude in him just then to tell her to keep back. But he in- quired 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
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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
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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 mur- mured from the floor. " Not unless you crush my head under your heel. I won't leave you."
" Get up/ 1 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
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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.
Suddenly he spoke up in an almost natural voice. His reflections had come to an end
" Let's get out, or we will lose the train/'
" Where are we going to, Tom ? " she asked timidly. Mrs Verloc was no longer a free woman.
" Let's get to Paris first, the best way we can. . e . Go out first, and see if the way's clear."
She obeyed. Her voice came subdued through the cautiously opened door.
" It's all right. 11
Ossipon came out. Notwithstanding his en- deavours to be gentle, the cracked bell clattered behind the closed door in the empty shop, as if trying in vain to warn the reposing Mr Verloc of the final departure of his wife accompanied by his friend,
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In the hansom, they presently picked up, the robust anarchist became explanatory. He was still awfully pale, with eyes that seemed to have sunk a whole half-inch into his tense face. But he seemed to have thought of everything with extraordinary method.
"When we arrive," he discoursed in a queer, monotonous tone, " you must go into the station ahead of me, as if we did not know each other. I will take the tickets, and slip in yours into your hand as I pass you. Then you will go into the first-class ladies' waiting-room, and sit there till ten minutes before the train starts. Then you come out. I will be outside. You go in first on the platform, as if you did not know me. There may be eyes watching there that know what's what Alone you are only a woman going off by train. I am known. With me, you may be guessed at as Mrs Verloc running away. Do you understand, my dear ? " he added, with an effort.
"Yes," said Mrs Verloc, sitting there against him in the hansom all rigid with the dread of the gallows and the fear of death. " Yes, Tom." And she added to herself, like an awful refrain : " The drop given was fourteen feet."
Ossipon, not looking at her, and with a face like a fresh plaster cast of himself after a wast-
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ing illness, said : " By-the-by, I ought to have the money for the tickets now.''
Mrs Verloc, undoing some hooks of her bodice, while she went on staring ahead be- yond the splashboard, handed over to him the new pigskin pocket-book. He received it with- out a word, and seemed to plunge it deep some- where into his very breast Then he slapped his coat on the outside.
All this was done without the exchange of a single glance ; they were like two people look- ing out for the first sight of a desired goal. It was not till the hansom swung round a corner and towards the bridge that Ossipon opened his lips again.
"Do you know how much money there is in that thing ? " he asked, as if addressing slowly some hobgoblin sitting between the ears of the horse.
" No," said Mrs Verloc. "He gave it to me. I didn't count. I thought nothing of it at the time. Afterwards "
She moved her right hand a little. It was so expressive that little movement of that right hand which had struck the deadly blow into a man's heart less than an hour before that Os- sipon could not repress a shudder. He exag- gerated it then purposely, and muttered :
" I am cold. I got chilled through."
2D
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Mrs Verloc looked straight ahead at the per- spective of her escape. Now and then, like a sable streamer blown across a road, the words " The drop given was fourteen feet " got in the way of her tense stare. Through her black veil the whites of her big eyes gleamed lustrously like the eyes of a masked woman.
Ossipon's rigidity had something business- like, a queer official expression. He was heard again all of a sudden, as though he had released a catch in order to speak.
" Look here ! Do you know whether your whether he kept his account at the bank in his own name or in some other name."
Mrs Verloc turned upon him her masked face and the big white gleam of her eyes.
" Other name ? " she said thoughtfully.
" Be exact in what you say," Ossipon lectured in the swift motion of the hansom. " It's ex- tremely important. I will explain to you. The bank has the numbers of these notes. If they were paid to him in his own name, then when his his death becomes known, the notes may serve to track us since we have no other money. You have no other money on you ? "
She shook her head negatively.
" None whatever ? " he insisted
"A few coppers/'
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14 It would be dangerous in that case. The money would have then to be dealt specially with. Very specially. We'd have perhaps to lose more than half the amount in order to get these notes changed in a certain safe place I know of in Paris. In the other case I mean if he had his account and got paid out under some other name say Smith, for instance the money is perfectly safe to use. You understand ? The bank has no means of knowing that Mr Verloc and, say, Smith are one and the same person. Do you see how important it is that you should make no mistake in answering me ? Can you answer that query at all? Perhaps not. Eh?"
She said composedly :
44 1 remember now ! He didn't bank in his own name. He told me once that it was on deposit in the name of Prozor."
44 You are sure ? "
"Certain."
" You don't think the bank had any know- ledge of his real name ? Or anybody in the bank or "
She shrugged her shoulders.
44 How can I know ? Is it likely, Tom ?"
44 No. I suppose it's not likely. It would have been more comfortable to know. . . , Here
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we are. Get out first, and walk straight in. Move smartly."
He remained behind, and paid the cabman out of his own loose silver. The programme traced by his minute foresight was carried out. When Mrs Verloc, with her ticket for St Malo in her hand, entered the ladies' waiting-room, Comrade Ossipon walked into the bar, and in seven minutes absorbed three goes of hot brandy and water.
" Trying to drive out a cold/' he explained to the barmaid, with a friendly nod and a grimacing smile. Then he came out, bringing out from that festive interlude the face of a man who had drunk at the very Fountain of Sorrow. He raised his eyes to the clock. It was time. He waited.
Punctual, Mrs Verloc came out, with her veil down, and all black black as commonplace death itself, crowned with a few cheap and pale flowers. She passed close to a little group of men who were laughing, but whose laughter could have been struck dead by a single word. Her walk was indolent, but her back was straight, and Comrade Ossipon looked after it in terror before making a start himself.
The train was drawn up, with hardly anybody about its row of open doors. Owing to the time of the year and to the abominable weather there
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were hardly any passengers. Mrs Verloc walked slowly along the line of empty compartments till Ossipon touched her elbow from behind.
" In here."
She got in, and he remained on the platform looking about. She bent forward, and in a whisper :
"What is it, Tom ? Is there any danger ?"
"Wait a moment. There's the guard."
She saw him accost the man in uniform. They talked for a while. She heard the guard say "Very well, sir," and saw him touch his cap. Then Ossipon came back, saying: "I told him not to let anybody get into our compartment"
She was leaning forward on her seat. " You think of everything. . . . You'll get me off, Tom ? " she asked in a gust of anguish, lifting her veil brusquely to look at her saviour.
She had uncovered a face like adamant. And out of this face the eyes looked on, big, dry, enlarged, lightless, burnt out like two black holes in the white, shining globes.
" There is no danger," he said, gazing into them with an earnestness almost rapt, which to Mrs Verloc, flying from the gallows, seemed to be full of force and tenderness. This devotion deeply moved her and the adamantine face lost the stern rigidity of its terror. Comrade Ossi-
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pon gazed at it as no lover ever gazed at his mistress's face. Alexander Ossipon, anarchist, nicknamed the Doctor, author of a medical (and improper) pamphlet, late lecturer on the social aspects of hygiene to working men's clubs, was free from the trammels of conven- tional morality but he submitted to the rule of science. He was scientific, and he gazed scientifically at that woman, the sister of a degenerate, a degenerate herself of a mur- dering type. He gazed at her, and invoked Lombroso, as an Italian peasant recommends himself to his favourite saint He gazed scientifically. He gazed at her cheeks, at her nose, at her eyes, at her ears. , . . Bad! . . . Fatal! Mrs Verloc's pale lips parting, slightly relaxed under his passionately attentive gaze, he gazed also at her teeth. . , . Not a doubt remained . . . a murdering type. ... If Comrade Ossipon did not recommend his terrified soul to Lombroso, it was only because on scientific grounds he could not believe that he carried about him such a thing as a soul. But he had in him the scientific spirit, which moved him to testify on the platform of a railway station in nervous jerky phrases.
" He was an extraordinary lad, that brother of yours. Most interesting to study. A perfect type in a way. Perfect ! "
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He spoke scientifically in his secret fear. And Mrs Verloc, hearing these words of commenda- tion vouchsafed to her beloved dead, swayed for- ward with a flicker of light in her sombre eyes, like a ray of sunshine heralding a tempest of rain.
" He was that indeed," she whispered softly, with quivering lips. "You took a lot of notice of him, Tom. I loved you for it."
" It's almost incredible the resemblance there was between you two," pursued Ossipon, giving a voice to his abiding dread, and trying to conceal his nervous, sickening impatience for the train to start. "Yes; he resembled you."
These words were not especially touching or sympathetic. But the fact of that resemblance insisted upon was enough in itself to act upon her emotions powerfully. With a little faint cry, and throwing her arms out, Mrs Verloc burst into tears at last.
Ossipon entered the carriage, hastily closed the door and looked out to see the time by the station clock. Eight minutes more. For the first three of these Mrs Verloc wept violently and helplessly without pause or interruption. Then she recovered somewhat, and sobbed gently in an abundant fall of tears. She tried to talk to her saviour, to the man who was the messenger of life.
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"Oh, Tom! How could I fear to die after he was taken away from me so cruelly ! How could I ! How could I be such a coward ! "
She lamented aloud her love of life, that life without grace or charm, and almost without decency, but of an exalted faithfulness of pur- pose, even unto murder. And, as often happens in the lament of poor humanity, rich in suffering but indigent in words, the truth the very cry of truth was found in a worn and artificial shape picked up somewhere among the phrases of sham sentiment
" How could I be so afraid of death ! Tom, I tried. But I am afraid. I tried to do away with myself. And I couldn't. Am I hard ? I suppose the cup of horrors was not full enough for such as me. Then when you came. ..."