Section 6

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tilt to a black felt sombrero shading the hollows and ridges of his wasted face. He got in mo- tion slowly, striking the floor wjth his stick at every step. It was rather an affair to get him out of the house because, now and then, he would stop, as if to think, and did not offer to move again till impelled forward by Michaelis. The gentle apostle grasped his arm with brotherly care ; and behind them, his hands in his pockets, the robust Ossipon yawned vaguely. A blue cap with a patent leather peak set well at the back of his yellow bush of hair gave him the aspect of a Norwegian sailor bored with the world after a thundering spree. Mr Verloc saw his guests off the premises, attending them bareheaded, his heavy overcoat hanging open, his eyes on the ground.
He closed the door behind their backs with restrained violence, turned the key, shot the bolt. He was not satisfied with his friends. In the light of Mr Vladimir's philosophy of bomb throwing they appeared hopelessly futile. The part of Mr Verloc in revolutionary politics having been to observe, he could not all at once, either in his own home or in larger assemblies, take the initiative of action. He had to be cautious. Moved by the just indig- nation of a man well over forty, menaced in
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what is dearest to him his repose and his security he asked himself scornfully what else could have been expected from such a lot, this Karl Yundt, this Michaelis this Ossipon.
Pausing in his intention to turn off the gas burning in the middle of the shop, Mr Verloc descended into the abyss of moral reflections. With the insight of a kindred temperament he pronounced his verdict. A lazy lot this Karl Yundt, nursed by a blear-eyed old woman, a woman he had years ago enticed away from a friend, and afterwards had tried more than once to shake off into the gutter. Jolly lucky for Yundt that she had persisted in coming up time after time, or else there would have been no one now to help him out of the 'bus by the Green Park railings, where that spectre took its constitutional crawl every fine morning. When that indomitable snarling old witch died the swaggering spectre would have to vanish too there would be an end to fiery Karl Yundt. And Mr Verloc's morality was offended also by the optimism of Michaelis, annexed by his wealthy old lady, who had taken lately to sending him to a cottage she had in the country. The ex-prisoner could moon about the shady lanes for days together in a delicious and humanitarian idleness. As
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to Ossipon, that beggar was sure to want for nothing as long as there were silly girls with savings-bank books in the world. And Mr Verloc, temperamentally identical with his as- sociates, drew fine distinctions in his mind on the strength of insignificant differences. He drew them with a certain complacency, because the instinct of conventional respectability was strong within him, being only overcome by his dislike of all kinds of recognised labour a temperamental defect which he shared with a large proportion of revolutionary reformers of a given social state. For obviously one does not revolt against the advantages and opportunities of that state, but against the price which must be paid for the same in the coin of accepted morality, self-restraint, and toil. The majority of revolutionists are the enemies of discipline and fatigue mostly. There are natures too, to whose sense of justice the price exacted looms up monstrously enormous, odious, oppressive, worrying, humiliating, extortionate, intolerable. Those are the fanatics. The remaining portion of social rebels is accounted for by vanity, the mother of all noble and vile illusions, the com- panion of poets, reformers, charlatans, prophets, and incendiaries.
Lost for a whole minute in the abyss of
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meditation, Mr Verloc did not reach the depth of these abstract considerations. Perhaps he was not able. In any case he had not the time. He was pulled up painfully by the sudden recollection of Mr Vladimir, another of his associates, whom in virtue of subtle moral affinities he was capable of judging correctly. He considered him as dangerous. A shade of envy crept into his thoughts. Loafing was all very well for these fellows, who knew not Mr Vladimir, and had women to fall back upon ; whereas he had a woman to provide for
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 be- hind 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
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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 commui- cation 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.
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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 pervad- ing 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
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(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 down- stairs " 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 un- dressing by flinging his overcoat on to a distant chair. His coat and waistcoat followed. He
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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 slip- ping his braces off his shoulders he pulled up vio- lently 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 accumu- lation 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 unin- habited 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 com- plexion like a sort of pink seal impressed on the fatal darkness.
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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 ex- perienced 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 ob- served.
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
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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 con- scientiously. " 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 excite- ment, 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 disre- garded his suggestion to go to bed. Mrs Verloc, falling into the trap, started to demonstrate at length to her husband that this was not " impu- dence " 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
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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 com- passion 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 ani- mated 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 re- called him to himself.
He appreciated this woman, and the senti- ment 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 :
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"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 eat- ing 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 con- tinuing 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 ex- citable. 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,"
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Mr Verloc made no comment.
" I wish he had never been to school/ 1 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 half- penny 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 any- thing 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!
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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 hope- lessly inert in his fear of darkness. He made a great effort.