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+Project Gutenberg's Etext of The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad
+#13 in our series by Joseph Conrad
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+The Secret Agent
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+by Joseph Conrad
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+July, 1997  [Etext #974]
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+Project Gutenberg's Etext of The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad
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+The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
+Scanned and proofed by David Price
+ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+The Secret Agent
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+
+Mr Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in
+charge of his brother-in-law.  It could be done, because there was
+very little business at any time, and practically none at all
+before the evening.  Mr Verloc cared but little about his
+ostensible business.  And, moreover, his wife was in charge of his
+brother-in-law.
+
+The shop was small, and so was the house.  It was one of those
+grimy brick houses which existed in large quantities before the era
+of reconstruction dawned upon London.  The shop was a square box of
+a place, with the front glazed in small panes.  In the daytime the
+door remained closed; in the evening it stood discreetly but
+suspiciously ajar.
+
+The window contained photographs of more or less undressed dancing
+girls; nondescript packages in wrappers like patent medicines;
+closed yellow paper envelopes, very flimsy, and marked two-and-six
+in heavy black figures; a few numbers of ancient French comic
+publications hung across a string as if to dry; a dingy blue china
+bowl, a casket of black wood, bottles of marking ink, and rubber
+stamps; a few books, with titles hinting at impropriety; a few
+apparently old copies of obscure newspapers, badly printed, with
+titles like THE TORCH, THE GONG - rousing titles.  And the two gas
+jets inside the panes were always turned low, either for economy's
+sake or for the sake of the customers.
+
+These customers were either very young men, who hung about the
+window for a time before slipping in suddenly; or men of a more
+mature age, but looking generally as if they were not in funds.
+Some of that last kind had the collars of their overcoats turned
+right up to their moustaches, and traces of mud on the bottom of
+their nether garments, which had the appearance of being much worn
+and not very valuable.  And the legs inside them did not, as a
+general rule, seem of much account either.  With their hands
+plunged deep in the side pockets of their coats, they dodged in
+sideways, one shoulder first, as if afraid to start the bell going.
+
+The bell, hung on the door by means of a curved ribbon of steel,
+was difficult to circumvent.  It was hopelessly cracked; but of an
+evening, at the slightest provocation, it clattered behind the
+customer with impudent virulence.
+
+It clattered; and at that signal, through the dusty glass door
+behind the painted deal counter, Mr Verloc would issue hastily from
+the parlour at the back.  His eyes were naturally heavy; he had an
+air of having wallowed, fully dressed, all day on an unmade bed.
+Another man would have felt such an appearance a distinct
+disadvantage.  In a commercial transaction of the retail order much
+depends on the seller's engaging and amiable aspect.  But Mr Verloc
+knew his business, and remained undisturbed by any sort of
+aesthetic doubt about his appearance.  With a firm, steady-eyed
+impudence, which seemed to hold back the threat of some abominable
+menace, he would proceed to sell over the counter some object
+looking obviously and scandalously not worth the money which passed
+in the transaction: a small cardboard box with apparently nothing
+inside, for instance, or one of those carefully closed yellow
+flimsy envelopes, or a soiled volume in paper covers with a
+promising title.  Now and then it happened that one of the faded,
+yellow dancing girls would get sold to an amateur, as though she
+had been alive and young.
+
+Sometimes it was Mrs Verloc who would appear at the call of the
+cracked bell.  Winnie Verloc was a young woman with a full bust, in
+a tight bodice, and with broad hips.  Her hair was very tidy.
+Steady-eyed like her husband, she preserved an air of unfathomable
+indifference behind the rampart of the counter.  Then the customer
+of comparatively tender years would get suddenly disconcerted at
+having to deal with a woman, and with rage in his heart would
+proffer a request for a bottle of marking ink, retail value
+sixpence (price in Verloc's shop one-and-sixpence), which, once
+outside, he would drop stealthily into the gutter.
+
+The evening visitors - the men with collars turned up and soft hats
+rammed down - nodded familiarly to Mrs Verloc, and with a muttered
+greeting, lifted up the flap at the end of the counter in order to
+pass into the back parlour, which gave access to a passage and to a
+steep flight of stairs.  The door of the shop was the only means of
+entrance to the house in which Mr Verloc carried on his business of
+a seller of shady wares, exercised his vocation of a protector of
+society, and cultivated his domestic virtues.  These last were
+pronounced.  He was thoroughly domesticated.  Neither his
+spiritual, nor his mental, nor his physical needs were of the kind
+to take him much abroad.  He found at home the ease of his body and
+the peace of his conscience, together with Mrs Verloc's wifely
+attentions and Mrs Verloc's mother's deferential regard.
+
+Winnie's mother was a stout, wheezy woman, with a large brown face.
+She wore a black wig under a white cap.  Her swollen legs rendered
+her inactive.  She considered herself to be of French descent,
+which might have been true; and after a good many years of married
+life with a licensed victualler of the more common sort, she
+provided for the years of widowhood by letting furnished apartments
+for gentlemen near Vauxhall Bridge Road in a square once of some
+splendour and still included in the district of Belgravia.  This
+topographical fact was of some advantage in advertising her rooms;
+but the patrons of the worthy widow were not exactly of the
+fashionable kind.  Such as they were, her daughter Winnie helped to
+look after them.  Traces of the French descent which the widow
+boasted of were apparent in Winnie too.  They were apparent in the
+extremely neat and artistic arrangement of her glossy dark hair.
+Winnie had also other charms: her youth; her full, rounded form;
+her clear complexion; the provocation of her unfathomable reserve,
+which never went so far as to prevent conversation, carried on on
+the lodgers' part with animation, and on hers with an equable
+amiability.  It must be that Mr Verloc was susceptible to these
+fascinations.  Mr Verloc was an intermittent patron.  He came and
+went without any very apparent reason.  He generally arrived in
+London (like the influenza) from the Continent, only he arrived
+unheralded by the Press; and his visitations set in with great
+severity.  He breakfasted in bed, and remained wallowing there with
+an air of quiet enjoyment till noon every day - and sometimes even
+to a later hour.  But when he went out he seemed to experience a
+great difficulty in finding his way back to his temporary home in
+the Belgravian square.  He left it late, and returned to it early -
+as early as three or four in the morning; and on waking up at ten
+addressed Winnie, bringing in the breakfast tray, with jocular,
+exhausted civility, in the hoarse, failing tones of a man who had
+been talking vehemently for many hours together.  His prominent,
+heavy-lidded eyes rolled sideways amorously and languidly, the
+bedclothes were pulled up to his chin, and his dark smooth
+moustache covered his thick lips capable of much honeyed banter.
+
+In Winnie's mother's opinion Mr Verloc was a very nice gentleman.
+From her life's experience gathered in various "business houses"
+the good woman had taken into her retirement an ideal of
+gentlemanliness as exhibited by the patrons of private-saloon bars.
+Mr Verloc approached that ideal; he attained it, in fact.
+
+"Of course, we'll take over your furniture, mother," Winnie had
+remarked.
+
+The lodging-house was to be given up.  It seems it would not answer
+to carry it on.  It would have been too much trouble for Mr Verloc.
+It would not have been convenient for his other business.  What his
+business was he did not say; but after his engagement to Winnie he
+took the trouble to get up before noon, and descending the basement
+stairs, make himself pleasant to Winnie's mother in the breakfast-
+room downstairs where she had her motionless being.  He stroked the
+cat, poked the fire, had his lunch served to him there.  He left
+its slightly stuffy cosiness with evident reluctance, but, all the
+same, remained out till the night was far advanced.  He never
+offered to take Winnie to theatres, as such a nice gentleman ought
+to have done.  His evenings were occupied.  His work was in a way
+political, he told Winnie once.  She would have, he warned her, to
+be very nice to his political friends.
+
+And with her straight, unfathomable glance she answered that she
+would be so, of course.
+
+How much more he told her as to his occupation it was impossible
+for Winnie's mother to discover.  The married couple took her over
+with the furniture.  The mean aspect of the shop surprised her.
+The change from the Belgravian square to the narrow street in Soho
+affected her legs adversely.  They became of an enormous size.  On
+the other hand, she experienced a complete relief from material
+cares.  Her son-in-law's heavy good nature inspired her with a
+sense of absolute safety.  Her daughter's future was obviously
+assured, and even as to her son Stevie she need have no anxiety.
+She had not been able to conceal from herself that he was a
+terrible encumbrance, that poor Stevie.  But in view of Winnie's
+fondness for her delicate brother, and of Mr Verloc's kind and
+generous disposition, she felt that the poor boy was pretty safe in
+this rough world.  And in her heart of hearts she was not perhaps
+displeased that the Verlocs had no children.  As that circumstance
+seemed perfectly indifferent to Mr Verloc, and as Winnie found an
+object of quasi-maternal affection in her brother, perhaps this was
+just as well for poor Stevie.
+
+For he was difficult to dispose of, that boy.  He was delicate and,
+in a frail way, good-looking too, except for the vacant droop of
+his lower lip.  Under our excellent system of compulsory education
+he had learned to read and write, notwithstanding the unfavourable
+aspect of the lower lip.  But as errand-boy he did not turn out a
+great success.  He forgot his messages; he was easily diverted from
+the straight path of duty by the attractions of stray cats and
+dogs, which he followed down narrow alleys into unsavoury courts;
+by the comedies of the streets, which he contemplated open-mouthed,
+to the detriment of his employer's interests; or by the dramas of
+fallen horses, whose pathos and violence induced him sometimes to
+shriek pierceingly in a crowd, which disliked to be disturbed by
+sounds of distress in its quiet enjoyment of the national
+spectacle.  When led away by a grave and protecting policeman, it
+would often become apparent that poor Stevie had forgotten his
+address - at least for a time.  A brusque question caused him to
+stutter to the point of suffocation.  When startled by anything
+perplexing he used to squint horribly.  However, he never had any
+fits (which was encouraging); and before the natural outbursts of
+impatience on the part of his father he could always, in his
+childhood's days, run for protection behind the short skirts of his
+sister Winnie.  On the other hand, he might have been suspected of
+hiding a fund of reckless naughtiness.  When he had reached the age
+of fourteen a friend of his late father, an agent for a foreign
+preserved milk firm, having given him an opening as office-boy, he
+was discovered one foggy afternoon, in his chief's absence, busy
+letting off fireworks on the staircase.  He touched off in quick
+succession a set of fierce rockets, angry catherine wheels, loudly
+exploding squibs - and the matter might have turned out very
+serious.  An awful panic spread through the whole building.  Wild-
+eyed, choking clerks stampeded through the passages full of smoke,
+silk hats and elderly business men could be seen rolling
+independently down the stairs.  Stevie did not seem to derive any
+personal gratification from what he had done.  His motives for this
+stroke of originality were difficult to discover.  It was only
+later on that Winnie obtained from him a misty and confused
+confession.  It seems that two other office-boys in the building
+had worked upon his feelings by tales of injustice and oppression
+till they had wrought his compassion to the pitch of that frenzy.
+But his father's friend, of course, dismissed him summarily as
+likely to ruin his business.  After that altruistic exploit Stevie
+was put to help wash the dishes in the basement kitchen, and to
+black the boots of the gentlemen patronising the Belgravian
+mansion.  There was obviously no future in such work.  The
+gentlemen tipped him a shilling now and then.  Mr Verloc showed
+himself the most generous of lodgers.  But altogether all that did
+not amount to much either in the way of gain or prospects; so that
+when Winnie announced her engagement to Mr Verloc her mother could
+not help wondering, with a sigh and a glance towards the scullery,
+what would become of poor Stephen now.
+
+It appeared that Mr Verloc was ready to take him over together with
+his wife's mother and with the furniture, which was the whole
+visible fortune of the family.  Mr Verloc gathered everything as it
+came to his broad, good-natured breast.  The furniture was disposed
+to the best advantage all over the house, but Mrs Verloc's mother
+was confined to two back rooms on the first floor.  The luckless
+Stevie slept in one of them.  By this time a growth of thin fluffy
+hair had come to blur, like a golden mist, the sharp line of his
+small lower jaw.  He helped his sister with blind love and docility
+in her household duties.  Mr Verloc thought that some occupation
+would be good for him.  His spare time he occupied by drawing
+circles with compass and pencil on a piece of paper.  He applied
+himself to that pastime with great industry, with his elbows spread
+out and bowed low over the kitchen table.  Through the open door of
+the parlour at the back of the shop Winnie, his sister, glanced at
+him from time to time with maternal vigilance.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Such was the house, the household, and the business Mr Verloc left
+behind him on his way westward at the hour of half-past ten in the
+morning.  It was unusually early for him; his whole person exhaled
+the charm of almost dewy freshness; he wore his blue cloth overcoat
+unbuttoned; his boots were shiny; his cheeks, freshly shaven, had a
+sort of gloss; and even his heavy-lidded eyes, refreshed by a night
+of peaceful slumber, sent out glances of comparative alertness.
+Through the park railings these glances beheld men and women riding
+in the Row, couples cantering past harmoniously, others advancing
+sedately at a walk, loitering groups of three or four, solitary
+horsemen looking unsociable, and solitary women followed at a long
+distance by a groom with a cockade to his hat and a leather belt
+over his tight-fitting coat.  Carriages went bowling by, mostly
+two-horse broughams, with here and there a victoria with the skin
+of some wild beast inside and a woman's face and hat emerging above
+the folded hood.  And a peculiarly London sun - against which
+nothing could be said except that it looked bloodshot - glorified
+all this by its stare.  It hung at a moderate elevation above Hyde
+Park Corner with an air of punctual and benign vigilance.  The very
+pavement under Mr Verloc's feet had an old-gold tinge in that
+diffused light, in which neither wall, nor tree, nor beast, nor man
+cast a shadow.  Mr Verloc was going westward through a town without
+shadows in an atmosphere of powdered old gold.  There were red,
+coppery gleams on the roofs of houses, on the corners of walls, on
+the panels of carriages, on the very coats of the horses, and on
+the broad back of Mr Verloc's overcoat, where they produced a dull
+effect of rustiness.  But Mr Verloc was not in the least conscious
+of having got rusty.  He surveyed through the park railings the
+evidences of the town's opulence and luxury with an approving eye.
+All these people had to be protected.  Protection is the first
+necessity of opulence and luxury.  They had to be protected; and
+their horses, carriages, houses, servants had to be protected; and
+the source of their wealth had to be protected in the heart of the
+city and the heart of the country; the whole social order
+favourable to their hygienic idleness had to be protected against
+the shallow enviousness of unhygienic labour.  It had to - and Mr
+Verloc would have rubbed his hands with satisfaction had he not
+been constitutionally averse from every superfluous exertion.  His
+idleness was not hygienic, but it suited him very well.  He was in
+a manner devoted to it with a sort of inert fanaticism, or perhaps
+rather with a fanatical inertness.  Born of industrious parents for
+a life of toil, he had embraced indolence from an impulse as
+profound as inexplicable and as imperious as the impulse which
+directs a man's preference for one particular woman in a given
+thousand.  He was too lazy even for a mere demagogue, for a workman
+orator, for a leader of labour.  It was too much trouble.  He
+required a more perfect form of ease; or it might have been that he
+was the victim of a philosophical unbelief in the effectiveness of
+every human effort.  Such a form of indolence requires, implies, a
+certain amount of intelligence.  Mr Verloc was not devoid of
+intelligence - and at the notion of a menaced social order he would
+perhaps have winked to himself if there had not been an effort to
+make in that sign of scepticism.  His big, prominent eyes were not
+well adapted to winking.  They were rather of the sort that closes
+solemnly in slumber with majestic effect.
+
+Undemonstrative and burly in a fat-pig style, Mr Verloc, without
+either rubbing his hands with satisfaction or winking sceptically
+at his thoughts, proceeded on his way.  He trod the pavement
+heavily with his shiny boots, and his general get-up was that of a
+well-to-do mechanic in business for himself.  He might have been
+anything from a picture-frame maker to a lock-smith; an employer of
+labour in a small way.  But there was also about him an
+indescribable air which no mechanic could have acquired in the
+practice of his handicraft however dishonestly exercised: the air
+common to men who live on the vices, the follies, or the baser
+fears of mankind; the air of moral nihilism common to keepers of
+gambling hells and disorderly houses; to private detectives and
+inquiry agents; to drink sellers and, I should say, to the sellers
+of invigorating electric belts and to the inventors of patent
+medicines.  But of that last I am not sure, not having carried my
+investigations so far into the depths.  For all I know, the
+expression of these last may be perfectly diabolic.  I shouldn't be
+surprised.  What I want to affirm is that Mr Verloc's expression
+was by no means diabolic.
+
+Before reaching Knightsbridge, Mr Verloc took a turn to the left
+out of the busy main thoroughfare, uproarious with the traffic of
+swaying omnibuses and trotting vans, in the almost silent, swift
+flow of hansoms.  Under his hat, worn with a slight backward tilt,
+his hair had been carefully brushed into respectful sleekness; for
+his business was with an Embassy.  And Mr Verloc, steady like a
+rock - a soft kind of rock - marched now along a street which could
+with every propriety be described as private.  In its breadth,
+emptiness, and extent it had the majesty of inorganic nature, of
+matter that never dies.  The only reminder of mortality was a
+doctor's brougham arrested in august solitude close to the
+curbstone.  The polished knockers of the doors gleamed as far as
+the eye could reach, the clean windows shone with a dark opaque
+lustre.  And all was still.  But a milk cart rattled noisily across
+the distant perspective; a butcher boy, driving with the noble
+recklessness of a charioteer at Olympic Games, dashed round the
+corner sitting high above a pair of red wheels.  A guilty-looking
+cat issuing from under the stones ran for a while in front of Mr
+Verloc, then dived into another basement; and a thick police
+constable, looking a stranger to every emotion, as if he too were
+part of inorganic nature, surging apparently out of a lamp-post,
+took not the slightest notice of Mr Verloc.  With a turn to the
+left Mr Verloc pursued his way along a narrow street by the side of
+a yellow wall which, for some inscrutable reason, had No. 1 Chesham
+Square written on it in black letters.  Chesham Square was at least
+sixty yards away, and Mr Verloc, cosmopolitan enough not to be
+deceived by London's topographical mysteries, held on steadily,
+without a sign of surprise or indignation.  At last, with business-
+like persistency, he reached the Square, and made diagonally for
+the number 10.  This belonged to an imposing carriage gate in a
+high, clean wall between two houses, of which one rationally enough
+bore the number 9 and the other was numbered 37; but the fact that
+this last belonged to Porthill Street, a street well known in the
+neighbourhood, was proclaimed by an inscription placed above the
+ground-floor windows by whatever highly efficient authority is
+charged with the duty of keeping track of London's strayed houses.
+Why powers are not asked of Parliament (a short act would do) for
+compelling those edifices to return where they belong is one of the
+mysteries of municipal administration.  Mr Verloc did not trouble
+his head about it, his mission in life being the protection of the
+social mechanism, not its perfectionment or even its criticism.
+
+It was so early that the porter of the Embassy issued hurriedly out
+of his lodge still struggling with the left sleeve of his livery
+coat.  His waistcoat was red, and he wore knee-breeches, but his
+aspect was flustered.  Mr Verloc, aware of the rush on his flank,
+drove it off by simply holding out an envelope stamped with the
+arms of the Embassy, and passed on.  He produced the same talisman
+also to the footman who opened the door, and stood back to let him
+enter the hall.
+
+A clear fire burned in a tall fireplace, and an elderly man
+standing with his back to it, in evening dress and with a chain
+round his neck, glanced up from the newspaper he was holding spread
+out in both hands before his calm and severe face.  He didn't move;
+but another lackey, in brown trousers and claw-hammer coat edged
+with thin yellow cord, approaching Mr Verloc listened to the murmur
+of his name, and turning round on his heel in silence, began to
+walk, without looking back once.  Mr Verloc, thus led along a
+ground-floor passage to the left of the great carpeted staircase,
+was suddenly motioned to enter a quite small room furnished with a
+heavy writing-table and a few chairs.  The servant shut the door,
+and Mr Verloc remained alone.  He did not take a seat.  With his
+hat and stick held in one hand he glanced about, passing his other
+podgy hand over his uncovered sleek head.
+
+Another door opened noiselessly, and Mr Verloc immobilising his
+glance in that direction saw at first only black clothes, the bald
+top of a head, and a drooping dark grey whisker on each side of a
+pair of wrinkled hands.  The person who had entered was holding a
+batch of papers before his eyes and walked up to the table with a
+rather mincing step, turning the papers over the while.  Privy
+Councillor Wurmt, Chancelier d'Ambassade, was rather short-sighted.
+This meritorious official laying the papers on the table, disclosed
+a face of pasty complexion and of melancholy ugliness surrounded by
+a lot of fine, long dark grey hairs, barred heavily by thick and
+bushy eyebrows.  He put on a black-framed pince-nez upon a blunt
+and shapeless nose, and seemed struck by Mr Verloc's appearance.
+Under the enormous eyebrows his weak eyes blinked pathetically
+through the glasses.
+
+He made no sign of greeting; neither did Mr Verloc, who certainly
+knew his place; but a subtle change about the general outlines of
+his shoulders and back suggested a slight bending of Mr Verloc's
+spine under the vast surface of his overcoat.  The effect was of
+unobtrusive deference.
+
+"I have here some of your reports," said the bureaucrat in an
+unexpectedly soft and weary voice, and pressing the tip of his
+forefinger on the papers with force.  He paused; and Mr Verloc, who
+had recognised his own handwriting very well, waited in an almost
+breathless silence.  "We are not very satisfied with the attitude
+of the police here," the other continued, with every appearance of
+mental fatigue.
+
+The shoulders of Mr Verloc, without actually moving, suggested a
+shrug.  And for the first time since he left his home that morning
+his lips opened.
+
+"Every country has its police," he said philosophically.  But as
+the official of the Embassy went on blinking at him steadily he
+felt constrained to add: "Allow me to observe that I have no means
+of action upon the police here."
+
+"What is desired," said the man of papers, "is the occurrence of
+something definite which should stimulate their vigilance.  That is
+within your province - is it not so?"
+
+Mr Verloc made no answer except by a sigh, which escaped him
+involuntarily, for instantly he tried to give his face a cheerful
+expression.  The official blinked doubtfully, as if affected by the
+dim light of the room.  He repeated vaguely.
+
+"The vigilance of the police - and the severity of the magistrates.
+The general leniency of the judicial procedure here, and the utter
+absence of all repressive measures, are a scandal to Europe.  What
+is wished for just now is the accentuation of the unrest - of the
+fermentation which undoubtedly exists - "
+
+"Undoubtedly, undoubtedly," broke in Mr Verloc in a deep
+deferential bass of an oratorical quality, so utterly different
+from the tone in which he had spoken before that his interlocutor
+remained profoundly surprised.  "It exists to a dangerous degree.
+My reports for the last twelve months make it sufficiently clear."
+
+"Your reports for the last twelve months," State Councillor Wurmt
+began in his gentle and dispassionate tone, "have been read by me.
+I failed to discover why you wrote them at all."
+
+A sad silence reigned for a time.  Mr Verloc seemed to have
+swallowed his tongue, and the other gazed at the papers on the
+table fixedly.  At last he gave them a slight push.
+
+"The state of affairs you expose there is assumed to exist as the
+first condition of your employment.  What is required at present is
+not writing, but the bringing to light of a distinct, significant
+fact - I would almost say of an alarming fact."
+
+"I need not say that all my endeavours shall be directed to that
+end," Mr Verloc said, with convinced modulations in his
+conversational husky tone.  But the sense of being blinked at
+watchfully behind the blind glitter of these eye-glasses on the
+other side of the table disconcerted him.  He stopped short with a
+gesture of absolute devotion.  The useful, hard-working, if obscure
+member of the Embassy had an air of being impressed by some newly-
+born thought.
+
+"You are very corpulent," he said.
+
+This observation, really of a psychological nature, and advanced
+with the modest hesitation of an officeman more familiar with ink
+and paper than with the requirements of active life, stung Mr
+Verloc in the manner of a rude personal remark.  He stepped back a
+pace.
+
+"Eh?  What were you pleased to say?" he exclaimed, with husky
+resentment.
+
+The Chancelier d'Ambassade entrusted with the conduct of this
+interview seemed to find it too much for him.
+
+"I think," he said, "that you had better see Mr Vladimir.  Yes,
+decidedly I think you ought to see Mr Vladimir.  Be good enough to
+wait here," he added, and went out with mincing steps.
+
+At once Mr Verloc passed his hand over his hair.  A slight
+perspiration had broken out on his forehead.  He let the air escape
+from his pursed-up lips like a man blowing at a spoonful of hot
+soup.  But when the servant in brown appeared at the door silently,
+Mr Verloc had not moved an inch from the place he had occupied
+throughout the interview.  He had remained motionless, as if
+feeling himself surrounded by pitfalls.
+
+He walked along a passage lighted by a lonely gas-jet, then up a
+flight of winding stairs, and through a glazed and cheerful
+corridor on the first floor.  The footman threw open a door, and
+stood aside.  The feet of Mr Verloc felt a thick carpet.  The room
+was large, with three windows; and a young man with a shaven, big
+face, sitting in a roomy arm-chair before a vast mahogany writing-
+table, said in French to the Chancelier d'Ambassade, who was going
+out with, the papers in his hand:
+
+"You are quite right, mon cher.  He's fat - the animal."
+
+Mr Vladimir, First Secretary, had a drawing-room reputation as an
+agreeable and entertaining man.  He was something of a favourite in
+society.  His wit consisted in discovering droll connections
+between incongruous ideas; and when talking in that strain he sat
+well forward of his seat, with his left hand raised, as if
+exhibiting his funny demonstrations between the thumb and
+forefinger, while his round and clean-shaven face wore an
+expression of merry perplexity.
+
+But there was no trace of merriment or perplexity in the way he
+looked at Mr Verloc.  Lying far back in the deep arm-chair, with
+squarely spread elbows, and throwing one leg over a thick knee, he
+had with his smooth and rosy countenance the air of a
+preternaturally thriving baby that will not stand nonsense from
+anybody.
+
+"You understand French, I suppose?" he said.
+
+Mr Verloc stated huskily that he did.  His whole vast bulk had a
+forward inclination.  He stood on the carpet in the middle of the
+room, clutching his hat and stick in one hand; the other hung
+lifelessly by his side.  He muttered unobtrusively somewhere deep
+down in his throat something about having done his military service
+in the French artillery.  At once, with contemptuous perversity, Mr
+Vladimir changed the language, and began to speak idiomatic English
+without the slightest trace of a foreign accent.
+
+"Ah!  Yes.  Of course.  Let's see.  How much did you get for
+obtaining the design of the improved breech-block of their new
+field-gun?"
+
+"Five years' rigorous confinement in a fortress," Mr Verloc
+answered unexpectedly, but without any sign of feeling.
+
+"You got off easily," was Mr Vladimir's comment.  "And, anyhow, it
+served you right for letting yourself get caught.  What made you go
+in for that sort of thing - eh?"
+
+Mr Verloc's husky conversational voice was heard speaking of youth,
+of a fatal infatuation for an unworthy -
+
+"Aha!  Cherchez la femme," Mr Vladimir deigned to interrupt,
+unbending, but without affability; there was, on the contrary, a
+touch of grimness in his condescension.  "How long have you been
+employed by the Embassy here?" he asked.
+
+"Ever since the time of the late Baron Stott-Wartenheim," Mr Verloc
+answered in subdued tones, and protruding his lips sadly, in sign
+of sorrow for the deceased diplomat.  The First Secretary observed
+this play of physiognomy steadily.
+
+"Ah! ever since.  Well!  What have you got to say for yourself?" he
+asked sharply.
+
+Mr Verloc answered with some surprise that he was not aware of
+having anything special to say.  He had been summoned by a letter -
+And he plunged his hand busily into the side pocket of his
+overcoat, but before the mocking, cynical watchfulness of Mr
+Vladimir, concluded to leave it there.
+
+"Bah!" said that latter.  "What do you mean by getting out of
+condition like this?  You haven't got even the physique of your
+profession.  You - a member of a starving proletariat - never!  You
+- a desperate socialist or anarchist - which is it?"
+
+"Anarchist," stated Mr Verloc in a deadened tone.
+
+"Bosh!" went on Mr Vladimir, without raising his voice.  "You
+startled old Wurmt himself.  You wouldn't deceive an idiot.  They
+all are that by-the-by, but you seem to me simply impossible.  So
+you began your connection with us by stealing the French gun
+designs.  And you got yourself caught.  That must have been very
+disagreeable to our Government.  You don't seem to be very smart."
+
+Mr Verloc tried to exculpate himself huskily.
+
+"As I've had occasion to observe before, a fatal infatuation for an
+unworthy - "
+
+Mr Vladimir raised a large white, plump hand.  "Ah, yes.  The
+unlucky attachment - of your youth.  She got hold of the money, and
+then sold you to the police - eh?"
+
+The doleful change in Mr Verloc's physiognomy, the momentary
+drooping of his whole person, confessed that such was the
+regrettable case.  Mr Vladimir's hand clasped the ankle reposing on
+his knee.  The sock was of dark blue silk.
+
+"You see, that was not very clever of you.  Perhaps you are too
+susceptible."
+
+Mr Verloc intimated in a throaty, veiled murmur that he was no
+longer young.
+
+"Oh!  That's a failing which age does not cure," Mr Vladimir
+remarked, with sinister familiarity.  "But no!  You are too fat for
+that.  You could not have come to look like this if you had been at
+all susceptible.  I'll tell you what I think is the matter: you are
+a lazy fellow.  How long have you been drawing pay from this
+Embassy?"
+
+"Eleven years," was the answer, after a moment of sulky hesitation.
+"I've been charged with several missions to London while His
+Excellency Baron Stott-Wartenheim was still Ambassador in Paris.
+Then by his Excellency's instructions I settled down in London.  I
+am English."
+
+"You are!  Are you?  Eh?"
+
+"A natural-born British subject," Mr Verloc said stolidly.  "But my
+father was French, and so - "
+
+"Never mind explaining," interrupted the other.  "I daresay you
+could have been legally a Marshal of France and a Member of
+Parliament in England - and then, indeed, you would have been of
+some use to our Embassy."
+
+This flight of fancy provoked something like a faint smile on Mr
+Verloc's face.  Mr Vladimir retained an imperturbable gravity.
+
+"But, as I've said, you are a lazy fellow; you don't use your
+opportunities.  In the time of Baron Stott-Wartenheim we had a lot
+of soft-headed people running this Embassy.  They caused fellows of
+your sort to form a false conception of the nature of a secret
+service fund.  It is my business to correct this misapprehension by
+telling you what the secret service is not.  It is not a
+philanthropic institution.  I've had you called here on purpose to
+tell you this."
+
+Mr Vladimir observed the forced expression of bewilderment on
+Verloc's face, and smiled sarcastically.
+
+"I see that you understand me perfectly.  I daresay you are
+intelligent enough for your work.  What we want now is activity -
+activity."
+
+On repeating this last word Mr Vladimir laid a long white
+forefinger on the edge of the desk.  Every trace of huskiness
+disappeared from Verloc's voice.  The nape of his gross neck became
+crimson above the velvet collar of his overcoat.  His lips quivered
+before they came widely open.
+
+"If you'll only be good enough to look up my record," he boomed out
+in his great, clear oratorical bass, "you'll see I gave a warning
+only three months ago, on the occasion of the Grand Duke Romuald's
+visit to Paris, which was telegraphed from here to the French
+police, and - "
+
+"Tut, tut!" broke out Mr Vladimir, with a frowning grimace.  "The
+French police had no use for your warning.  Don't roar like this.
+What the devil do you mean?"
+
+With a note of proud humility Mr Verloc apologised for forgetting
+himself.  His voice, - famous for years at open-air meetings and at
+workmen's assemblies in large halls, had contributed, he said, to
+his reputation of a good and trustworthy comrade.  It was,
+therefore, a part of his usefulness.  It had inspired confidence in
+his principles.  "I was always put up to speak by the leaders at a
+critical moment," Mr Verloc declared, with obvious satisfaction.
+There was no uproar above which he could not make himself heard, he
+added; and suddenly he made a demonstration.
+
+"Allow me," he said.  With lowered forehead, without looking up,
+swiftly and ponderously he crossed the room to one of the French
+windows.  As if giving way to an uncontrollable impulse, he opened
+it a little.  Mr Vladimir, jumping up amazed from the depths of the
+arm-chair, looked over his shoulder; and below, across the
+courtyard of the Embassy, well beyond the open gate, could be seen
+the broad back of a policeman watching idly the gorgeous
+perambulator of a wealthy baby being wheeled in state across the
+Square.
+
+"Constable!" said Mr Verloc, with no more effort than if he were
+whispering; and Mr Vladimir burst into a laugh on seeing the
+policeman spin round as if prodded by a sharp instrument.  Mr
+Verloc shut the window quietly, and returned to the middle of the
+room.
+
+"With a voice like that," he said, putting on the husky
+conversational pedal, "I was naturally trusted.  And I knew what to
+say, too."
+
+Mr Vladimir, arranging his cravat, observed him in the glass over
+the mantelpiece.
+
+"I daresay you have the social revolutionary jargon by heart well
+enough," he said contemptuously.  "Vox et. . . You haven't ever
+studied Latin - have you?"
+
+"No," growled Mr Verloc.  "You did not expect me to know it.  I
+belong to the million.  Who knows Latin?  Only a few hundred
+imbeciles who aren't fit to take care of themselves."
+
+For some thirty seconds longer Mr Vladimir studied in the mirror
+the fleshy profile, the gross bulk, of the man behind him.  And at
+the same time he had the advantage of seeing his own face, clean-
+shaved and round, rosy about the gills, and with the thin sensitive
+lips formed exactly for the utterance of those delicate witticisms
+which had made him such a favourite in the very highest society.
+Then he turned, and advanced into the room with such determination
+that the very ends of his quaintly old-fashioned bow necktie seemed
+to bristle with unspeakable menaces.  The movement was so swift and
+fierce that Mr Verloc, casting an oblique glance, quailed inwardly.
+
+"Aha!  You dare be impudent," Mr Vladimir began, with an amazingly
+guttural intonation not only utterly un-English, but absolutely un-
+European, and startling even to Mr Verloc's experience of
+cosmopolitan slums.  "You dare!  Well, I am going to speak plain
+English to you.  Voice won't do.  We have no use for your voice.
+We don't want a voice.  We want facts - startling facts - damn
+you," he added, with a sort of ferocious discretion, right into Mr
+Verloc's face.
+
+"Don't you try to come over me with your Hyperborean manners," Mr
+Verloc defended himself huskily, looking at the carpet.  At this
+his interlocutor, smiling mockingly above the bristling bow of his
+necktie, switched the conversation into French.
+
+"You give yourself for an `agent provocateur.'  The proper business
+of an `agent provocateur' is to provoke.  As far as I can judge
+from your record kept here, you have done nothing to earn your
+money for the last three years."
+
+"Nothing!" exclaimed Verloc, stirring not a limb, and not raising
+his eyes, but with the note of sincere feeling in his tone.  "I
+have several times prevented what might have been - "
+
+"There is a proverb in this country which says prevention is better
+than cure," interrupted Mr Vladimir, throwing himself into the arm-
+chair.  "It is stupid in a general way.  There is no end to
+prevention.  But it is characteristic.  They dislike finality in
+this country.  Don't you be too English.  And in this particular
+instance, don't be absurd.  The evil is already here.  We don't
+want prevention - we want cure."
+
+He paused, turned to the desk, and turning over some papers lying
+there, spoke in a changed business-like tone, without looking at Mr
+Verloc.
+
+"You know, of course, of the International Conference assembled in
+Milan?"
+
+Mr Verloc intimated hoarsely that he was in the habit of reading
+the daily papers.  To a further question his answer was that, of
+course, he understood what he read.  At this Mr Vladimir, smiling
+faintly at the documents he was still scanning one after another,
+murmured "As long as it is not written in Latin, I suppose."
+
+"Or Chinese," added Mr Verloc stolidly.
+
+"H'm.  Some of your revolutionary friends' effusions are written in
+a CHARABIA every bit as incomprehensible as Chinese - "  Mr
+Vladimir let fall disdainfully a grey sheet of printed matter.
+"What are all these leaflets headed F. P., with a hammer, pen, and
+torch crossed?  What does it mean, this F. P.?"  Mr Verloc
+approached the imposing writing-table.
+
+"The Future of the Proletariat.  It's a society," he explained,
+standing ponderously by the side of the arm-chair, "not anarchist
+in principle, but open to all shades of revolutionary opinion."
+
+"Are you in it?"
+
+"One of the Vice-Presidents," Mr Verloc breathed out heavily; and
+the First Secretary of the Embassy raised his head to look at him.
+
+"Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself," he said incisively.
+"Isn't your society capable of anything else but printing this
+prophetic bosh in blunt type on this filthy paper eh?  Why don't
+you do something?  Look here.  I've this matter in hand now, and I
+tell you plainly that you will have to earn your money.  The good
+old Stott-Wartenheim times are over.  No work, no pay."
+
+Mr Verloc felt a queer sensation of faintness in his stout legs.
+He stepped back one pace, and blew his nose loudly.
+
+He was, in truth, startled and alarmed.  The rusty London sunshine
+struggling clear of the London mist shed a lukewarm brightness into
+the First Secretary's private room; and in the silence Mr Verloc
+heard against a window-pane the faint buzzing of a fly - his first
+fly of the year - heralding better than any number of swallows the
+approach of spring.  The useless fussing of that tiny energetic
+organism affected unpleasantly this big man threatened in his
+indolence.
+
+In the pause Mr Vladimir formulated in his mind a series of
+disparaging remarks concerning Mr Verloc's face and figure.  The
+fellow was unexpectedly vulgar, heavy, and impudently
+unintelligent.  He looked uncommonly like a master plumber come to
+present his bill.  The First Secretary of the Embassy, from his
+occasional excursions into the field of American humour, had formed
+a special notion of that class of mechanic as the embodiment of
+fraudulent laziness and incompetency.
+
+This was then the famous and trusty secret agent, so secret that he
+was never designated otherwise but by the symbol [delta] in the
+late Baron Stott-Wartenheim's official, semi-official, and
+confidential correspondence; the celebrated agent [delta], whose
+warnings had the power to change the schemes and the dates of
+royal, imperial, grand ducal journeys, and sometimes caused them to
+be put off altogether!  This fellow!  And Mr Vladimir indulged
+mentally in an enormous and derisive fit of merriment, partly at
+his own astonishment, which he judged naive, but mostly at the
+expense of the universally regretted Baron Stott-Wartenheim.  His
+late Excellency, whom the august favour of his Imperial master had
+imposed as Ambassador upon several reluctant Ministers of Foreign
+Affairs, had enjoyed in his lifetime a fame for an owlish,
+pessimistic gullibility.  His Excellency had the social revolution
+on the brain.  He imagined himself to be a diplomatist set apart by
+a special dispensation to watch the end of diplomacy, and pretty
+nearly the end of the world, in a horrid democratic upheaval.  His
+prophetic and doleful despatches had been for years the joke of
+Foreign Offices.  He was said to have exclaimed on his deathbed
+(visited by his Imperial friend and master): "Unhappy Europe!  Thou
+shalt perish by the moral insanity of thy children!"  He was fated
+to be the victim of the first humbugging rascal that came along,
+thought Mr Vladimir, smiling vaguely at Mr Verloc.
+
+"You ought to venerate the memory of Baron Stott-Wartenheim," he
+exclaimed suddenly.
+
+The lowered physiognomy of Mr Verloc expressed a sombre and weary
+annoyance.
+
+"Permit me to observe to you," he said, "that I came here because I
+was summoned by a peremptory letter.  I have been here only twice
+before in the last eleven years, and certainly never at eleven in
+the morning.  It isn't very wise to call me up like this.  There is
+just a chance of being seen.  And that would be no joke for me."
+
+Mr Vladimir shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"It would destroy my usefulness," continued the other hotly.
+
+"That's your affair," murmured Mr Vladimir, with soft brutality.
+"When you cease to be useful you shall cease to be employed.  Yes.
+Right off.  Cut short.  You shall - " Mr Vladimir, frowning,
+paused, at a loss for a sufficiently idiomatic expression, and
+instantly brightened up, with a grin of beautifully white teeth.
+"You shall be chucked," he brought out ferociously.
+
+Once more Mr Verloc had to react with all the force of his will
+against that sensation of faintness running down one's legs which
+once upon a time had inspired some poor devil with the felicitous
+expression: "My heart went down into my boots."  Mr Verloc, aware
+of the sensation, raised his head bravely.
+
+Mr Vladimir bore the look of heavy inquiry with perfect serenity.
+
+"What we want is to administer a tonic to the Conference in Milan,"
+he said airily.  "Its deliberations upon international action for
+the suppression of political crime don't seem to get anywhere.
+England lags.  This country is absurd with its sentimental regard
+for individual liberty.  It's intolerable to think that all your
+friends have got only to come over to - "
+
+"In that way I have them all under my eye," Mr Verloc interrupted
+huskily.
+
+"It would be much more to the point to have them all under lock and
+key.  England must be brought into line.  The imbecile bourgeoisie
+of this country make themselves the accomplices of the very people
+whose aim is to drive them out of their houses to starve in
+ditches.  And they have the political power still, if they only had
+the sense to use it for their preservation.  I suppose you agree
+that the middle classes are stupid?"
+
+Mr Verloc agreed hoarsely.
+
+"They are."
+
+"They have no imagination.  They are blinded by an idiotic vanity.
+What they want just now is a jolly good scare.  This is the
+psychological moment to set your friends to work.  I have had you
+called here to develop to you my idea."
+
+And Mr Vladimir developed his idea from on high, with scorn and
+condescension, displaying at the same time an amount of ignorance
+as to the real aims, thoughts, and methods of the revolutionary
+world which filled the silent Mr Verloc with inward consternation.
+He confounded causes with effects more than was excusable; the most
+distinguished propagandists with impulsive bomb throwers; assumed
+organisation where in the nature of things it could not exist;
+spoke of the social revolutionary party one moment as of a
+perfectly disciplined army, where the word of chiefs was supreme,
+and at another as if it had been the loosest association of
+desperate brigands that ever camped in a mountain gorge.  Once Mr
+Verloc had opened his mouth for a protest, but the raising of a
+shapely, large white hand arrested him.  Very soon he became too
+appalled to even try to protest.  He listened in a stillness of
+dread which resembled the immobility of profound attention.
+
+"A series of outrages," Mr Vladimir continued calmly, "executed
+here in this country; not only PLANNED here - that would not do -
+they would not mind.  Your friends could set half the Continent on
+fire without influencing the public opinion here in favour of a
+universal repressive legislation.  They will not look outside their
+backyard here."
+
+Mr Verloc cleared his throat, but his heart failed him, and he said
+nothing.
+
+"These outrages need not be especially sanguinary," Mr Vladimir
+went on, as if delivering a scientific lecture, "but they must be
+sufficiently startling - effective.  Let them be directed against
+buildings, for instance.  What is the fetish of the hour that all
+the bourgeoisie recognise - eh, Mr Verloc?"
+
+Mr Verloc opened his hands and shrugged his shoulders slightly.
+
+"You are too lazy to think," was Mr Vladimir's comment upon that
+gesture.  "Pay attention to what I say.  The fetish of to-day is
+neither royalty nor religion.  Therefore the palace and the church
+should be left alone.  You understand what I mean, Mr Verloc?"
+
+The dismay and the scorn of Mr Verloc found vent in an attempt at
+levity.
+
+"Perfectly.  But what of the Embassies?  A series of attacks on the
+various Embassies," he began; but he could not withstand the cold,
+watchful stare of the First Secretary.
+
+"You can be facetious, I see," the latter observed carelessly.
+"That's all right.  It may enliven your oratory at socialistic
+congresses.  But this room is no place for it.  It would be
+infinitely safer for you to follow carefully what I am saying.  As
+you are being called upon to furnish facts instead of cock-and-bull
+stories, you had better try to make your profit off what I am
+taking the trouble to explain to you.  The sacrosanct fetish of to-
+day is science.  Why don't you get some of your friends to go for
+that wooden-faced panjandrum - eh?  Is it not part of these
+institutions which must be swept away before the F. P. comes
+along?"
+
+Mr Verloc said nothing.  He was afraid to open his lips lest a
+groan should escape him.
+
+"This is what you should try for.  An attempt upon a crowned head
+or on a president is sensational enough in a way, but not so much
+as it used to be.  It has entered into the general conception of
+the existence of all chiefs of state.  It's almost conventional -
+especially since so many presidents have been assassinated.  Now
+let us take an outrage upon - say a church.  Horrible enough at
+first sight, no doubt, and yet not so effective as a person of an
+ordinary mind might think.  No matter how revolutionary and
+anarchist in inception, there would be fools enough to give such an
+outrage the character of a religious manifestation.  And that would
+detract from the especial alarming significance we wish to give to
+the act.  A murderous attempt on a restaurant or a theatre would
+suffer in the same way from the suggestion of non-political
+passion: the exasperation of a hungry man, an act of social
+revenge.  All this is used up; it is no longer instructive as an
+object lesson in revolutionary anarchism.  Every newspaper has
+ready-made phrases to explain such manifestations away.  I am about
+to give you the philosophy of bomb throwing from my point of view;
+from the point of view you pretend to have been serving for the
+last eleven years.  I will try not to talk above your head.  The
+sensibilities of the class you are attacking are soon blunted.
+Property seems to them an indestructible thing.  You can't count
+upon their emotions either of pity or fear for very long.  A bomb
+outrage to have any influence on public opinion now must go beyond
+the intention of vengeance or terrorism.  It must be purely
+destructive.  It must be that, and only that, beyond the faintest
+suspicion of any other object.  You anarchists should make it clear
+that you are perfectly determined to make a clean sweep of the
+whole social creation.  But how to get that appallingly absurd
+notion into the heads of the middle classes so that there should be
+no mistake?  That's the question.  By directing your blows at
+something outside the ordinary passions of humanity is the answer.
+Of course, there is art.  A bomb in the National Gallery would make
+some noise.  But it would not be serious enough.  Art has never
+been their fetish.  It's like breaking a few back windows in a
+man's house; whereas, if you want to make him really sit up, you
+must try at least to raise the roof.  There would be some screaming
+of course, but from whom?  Artists - art critics and such like -
+people of no account.  Nobody minds what they say.  But there is
+learning - science.  Any imbecile that has got an income believes
+in that.  He does not know why, but he believes it matters somehow.
+It is the sacrosanct fetish.  All the damned professors are
+radicals at heart.  Let them know that their great panjandrum has
+got to go too, to make room for the Future of the Proletariat.  A
+howl from all these intellectual idiots is bound to help forward
+the labours of the Milan Conference.  They will be writing to the
+papers.  Their indignation would be above suspicion, no material
+interests being openly at stake, and it will alarm every
+selfishness of the class which should be impressed.  They believe
+that in some mysterious way science is at the source of their
+material prosperity.  They do.  And the absurd ferocity of such a
+demonstration will affect them more profoundly than the mangling of
+a whole street - or theatre - full of their own kind.  To that last
+they can always say: `Oh! it's mere class hate.'  But what is one
+to say to an act of destructive ferocity so absurd as to be
+incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable; in fact, mad?
+Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate
+it either by threats, persuasion, or bribes.  Moreover, I am a
+civilised man.  I would never dream of directing you to organise a
+mere butchery, even if I expected the best results from it.  But I
+wouldn't expect from a butchery the result I want.  Murder is
+always with us.  It is almost an institution.  The demonstration
+must be against learning  - science.  But not every science will
+do.  The attack must have all the shocking senselessness of
+gratuitous blasphemy.  Since bombs are your means of expression, it
+would be really telling if one could throw a bomb into pure
+mathematics.  But that is impossible.  I have been trying to
+educate you; I have expounded to you the higher philosophy of your
+usefulness, and suggested to you some serviceable arguments.  The
+practical application of my teaching interests YOU mostly.  But
+from the moment I have undertaken to interview you I have also
+given some attention to the practical aspect of the question.  What
+do you think of having a go at astronomy?"
+
+For sometime already Mr Verloc's immobility by the side of the arm-
+chair resembled a state of collapsed coma - a sort of passive
+insensibility interrupted by slight convulsive starts, such as may
+be observed in the domestic dog having a nightmare on the
+hearthrug.  And it was in an uneasy doglike growl that he repeated
+the word:
+
+"Astronomy."
+
+He had not recovered thoroughly as yet from that state of
+bewilderment brought about by the effort to follow Mr Vladimir's
+rapid incisive utterance.  It had overcome his power of
+assimilation.  It had made him angry.  This anger was complicated
+by incredulity.  And suddenly it dawned upon him that all this was
+an elaborate joke.  Mr Vladimir exhibited his white teeth in a
+smile, with dimples on his round, full face posed with a complacent
+inclination above the bristling bow of his neck-tie.  The favourite
+of intelligent society women had assumed his drawing-room attitude
+accompanying the delivery of delicate witticisms.  Sitting well
+forward, his white hand upraised, he seemed to hold delicately
+between his thumb and forefinger the subtlety of his suggestion.
+
+"There could be nothing better.  Such an outrage combines the
+greatest possible regard for humanity with the most alarming
+display of ferocious imbecility.  I defy the ingenuity of
+journalists to persuade their public that any given member of the
+proletariat can have a personal grievance against astronomy.
+Starvation itself could hardly be dragged in there - eh?  And there
+are other advantages.  The whole civilised world has heard of
+Greenwich.  The very boot-blacks in the basement of Charing Cross
+Station know something of it.  See?"
+
+The features of Mr Vladimir, so well known in the best society by
+their humorous urbanity, beamed with cynical self-satisfaction,
+which would have astonished the intelligent women his wit
+entertained so exquisitely.  "Yes," he continued, with a
+contemptuous smile, "the blowing up of the first meridian is bound
+to raise a howl of execration."
+
+"A difficult business," Mr Verloc mumbled, feeling that this was
+the only safe thing to say.
+
+"What is the matter?  Haven't you the whole gang under your hand?
+The very pick of the basket?  That old terrorist Yundt is here.  I
+see him walking about Piccadilly in his green havelock almost every
+day.  And Michaelis, the ticket-of-leave apostle - you don't mean
+to say you don't know where he is?  Because if you don't, I can
+tell you," Mr Vladimir went on menacingly.  "If you imagine that
+you are the only one on the secret fund list, you are mistaken."
+
+This perfectly gratuitous suggestion caused Mr Verloc to shuffle
+his feet slightly.
+
+"And the whole Lausanne lot - eh?  Haven't they been flocking over
+here at the first hint of the Milan Conference?  This is an absurd
+country."
+
+"It will cost money," Mr Verloc said, by a sort of instinct.
+
+"That cock won't fight," Mr Vladimir retorted, with an amazingly
+genuine English accent.  "You'll get your screw every month, and no
+more till something happens.  And if nothing happens very soon you
+won't get even that.  What's your ostensible occupation?  What are
+you supposed to live by?"
+
+"I keep a shop," answered Mr Verloc.
+
+"A shop!  What sort of shop?"
+
+"Stationery, newspapers.  My wife - "
+
+"Your what?" interrupted Mr Vladimir in his guttural Central Asian
+tones.
+
+"My wife."  Mr Verloc raised his husky voice slightly.  "I am
+married."
+
+"That be damned for a yarn," exclaimed the other in unfeigned
+astonishment.  "Married!  And you a professed anarchist, too!  What
+is this confounded nonsense?  But I suppose it's merely a manner of
+speaking.  Anarchists don't marry.  It's well known.  They can't.
+It would be apostasy."
+
+"My wife isn't one," Mr Verloc mumbled sulkily.  "Moreover, it's no
+concern of yours."
+
+"Oh yes, it is," snapped Mr Vladimir.  "I am beginning to be
+convinced that you are not at all the man for the work you've been
+employed on.  Why, you must have discredited yourself completely in
+your own world by your marriage.  Couldn't you have managed
+without?  This is your virtuous attachment - eh?  What with one
+sort of attachment and another you are doing away with your
+usefulness."
+
+Mr Verloc, puffing out his cheeks, let the air escape violently,
+and that was all.  He had armed himself with patience.  It was not
+to be tried much longer.  The First Secretary became suddenly very
+curt, detached, final.
+
+"You may go now," he said.  "A dynamite outrage must be provoked.
+I give you a month.  The sittings of the Conference are suspended.
+Before it reassembles again something must have happened here, or
+your connection with us ceases."
+
+He changed the note once more with an unprincipled versatility.
+
+"Think over my philosophy, Mr - Mr - Verloc," he said, with a sort
+of chaffing condescension, waving his hand towards the door.  "Go
+for the first meridian.  You don't know the middle classes as well
+as I do.  Their sensibilities are jaded.  The first meridian.
+Nothing better, and nothing easier, I should think."
+
+He had got up, and with his thin sensitive lips twitching
+humorously, watched in the glass over the mantelpiece Mr Verloc
+backing out of the room heavily, hat and stick in hand.  The door
+closed.
+
+The footman in trousers, appearing suddenly in the corridor, let Mr
+Verloc another way out and through a small door in the corner of
+the courtyard.  The porter standing at the gate ignored his exit
+completely; and Mr Verloc retraced the path of his morning's
+pilgrimage as if in a dream - an angry dream.  This detachment from
+the material world was so complete that, though the mortal envelope
+of Mr Verloc had not hastened unduly along the streets, that part
+of him to which it would be unwarrantably rude to refuse
+immortality, found itself at the shop door all at once, as if borne
+from west to east on the wings of a great wind.  He walked straight
+behind the counter, and sat down on a wooden chair that stood
+there.  No one appeared to disturb his solitude.  Stevie, put into
+a green baize apron, was now sweeping and dusting upstairs, intent
+and conscientious, as though he were playing at it; and Mrs Verloc,
+warned in the kitchen by the clatter of the cracked bell, had
+merely come to the glazed door of the parlour, and putting the
+curtain aside a little, had peered into the dim shop.  Seeing her
+husband sitting there shadowy and bulky, with his hat tilted far
+back on his head, she had at once returned to her stove.  An hour
+or more later she took the green baize apron off her brother
+Stevie, and instructed him to wash his hands and face in the
+peremptory tone she had used in that connection for fifteen years
+or so - ever since she had, in fact, ceased to attend to the boy's
+hands and face herself.  She spared presently a glance away from
+her dishing-up for the inspection of that face and those hands
+which Stevie, approaching the kitchen table, offered for her
+approval with an air of self-assurance hiding a perpetual residue
+of anxiety.  Formerly the anger of the father was the supremely
+effective sanction of these rites, but Mr Verloc's placidity in
+domestic life would have made all mention of anger incredible even
+to poor Stevie's nervousness.  The theory was that Mr Verloc would
+have been inexpressibly pained and shocked by any deficiency of
+cleanliness at meal times.  Winnie after the death of her father
+found considerable consolation in the feeling that she need no
+longer tremble for poor Stevie.  She could not bear to see the boy
+hurt.  It maddened her.  As a little girl she had often faced with
+blazing eyes the irascible licensed victualler in defence of her
+brother.  Nothing now in Mrs Verloc's appearance could lead one to
+suppose that she was capable of a passionate demonstration.
+
+She finished her dishing-up.  The table was laid in the parlour.
+Going to the foot of the stairs, she screamed out "Mother!"  Then
+opening the glazed door leading to the shop, she said quietly
+"Adolf!"  Mr Verloc had not changed his position; he had not
+apparently stirred a limb for an hour and a half.  He got up
+heavily, and came to his dinner in his overcoat and with his hat
+on, without uttering a word.  His silence in itself had nothing
+startlingly unusual in this household, hidden in the shades of the
+sordid street seldom touched by the sun, behind the dim shop with
+its wares of disreputable rubbish.  Only that day Mr Verloc's
+taciturnity was so obviously thoughtful that the two women were
+impressed by it.  They sat silent themselves, keeping a watchful
+eye on poor Stevie, lest he should break out into one of his fits
+of loquacity.  He faced Mr Verloc across the table, and remained
+very good and quiet, staring vacantly.  The endeavour to keep him
+from making himself objectionable in any way to the master of the
+house put no inconsiderable anxiety into these two women's lives.
+"That boy," as they alluded to him softly between themselves, had
+been a source of that sort of anxiety almost from the very day of
+his birth.  The late licensed victualler's humiliation at having
+such a very peculiar boy for a son manifested itself by a
+propensity to brutal treatment; for he was a person of fine
+sensibilities, and his sufferings as a man and a father were
+perfectly genuine.  Afterwards Stevie had to be kept from making
+himself a nuisance to the single gentlemen lodgers, who are
+themselves a queer lot, and are easily aggrieved.  And there was
+always the anxiety of his mere existence to face.  Visions of a
+workhouse infirmary for her child had haunted the old woman in the
+basement breakfast-room of the decayed Belgravian house.  "If you
+had not found such a good husband, my dear," she used to say to her
+daughter, "I don't know what would have become of that poor boy."
+
+Mr Verloc extended as much recognition to Stevie as a man not
+particularly fond of animals may give to his wife's beloved cat;
+and this recognition, benevolent and perfunctory, was essentially
+of the same quality.  Both women admitted to themselves that not
+much more could be reasonably expected.  It was enough to earn for
+Mr Verloc the old woman's reverential gratitude.  In the early
+days, made sceptical by the trials of friendless life, she used
+sometimes to ask anxiously: "You don't think, my dear, that Mr
+Verloc is getting tired of seeing Stevie about?"  To this Winnie
+replied habitually by a slight toss of her head.  Once, however,
+she retorted, with a rather grim pertness: "He'll have to get tired
+of me first."  A long silence ensued.  The mother, with her feet
+propped up on a stool, seemed to be trying to get to the bottom of
+that answer, whose feminine profundity had struck her all of a
+heap.  She had never really understood why Winnie had married Mr
+Verloc.  It was very sensible of her, and evidently had turned out
+for the best, but her girl might have naturally hoped to find
+somebody of a more suitable age.  There had been a steady young
+fellow, only son of a butcher in the next street, helping his
+father in business, with whom Winnie had been walking out with
+obvious gusto.  He was dependent on his father, it is true; but the
+business was good, and his prospects excellent.  He took her girl
+to the theatre on several evenings.  Then just as she began to
+dread to hear of their engagement (for what could she have done
+with that big house alone, with Stevie on her hands), that romance
+came to an abrupt end, and Winnie went about looking very dull.
+But Mr Verloc, turning up providentially to occupy the first-floor
+front bedroom, there had been no more question of the young
+butcher.  It was clearly providential.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+
+" . . . All idealisation makes life poorer.  To beautify it is to
+take away its character of complexity - it is to destroy it.  Leave
+that to the moralists, my boy.  History is made by men, but they do
+not make it in their heads.  The ideas that are born in their
+consciousness play an insignificant part in the march of events.
+History is dominated and determined by the tool and the production
+- by the force of economic conditions.  Capitalism has made
+socialism, and the laws made by the capitalism for the protection
+of property are responsible for anarchism.  No one can tell what
+form the social organisation may take in the future.  Then why
+indulge in prophetic phantasies?  At best they can only interpret
+the mind of the prophet, and can have no objective value.  Leave
+that pastime to the moralists, my boy."
+
+Michaelis, the ticket-of-leave apostle, was speaking in an even
+voice, a voice that wheezed as if deadened and oppressed by the
+layer of fat on his chest.  He had come out of a highly hygienic
+prison round like a tub, with an enormous stomach and distended
+cheeks of a pale, semi-transparent complexion, as though for
+fifteen years the servants of an outraged society had made a point
+of stuffing him with fattening foods in a damp and lightless
+cellar.  And ever since he had never managed to get his weight down
+as much as an ounce.
+
+It was said that for three seasons running a very wealthy old lady
+had sent him for a cure to Marienbad - where he was about to share
+the public curiosity once with a crowned head - but the police on
+that occasion ordered him to leave within twelve hours.  His
+martyrdom was continued by forbidding him all access to the healing
+waters.  But he was resigned now.
+
+With his elbow presenting no appearance of a joint, but more like a
+bend in a dummy's limb, thrown over the back of a chair, he leaned
+forward slightly over his short and enormous thighs to spit into
+the grate.
+
+"Yes!  I had the time to think things out a little," he added
+without emphasis.  "Society has given me plenty of time for
+meditation."
+
+On the other side of the fireplace, in the horse-hair arm-chair
+where Mrs Verloc's mother was generally privileged to sit, Karl
+Yundt giggled grimly, with a faint black grimace of a toothless
+mouth.  The terrorist, as he called himself, was old and bald, with
+a narrow, snow-white wisp of a goatee hanging limply from his chin.
+An extraordinary expression of underhand malevolence survived in
+his extinguished eyes.  When he rose painfully the thrusting
+forward of a skinny groping hand deformed by gouty swellings
+suggested the effort of a moribund murderer summoning all his
+remaining strength for a last stab.  He leaned on a thick stick,
+which trembled under his other hand.
+
+"I have always dreamed," he mouthed fiercely, "of a band of men
+absolute in their resolve to discard all scruples in the choice of
+means, strong enough to give themselves frankly the name of
+destroyers, and free from the taint of that resigned pessimism
+which rots the world.  No pity for anything on earth, including
+themselves, and death enlisted for good and all in the service of
+humanity - that's what I would have liked to see."
+
+His little bald head quivered, imparting a comical vibration to the
+wisp of white goatee.  His enunciation would have been almost
+totally unintelligible to a stranger.  His worn-out passion,
+resembling in its impotent fierceness the excitement of a senile
+sensualist, was badly served by a dried throat and toothless gums
+which seemed to catch the tip of his tongue.  Mr Verloc,
+established in the corner of the sofa at the other end of the room,
+emitted two hearty grunts of assent.
+
+The old terrorist turned slowly his head on his skinny neck from
+side to side.
+
+"And I could never get as many as three such men together.  So much
+for your rotten pessimism," he snarled at Michaelis, who uncrossed
+his thick legs, similar to bolsters, and slid his feet abruptly
+under his chair in sign of exasperation.
+
+He a pessimist!  Preposterous!  He cried out that the charge was
+outrageous.  He was so far from pessimism that he saw already the
+end of all private property coming along logically, unavoidably, by
+the mere development of its inherent viciousness.  The possessors
+of property had not only to face the awakened proletariat, but they
+had also to fight amongst themselves.  Yes.  Struggle, warfare, was
+the condition of private ownership.  It was fatal.  Ah! he did not
+depend upon emotional excitement to keep up his belief, no
+declamations, no anger, no visions of blood-red flags waving, or
+metaphorical lurid suns of vengeance rising above the horizon of a
+doomed society.  Not he!  Cold reason, he boasted, was the basis of
+his optimism.  Yes, optimism -
+
+His laborious wheezing stopped, then, after a gasp or two, he
+added:
+
+"Don't you think that, if I had not been the optimist I am, I could
+not have found in fifteen years some means to cut my throat?  And,
+in the last instance, there were always the walls of my cell to
+dash my head against."
+
+The shortness of breath took all fire, all animation out of his
+voice; his great, pale cheeks hung like filled pouches, motionless,
+without a quiver; but in his blue eyes, narrowed as if peering,
+there was the same look of confident shrewdness, a little crazy in
+its fixity, they must have had while the indomitable optimist sat
+thinking at night in his cell.  Before him, Karl Yundt remained
+standing, one wing of his faded greenish havelock thrown back
+cavalierly over his shoulder.  Seated in front of the fireplace,
+Comrade Ossipon, ex-medical student, the principal writer of the F.
+P. leaflets, stretched out his robust legs, keeping the soles of
+his boots turned up to the glow in the grate.  A bush of crinkly
+yellow hair topped his red, freckled face, with a flattened nose
+and prominent mouth cast in the rough mould of the negro type.  His
+almond-shaped eyes leered languidly over the high cheek-bones.  He
+wore a grey flannel shirt, the loose ends of a black silk tie hung
+down the buttoned breast of his serge coat; and his head resting on
+the back of his chair, his throat largely exposed, he raised to his
+lips a cigarette in a long wooden tube, puffing jets of smoke
+straight up at the ceiling.
+
+Michaelis pursued his idea - THE idea of his solitary reclusion -
+the thought vouchsafed to his captivity and growing like a faith
+revealed in visions.  He talked to himself, indifferent to the
+sympathy or hostility of his hearers, indifferent indeed to their
+presence, from the habit he had acquired of thinking aloud
+hopefully in the solitude of the four whitewashed walls of his
+cell, in the sepulchral silence of the great blind pile of bricks
+near a river, sinister and ugly like a colossal mortuary for the
+socially drowned.
+
+He was no good in discussion, not because any amount of argument
+could shake his faith, but because the mere fact of hearing another
+voice disconcerted him painfully, confusing his thoughts at once -
+these thoughts that for so many years, in a mental solitude more
+barren than a waterless desert, no living voice had ever combatted,
+commented, or approved.
+
+No one interrupted him now, and he made again the confession of his
+faith, mastering him irresistible and complete like an act of
+grace: the secret of fate discovered in the material side of life;
+the economic condition of the world responsible for the past and
+shaping the future; the source of all history, of all ideas,
+guiding the mental development of mankind and the very impulses of
+their passion -
+
+A harsh laugh from Comrade Ossipon cut the tirade dead short in a
+sudden faltering of the tongue and a bewildered unsteadiness of the
+apostle's mildly exalted eyes.  He closed them slowly for a moment,
+as if to collect his routed thoughts.  A silence fell; but what
+with the two gas-jets over the table and the glowing grate the
+little parlour behind Mr Verloc's shop had become frightfully hot.
+Mr Verloc, getting off the sofa with ponderous reluctance, opened
+the door leading into the kitchen to get more air, and thus
+disclosed the innocent Stevie, seated very good and quiet at a deal
+table, drawing circles, circles, circles; innumerable circles,
+concentric, eccentric; a coruscating whirl of circles that by their
+tangled multitude of repeated curves, uniformity of form, and
+confusion of intersecting lines suggested a rendering of cosmic
+chaos, the symbolism of a mad art attempting the inconceivable.
+The artist never turned his head; and in all his soul's application
+to the task his back quivered, his thin neck, sunk into a deep
+hollow at the base of the skull, seemed ready to snap.
+
+Mr Verloc, after a grunt of disapproving surprise, returned to the
+sofa.  Alexander Ossipon got up, tall in his threadbare blue serge
+suit under the low ceiling, shook off the stiffness of long
+immobility, and strolled away into the kitchen (down two steps) to
+look over Stevie's shoulder.  He came back, pronouncing oracularly:
+"Very good.  Very characteristic, perfectly typical."
+
+"What's very good?" grunted inquiringly Mr Verloc, settled again in
+the corner of the sofa.  The other explained his meaning
+negligently, with a shade of condescension and a toss of his head
+towards the kitchen:
+
+"Typical of this form of degeneracy - these drawings, I mean."
+
+"You would call that lad a degenerate, would you?" mumbled Mr
+Verloc.
+
+Comrade Alexander Ossipon - nicknamed the Doctor, ex-medical
+student without a degree; afterwards wandering lecturer to working-
+men's associations upon the socialistic aspects of hygiene; author
+of a popular quasi-medical study (in the form of a cheap pamphlet
+seized promptly by the police) entitled "The Corroding Vices of the
+Middle Classes"; special delegate of the more or less mysterious
+Red Committee, together with Karl Yundt and Michaelis for the work
+of literary propaganda - turned upon the obscure familiar of at
+least two Embassies that glance of insufferable, hopelessly dense
+sufficiency which nothing but the frequentation of science can give
+to the dulness of common mortals.
+
+"That's what he may be called scientifically.  Very good type too,
+altogether, of that sort of degenerate.  It's enough to glance at
+the lobes of his ears.  If you read Lombroso - "
+
+Mr Verloc, moody and spread largely on the sofa, continued to look
+down the row of his waistcoat buttons; but his cheeks became tinged
+by a faint blush.  Of late even the merest derivative of the word
+science (a term in itself inoffensive and of indefinite meaning)
+had the curious power of evoking a definitely offensive mental
+vision of Mr Vladimir, in his body as he lived, with an almost
+supernatural clearness.  And this phenomenon, deserving justly to
+be classed amongst the marvels of science, induced in Mr Verloc an
+emotional state of dread and exasperation tending to express itself
+in violent swearing.  But he said nothing.  It was Karl Yundt who
+was heard, implacable to his last breath.
+
+"Lombroso is an ass."
+
+Comrade Ossipon met the shock of this blasphemy by an awful, vacant
+stare.  And the other, his extinguished eyes without gleams
+blackening the deep shadows under the great, bony forehead,
+mumbled, catching the tip of his tongue between his lips at every
+second word as though he were chewing it angrily:
+
+"Did you ever see such an idiot?  For him the criminal is the
+prisoner.  Simple, is it not?  What about those who shut him up
+there - forced him in there?  Exactly.  Forced him in there.  And
+what is crime?  Does he know that, this imbecile who has made his
+way in this world of gorged fools by looking at the ears and teeth
+of a lot of poor, luckless devils?  Teeth and ears mark the
+criminal?  Do they?  And what about the law that marks him still
+better - the pretty branding instrument invented by the overfed to
+protect themselves against the hungry?  Red-hot applications on
+their vile skins - hey?  Can't you smell and hear from here the
+thick hide of the people burn and sizzle?  That's how criminals are
+made for your Lombrosos to write their silly stuff about."
+
+The knob of his stick and his legs shook together with passion,
+whilst the trunk, draped in the wings of the havelock, preserved
+his historic attitude of defiance.  He seemed to sniff the tainted
+air of social cruelty, to strain his ear for its atrocious sounds.
+There was an extraordinary force of suggestion in this posturing.
+The all but moribund veteran of dynamite wars had been a great
+actor in his time - actor on platforms, in secret assemblies, in
+private interviews.  The famous terrorist had never in his life
+raised personally as much as his little finger against the social
+edifice.  He was no man of action; he was not even an orator of
+torrential eloquence, sweeping the masses along in the rushing
+noise and foam of a great enthusiasm.  With a more subtle
+intention, he took the part of an insolent and venomous evoker of
+sinister impulses which lurk in the blind envy and exasperated
+vanity of ignorance, in the suffering and misery of poverty, in all
+the hopeful and noble illusions of righteous anger, pity, and
+revolt.  The shadow of his evil gift clung to him yet like the
+smell of a deadly drug in an old vial of poison, emptied now,
+useless, ready to be thrown away upon the rubbish-heap of things
+that had served their time.
+
+Michaelis, the ticket-of-leave apostle, smiled vaguely with his
+glued lips; his pasty moon face drooped under the weight of
+melancholy assent.  He had been a prisoner himself.  His own skin
+had sizzled under the red-hot brand, he murmured softly.  But
+Comrade Ossipon, nicknamed the Doctor, had got over the shock by
+that time.
+
+"You don't understand," he began disdainfully, but stopped short,
+intimidated by the dead blackness of the cavernous eyes in the face
+turned slowly towards him with a blind stare, as if guided only by
+the sound.  He gave the discussion up, with a slight shrug of the
+shoulders.
+
+Stevie, accustomed to move about disregarded, had got up from the
+kitchen table, carrying off his drawing to bed with him.  He had
+reached the parlour door in time to receive in full the shock of
+Karl Yundt's eloquent imagery.  The sheet of paper covered with
+circles dropped out of his fingers, and he remained staring at the
+old terrorist, as if rooted suddenly to the spot by his morbid
+horror and dread of physical pain.  Stevie knew very well that hot
+iron applied to one's skin hurt very much.  His scared eyes blazed
+with indignation: it would hurt terribly.  His mouth dropped open.
+
+Michaelis by staring unwinkingly at the fire had regained that
+sentiment of isolation necessary for the continuity of his thought.
+His optimism had begun to flow from his lips.  He saw Capitalism
+doomed in its cradle, born with the poison of the principle of
+competition in its system.  The great capitalists devouring the
+little capitalists, concentrating the power and the tools of
+production in great masses, perfecting industrial processes, and in
+the madness of self-aggrandisement only preparing, organising,
+enriching, making ready the lawful inheritance of the suffering
+proletariat.  Michaelis pronounced the great word "Patience" - and
+his clear blue glance, raised to the low ceiling of Mr Verloc's
+parlour, had a character of seraphic trustfulness.  In the doorway
+Stevie, calmed, seemed sunk in hebetude.
+
+Comrade Ossipon's face twitched with exasperation.
+
+"Then it's no use doing anything - no use whatever."
+
+"I don't say that," protested Michaelis gently.  His vision of
+truth had grown so intense that the sound of a strange voice failed
+to rout it this time.  He continued to look down at the red coals.
+Preparation for the future was necessary, and he was willing to
+admit that the great change would perhaps come in the upheaval of a
+revolution.  But he argued that revolutionary propaganda was a
+delicate work of high conscience.  It was the education of the
+masters of the world.  It should be as careful as the education
+given to kings.  He would have it advance its tenets cautiously,
+even timidly, in our ignorance of the effect that may be produced
+by any given economic change upon the happiness, the morals, the
+intellect, the history of mankind.  For history is made with tools,
+not with ideas; and everything is changed by economic conditions -
+art, philosophy, love, virtue - truth itself!
+
+The coals in the grate settled down with a slight crash; and
+Michaelis, the hermit of visions in the desert of a penitentiary,
+got up impetuously.  Round like a distended balloon, he opened his
+short, thick arms, as if in a pathetically hopeless attempt to
+embrace and hug to his breast a self-regenerated universe.  He
+gasped with ardour.
+
+"The future is as certain as the past - slavery, feudalism,
+individualism, collectivism.  This is the statement of a law, not
+an empty prophecy."
+
+The disdainful pout of Comrade Ossipon's thick lips accentuated the
+negro type of his face.
+
+"Nonsense," he said calmly enough.  "There is no law and no
+certainty.  The teaching propaganda be hanged.  What the people
+knows does not matter, were its knowledge ever so accurate.  The
+only thing that matters to us is the emotional state of the masses.
+Without emotion there is no action."
+
+He paused, then added with modest firmness:
+
+"I am speaking now to you scientifically - scientifically - Eh?
+What did you say, Verloc?"
+
+"Nothing," growled from the sofa Mr Verloc, who, provoked by the
+abhorrent sound, had merely muttered a "Damn."
+
+The venomous spluttering of the old terrorist without teeth was
+heard.
+
+"Do you know how I would call the nature of the present economic
+conditions?  I would call it cannibalistic.  That's what it is!
+They are nourishing their greed on the quivering flesh and the warm
+blood of the people - nothing else."
+
+Stevie swallowed the terrifying statement with an audible gulp, and
+at once, as though it had been swift poison, sank limply in a
+sitting posture on the steps of the kitchen door.
+
+Michaelis gave no sign of having heard anything.  His lips seemed
+glued together for good; not a quiver passed over his heavy cheeks.
+With troubled eyes he looked for his round, hard hat, and put it on
+his round head.  His round and obese body seemed to float low
+between the chairs under the sharp elbow of Karl Yundt.  The old
+terrorist, raising an uncertain and clawlike hand, gave a
+swaggering tilt to a black felt sombrero shading the hollows and
+ridges of his wasted face.  He got in motion slowly, striking the
+floor with 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
+indignation of a man well over forty, menaced in 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 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 associates, 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 revolutionises
+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 companion of poets, reformers,
+charlatans, prophets, and incendiaries.
+
+Lost for a whole minute in the abyss of 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 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
+mediaeval 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?"
+
+"No; omnibus," the little man answered readily enough.  He lived
+far away in Islington, in a small house down a shabby street,
+littered with straw and dirty paper, where out of school hours a
+troop of assorted children ran and squabbled with a shrill,
+joyless, rowdy clamour.  His single back room, remarkable for
+having an extremely large cupboard, he rented furnished from two
+elderly spinsters, dressmakers in a humble way with a clientele of
+servant girls mostly.  He had a heavy padlock put on the cupboard,
+but otherwise he was a model lodger, giving no trouble, and
+requiring practically no attendance.  His oddities were that he
+insisted on being present when his room was being swept, and that
+when he went out he locked his door, and took the key away with
+him.
+
+Ossipon had a vision of these round black-rimmed spectacles
+progressing along the streets on the top of an omnibus, their self-
+confident glitter falling here and there on the walls of houses or
+lowered upon the heads of the unconscious stream of people on the
+pavements.  The ghost of a sickly smile altered the set of
+Ossipon's thick lips at the thought of the walls nodding, of people
+running for life at the sight of those spectacles.  If they had
+only known!  What a panic!  He murmured interrogatively: "Been
+sitting long here?"
+
+"An hour or more," answered the other negligently, and took a pull
+at the dark beer.  All his movements - the way he grasped the mug,
+the act of drinking, the way he set the heavy glass down and folded
+his arms - had a firmness, an assured precision which made the big
+and muscular Ossipon, leaning forward with staring eyes and
+protruding lips, look the picture of eager indecision.
+
+"An hour," he said.  "Then it may be you haven't heard yet the news
+I've heard just now - in the street.  Have you?"
+
+The little man shook his head negatively the least bit.  But as he
+gave no indication of curiosity Ossipon ventured to add that he had
+heard it just outside the place.  A newspaper boy had yelled the
+thing under his very nose, and not being prepared for anything of
+that sort, he was very much startled and upset.  He had to come in
+there with a dry mouth.  "I never thought of finding you here," he
+added, murmuring steadily, with his elbows planted on the table.
+
+"I come here sometimes," said the other, preserving his provoking
+coolness of demeanour.
+
+"It's wonderful that you of all people should have heard nothing of
+it," the big Ossipon continued.  His eyelids snapped nervously upon
+the shining eyes.  "You of all people," he repeated tentatively.
+This obvious restraint argued an incredible and inexplicable
+timidity of the big fellow before the calm little man, who again
+lifted the glass mug, drank, and put it down with brusque and
+assured movements.  And that was all.
+
+Ossipon after waiting for something, word or sign, that did not
+come, made an effort to assume a sort of indifference.
+
+"Do you," he said, deadening his voice still more, "give your stuff
+to anybody who's up to asking you for it?"
+
+"My absolute rule is never to refuse anybody - as long as I have a
+pinch by me," answered the little man with decision.
+
+"That's a principle?" commented Ossipon.
+
+"It's a principle."
+
+"And you think it's sound?"
+
+The large round spectacles, which gave a look of staring self-
+confidence to the sallow face, confronted Ossipon like sleepless,
+unwinking orbs flashing a cold fire.
+
+"Perfectly.  Always.  Under every circumstance.  What could stop
+me?  Why should I not?  Why should I think twice about it?"
+
+Ossipon gasped, as it were, discreetly.
+
+"Do you mean to say you would hand it over to a `teck' if one came
+to ask you for your wares?"
+
+The other smiled faintly.
+
+"Let them come and try it on, and you will see," he said.  "They
+know me, but I know also every one of them.  They won't come near
+me - not they."
+
+His thin livid lips snapped together firmly.  Ossipon began to
+argue.
+
+"But they could send someone - rig a plant on you.  Don't you see?
+Get the stuff from you in that way, and then arrest you with the
+proof in their hands."
+
+"Proof of what?  Dealing in explosives without a licence perhaps."
+This was meant for a contemptuous jeer, though the expression of
+the thin, sickly face remained unchanged, and the utterance was
+negligent.  "I don't think there's one of them anxious to make that
+arrest.  I don't think they could get one of them to apply for a
+warrant.  I mean one of the best.  Not one."
+
+"Why?" Ossipon asked.
+
+"Because they know very well I take care never to part with the
+last handful of my wares.  I've it always by me."  He touched the
+breast of his coat lightly.  "In a thick glass flask," he added.
+
+"So I have been told," said Ossipon, with a shade of wonder in his
+voice.  "But I didn't know if - "
+
+"They know," interrupted the little man crisply, leaning against
+the straight chair back, which rose higher than his fragile head.
+"I shall never be arrested.  The game isn't good enough for any
+policeman of them all.  To deal with a man like me you require
+sheer, naked, inglorious heroism."  Again his lips closed with a
+self-confident snap.  Ossipon repressed a movement of impatience.
+
+"Or recklessness - or simply ignorance," he retorted.  "They've
+only to get somebody for the job who does not know you carry enough
+stuff in your pocket to blow yourself and everything within sixty
+yards of you to pieces."
+
+"I never affirmed I could not be eliminated," rejoined the other.
+"But that wouldn't be an arrest.  Moreover, it's not so easy as it
+looks."
+
+"Bah!" Ossipon contradicted.  "Don't be too sure of that.  What's
+to prevent half-a-dozen of them jumping upon you from behind in the
+street?  With your arms pinned to your sides you could do nothing -
+could you?"
+
+"Yes; I could.  I am seldom out in the streets after dark," said
+the little man impassively, "and never very late.  I walk always
+with my right hand closed round the india-rubber ball which I have
+in my trouser pocket.  The pressing of this ball actuates a
+detonator inside the flask I carry in my pocket.  It's the
+principle of the pneumatic instantaneous shutter for a camera lens.
+The tube leads up - "
+
+With a swift disclosing gesture he gave Ossipon a glimpse of an
+india-rubber tube, resembling a slender brown worm, issuing from
+the armhole of his waistcoat and plunging into the inner breast
+pocket of his jacket.  His clothes, of a nondescript brown mixture,
+were threadbare and marked with stains, dusty in the folds, with
+ragged button-holes.  "The detonator is partly mechanical, partly
+chemical," he explained, with casual condescension.
+
+"It is instantaneous, of course?" murmured Ossipon, with a slight
+shudder.
+
+"Far from it," confessed the other, with a reluctance which seemed
+to twist his mouth dolorously.  "A full twenty seconds must elapse
+from the moment I press the ball till the explosion takes place."
+
+"Phew!" whistled Ossipon, completely appalled.  "Twenty seconds!
+Horrors!  You mean to say that you could face that?  I should go
+crazy - "
+
+"Wouldn't matter if you did.  Of course, it's the weak point of
+this special system, which is only for my own use.  The worst is
+that the manner of exploding is always the weak point with us.  I
+am trying to invent a detonator that would adjust itself to all
+conditions of action, and even to unexpected changes of conditions.
+A variable and yet perfectly precise mechanism.  A really
+intelligent detonator."
+
+"Twenty seconds," muttered Ossipon again.  "Ough!  And then - "
+
+With a slight turn of the head the glitter of the spectacles seemed
+to gauge the size of the beer saloon in the basement of the
+renowned Silenus Restaurant.
+
+"Nobody in this room could hope to escape," was the verdict of that
+survey.  "Nor yet this couple going up the stairs now."
+
+The piano at the foot of the staircase clanged through a mazurka
+with brazen impetuosity, as though a vulgar and impudent ghost were
+showing off.  The keys sank and rose mysteriously.  Then all became
+still.  For a moment Ossipon imagined the overlighted place changed
+into a dreadful black hole belching horrible fumes choked with
+ghastly rubbish of smashed brickwork and mutilated corpses.  He had
+such a distinct perception of ruin and death that he shuddered
+again.  The other observed, with an air of calm sufficiency:
+
+"In the last instance it is character alone that makes for one's
+safety.  There are very few people in the world whose character is
+as well established as mine."
+
+"I wonder how you managed it," growled Ossipon.
+
+"Force of personality," said the other, without raising his voice;
+and coming from the mouth of that obviously miserable organism the
+assertion caused the robust Ossipon to bite his lower lip.  "Force
+of personality," he repeated, with ostentatious calm.  "I have the
+means to make myself deadly, but that by itself, you understand, is
+absolutely nothing in the way of protection.  What is effective is
+the belief those people have in my will to use the means.  That's
+their impression.  It is absolute.  Therefore I am deadly."
+
+"There are individuals of character amongst that lot too," muttered
+Ossipon ominously.
+
+"Possibly.  But it is a matter of degree obviously, since, for
+instance, I am not impressed by them.  Therefore they are inferior.
+They cannot be otherwise.  Their character is built upon
+conventional morality.  It leans on the social order.  Mine stands
+free from everything artificial.  They are bound in all sorts of
+conventions.  They depend on life, which, in this connection, is a
+historical fact surrounded by all sorts of restraints and
+considerations, a complex organised fact open to attack at every
+point; whereas I depend on death, which knows no restraint and
+cannot be attacked.  My superiority is evident."
+
+"This is a transcendental way of putting it," said Ossipon,
+watching the cold glitter of the round spectacles.  "I've heard
+Karl Yundt say much the same thing not very long ago."
+
+"Karl Yundt," mumbled the other contemptuously, "the delegate of
+the International Red Committee, has been a posturing shadow all
+his life.  There are three of you delegates, aren't there?  I won't
+define the other two, as you are one of them.  But what you say
+means nothing.  You are the worthy delegates for revolutionary
+propaganda, but the trouble is not only that you are as unable to
+think independently as any respectable grocer or journalist of them
+all, but that you have no character whatever."
+
+Ossipon could not restrain a start of indignation.
+
+"But what do you want from us?" he exclaimed in a deadened voice.
+"What is it you are after yourself?"
+
+"A perfect detonator," was the peremptory answer.  "What are you
+making that face for?  You see, you can't even bear the mention of
+something conclusive."
+
+"I am not making a face," growled the annoyed Ossipon bearishly.
+
+"You revolutionises," the other continued, with leisurely self-
+confidence, "are the slaves of the social convention, which is
+afraid of you; slaves of it as much as the very police that stands
+up in the defence of that convention.  Clearly you are, since you
+want to revolutionise it.  It governs your thought, of course, and
+your action too, and thus neither your thought nor your action can
+ever be conclusive."  He paused, tranquil, with that air of close,
+endless silence, then almost immediately went on.  "You are not a
+bit better than the forces arrayed against you - than the police,
+for instance.  The other day I came suddenly upon Chief Inspector
+Heat at the corner of Tottenham Court Road.  He looked at me very
+steadily.  But I did not look at him.  Why should I give him more
+than a glance?  He was thinking of many things - of his superiors,
+of his reputation, of the law courts, of his salary, of newspapers
+- of a hundred things.  But I was thinking of my perfect detonator
+only.  He meant nothing to me.  He was as insignificant as - I
+can't call to mind anything insignificant enough to compare him
+with - except Karl Yundt perhaps.  Like to like.  The terrorist and
+the policeman both come from the same basket.  Revolution, legality
+- counter moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom
+identical.  He plays his little game - so do you propagandists.
+But I don't play; I work fourteen hours a day, and go hungry
+sometimes.  My experiments cost money now and again, and then I
+must do without food for a day or two.  You're looking at my beer.
+Yes.  I have had two glasses already, and shall have another
+presently.  This is a little holiday, and I celebrate it alone.
+Why not?  I've the grit to work alone, quite alone, absolutely
+alone.  I've worked alone for years."
+
+Ossipon's face had turned dusky red.
+
+"At the perfect detonator - eh?" he sneered, very low.
+
+"Yes," retorted the other.  "It is a good definition.  You couldn't
+find anything half so precise to define the nature of your activity
+with all your committees and delegations.  It is I who am the true
+propagandist."
+
+"We won't discuss that point," said Ossipon, with an air of rising
+above personal considerations.  "I am afraid I'll have to spoil
+your holiday for you, though.  There's a man blown up in Greenwich
+Park this morning."
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"They have been yelling the news in the streets since two o'clock.
+I bought the paper, and just ran in here.  Then I saw you sitting
+at this table.  I've got it in my pocket now."
+
+He pulled the newspaper out.  It was a good-sized rosy sheet, as if
+flushed by the warmth of its own convictions, which were
+optimistic.  He scanned the pages rapidly.
+
+"Ah!  Here it is.  Bomb in Greenwich Park.  There isn't much so
+far.  Half-past eleven.  Foggy morning.  Effects of explosion felt
+as far as Romney Road and Park Place.  Enormous hole in the ground
+under a tree filled with smashed roots and broken branches.  All
+round fragments of a man's body blown to pieces.  That's all.  The
+rest's mere newspaper gup.  No doubt a wicked attempt to blow up
+the Observatory, they say.  H'm.  That's hardly credible."
+
+He looked at the paper for a while longer in silence, then passed
+it to the other, who after gazing abstractedly at the print laid it
+down without comment.
+
+It was Ossipon who spoke first - still resentful.
+
+"The fragments of only ONE man, you note.  Ergo: blew HIMSELF up.
+That spoils your day off for you - don't it?  Were you expecting
+that sort of move?  I hadn't the slightest idea - not the ghost of
+a notion of anything of the sort being planned to come off here -
+in this country.  Under the present circumstances it's nothing
+short of criminal."
+
+The little man lifted his thin black eyebrows with dispassionate
+scorn.
+
+"Criminal!  What is that?  What is crime?  What can be the meaning
+of such an assertion?"
+
+"How am I to express myself?  One must use the current words," said
+Ossipon impatiently.  "The meaning of this assertion is that this
+business may affect our position very adversely in this country.
+Isn't that crime enough for you?  I am convinced you have been
+giving away some of your stuff lately."
+
+Ossipon stared hard.  The other, without flinching, lowered and
+raised his head slowly.
+
+"You have!" burst out the editor of the F. P. leaflets in an
+intense whisper.  "No!  And are you really handing it over at large
+like this, for the asking, to the first fool that comes along?"
+
+"Just so!  The condemned social order has not been built up on
+paper and ink, and I don't fancy that a combination of paper and
+ink will ever put an end to it, whatever you may think.  Yes, I
+would give the stuff with both hands to every man, woman, or fool
+that likes to come along.  I know what you are thinking about.  But
+I am not taking my cue from the Red Committee.  I would see you all
+hounded out of here, or arrested - or beheaded for that matter -
+without turning a hair.  What happens to us as individuals is not
+of the least consequence."
+
+He spoke carelessly, without heat, almost without feeling, and
+Ossipon, secretly much affected, tried to copy this detachment.
+
+"If the police here knew their business they would shoot you full
+of holes with revolvers, or else try to sand-bag you from behind in
+broad daylight."
+
+The little man seemed already to have considered that point of view
+in his dispassionate self-confident manner.
+
+"Yes," he assented with the utmost readiness.  "But for that they
+would have to face their own institutions.  Do you see?  That
+requires uncommon grit.  Grit of a special kind."
+
+Ossipon blinked.
+
+"I fancy that's exactly what would happen to you if you were to set
+up your laboratory in the States.  They don't stand on ceremony
+with their institutions there."
+
+"I am not likely to go and see.  Otherwise your remark is just,"
+admitted the other.  "They have more character over there, and
+their character is essentially anarchistic.  Fertile ground for us,
+the States - very good ground.  The great Republic has the root of
+the destructive matter in her.  The collective temperament is
+lawless.  Excellent.  They may shoot us down, but - "
+
+"You are too transcendental for me," growled Ossipon, with moody
+concern.
+
+"Logical," protested the other.  "There are several kinds of logic.
+This is the enlightened kind.  America is all right.  It is this
+country that is dangerous, with her idealistic conception of
+legality.  The social spirit of this people is wrapped up in
+scrupulous prejudices, and that is fatal to our work.  You talk of
+England being our only refuge!  So much the worse.  Capua!  What do
+we want with refuges?  Here you talk, print, plot, and do nothing.
+I daresay it's very convenient for such Karl Yundts."
+
+He shrugged his shoulders slightly, then added with the same
+leisurely assurance: "To break up the superstition and worship of
+legality should be our aim.  Nothing would please me more than to
+see Inspector Heat and his likes take to shooting us down in broad
+daylight with the approval of the public.  Half our battle would be
+won then; the disintegration of the old morality would have set in
+in its very temple.  That is what you ought to aim at.  But you
+revolutionises will never understand that.  You plan the future,
+you lose yourselves in reveries of economical systems derived from
+what is; whereas what's wanted is a clean sweep and a clear start
+for a new conception of life.  That sort of future will take care
+of itself if you will only make room for it.  Therefore I would
+shovel my stuff in heaps at the corners of the streets if I had
+enough for that; and as I haven't, I do my best by perfecting a
+really dependable detonator."
+
+Ossipon, who had been mentally swimming in deep waters, seized upon
+the last word as if it were a saving plank.
+
+"Yes.  Your detonators.  I shouldn't wonder if it weren't one of
+your detonators that made a clean sweep of the man in the park."
+
+A shade of vexation darkened the determined sallow face confronting
+Ossipon.
+
+"My difficulty consists precisely in experimenting practically with
+the various kinds.  They must be tried after all.  Besides - "
+
+Ossipon interrupted.
+
+"Who could that fellow be?  I assure you that we in London had no
+knowledge - Couldn't you describe the person you gave the stuff
+to?"
+
+The other turned his spectacles upon Ossipon like a pair of
+searchlights.
+
+"Describe him," he repeated slowly.  "I don't think there can be
+the slightest objection now.  I will describe him to you in one
+word - Verloc."
+
+Ossipon, whom curiosity had lifted a few inches off his seat,
+dropped back, as if hit in the face.
+
+"Verloc!  Impossible."
+
+The self-possessed little man nodded slightly once.
+
+"Yes.  He's the person.  You can't say that in this case I was
+giving my stuff to the first fool that came along.  He was a
+prominent member of the group as far as I understand."
+
+"Yes," said Ossipon.  "Prominent.  No, not exactly.  He was the
+centre for general intelligence, and usually received comrades
+coming over here.  More useful than important.  Man of no ideas.
+Years ago he used to speak at meetings - in France, I believe.  Not
+very well, though.  He was trusted by such men as Latorre, Moser
+and all that old lot.  The only talent he showed really was his
+ability to elude the attentions of the police somehow.  Here, for
+instance, he did not seem to be looked after very closely.  He was
+regularly married, you know.  I suppose it's with her money that he
+started that shop.  Seemed to make it pay, too."
+
+Ossipon paused abruptly, muttered to himself "I wonder what that
+woman will do now?" and fell into thought.
+
+The other waited with ostentatious indifference.  His parentage was
+obscure, and he was generally known only by his nickname of
+Professor.  His title to that designation consisted in his having
+been once assistant demonstrator in chemistry at some technical
+institute.  He quarrelled with the authorities upon a question of
+unfair treatment.  Afterwards he obtained a post in the laboratory
+of a manufactory of dyes.  There too he had been treated with
+revolting injustice.  His struggles, his privations, his hard work
+to raise himself in the social scale, had filled him with such an
+exalted conviction of his merits that it was extremely difficult
+for the world to treat him with justice - the standard of that
+notion depending so much upon the patience of the individual.  The
+Professor had genius, but lacked the great social virtue of
+resignation.
+
+"Intellectually a nonentity," Ossipon pronounced aloud, abandoning
+suddenly the inward contemplation of Mrs Verloc's bereaved person
+and business.  "Quite an ordinary personality.  You are wrong in
+not keeping more in touch with the comrades, Professor," he added
+in a reproving tone.  "Did he say anything to you - give you some
+idea of his intentions?  I hadn't seen him for a month.  It seems
+impossible that he should be gone."
+
+"He told me it was going to be a demonstration against a building,"
+said the Professor.  "I had to know that much to prepare the
+missile.  I pointed out to him that I had hardly a sufficient
+quantity for a completely destructive result, but he pressed me
+very earnestly to do my best.  As he wanted something that could be
+carried openly in the hand, I proposed to make use of an old one-
+gallon copal varnish can I happened to have by me.  He was pleased
+at the idea.  It gave me some trouble, because I had to cut out the
+bottom first and solder it on again afterwards.  When prepared for
+use, the can enclosed a wide-mouthed, well-corked jar of thick
+glass packed around with some wet clay and containing sixteen
+ounces of X2 green powder.  The detonator was connected with the
+screw top of the can.  It was ingenious - a combination of time and
+shock.  I explained the system to him.  It was a thin tube of tin
+enclosing a - "
+
+Ossipon's attention had wandered.
+
+"What do you think has happened?" he interrupted.
+
+"Can't tell.  Screwed the top on tight, which would make the
+connection, and then forgot the time.  It was set for twenty
+minutes.  On the other hand, the time contact being made, a sharp
+shock would bring about the explosion at once.  He either ran the
+time too close, or simply let the thing fall.  The contact was made
+all right - that's clear to me at any rate.  The system's worked
+perfectly.  And yet you would think that a common fool in a hurry
+would be much more likely to forget to make the contact altogether.
+I was worrying myself about that sort of failure mostly.  But there
+are more kinds of fools than one can guard against.  You can't
+expect a detonator to be absolutely fool-proof."
+
+He beckoned to a waiter.  Ossipon sat rigid, with the abstracted
+gaze of mental travail.  After the man had gone away with the money
+he roused himself, with an air of profound dissatisfaction.
+
+"It's extremely unpleasant for me," he mused.  "Karl has been in
+bed with bronchitis for a week.  There's an even chance that he
+will never get up again.  Michaelis's luxuriating in the country
+somewhere.  A fashionable publisher has offered him five hundred
+pounds for a book.  It will be a ghastly failure.  He has lost the
+habit of consecutive thinking in prison, you know."
+
+The Professor on his feet, now buttoning his coat, looked about him
+with perfect indifference.
+
+"What are you going to do?" asked Ossipon wearily.  He dreaded the
+blame of the Central Red Committee, a body which had no permanent
+place of abode, and of whose membership he was not exactly
+informed.  If this affair eventuated in the stoppage of the modest
+subsidy allotted to the publication of the F. P. pamphlets, then
+indeed he would have to regret Verloc's inexplicable folly.
+
+"Solidarity with the extremest form of action is one thing, and
+silly recklessness is another," he said, with a sort of moody
+brutality.  "I don't know what came to Verloc.  There's some
+mystery there.  However, he's gone.  You may take it as you like,
+but under the circumstances the only policy for the militant
+revolutionary group is to disclaim all connection with this damned
+freak of yours.  How to make the disclaimer convincing enough is
+what bothers me."
+
+The little man on his feet, buttoned up and ready to go, was no
+taller than the seated Ossipon.  He levelled his spectacles at the
+latter's face point-blank.
+
+"You might ask the police for a testimonial of good conduct.  They
+know where every one of you slept last night.  Perhaps if you asked
+them they would consent to publish some sort of official
+statement."
+
+"No doubt they are aware well enough that we had nothing to do with
+this," mumbled Ossipon bitterly.  "What they will say is another
+thing."  He remained thoughtful, disregarding the short, owlish,
+shabby figure standing by his side.  "I must lay hands on Michaelis
+at once, and get him to speak from his heart at one of our
+gatherings.  The public has a sort of sentimental regard for that
+fellow.  His name is known.  And I am in touch with a few reporters
+on the big dailies.  What he would say would be utter bosh, but he
+has a turn of talk that makes it go down all the same."
+
+"Like treacle," interjected the Professor, rather low, keeping an
+impassive expression.
+
+The perplexed Ossipon went on communing with himself half audibly,
+after the manner of a man reflecting in perfect solitude.
+
+"Confounded ass!  To leave such an imbecile business on my hands.
+And I don't even know if - "
+
+He sat with compressed lips.  The idea of going for news straight
+to the shop lacked charm.  His notion was that Verloc's shop might
+have been turned already into a police trap.  They will be bound to
+make some arrests, he thought, with something resembling virtuous
+indignation, for the even tenor of his revolutionary life was
+menaced by no fault of his.  And yet unless he went there he ran
+the risk of remaining in ignorance of what perhaps it would be very
+material for him to know.  Then he reflected that, if the man in
+the park had been so very much blown to pieces as the evening
+papers said, he could not have been identified.  And if so, the
+police could have no special reason for watching Verloc's shop more
+closely than any other place known to be frequented by marked
+anarchists - no more reason, in fact, than for watching the doors
+of the Silenus.  There would be a lot of watching all round, no
+matter where he went.  Still -
+
+"I wonder what I had better do now?" he muttered, taking counsel
+with himself.
+
+A rasping voice at his elbow said, with sedate scorn:
+
+"Fasten yourself upon the woman for all she's worth."
+
+After uttering these words the Professor walked away from the
+table.  Ossipon, whom that piece of insight had taken unawares,
+gave one ineffectual start, and remained still, with a helpless
+gaze, as though nailed fast to the seat of his chair.  The lonely
+piano, without as much as a music stool to help it, struck a few
+chords courageously, and beginning a selection of national airs,
+played him out at last to the tune of "Blue Bells of Scotland."
+The painfully detached notes grew faint behind his back while he
+went slowly upstairs, across the hall, and into the street.
+
+In front of the great doorway a dismal row of newspaper sellers
+standing clear of the pavement dealt out their wares from the
+gutter.  It was a raw, gloomy day of the early spring; and the
+grimy sky, the mud of the streets, the rags of the dirty men,
+harmonised excellently with the eruption of the damp, rubbishy
+sheets of paper soiled with printers' ink.  The posters, maculated
+with filth, garnished like tapestry the sweep of the curbstone.
+The trade in afternoon papers was brisk, yet, in comparison with
+the swift, constant march of foot traffic, the effect was of
+indifference, of a disregarded distribution.  Ossipon looked
+hurriedly both ways before stepping out into the cross-currents,
+but the Professor was already out of sight.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+
+The Professor had turned into a street to the left, and walked
+along, with his head carried rigidly erect, in a crowd whose every
+individual almost overtopped his stunted stature.  It was vain to
+pretend to himself that he was not disappointed.  But that was mere
+feeling; the stoicism of his thought could not be disturbed by this
+or any other failure.  Next time, or the time after next, a telling
+stroke would be delivered-something really startling - a blow fit
+to open the first crack in the imposing front of the great edifice
+of legal conceptions sheltering the atrocious injustice of society.
+Of humble origin, and with an appearance really so mean as to stand
+in the way of his considerable natural abilities, his imagination
+had been fired early by the tales of men rising from the depths of
+poverty to positions of authority and affluence.  The extreme,
+almost ascetic purity of his thought, combined with an astounding
+ignorance of worldly conditions, had set before him a goal of power
+and prestige to be attained without the medium of arts, graces,
+tact, wealth - by sheer weight of merit alone.  On that view he
+considered himself entitled to undisputed success.  His father, a
+delicate dark enthusiast with a sloping forehead, had been an
+itinerant and rousing preacher of some obscure but rigid Christian
+sect - a man supremely confident in the privileges of his
+righteousness.  In the son, individualist by temperament, once the
+science of colleges had replaced thoroughly the faith of
+conventicles, this moral attitude translated itself into a frenzied
+puritanism of ambition.  He nursed it as something secularly holy.
+To see it thwarted opened his eyes to the true nature of the world,
+whose morality was artificial, corrupt, and blasphemous.  The way
+of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal
+impulses disguised into creeds.  The Professor's indignation found
+in itself a final cause that absolved him from the sin of turning
+to destruction as the agent of his ambition.  To destroy public
+faith in legality was the imperfect formula of his pedantic
+fanaticism; but the subconscious conviction that the framework of
+an established social order cannot be effectually shattered except
+by some form of collective or individual violence was precise and
+correct.  He was a moral agent - that was settled in his mind.  By
+exercising his agency with ruthless defiance he procured for
+himself the appearances of power and personal prestige.  That was
+undeniable to his vengeful bitterness.  It pacified its unrest; and
+in their own way the most ardent of revolutionaries are perhaps
+doing no more but seeking for peace in common with the rest of
+mankind - the peace of soothed vanity, of satisfied appetites, or
+perhaps of appeased conscience.
+
+Lost in the crowd, miserable and undersized, he meditated
+confidently on his power, keeping his hand in the left pocket of
+his trousers, grasping lightly the india-rubber ball, the supreme
+guarantee of his sinister freedom; but after a while he became
+disagreeably affected by the sight of the roadway thronged with
+vehicles and of the pavement crowded with men and women.  He was in
+a long, straight street, peopled by a mere fraction of an immense
+multitude; but all round him, on and on, even to the limits of the
+horizon hidden by the enormous piles of bricks, he felt the mass of
+mankind mighty in its numbers.  They swarmed numerous like locusts,
+industrious like ants, thoughtless like a natural force, pushing on
+blind and orderly and absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic,
+to terror too perhaps.
+
+That was the form of doubt he feared most.  Impervious to fear!
+Often while walking abroad, when he happened also to come out of
+himself, he had such moments of dreadful and sane mistrust of
+mankind.  What if nothing could move them?  Such moments come to
+all men whose ambition aims at a direct grasp upon humanity - to
+artists, politicians, thinkers, reformers, or saints.  A despicable
+emotional state this, against which solitude fortifies a superior
+character; and with severe exultation the Professor thought of the
+refuge of his room, with its padlocked cupboard, lost in a
+wilderness of poor houses, the hermitage of the perfect anarchist.
+In order to reach sooner the point where he could take his omnibus,
+he turned brusquely out of the populous street into a narrow and
+dusky alley paved with flagstones.  On one side the low brick
+houses had in their dusty windows the sightless, moribund look of
+incurable decay - empty shells awaiting demolition.  From the other
+side life had not departed wholly as yet.  Facing the only gas-lamp
+yawned the cavern of a second-hand furniture dealer, where, deep in
+the gloom of a sort of narrow avenue winding through a bizarre
+forest of wardrobes, with an undergrowth tangle of table legs, a
+tall pier-glass glimmered like a pool of water in a wood.  An
+unhappy, homeless couch, accompanied by two unrelated chairs, stood
+in the open.  The only human being making use of the alley besides
+the Professor, coming stalwart and erect from the opposite
+direction, checked his swinging pace suddenly.
+
+"Hallo!" he said, and stood a little on one side watchfully.
+
+The Professor had already stopped, with a ready half turn which
+brought his shoulders very near the other wall.  His right hand
+fell lightly on the back of the outcast couch, the left remained
+purposefully plunged deep in the trousers pocket, and the roundness
+of the heavy rimmed spectacles imparted an owlish character to his
+moody, unperturbed face.
+
+It was like a meeting in a side corridor of a mansion full of life.
+The stalwart man was buttoned up in a dark overcoat, and carried an
+umbrella.  His hat, tilted back, uncovered a good deal of forehead,
+which appeared very white in the dusk.  In the dark patches of the
+orbits the eyeballs glimmered piercingly.  Long, drooping
+moustaches, the colour of ripe corn, framed with their points the
+square block of his shaved chin.
+
+"I am not looking for you," he said curtly.
+
+The Professor did not stir an inch.  The blended noises of the
+enormous town sank down to an inarticulate low murmur.  Chief
+Inspector Heat of the Special Crimes Department changed his tone.
+
+"Not in a hurry to get home?" he asked, with mocking simplicity.
+
+The unwholesome-looking little moral agent of destruction exulted
+silently in the possession of personal prestige, keeping in check
+this man armed with the defensive mandate of a menaced society.
+More fortunate than Caligula, who wished that the Roman Senate had
+only one head for the better satisfaction of his cruel lust, he
+beheld in that one man all the forces he had set at defiance: the
+force of law, property, oppression, and injustice.  He beheld all
+his enemies, and fearlessly confronted them all in a supreme
+satisfaction of his vanity.  They stood perplexed before him as if
+before a dreadful portent.  He gloated inwardly over the chance of
+this meeting affirming his superiority over all the multitude of
+mankind.
+
+It was in reality a chance meeting.  Chief Inspector Heat had had a
+disagreeably busy day since his department received the first
+telegram from Greenwich a little before eleven in the morning.
+First of all, the fact of the outrage being attempted less than a
+week after he had assured a high official that no outbreak of
+anarchist activity was to be apprehended was sufficiently annoying.
+If he ever thought himself safe in making a statement, it was then.
+He had made that statement with infinite satisfaction to himself,
+because it was clear that the high official desired greatly to hear
+that very thing.  He had affirmed that nothing of the sort could
+even be thought of without the department being aware of it within
+twenty-four hours; and he had spoken thus in his consciousness of
+being the great expert of his department.  He had gone even so far
+as to utter words which true wisdom would have kept back.  But
+Chief Inspector Heat was not very wise - at least not truly so.
+True wisdom, which is not certain of anything in this world of
+contradictions, would have prevented him from attaining his present
+position.  It would have alarmed his superiors, and done away with
+his chances of promotion.  His promotion had been very rapid.
+
+"There isn't one of them, sir, that we couldn't lay our hands on at
+any time of night and day.  We know what each of them is doing hour
+by hour," he had declared.  And the high official had deigned to
+smile.  This was so obviously the right thing to say for an officer
+of Chief Inspector Heat's reputation that it was perfectly
+delightful.  The high official believed the declaration, which
+chimed in with his idea of the fitness of things.  His wisdom was
+of an official kind, or else he might have reflected upon a matter
+not of theory but of experience that in the close-woven stuff of
+relations between conspirator and police there occur unexpected
+solutions of continuity, sudden holes in space and time.  A given
+anarchist may be watched inch by inch and minute by minute, but a
+moment always comes when somehow all sight and touch of him are
+lost for a few hours, during which something (generally an
+explosion) more or less deplorable does happen.  But the high
+official, carried away by his sense of the fitness of things, had
+smiled, and now the recollection of that smile was very annoying to
+Chief Inspector Heat, principal expert in anarchist procedure.
+
+This was not the only circumstance whose recollection depressed the
+usual serenity of the eminent specialist.  There was another dating
+back only to that very morning.  The thought that when called
+urgently to his Assistant Commissioner's private room he had been
+unable to conceal his astonishment was distinctly vexing.  His
+instinct of a successful man had taught him long ago that, as a
+general rule, a reputation is built on manner as much as on
+achievement.  And he felt that his manner when confronted with the
+telegram had not been impressive.  He had opened his eyes widely,
+and had exclaimed "Impossible!" exposing himself thereby to the
+unanswerable retort of a finger-tip laid forcibly on the telegram
+which the Assistant Commissioner, after reading it aloud, had flung
+on the desk.  To be crushed, as it were, under the tip of a
+forefinger was an unpleasant experience.  Very damaging, too!
+Furthermore, Chief Inspector Heat was conscious of not having
+mended matters by allowing himself to express a conviction.
+
+"One thing I can tell you at once: none of our lot had anything to
+do with this."
+
+He was strong in his integrity of a good detective, but he saw now
+that an impenetrably attentive reserve towards this incident would
+have served his reputation better.  On the other hand, he admitted
+to himself that it was difficult to preserve one's reputation if
+rank outsiders were going to take a hand in the business.
+Outsiders are the bane of the police as of other professions.  The
+tone of the Assistant Commissioner's remarks had been sour enough
+to set one's teeth on edge.
+
+And since breakfast Chief Inspector Heat had not managed to get
+anything to eat.
+
+Starting immediately to begin his investigation on the spot, he had
+swallowed a good deal of raw, unwholesome fog in the park.  Then he
+had walked over to the hospital; and when the investigation in
+Greenwich was concluded at last he had lost his inclination for
+food.  Not accustomed, as the doctors are, to examine closely the
+mangled remains of human beings, he had been shocked by the sight
+disclosed to his view when a waterproof sheet had been lifted off a
+table in a certain apartment of the hospital.
+
+Another waterproof sheet was spread over that table in the manner
+of a table-cloth, with the corners turned up over a sort of mound -
+a heap of rags, scorched and bloodstained, half concealing what
+might have been an accumulation of raw material for a cannibal
+feast.  It required considerable firmness of mind not to recoil
+before that sight.  Chief Inspector Heat, an efficient officer of
+his department, stood his ground, but for a whole minute he did not
+advance.  A local constable in uniform cast a sidelong glance, and
+said, with stolid simplicity:
+
+"He's all there.  Every bit of him.  It was a job."
+
+He had been the first man on the spot after the explosion.  He
+mentioned the fact again.  He had seen something like a heavy flash
+of lightning in the fog.  At that time he was standing at the door
+of the King William Street Lodge talking to the keeper.  The
+concussion made him tingle all over.  He ran between the trees
+towards the Observatory.  "As fast as my legs would carry me," he
+repeated twice.
+
+Chief Inspector Heat, bending forward over the table in a gingerly
+and horrified manner, let him run on.  The hospital porter and
+another man turned down the corners of the cloth, and stepped
+aside.  The Chief Inspector's eyes searched the gruesome detail of
+that heap of mixed things, which seemed to have been collected in
+shambles and rag shops.
+
+"You used a shovel," he remarked, observing a sprinkling of small
+gravel, tiny brown bits of bark, and particles of splintered wood
+as fine as needles.
+
+"Had to in one place," said the stolid constable.  "I sent a keeper
+to fetch a spade.  When he heard me scraping the ground with it he
+leaned his forehead against a tree, and was as sick as a dog."
+
+The Chief Inspector, stooping guardedly over the table, fought down
+the unpleasant sensation in his throat.  The shattering violence of
+destruction which had made of that body a heap of nameless
+fragments affected his feelings with a sense of ruthless cruelty,
+though his reason told him the effect must have been as swift as a
+flash of lightning.  The man, whoever he was, had died
+instantaneously; and yet it seemed impossible to believe that a
+human body could have reached that state of disintegration without
+passing through the pangs of inconceivable agony.  No physiologist,
+and still less of a metaphysician, Chief Inspector Heat rose by the
+force of sympathy, which is a form of fear, above the vulgar
+conception of time.  Instantaneous!  He remembered all he had ever
+read in popular publications of long and terrifying dreams dreamed
+in the instant of waking; of the whole past life lived with
+frightful intensity by a drowning man as his doomed head bobs up,
+streaming, for the last time.  The inexplicable mysteries of
+conscious existence beset Chief Inspector Heat till he evolved a
+horrible notion that ages of atrocious pain and mental torture
+could be contained between two successive winks of an eye.  And
+meantime the Chief Inspector went on, peering at the table with a
+calm face and the slightly anxious attention of an indigent
+customer bending over what may be called the by-products of a
+butcher's shop with a view to an inexpensive Sunday dinner.  All
+the time his trained faculties of an excellent investigator, who
+scorns no chance of information, followed the self-satisfied,
+disjointed loquacity of the constable.
+
+"A fair-haired fellow," the last observed in a placid tone, and
+paused.  "The old woman who spoke to the sergeant noticed a fair-
+haired fellow coming out of Maze Hill Station."  He paused.  "And
+he was a fair-haired fellow.  She noticed two men coming out of the
+station after the uptrain had gone on," he continued slowly.  "She
+couldn't tell if they were together.  She took no particular notice
+of the big one, but the other was a fair, slight chap, carrying a
+tin varnish can in one hand."  The constable ceased.
+
+"Know the woman?" muttered the Chief Inspector, with his eyes fixed
+on the table, and a vague notion in his mind of an inquest to be
+held presently upon a person likely to remain for ever unknown.
+
+"Yes.  She's housekeeper to a retired publican, and attends the
+chapel in Park Place sometimes," the constable uttered weightily,
+and paused, with another oblique glance at the table.
+
+Then suddenly: "Well, here he is - all of him I could see.  Fair.
+Slight - slight enough.  Look at that foot there.  I picked up the
+legs first, one after another.  He was that scattered you didn't
+know where to begin."
+
+The constable paused; the least flicker of an innocent self-
+laudatory smile invested his round face with an infantile
+expression.
+
+"Stumbled," he announced positively.  "I stumbled once myself, and
+pitched on my head too, while running up.  Them roots do stick out
+all about the place.  Stumbled against the root of a tree and fell,
+and that thing he was carrying must have gone off right under his
+chest, I expect."
+
+The echo of the words "Person unknown" repeating itself in his
+inner consciousness bothered the Chief Inspector considerably.  He
+would have liked to trace this affair back to its mysterious origin
+for his own information.  He was professionally curious.  Before
+the public he would have liked to vindicate the efficiency of his
+department by establishing the identity of that man.  He was a
+loyal servant.  That, however, appeared impossible.  The first term
+of the problem was unreadable - lacked all suggestion but that of
+atrocious cruelty.
+
+Overcoming his physical repugnance, Chief Inspector Heat stretched
+out his hand without conviction for the salving of his conscience,
+and took up the least soiled of the rags.  It was a narrow strip of
+velvet with a larger triangular piece of dark blue cloth hanging
+from it.  He held it up to his eyes; and the police constable
+spoke.
+
+"Velvet collar.  Funny the old woman should have noticed the velvet
+collar.  Dark blue overcoat with a velvet collar, she has told us.
+He was the chap she saw, and no mistake.  And here he is all
+complete, velvet collar and all.  I don't think I missed a single
+piece as big as a postage stamp."
+
+At this point the trained faculties of the Chief Inspector ceased
+to hear the voice of the constable.  He moved to one of the windows
+for better light.  His face, averted from the room, expressed a
+startled intense interest while he examined closely the triangular
+piece of broad-cloth.  By a sudden jerk he detached it, and ONLY
+after stuffing it into his pocket turned round to the room, and
+flung the velvet collar back on the table -
+
+"Cover up," he directed the attendants curtly, without another
+look, and, saluted by the constable, carried off his spoil hastily.
+
+A convenient train whirled him up to town, alone and pondering
+deeply, in a third-class compartment.  That singed piece of cloth
+was incredibly valuable, and he could not defend himself from
+astonishment at the casual manner it had come into his possession.
+It was as if Fate had thrust that clue into his hands.  And after
+the manner of the average man, whose ambition is to command events,
+he began to mistrust such a gratuitous and accidental success -
+just because it seemed forced upon him.  The practical value of
+success depends not a little on the way you look at it.  But Fate
+looks at nothing.  It has no discretion.  He no longer considered
+it eminently desirable all round to establish publicly the identity
+of the man who had blown himself up that morning with such horrible
+completeness.  But he was not certain of the view his department
+would take.  A department is to those it employs a complex
+personality with ideas and even fads of its own.  It depends on the
+loyal devotion of its servants, and the devoted loyalty of trusted
+servants is associated with a certain amount of affectionate
+contempt, which keeps it sweet, as it were.  By a benevolent
+provision of Nature no man is a hero to his valet, or else the
+heroes would have to brush their own clothes.  Likewise no
+department appears perfectly wise to the intimacy of its workers.
+A department does not know so much as some of its servants.  Being
+a dispassionate organism, it can never be perfectly informed.  It
+would not be good for its efficiency to know too much.  Chief
+Inspector Heat got out of the train in a state of thoughtfulness
+entirely untainted with disloyalty, but not quite free of that
+jealous mistrust which so often springs on the ground of perfect
+devotion, whether to women or to institutions.
+
+It was in this mental disposition, physically very empty, but still
+nauseated by what he had seen, that he had come upon the Professor.
+Under these conditions which make for irascibility in a sound,
+normal man, this meeting was specially unwelcome to Chief Inspector
+Heat.  He had not been thinking of the Professor; he had not been
+thinking of any individual anarchist at all.  The complexion of
+that case had somehow forced upon him the general idea of the
+absurdity of things human, which in the abstract is sufficiently
+annoying to an unphilosophical temperament, and in concrete
+instances becomes exasperating beyond endurance.  At the beginning
+of his career Chief Inspector Heat had been concerned with the more
+energetic forms of thieving.  He had gained his spurs in that
+sphere, and naturally enough had kept for it, after his promotion
+to another department, a feeling not very far removed from
+affection.  Thieving was not a sheer absurdity.  It was a form of
+human industry, perverse indeed, but still an industry exercised in
+an industrious world; it was work undertaken for the same reason as
+the work in potteries, in coal mines, in fields, in tool-grinding
+shops.  It was labour, whose practical difference from the other
+forms of labour consisted in the nature of its risk, which did not
+lie in ankylosis, or lead poisoning, or fire-damp, or gritty dust,
+but in what may be briefly defined in its own special phraseology
+as "Seven years hard."  Chief Inspector Heat was, of course, not
+insensible to the gravity of moral differences.  But neither were
+the thieves he had been looking after.  They submitted to the
+severe sanctions of a morality familiar to Chief Inspector Heat
+with a certain resignation.
+
+They were his fellow-citizens gone wrong because of imperfect
+education, Chief Inspector Heat believed; but allowing for that
+difference, he could understand the mind of a burglar, because, as
+a matter of fact, the mind and the instincts of a burglar are of
+the same kind as the mind and the instincts of a police officer.
+Both recognise the same conventions, and have a working knowledge
+of each other's methods and of the routine of their respective
+trades.  They understand each other, which is advantageous to both,
+and establishes a sort of amenity in their relations.  Products of
+the same machine, one classed as useful and the other as noxious,
+they take the machine for granted in different ways, but with a
+seriousness essentially the same.  The mind of Chief Inspector Heat
+was inaccessible to ideas of revolt.  But his thieves were not
+rebels.  His bodily vigour, his cool inflexible manner, his courage
+and his fairness, had secured for him much respect and some
+adulation in the sphere of his early successes.  He had felt
+himself revered and admired.  And Chief Inspector Heat, arrested
+within six paces of the anarchist nick-named the Professor, gave a
+thought of regret to the world of thieves - sane, without morbid
+ideals, working by routine, respectful of constituted authorities,
+free from all taint of hate and despair.
+
+After paying this tribute to what is normal in the constitution of
+society (for the idea of thieving appeared to his instinct as
+normal as the idea of property), Chief Inspector Heat felt very
+angry with himself for having stopped, for having spoken, for
+having taken that way at all on the ground of it being a short cut
+from the station to the headquarters.  And he spoke again in his
+big authoritative voice, which, being moderated, had a threatening
+character.
+
+"You are not wanted, I tell you," he repeated.
+
+The anarchist did not stir.  An inward laugh of derision uncovered
+not only his teeth but his gums as well, shook him all over,
+without the slightest sound.  Chief Inspector Heat was led to add,
+against his better judgment:
+
+"Not yet.  When I want you I will know where to find you."
+
+Those were perfectly proper words, within the tradition and
+suitable to his character of a police officer addressing one of his
+special flock.  But the reception they got departed from tradition
+and propriety.  It was outrageous.  The stunted, weakly figure
+before him spoke at last.
+
+"I've no doubt the papers would give you an obituary notice then.
+You know best what that would be worth to you.  I should think you
+can imagine easily the sort of stuff that would be printed.  But
+you may be exposed to the unpleasantness of being buried together
+with me, though I suppose your friends would make an effort to sort
+us out as much as possible."
+
+With all his healthy contempt for the spirit dictating such
+speeches, the atrocious allusiveness of the words had its effect on
+Chief Inspector Heat.  He had too much insight, and too much exact
+information as well, to dismiss them as rot.  The dusk of this
+narrow lane took on a sinister tint from the dark, frail little
+figure, its back to the wall, and speaking with a weak, self-
+confident voice.  To the vigorous, tenacious vitality of the Chief
+Inspector, the physical wretchedness of that being, so obviously
+not fit to live, was ominous; for it seemed to him that if he had
+the misfortune to be such a miserable object he would not have
+cared how soon he died.  Life had such a strong hold upon him that
+a fresh wave of nausea broke out in slight perspiration upon his
+brow.  The murmur of town life, the subdued rumble of wheels in the
+two invisible streets to the right and left, came through the curve
+of the sordid lane to his ears with a precious familiarity and an
+appealing sweetness.  He was human.  But Chief Inspector Heat was
+also a man, and he could not let such words pass.
+
+"All this is good to frighten children with," he said.  "I'll have
+you yet."
+
+It was very well said, without scorn, with an almost austere
+quietness.
+
+"Doubtless," was the answer; "but there's no time like the present,
+believe me.  For a man of real convictions this is a fine
+opportunity of self-sacrifice.  You may not find another so
+favourable, so humane.  There isn't even a cat near us, and these
+condemned old houses would make a good heap of bricks where you
+stand.  You'll never get me at so little cost to life and property,
+which you are paid to protect."
+
+"You don't know who you're speaking to," said Chief Inspector Heat
+firmly.  "If I were to lay my hands on you now I would be no better
+than yourself."
+
+"Ah!  The game!'
+
+"You may be sure our side will win in the end.  It may yet be
+necessary to make people believe that some of you ought to be shot
+at sight like mad dogs.  Then that will be the game.  But I'll be
+damned if I know what yours is.  I don't believe you know
+yourselves.  You'll never get anything by it."
+
+"Meantime it's you who get something from it - so far.  And you get
+it easily, too.  I won't speak of your salary, but haven't you made
+your name simply by not understanding what we are after?"
+
+"What are you after, then?" asked Chief Inspector Heat, with
+scornful haste, like a man in a hurry who perceives he is wasting
+his time.
+
+The perfect anarchist answered by a smile which did not part his
+thin colourless lips; and the celebrated Chief Inspector felt a
+sense of superiority which induced him to raise a warning finger.
+
+"Give it up - whatever it is," he said in an admonishing tone, but
+not so kindly as if he were condescending to give good advice to a
+cracksman of repute.  "Give it up.  You'll find we are too many for
+you."
+
+The fixed smile on the Professor's lips wavered, as if the mocking
+spirit within had lost its assurance.  Chief Inspector Heat went
+on:
+
+"Don't you believe me eh?  Well, you've only got to look about you.
+We are.  And anyway, you're not doing it well.  You're always
+making a mess of it.  Why, if the thieves didn't know their work
+better they would starve."
+
+The hint of an invincible multitude behind that man's back roused a
+sombre indignation in the breast of the Professor.  He smiled no
+longer his enigmatic and mocking smile.  The resisting power of
+numbers, the unattackable stolidity of a great multitude, was the
+haunting fear of his sinister loneliness.  His lips trembled for
+some time before he managed to say in a strangled voice:
+
+"I am doing my work better than you're doing yours."
+
+"That'll do now," interrupted Chief Inspector Heat hurriedly; and
+the Professor laughed right out this time.  While still laughing he
+moved on; but he did not laugh long.  It was a sad-faced, miserable
+little man who emerged from the narrow passage into the bustle of
+the broad thoroughfare.  He walked with the nerveless gait of a
+tramp going on, still going on, indifferent to rain or sun in a
+sinister detachment from the aspects of sky and earth.  Chief
+Inspector Heat, on the other hand, after watching him for a while,
+stepped out with the purposeful briskness of a man disregarding
+indeed the inclemencies of the weather, but conscious of having an
+authorised mission on this earth and the moral support of his kind.
+All the inhabitants of the immense town, the population of the
+whole country, and even the teeming millions struggling upon the
+planet, were with him - down to the very thieves and mendicants.
+Yes, the thieves themselves were sure to be with him in his present
+work.  The consciousness of universal support in his general
+activity heartened him to grapple with the particular problem.
+
+The problem immediately before the Chief Inspector was that of
+managing the Assistant Commissioner of his department, his
+immediate superior.  This is the perennial problem of trusty and
+loyal servants; anarchism gave it its particular complexion, but
+nothing more.  Truth to say, Chief Inspector Heat thought but
+little of anarchism.  He did not attach undue importance to it, and
+could never bring himself to consider it seriously.  It had more
+the character of disorderly conduct; disorderly without the human
+excuse of drunkenness, which at any rate implies good feeling and
+an amiable leaning towards festivity.  As criminals, anarchists
+were distinctly no class - no class at all.  And recalling the
+Professor, Chief Inspector Heat, without checking his swinging
+pace, muttered through his teeth:
+
+"Lunatic."
+
+Catching thieves was another matter altogether.  It had that
+quality of seriousness belonging to every form of open sport where
+the best man wins under perfectly comprehensible rules.  There were
+no rules for dealing with anarchists.  And that was distasteful to
+the Chief Inspector.  It was all foolishness, but that foolishness
+excited the public mind, affected persons in high places, and
+touched upon international relations.  A hard, merciless contempt
+settled rigidly on the Chief Inspector's face as he walked on.  His
+mind ran over all the anarchists of his flock.  Not one of them had
+half the spunk of this or that burglar he had known.  Not half -
+not one-tenth.
+
+At headquarters the Chief Inspector was admitted at once to the
+Assistant Commissioner's private room.  He found him, pen in hand,
+bent over a great table bestrewn with papers, as if worshipping an
+enormous double inkstand of bronze and crystal.  Speaking tubes
+resembling snakes were tied by the heads to the back of the
+Assistant Commissioner's wooden arm-chair, and their gaping mouths
+seemed ready to bite his elbows.  And in this attitude he raised
+only his eyes, whose lids were darker than his face and very much
+creased.  The reports had come in: every anarchist had been exactly
+accounted for.
+
+After saying this he lowered his eyes, signed rapidly two single
+sheets of paper, and only then laid down his pen, and sat well
+back, directing an inquiring gaze at his renowned subordinate.  The
+Chief Inspector stood it well, deferential but inscrutable.
+
+"I daresay you were right," said the Assistant Commissioner, "in
+telling me at first that the London anarchists had nothing to do
+with this.  I quite appreciate the excellent watch kept on them by
+your men.  On the other hand, this, for the public, does not amount
+to more than a confession of ignorance."
+
+The Assistant Commissioner's delivery was leisurely, as it were
+cautious.  His thought seemed to rest poised on a word before
+passing to another, as though words had been the stepping-stones
+for his intellect picking its way across the waters of error.
+"Unless you have brought something useful from Greenwich," he
+added.
+
+The Chief Inspector began at once the account of his investigation
+in a clear matter-of-fact manner.  His superior turning his chair a
+little, and crossing his thin legs, leaned sideways on his elbow,
+with one hand shading his eyes.  His listening attitude had a sort
+of angular and sorrowful grace.  Gleams as of highly burnished
+silver played on the sides of his ebony black head when he inclined
+it slowly at the end.
+
+Chief Inspector Heat waited with the appearance of turning over in
+his mind all he had just said, but, as a matter of fact,
+considering the advisability of saying something more.  The
+Assistant Commissioner cut his hesitation short.
+
+"You believe there were two men?" he asked, without uncovering his
+eyes.
+
+The Chief Inspector thought it more than probable.  In his opinion,
+the two men had parted from each other within a hundred yards from
+the Observatory walls.  He explained also how the other man could
+have got out of the park speedily without being observed.  The fog,
+though not very dense, was in his favour.  He seemed to have
+escorted the other to the spot, and then to have left him there to
+do the job single-handed.  Taking the time those two were seen
+coming out of Maze Hill Station by the old woman, and the time when
+the explosion was heard, the Chief Inspector thought that the other
+man might have been actually at the Greenwich Park Station, ready
+to catch the next train up, at the moment his comrade was
+destroying himself so thoroughly.
+
+"Very thoroughly - eh?" murmured the Assistant Commissioner from
+under the shadow of his hand.
+
+The Chief Inspector in a few vigorous words described the aspect of
+the remains.  "The coroner's jury will have a treat," he added
+grimly.
+
+The Assistant Commissioner uncovered his eyes.
+
+"We shall have nothing to tell them," he remarked languidly.
+
+He looked up, and for a time watched the markedly non-committal
+attitude of his Chief Inspector.  His nature was one that is not
+easily accessible to illusions.  He knew that a department is at
+the mercy of its subordinate officers, who have their own
+conceptions of loyalty.  His career had begun in a tropical colony.
+He had liked his work there.  It was police work.  He had been very
+successful in tracking and breaking up certain nefarious secret
+societies amongst the natives.  Then he took his long leave, and
+got married rather impulsively.  It was a good match from a worldly
+point of view, but his wife formed an unfavourable opinion of the
+colonial climate on hearsay evidence.  On the other hand, she had
+influential connections.  It was an excellent match.  But he did
+not like the work he had to do now.  He felt himself dependent on
+too many subordinates and too many masters.  The near presence of
+that strange emotional phenomenon called public opinion weighed
+upon his spirits, and alarmed him by its irrational nature.  No
+doubt that from ignorance he exaggerated to himself its power for
+good and evil - especially for evil; and the rough east winds of
+the English spring (which agreed with his wife) augmented his
+general mistrust of men's motives and of the efficiency of their
+organisation.  The futility of office work especially appalled him
+on those days so trying to his sensitive liver.
+
+He got up, unfolding himself to his full height, and with a
+heaviness of step remarkable in so slender a man, moved across the
+room to the window.  The panes streamed with rain, and the short
+street he looked down into lay wet and empty, as if swept clear
+suddenly by a great flood.  It was a very trying day, choked in raw
+fog to begin with, and now drowned in cold rain.  The flickering,
+blurred flames of gas-lamps seemed to be dissolving in a watery
+atmosphere.  And the lofty pretensions of a mankind oppressed by
+the miserable indignities of the weather appeared as a colossal and
+hopeless vanity deserving of scorn, wonder, and compassion.
+
+"Horrible, horrible!" thought the Assistant Commissioner to
+himself, with his face near the window-pane.  "We have been having
+this sort of thing now for ten days; no, a fortnight - a
+fortnight."  He ceased to think completely for a time.  That utter
+stillness of his brain lasted about three seconds.  Then he said
+perfunctorily: "You have set inquiries on foot for tracing that
+other man up and down the line?"
+
+He had no doubt that everything needful had been done.  Chief
+Inspector Heat knew, of course, thoroughly the business of man-
+hunting.  And these were the routine steps, too, that would be
+taken as a matter of course by the merest beginner.  A few
+inquiries amongst the ticket collectors and the porters of the two
+small railway stations would give additional details as to the
+appearance of the two men; the inspection of the collected tickets
+would show at once where they came from that morning.  It was
+elementary, and could not have been neglected.  Accordingly the
+Chief Inspector answered that all this had been done directly the
+old woman had come forward with her deposition.  And he mentioned
+the name of a station.  "That's where they came from, sir," he went
+on.  "The porter who took the tickets at Maze Hill remembers two
+chaps answering to the description passing the barrier.  They
+seemed to him two respectable working men of a superior sort - sign
+painters or house decorators.  The big man got out of a third-class
+compartment backward, with a bright tin can in his hand.  On the
+platform he gave it to carry to the fair young fellow who followed
+him.  All this agrees exactly with what the old woman told the
+police sergeant in Greenwich."
+
+The Assistant Commissioner, still with his face turned to the
+window, expressed his doubt as to these two men having had anything
+to do with the outrage.  All this theory rested upon the utterances
+of an old charwoman who had been nearly knocked down by a man in a
+hurry.  Not a very substantial authority indeed, unless on the
+ground of sudden inspiration, which was hardly tenable.
+
+"Frankly now, could she have been really inspired?" he queried,
+with grave irony, keeping his back to the room, as if entranced by
+the contemplation of the town's colossal forms half lost in the
+night.  He did not even look round when he heard the mutter of the
+word "Providential" from the principal subordinate of his
+department, whose name, printed sometimes in the papers, was
+familiar to the great public as that of one of its zealous and
+hard-working protectors.  Chief Inspector Heat raised his voice a
+little.
+
+"Strips and bits of bright tin were quite visible to me," he said.
+"That's a pretty good corroboration."
+
+"And these men came from that little country station," the
+Assistant Commissioner mused aloud, wondering.  He was told that
+such was the name on two tickets out of three given up out of that
+train at Maze Hill.  The third person who got out was a hawker from
+Gravesend well known to the porters.  The Chief Inspector imparted
+that information in a tone of finality with some ill humour, as
+loyal servants will do in the consciousness of their fidelity and
+with the sense of the value of their loyal exertions.  And still
+the Assistant Commissioner did not turn away from the darkness
+outside, as vast as a sea.
+
+"Two foreign anarchists coming from that place," he said,
+apparently to the window-pane.  "It's rather unaccountable."'
+
+"Yes, sir.  But it would be still more unaccountable if that
+Michaelis weren't staying in a cottage in the neighbourhood."
+
+At the sound of that name, falling unexpectedly into this annoying
+affair, the Assistant Commissioner dismissed brusquely the vague
+remembrance of his daily whist party at his club.  It was the most
+comforting habit of his life, in a mainly successful display of his
+skill without the assistance of any subordinate.  He entered his
+club to play from five to seven, before going home to dinner,
+forgetting for those two hours whatever was distasteful in his
+life, as though the game were a beneficent drug for allaying the
+pangs of moral discontent.  His partners were the gloomily humorous
+editor of a celebrated magazine; a silent, elderly barrister with
+malicious little eyes; and a highly martial, simple-minded old
+Colonel with nervous brown hands.  They were his club acquaintances
+merely.  He never met them elsewhere except at the card-table.  But
+they all seemed to approach the game in the spirit of co-sufferers,
+as if it were indeed a drug against the secret ills of existence;
+and every day as the sun declined over the countless roofs of the
+town, a mellow, pleasurable impatience, resembling the impulse of a
+sure and profound friendship, lightened his professional labours.
+And now this pleasurable sensation went out of him with something
+resembling a physical shock, and was replaced by a special kind of
+interest in his work of social protection - an improper sort of
+interest, which may be defined best as a sudden and alert mistrust
+of the weapon in his hand.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+
+The lady patroness of Michaelis, the ticket-of-leave apostle of
+humanitarian hopes, was one of the most influential and
+distinguished connections of the Assistant Commissioner's wife,
+whom she called Annie, and treated still rather as a not very wise
+and utterly inexperienced young girl.  But she had consented to
+accept him on a friendly footing, which was by no means the case
+with all of his wife's influential connections.  Married young and
+splendidly at some remote epoch of the past, she had had for a time
+a close view of great affairs and even of some great men.  She
+herself was a great lady.  Old now in the number of her years, she
+had that sort of exceptional temperament which defies time with
+scornful disregard, as if it were a rather vulgar convention
+submitted to by the mass of inferior mankind.  Many other
+conventions easier to set aside, alas! failed to obtain her
+recognition, also on temperamental grounds - either because they
+bored her, or else because they stood in the way of her scorns and
+sympathies.  Admiration was a sentiment unknown to her (it was one
+of the secret griefs of her most noble husband against her) -
+first, as always more or less tainted with mediocrity, and next as
+being in a way an admission of inferiority.  And both were frankly
+inconceivable to her nature.  To be fearlessly outspoken in her
+opinions came easily to her, since she judged solely from the
+standpoint of her social position.  She was equally untrammelled in
+her actions; and as her tactfulness proceeded from genuine
+humanity, her bodily vigour remained remarkable and her superiority
+was serene and cordial, three generations had admired her
+infinitely, and the last she was likely to see had pronounced her a
+wonderful woman.  Meantime intelligent, with a sort of lofty
+simplicity, and curious at heart, but not like many women merely of
+social gossip, she amused her age by attracting within her ken
+through the power of her great, almost historical, social prestige
+everything that rose above the dead level of mankind, lawfully or
+unlawfully, by position, wit, audacity, fortune or misfortune.
+Royal Highnesses, artists, men of science, young statesmen, and
+charlatans of all ages and conditions, who, unsubstantial and
+light, bobbing up like corks, show best the direction of the
+surface currents, had been welcomed in that house, listened to,
+penetrated, understood, appraised, for her own edification.  In her
+own words, she liked to watch what the world was coming to.  And as
+she had a practical mind her judgment of men and things, though
+based on special prejudices, was seldom totally wrong, and almost
+never wrong-headed.  Her drawing-room was probably the only place
+in the wide world where an Assistant Commissioner of Police could
+meet a convict liberated on a ticket-of-leave on other than
+professional and official ground.  Who had brought Michaelis there
+one afternoon the Assistant Commissioner did not remember very
+well.  He had a notion it must have been a certain Member of
+Parliament of illustrious parentage and unconventional sympathies,
+which were the standing joke of the comic papers.  The notabilities
+and even the simple notorieties of the day brought each other
+freely to that temple of an old woman's not ignoble curiosity.  You
+never could guess whom you were likely to come upon being received
+in semi-privacy within the faded blue silk and gilt frame screen,
+making a cosy nook for a couch and a few arm-chairs in the great
+drawing-room, with its hum of voices and the groups of people
+seated or standing in the light of six tall windows.
+
+Michaelis had been the object of a revulsion of popular sentiment,
+the same sentiment which years ago had applauded the ferocity of
+the life sentence passed upon him for complicity in a rather mad
+attempt to rescue some prisoners from a police van.  The plan of
+the conspirators had been to shoot down the horses and overpower
+the escort.  Unfortunately, one of the police constables got shot
+too.  He left a wife and three small children, and the death of
+that man aroused through the length and breadth of a realm for
+whose defence, welfare, and glory men die every day as matter of
+duty, an outburst of furious indignation, of a raging implacable
+pity for the victim.  Three ring-leaders got hanged.  Michaelis,
+young and slim, locksmith by trade, and great frequenter of evening
+schools, did not even know that anybody had been killed, his part
+with a few others being to force open the door at the back of the
+special conveyance.  When arrested he had a bunch of skeleton keys
+in one pocket a heavy chisel in another, and a short crowbar in his
+hand: neither more nor less than a burglar.  But no burglar would
+have received such a heavy sentence.  The death of the constable
+had made him miserable at heart, but the failure of the plot also.
+He did not conceal either of these sentiments from his empanelled
+countrymen, and that sort of compunction appeared shockingly
+imperfect to the crammed court.  The judge on passing sentence
+commented feelingly upon the depravity and callousness of the young
+prisoner.
+
+That made the groundless fame of his condemnation; the fame of his
+release was made for him on no better grounds by people who wished
+to exploit the sentimental aspect of his imprisonment either for
+purposes of their own or for no intelligible purpose.  He let them
+do so in the innocence of his heart and the simplicity of his mind.
+Nothing that happened to him individually had any importance.  He
+was like those saintly men whose personality is lost in the
+contemplation of their faith.  His ideas were not in the nature of
+convictions.  They were inaccessible to reasoning.  They formed in
+all their contradictions and obscurities an invincible and
+humanitarian creed, which he confessed rather than preached, with
+an obstinate gentleness, a smile of pacific assurance on his lips,
+and his candid blue eyes cast down because the sight of faces
+troubled his inspiration developed in solitude.  In that
+characteristic attitude, pathetic in his grotesque and incurable
+obesity which he had to drag like a galley slave's bullet to the
+end of his days, the Assistant Commissioner of Police beheld the
+ticket-of-leave apostle filling a privileged arm-chair within the
+screen.  He sat there by the head of the old lady's couch, mild-
+voiced and quiet, with no more self-consciousness than a very small
+child, and with something of a child's charm - the appealing charm
+of trustfulness.  Confident of the future, whose secret ways had
+been revealed to him within the four walls of a well-known
+penitentiary, he had no reason to look with suspicion upon anybody.
+If he could not give the great and curious lady a very definite
+idea as to what the world was coming to, he had managed without
+effort to impress her by his unembittered faith, by the sterling
+quality of his optimism.
+
+A certain simplicity of thought is common to serene souls at both
+ends of the social scale.  The great lady was simple in her own
+way.  His views and beliefs had nothing in them to shock or startle
+her, since she judged them from the standpoint of her lofty
+position.  Indeed, her sympathies were easily accessible to a man
+of that sort.  She was not an exploiting capitalist herself; she
+was, as it were, above the play of economic conditions.  And she
+had a great capacity of pity for the more obvious forms of common
+human miseries, precisely because she was such a complete stranger
+to them that she had to translate her conception into terms of
+mental suffering before she could grasp the notion of their
+cruelty.  The Assistant Commissioner remembered very well the
+conversation between these two.  He had listened in silence.  It
+was something as exciting in a way, and even touching in its
+foredoomed futility, as the efforts at moral intercourse between
+the inhabitants of remote planets.  But this grotesque incarnation
+of humanitarian passion appealed somehow, to one's imagination.  At
+last Michaelis rose, and taking the great lady's extended hand,
+shook it, retained it for a moment in his great cushioned palm with
+unembarrassed friendliness, and turned upon the semi-private nook
+of the drawing-room his back, vast and square, and as if distended
+under the short tweed jacket.  Glancing about in serene
+benevolence, he waddled along to the distant door between the knots
+of other visitors.  The murmur of conversations paused on his
+passage.  He smiled innocently at a tall, brilliant girl, whose
+eyes met his accidentally, and went out unconscious of the glances
+following him across the room.  Michaelis' first appearance in the
+world was a success - a success of esteem unmarred by a single
+murmur of derision.  The interrupted conversations were resumed in
+their proper tone, grave or light.  Only a well-set-up, long-
+limbed, active-looking man of forty talking with two ladies near a
+window remarked aloud, with an unexpected depth of feeling:
+"Eighteen stone, I should say, and not five foot six.  Poor fellow!
+It's terrible - terrible."
+
+The lady of the house, gazing absently at the Assistant
+Commissioner, left alone with her on the private side of the
+screen, seemed to be rearranging her mental impressions behind her
+thoughtful immobility of a handsome old face.  Men with grey
+moustaches and full, healthy, vaguely smiling countenances
+approached, circling round the screen; two mature women with a
+matronly air of gracious resolution; a clean-shaved individual with
+sunken cheeks, and dangling a gold-mounted eyeglass on a broad
+black ribbon with an old-world, dandified effect.  A silence
+deferential, but full of reserves, reigned for a moment, and then
+the great lady exclaimed, not with resentment, but with a sort of
+protesting indignation:
+
+"And that officially is supposed to be a revolutionist!  What
+nonsense."  She looked hard at the Assistant Commissioner, who
+murmured apologetically:
+
+"Not a dangerous one perhaps."
+
+"Not dangerous - I should think not indeed.  He is a mere believer.
+It's the temperament of a saint," declared the great lady in a firm
+tone.  "And they kept him shut up for twenty years.  One shudders
+at the stupidity of it.  And now they have let him out everybody
+belonging to him is gone away somewhere or dead.  His parents are
+dead; the girl he was to marry has died while he was in prison; he
+has lost the skill necessary for his manual occupation.  He told me
+all this himself with the sweetest patience; but then, he said, he
+had had plenty of time to think out things for himself.  A pretty
+compensation!  If that's the stuff revolutionists are made of some
+of us may well go on their knees to them," she continued in a
+slightly bantering voice, while the banal society smiles hardened
+on the worldly faces turned towards her with conventional
+deference.  "The poor creature is obviously no longer in a position
+to take care of himself.  Somebody will have to look after him a
+little."
+
+"He should be recommended to follow a treatment of some sort," the
+soldierly voice of the active-looking man was heard advising
+earnestly from a distance.  He was in the pink of condition for his
+age, and even the texture of his long frock coat had a character of
+elastic soundness, as if it were a living tissue.  "The man is
+virtually a cripple," he added with unmistakable feeling.
+
+Other voices, as if glad of the opening, murmured hasty compassion.
+"Quite startling," "Monstrous," "Most painful to see."  The lank
+man, with the eyeglass on a broad ribbon, pronounced mincingly the
+word "Grotesque," whose justness was appreciated by those standing
+near him.  They smiled at each other.
+
+The Assistant Commissioner had expressed no opinion either then or
+later, his position making it impossible for him to ventilate any
+independent view of a ticket-of-leave convict.  But, in truth, he
+shared the view of his wife's friend and patron that Michaelis was
+a humanitarian sentimentalist, a little mad, but upon the whole
+incapable of hurting a fly intentionally.  So when that name
+cropped up suddenly in this vexing bomb affair he realised all the
+danger of it for the ticket-of-leave apostle, and his mind reverted
+at once to the old lady's well-established infatuation.  Her
+arbitrary kindness would not brook patiently any interference with
+Michaelis' freedom.  It was a deep, calm, convinced infatuation.
+She had not only felt him to be inoffensive, but she had said so,
+which last by a confusion of her absolutist mind became a sort of
+incontrovertible demonstration.  It was as if the monstrosity of
+the man, with his candid infant's eyes and a fat angelic smile, had
+fascinated her.  She had come to believe almost his theory of the
+future, since it was not repugnant to her prejudices.  She disliked
+the new element of plutocracy in the social compound, and
+industrialism as a method of human development appeared to her
+singularly repulsive in its mechanical and unfeeling character.
+The humanitarian hopes of the mild Michaelis tended not towards
+utter destruction, but merely towards the complete economic ruin of
+the system.  And she did not really see where was the moral harm of
+it.  It would do away with all the multitude of the "parvenus,"
+whom she disliked and mistrusted, not because they had arrived
+anywhere (she denied that), but because of their profound
+unintelligence of the world, which was the primary cause of the
+crudity of their perceptions and the aridity of their hearts.  With
+the annihilation of all capital they would vanish too; but
+universal ruin (providing it was universal, as it was revealed to
+Michaelis) would leave the social values untouched.  The
+disappearance of the last piece of money could not affect people of
+position.  She could not conceive how it could affect her position,
+for instance.  She had developed these discoveries to the Assistant
+Commissioner with all the serene fearlessness of an old woman who
+had escaped the blight of indifference.  He had made for himself
+the rule to receive everything of that sort in a silence which he
+took care from policy and inclination not to make offensive.  He
+had an affection for the aged disciple of Michaelis, a complex
+sentiment depending a little on her prestige, on her personality,
+but most of all on the instinct of flattered gratitude.  He felt
+himself really liked in her house.  She was kindness personified.
+And she was practically wise too, after the manner of experienced
+women.  She made his married life much easier than it would have
+been without her generously full recognition of his rights as
+Annie's husband.  Her influence upon his wife, a woman devoured by
+all sorts of small selfishnesses, small envies, small jealousies,
+was excellent.  Unfortunately, both her kindness and her wisdom
+were of unreasonable complexion, distinctly feminine, and difficult
+to deal with.  She remained a perfect woman all along her full tale
+of years, and not as some of them do become - a sort of slippery,
+pestilential old man in petticoats.  And it was as of a woman that
+he thought of her - the specially choice incarnation of the
+feminine, wherein is recruited the tender, ingenuous, and fierce
+bodyguard for all sorts of men who talk under the influence of an
+emotion, true or fraudulent; for preachers, seers, prophets, or
+reformers.
+
+Appreciating the distinguished and good friend of his wife, and
+himself, in that way, the Assistant Commissioner became alarmed at
+the convict Michaelis' possible fate.  Once arrested on suspicion
+of being in some way, however remote, a party to this outrage, the
+man could hardly escape being sent back to finish his sentence at
+least.  And that would kill him; he would never come out alive.
+The Assistant Commissioner made a reflection extremely unbecoming
+his official position without being really creditable to his
+humanity.
+
+"If the fellow is laid hold of again," he thought, "she will never
+forgive me."
+
+The frankness of such a secretly outspoken thought could not go
+without some derisive self-criticism.  No man engaged in a work he
+does not like can preserve many saving illusions about himself.
+The distaste, the absence of glamour, extend from the occupation to
+the personality.  It is only when our appointed activities seem by
+a lucky accident to obey the particular earnestness of our
+temperament that we can taste the comfort of complete self-
+deception.  The Assistant Commissioner did not like his work at
+home.  The police work he had been engaged on in a distant part of
+the globe had the saving character of an irregular sort of warfare
+or at least the risk and excitement of open-air sport.  His real
+abilities, which were mainly of an administrative order, were
+combined with an adventurous disposition.  Chained to a desk in the
+thick of four millions of men, he considered himself the victim of
+an ironic fate - the same, no doubt, which had brought about his
+marriage with a woman exceptionally sensitive in the matter of
+colonial climate, besides other limitations testifying to the
+delicacy of her nature - and her tastes.  Though he judged his
+alarm sardonically he did not dismiss the improper thought from his
+mind.  The instinct of self-preservation was strong within him.  On
+the contrary, he repeated it mentally with profane emphasis and a
+fuller precision: "Damn it!  If that infernal Heat has his way the
+fellow'll die in prison smothered in his fat, and she'll never
+forgive me."
+
+His black, narrow figure, with the white band of the collar under
+the silvery gleams on the close-cropped hair at the back of the
+head, remained motionless.  The silence had lasted such a long time
+that Chief Inspector Heat ventured to clear his throat.  This noise
+produced its effect.  The zealous and intelligent officer was asked
+by his superior, whose back remained turned to him immovably:
+
+"You connect Michaelis with this affair?"
+
+Chief Inspector Heat was very positive, but cautious.
+
+"Well, sir," he said, "we have enough to go upon.  A man like that
+has no business to be at large, anyhow."
+
+"You will want some conclusive evidence," came the observation in a
+murmur.
+
+Chief Inspector Heat raised his eyebrows at the black, narrow back,
+which remained obstinately presented to his intelligence and his
+zeal.
+
+"There will be no difficulty in getting up sufficient evidence
+against HIM," he said, with virtuous complacency.  "You may trust
+me for that, sir," he added, quite unnecessarily, out of the
+fulness of his heart; for it seemed to him an excellent thing to
+have that man in hand to be thrown down to the public should it
+think fit to roar with any special indignation in this case.  It
+was impossible to say yet whether it would roar or not.  That in
+the last instance depended, of course, on the newspaper press.  But
+in any case, Chief Inspector Heat, purveyor of prisons by trade,
+and a man of legal instincts, did logically believe that
+incarceration was the proper fate for every declared enemy of the
+law.  In the strength of that conviction he committed a fault of
+tact.  He allowed himself a little conceited laugh, and repeated:
+
+"Trust me for that, sir."
+
+This was too much for the forced calmness under which the Assistant
+Commissioner had for upwards of eighteen months concealed his
+irritation with the system and the subordinates of his office.  A
+square peg forced into a round hole, he had felt like a daily
+outrage that long established smooth roundness into which a man of
+less sharply angular shape would have fitted himself, with
+voluptuous acquiescence, after a shrug or two.  What he resented
+most was just the necessity of taking so much on trust.  At the
+little laugh of Chief Inspector Heat's he spun swiftly on his
+heels, as if whirled away from the window-pane by an electric
+shock.  He caught on the latter's face not only the complacency
+proper to the occasion lurking under the moustache, but the
+vestiges of experimental watchfulness in the round eyes, which had
+been, no doubt, fastened on his back, and now met his glance for a
+second before the intent character of their stare had the time to
+change to a merely startled appearance.
+
+The Assistant Commissioner of Police had really some qualifications
+for his post.  Suddenly his suspicion was awakened.  It is but fair
+to say that his suspicions of the police methods (unless the police
+happened to be a semi-military body organised by himself) was not
+difficult to arouse.  If it ever slumbered from sheer weariness, it
+was but lightly; and his appreciation of Chief Inspector Heat's
+zeal and ability, moderate in itself, excluded all notion of moral
+confidence.  "He's up to something," he exclaimed mentally, and at
+once became angry.  Crossing over to his desk with headlong
+strides, he sat down violently.  "Here I am stuck in a litter of
+paper," he reflected, with unreasonable resentment, "supposed to
+hold all the threads in my hands, and yet I can but hold what is
+put in my hand, and nothing else.  And they can fasten the other
+ends of the threads where they please."
+
+He raised his head, and turned towards his subordinate a long,
+meagre face with the accentuated features of an energetic Don
+Quixote.
+
+"Now what is it you've got up your sleeve?"
+
+The other stared.  He stared without winking in a perfect
+immobility of his round eyes, as he was used to stare at the
+various members of the criminal class when, after being duly
+cautioned, they made their statements in the tones of injured
+innocence, or false simplicity, or sullen resignation.  But behind
+that professional and stony fixity there was some surprise too, for
+in such a tone, combining nicely the note of contempt and
+impatience, Chief Inspector Heat, the right-hand man of the
+department, was not used to be addressed.  He began in a
+procrastinating manner, like a man taken unawares by a new and
+unexpected experience.
+
+"What I've got against that man Michaelis you mean, sir?"
+
+The Assistant Commissioner watched the bullet head; the points of
+that Norse rover's moustache, falling below the line of the heavy
+jaw; the whole full and pale physiognomy, whose determined
+character was marred by too much flesh; at the cunning wrinkles
+radiating from the outer corners of the eyes - and in that
+purposeful contemplation of the valuable and trusted officer he
+drew a conviction so sudden that it moved him like an inspiration.
+
+"I have reason to think that when you came into this room," he said
+in measured tones, "it was not Michaelis who was in your mind; not
+principally - perhaps not at all."
+
+"You have reason to think, sir?" muttered Chief Inspector Heat,
+with every appearance of astonishment, which up to a certain point
+was genuine enough.  He had discovered in this affair a delicate
+and perplexing side, forcing upon the discoverer a certain amount
+of insincerity - that sort of insincerity which, under the names of
+skill, prudence, discretion, turns up at one point or another in
+most human affairs.  He felt at the moment like a tight-rope artist
+might feel if suddenly, in the middle of the performance, the
+manager of the Music Hall were to rush out of the proper managerial
+seclusion and begin to shake the rope.  Indignation, the sense of
+moral insecurity engendered by such a treacherous proceeding joined
+to the immediate apprehension of a broken neck, would, in the
+colloquial phrase, put him in a state.  And there would be also
+some scandalised concern for his art too, since a man must identify
+himself with something more tangible than his own personality, and
+establish his pride somewhere, either in his social position, or in
+the quality of the work he is obliged to do, or simply in the
+superiority of the idleness he may be fortunate enough to enjoy.
+
+"Yes," said the Assistant Commissioner; "I have.  I do not mean to
+say that you have not thought of Michaelis at all.  But you are
+giving the fact you've mentioned a prominence which strikes me as
+not quite candid, Inspector Heat.  If that is really the track of
+discovery, why haven't you followed it up at once, either
+personally or by sending one of your men to that village?"
+
+"Do you think, sir, I have failed in my duty there?" the Chief
+Inspector asked, in a tone which he sought to make simply
+reflective.  Forced unexpectedly to concentrate his faculties upon
+the task of preserving his balance, he had seized upon that point,
+and exposed himself to a rebuke; for, the Assistant Commissioner
+frowning slightly, observed that this was a very improper remark to
+make.
+
+"But since you've made it," he continued coldly, "I'll tell you
+that this is not my meaning."
+
+He paused, with a straight glance of his sunken eyes which was a
+full equivalent of the unspoken termination "and you know it."  The
+head of the so-called Special Crimes Department debarred by his
+position from going out of doors personally in quest of secrets
+locked up in guilty breasts, had a propensity to exercise his
+considerable gifts for the detection of incriminating truth upon
+his own subordinates.  That peculiar instinct could hardly be
+called a weakness.  It was natural.  He was a born detective.  It
+had unconsciously governed his choice of a career, and if it ever
+failed him in life it was perhaps in the one exceptional
+circumstance of his marriage - which was also natural.  It fed,
+since it could not roam abroad, upon the human material which was
+brought to it in its official seclusion.  We can never cease to be
+ourselves.
+
+His elbow on the desk, his thin legs crossed, and nursing his cheek
+in the palm of his meagre hand, the Assistant Commissioner in
+charge of the Special Crimes branch was getting hold of the case
+with growing interest.  His Chief Inspector, if not an absolutely
+worthy foeman of his penetration, was at any rate the most worthy
+of all within his reach.  A mistrust of established reputations was
+strictly in character with the Assistant Commissioner's ability as
+detector.  His memory evoked a certain old fat and wealthy native
+chief in the distant colony whom it was a tradition for the
+successive Colonial Governors to trust and make much of as a firm
+friend and supporter of the order and legality established by white
+men; whereas, when examined sceptically, he was found out to be
+principally his own good friend, and nobody else's.  Not precisely
+a traitor, but still a man of many dangerous reservations in his
+fidelity, caused by a due regard for his own advantage, comfort,
+and safety.  A fellow of some innocence in his naive duplicity, but
+none the less dangerous.  He took some finding out.  He was
+physically a big man, too, and (allowing for the difference of
+colour, of course) Chief Inspector Heat's appearance recalled him
+to the memory of his superior.  It was not the eyes nor yet the
+lips exactly.  It was bizarre.  But does not Alfred Wallace relate
+in his famous book on the Malay Archipelago how, amongst the Aru
+Islanders, he discovered in an old and naked savage with a sooty
+skin a peculiar resemblance to a dear friend at home?
+
+For the first time since he took up his appointment the Assistant
+Commissioner felt as if he were going to do some real work for his
+salary.  And that was a pleasurable sensation.  "I'll turn him
+inside out like an old glove," thought the Assistant Commissioner,
+with his eyes resting pensively upon Chief Inspector Heat.
+
+"No, that was not my thought," he began again.  "There is no doubt
+about you knowing your business - no doubt at all; and that's
+precisely why I - "  He stopped short, and changing his tone: "What
+could you bring up against Michaelis of a definite nature?  I mean
+apart from the fact that the two men under suspicion - you're
+certain there were two of them - came last from a railway station
+within three miles of the village where Michaelis is living now."
+
+"This by itself is enough for us to go upon, sir, with that sort of
+man," said the Chief Inspector, with returning composure.  The
+slight approving movement of the Assistant Commissioner's head went
+far to pacify the resentful astonishment of the renowned officer.
+For Chief Inspector Heat was a kind man, an excellent husband, a
+devoted father; and the public and departmental confidence he
+enjoyed acting favourably upon an amiable nature, disposed him to
+feel friendly towards the successive Assistant Commissioners he had
+seen pass through that very room.  There had been three in his
+time.  The first one, a soldierly, abrupt, red-faced person, with
+white eyebrows and an explosive temper, could be managed with a
+silken thread.  He left on reaching the age limit.  The second, a
+perfect gentleman, knowing his own and everybody else's place to a
+nicety, on resigning to take up a higher appointment out of England
+got decorated for (really) Inspector Heat's services.  To work with
+him had been a pride and a pleasure.  The third, a bit of a dark
+horse from the first, was at the end of eighteen months something
+of a dark horse still to the department.  Upon the whole Chief
+Inspector Heat believed him to be in the main harmless - odd-
+looking, but harmless.  He was speaking now, and the Chief
+Inspector listened with outward deference (which means nothing,
+being a matter of duty) and inwardly with benevolent toleration.
+
+"Michaelis reported himself before leaving London for the country?"
+
+"Yes, sir.  He did."
+
+"And what may he be doing there?" continued the Assistant
+Commissioner, who was perfectly informed on that point.  Fitted
+with painful tightness into an old wooden arm-chair, before a worm-
+eaten oak table in an upstairs room of a four-roomed cottage with a
+roof of moss-grown tiles, Michaelis was writing night and day in a
+shaky, slanting hand that "Autobiography of a Prisoner" which was
+to be like a book of Revelation in the history of mankind.  The
+conditions of confined space, seclusion, and solitude in a small
+four-roomed cottage were favourable to his inspiration.  It was
+like being in prison, except that one was never disturbed for the
+odious purpose of taking exercise according to the tyrannical
+regulations of his old home in the penitentiary.  He could not tell
+whether the sun still shone on the earth or not.  The perspiration
+of the literary labour dropped from his brow.  A delightful
+enthusiasm urged him on.  It was the liberation of his inner life,
+the letting out of his soul into the wide world.  And the zeal of
+his guileless vanity (first awakened by the offer of five hundred
+pounds from a publisher) seemed something predestined and holy.
+
+"It would be, of course, most desirable to be informed exactly,"
+insisted the Assistant Commissioner uncandidly.
+
+Chief Inspector Heat, conscious of renewed irritation at this
+display of scrupulousness, said that the county police had been
+notified from the first of Michaelis' arrival, and that a full
+report could be obtained in a few hours.  A wire to the
+superintendent -
+
+Thus he spoke, rather slowly, while his mind seemed already to be
+weighing the consequences.  A slight knitting of the brow was the
+outward sign of this.  But he was interrupted by a question.
+
+"You've sent that wire already?"
+
+"No, sir," he answered, as if surprised.
+
+The Assistant Commissioner uncrossed his legs suddenly.  The
+briskness of that movement contrasted with the casual way in which
+he threw out a suggestion.
+
+"Would you think that Michaelis had anything to do with the
+preparation of that bomb, for instance?"
+
+The Chief Inspector assumed a reflective manner.
+
+"I wouldn't say so.  There's no necessity to say anything at
+present.  He associates with men who are classed as dangerous.  He
+was made a delegate of the Red Committee less than a year after his
+release on licence.  A sort of compliment, I suppose."
+
+And the Chief Inspector laughed a little angrily, a little
+scornfully.  With a man of that sort scrupulousness was a misplaced
+and even an illegal sentiment.  The celebrity bestowed upon
+Michaelis on his release two years ago by some emotional
+journalists in want of special copy had rankled ever since in his
+breast.  It was perfectly legal to arrest that man on the barest
+suspicion.  It was legal and expedient on the face of it.  His two
+former chiefs would have seen the point at once; whereas this one,
+without saying either yes or no, sat there, as if lost in a dream.
+Moreover, besides being legal and expedient, the arrest of
+Michaelis solved a little personal difficulty which worried Chief
+Inspector Heat somewhat.  This difficulty had its bearing upon his
+reputation, upon his comfort, and even upon the efficient
+performance of his duties.  For, if Michaelis no doubt knew
+something about this outrage, the Chief Inspector was fairly
+certain that he did not know too much.  This was just as well.  He
+knew much less - the Chief Inspector was positive - than certain
+other individuals he had in his mind, but whose arrest seemed to
+him inexpedient, besides being a more complicated matter, on
+account of the rules of the game.  The rules of the game did not
+protect so much Michaelis, who was an ex-convict.  It would be
+stupid not to take advantage of legal facilities, and the
+journalists who had written him up with emotional gush would be
+ready to write him down with emotional indignation.
+
+This prospect, viewed with confidence, had the attraction of a
+personal triumph for Chief Inspector Heat.  And deep down in his
+blameless bosom of an average married citizen, almost unconscious
+but potent nevertheless, the dislike of being compelled by events
+to meddle with the desperate ferocity of the Professor had its say.
+This dislike had been strengthened by the chance meeting in the
+lane.  The encounter did not leave behind with Chief Inspector Heat
+that satisfactory sense of superiority the members of the police
+force get from the unofficial but intimate side of their
+intercourse with the criminal classes, by which the vanity of power
+is soothed, and the vulgar love of domination over our fellow-
+creatures is flattered as worthily as it deserves.
+
+The perfect anarchist was not recognised as a fellow-creature by
+Chief Inspector Heat.  He was impossible - a mad dog to be left
+alone.  Not that the Chief Inspector was afraid of him; on the
+contrary, he meant to have him some day.  But not yet; he meant to
+get hold of him in his own time, properly and effectively according
+to the rules of the game.  The present was not the right time for
+attempting that feat, not the right time for many reasons, personal
+and of public service.  This being the strong feeling of Inspector
+Heat, it appeared to him just and proper that this affair should be
+shunted off its obscure and inconvenient track, leading goodness
+knows where, into a quiet (and lawful) siding called Michaelis.
+And he repeated, as if reconsidering the suggestion
+conscientiously:
+
+"The bomb.  No, I would not say that exactly.  We may never find
+that out.  But it's clear that he is connected with this in some
+way, which we can find out without much trouble."
+
+His countenance had that look of grave, overbearing indifference
+once well known and much dreaded by the better sort of thieves.
+Chief Inspector Heat, though what is called a man, was not a
+smiling animal.  But his inward state was that of satisfaction at
+the passively receptive attitude of the Assistant Commissioner, who
+murmured gently:
+
+"And you really think that the investigation should be made in that
+direction?"
+
+"I do, sir."
+
+"Quite convinced?
+
+"I am, sir.  That's the true line for us to take."
+
+The Assistant Commissioner withdrew the support of his hand from
+his reclining head with a suddenness that, considering his languid
+attitude, seemed to menace his whole person with collapse.  But, on
+the contrary, he sat up, extremely alert, behind the great writing-
+table on which his hand had fallen with the sound of a sharp blow.
+
+"What I want to know is what put it out of your head till now."
+
+"Put it out of my head," repeated the Chief Inspector very slowly.
+
+"Yes.  Till you were called into this room - you know."
+
+The Chief Inspector felt as if the air between his clothing and his
+skin had become unpleasantly hot.  It was the sensation of an
+unprecedented and incredible experience.
+
+"Of course," he said, exaggerating the deliberation of his
+utterance to the utmost limits of possibility, "if there is a
+reason, of which I know nothing, for not interfering with the
+convict Michaelis, perhaps it's just as well I didn't start the
+county police after him."
+
+This took such a long time to say that the unflagging attention of
+the Assistant Commissioner seemed a wonderful feat of endurance.
+His retort came without delay.
+
+"No reason whatever that I know of.  Come, Chief Inspector, this
+finessing with me is highly improper on your part - highly
+improper.  And it's also unfair, you know.  You shouldn't leave me
+to puzzle things out for myself like this.  Really, I am
+surprised."
+
+He paused, then added smoothly: "I need scarcely tell you that this
+conversation is altogether unofficial."
+
+These words were far from pacifying the Chief Inspector.  The
+indignation of a betrayed tight-rope performer was strong within
+him.  In his pride of a trusted servant he was affected by the
+assurance that the rope was not shaken for the purpose of breaking
+his neck, as by an exhibition of impudence.  As if anybody were
+afraid!  Assistant Commissioners come and go, but a valuable Chief
+Inspector is not an ephemeral office phenomenon.  He was not afraid
+of getting a broken neck.  To have his performance spoiled was more
+than enough to account for the glow of honest indignation.  And as
+thought is no respecter of persons, the thought of Chief Inspector
+Heat took a threatening and prophetic shape.  "You, my boy," he
+said to himself, keeping his round and habitually roving eyes
+fastened upon the Assistant Commissioner's face - "you, my boy, you
+don't know your place, and your place won't know you very long
+either, I bet."
+
+As if in provoking answer to that thought, something like the ghost
+of an amiable smile passed on the lips of the Assistant
+Commissioner.  His manner was easy and business-like while he
+persisted in administering another shake to the tight rope.
+
+"Let us come now to what you have discovered on the spot, Chief
+Inspector," he said.
+
+"A fool and his job are soon parted," went on the train of
+prophetic thought in Chief Inspector Heat's head.  But it was
+immediately followed by the reflection that a higher official, even
+when "fired out" (this was the precise image), has still the time
+as he flies through the door to launch a nasty kick at the shin-
+bones of a subordinate.  Without softening very much the basilisk
+nature of his stare, he said impassively:
+
+"We are coming to that part of my investigation, sir."
+
+"That's right.  Well, what have you brought away from it?"
+
+The Chief Inspector, who had made up his mind to jump off the rope,
+came to the ground with gloomy frankness.
+
+"I've brought away an address," he said, pulling out of his pocket
+without haste a singed rag of dark blue cloth.  "This belongs to
+the overcoat the fellow who got himself blown to pieces was
+wearing.  Of course, the overcoat may not have been his, and may
+even have been stolen.  But that's not at all probable if you look
+at this."
+
+The Chief Inspector, stepping up to the table, smoothed out
+carefully the rag of blue cloth.  He had picked it up from the
+repulsive heap in the mortuary, because a tailor's name is found
+sometimes under the collar.  It is not often of much use, but still
+-  He only half expected to find anything useful, but certainly he
+did not expect to find - not under the collar at all, but stitched
+carefully on the under side of the lapel - a square piece of calico
+with an address written on it in marking ink.
+
+The Chief Inspector removed his smoothing hand.
+
+"I carried it off with me without anybody taking notice," he said.
+"I thought it best.  It can always be produced if required."
+
+The Assistant Commissioner, rising a little in his chair, pulled
+the cloth over to his side of the table.  He sat looking at it in
+silence.  Only the number 32 and the name of Brett Street were
+written in marking ink on a piece of calico slightly larger than an
+ordinary cigarette paper.  He was genuinely surprised.
+
+"Can't understand why he should have gone about labelled like
+this," he said, looking up at Chief Inspector Heat.  "It's a most
+extraordinary thing."
+
+"I met once in the smoking-room of a hotel an old gentleman who
+went about with his name and address sewn on in all his coats in
+case of an accident or sudden illness," said the Chief Inspector.
+"He professed to be eighty-four years old, but he didn't look his
+age.  He told me he was also afraid of losing his memory suddenly,
+like those people he has been reading of in the papers."
+
+A question from the Assistant Commissioner, who wanted to know what
+was No. 32 Brett Street, interrupted that reminiscence abruptly.
+The Chief Inspector, driven down to the ground by unfair artifices,
+had elected to walk the path of unreserved openness.  If he
+believed firmly that to know too much was not good for the
+department, the judicious holding back of knowledge was as far as
+his loyalty dared to go for the good of the service.  If the
+Assistant Commissioner wanted to mismanage this affair nothing, of
+course, could prevent him.  But, on his own part, he now saw no
+reason for a display of alacrity.  So he answered concisely:
+
+"It's a shop, sir."
+
+The Assistant Commissioner, with his eyes lowered on the rag of
+blue cloth, waited for more information.  As that did not come he
+proceeded to obtain it by a series of questions propounded with
+gentle patience.  Thus he acquired an idea of the nature of Mr
+Verloc's commerce, of his personal appearance, and heard at last
+his name.  In a pause the Assistant Commissioner raised his eyes,
+and discovered some animation on the Chief Inspector's face.  They
+looked at each other in silence.
+
+"Of course," said the latter, "the department has no record of that
+man."
+
+"Did any of my predecessors have any knowledge of what you have
+told me now?" asked the Assistant Commissioner, putting his elbows
+on the table and raising his joined hands before his face, as if
+about to offer prayer, only that his eyes had not a pious
+expression.
+
+"No, sir; certainly not.  What would have been the object?  That
+sort of man could never be produced publicly to any good purpose.
+It was sufficient for me to know who he was, and to make use of him
+in a way that could be used publicly."
+
+"And do you think that sort of private knowledge consistent with
+the official position you occupy?"
+
+"Perfectly, sir.  I think it's quite proper.  I will take the
+liberty to tell you, sir, that it makes me what I am - and I am
+looked upon as a man who knows his work.  It's a private affair of
+my own.  A personal friend of mine in the French police gave me the
+hint that the fellow was an Embassy spy.  Private friendship,
+private information, private use of it - that's how I look upon
+it."
+
+The Assistant Commissioner after remarking to himself that the
+mental state of the renowned Chief Inspector seemed to affect the
+outline of his lower jaw, as if the lively sense of his high
+professional distinction had been located in that part of his
+anatomy, dismissed the point for the moment with a calm "I see."
+Then leaning his cheek on his joined hands:
+
+"Well then - speaking privately if you like - how long have you
+been in private touch with this Embassy spy?"
+
+To this inquiry the private answer of the Chief Inspector, so
+private that it was never shaped into audible words, was:
+
+"Long before you were even thought of for your place here."
+
+The so-to-speak public utterance was much more precise.
+
+"I saw him for the first time in my life a little more than seven
+years ago, when two Imperial Highnesses and the Imperial Chancellor
+were on a visit here.  I was put in charge of all the arrangements
+for looking after them.  Baron Stott-Wartenheim was Ambassador
+then.  He was a very nervous old gentleman.  One evening, three
+days before the Guildhall Banquet, he sent word that he wanted to
+see me for a moment.  I was downstairs, and the carriages were at
+the door to take the Imperial Highnesses and the Chancellor to the
+opera.  I went up at once.  I found the Baron walking up and down
+his bedroom in a pitiable state of distress, squeezing his hands
+together.  He assured me he had the fullest confidence in our
+police and in my abilities, but he had there a man just come over
+from Paris whose information could be trusted simplicity.  He
+wanted me to hear what that man had to say.  He took me at once
+into a dressing-room next door, where I saw a big fellow in a heavy
+overcoat sitting all alone on a chair, and holding his hat and
+stick in one hand.  The Baron said to him in French `Speak, my
+friend.'  The light in that room was not very good.  I talked with
+him for some five minutes perhaps.  He certainly gave me a piece of
+very startling news.  Then the Baron took me aside nervously to
+praise him up to me, and when I turned round again I discovered
+that the fellow had vanished like a ghost.  Got up and sneaked out
+down some back stairs, I suppose.  There was no time to run after
+him, as I had to hurry off after the Ambassador down the great
+staircase, and see the party started safe for the opera.  However,
+I acted upon the information that very night.  Whether it was
+perfectly correct or not, it did look serious enough.  Very likely
+it saved us from an ugly trouble on the day of the Imperial visit
+to the City.
+
+"Some time later, a month or so after my promotion to Chief
+Inspector, my attention was attracted to a big burly man, I thought
+I had seen somewhere before, coming out in a hurry from a
+jeweller's shop in the Strand.  I went after him, as it was on my
+way towards Charing Cross, and there seeing one of our detectives
+across the road, I beckoned him over, and pointed out the fellow to
+him, with instructions to watch his movements for a couple of days,
+and then report to me.  No later than next afternoon my man turned
+up to tell me that the fellow had married his landlady's daughter
+at a registrar's office that very day at 11.30 a.m., and had gone
+off with her to Margate for a week.  Our man had seen the luggage
+being put on the cab.  There were some old Paris labels on one of
+the bags.  Somehow I couldn't get the fellow out of my head, and
+the very next time I had to go to Paris on service I spoke about
+him to that friend of mine in the Paris police.  My friend said:
+`From what you tell me I think you must mean a rather well-known
+hanger-on and emissary of the Revolutionary Red Committee.  He says
+he is an Englishman by birth.  We have an idea that he has been for
+a good few years now a secret agent of one of the foreign Embassies
+in London.'  This woke up my memory completely.  He was the
+vanishing fellow I saw sitting on a chair in Baron Stott-
+Wartenheim's bathroom.  I told my friend that he was quite right.
+The fellow was a secret agent to my certain knowledge.  Afterwards
+my friend took the trouble to ferret out the complete record of
+that man for me.  I thought I had better know all there was to
+know; but I don't suppose you want to hear his history now, sir?"
+
+The Assistant Commissioner shook his supported head.  "The history
+of your relations with that useful personage is the only thing that
+matters just now," he said, closing slowly his weary, deep-set
+eyes, and then opening them swiftly with a greatly refreshed
+glance.
+
+"There's nothing official about them," said the Chief Inspector
+bitterly.  "I went into his shop one evening, told him who I was,
+and reminded him of our first meeting.  He didn't as much as twitch
+an eyebrow.  He said that he was married and settled now, and that
+all he wanted was not to be interfered in his little business.  I
+took it upon myself to promise him that, as long as he didn't go in
+for anything obviously outrageous, he would be left alone by the
+police.  That was worth something to him, because a word from us to
+the Custom-House people would have been enough to get some of these
+packages he gets from Paris and Brussels opened in Dover, with
+confiscation to follow for certain, and perhaps a prosecution as
+well at the end of it."
+
+"That's a very precarious trade," murmured the Assistant
+Commissioner.  "Why did he go in for that?"
+
+The Chief Inspector raised scornful eyebrows dispassionately.
+
+"Most likely got a connection - friends on the Continent - amongst
+people who deal in such wares.  They would be just the sort he
+would consort with.  He's a lazy dog, too - like the rest of them,"
+
+"What do you get from him in exchange for your protection?"
+
+The Chief Inspector was not inclined to enlarge on the value of Mr
+Verloc's services.
+
+"He would not be much good to anybody but myself.  One has got to
+know a good deal beforehand to make use of a man like that.  I can
+understand the sort of hint he can give.  And when I want a hint he
+can generally furnish it to me."
+
+The Chief Inspector lost himself suddenly in a discreet reflective
+mood; and the Assistant Commissioner repressed a smile at the
+fleeting thought that the reputation of Chief Inspector Heat might
+possibly have been made in a great part by the Secret Agent Verloc.
+
+"In a more general way of being of use, all our men of the Special
+Crimes section on duty at Charing Cross and Victoria have orders to
+take careful notice of anybody they may see with him.  He meets the
+new arrivals frequently, and afterwards keeps track of them.  He
+seems to have been told off for that sort of duty.  When I want an
+address in a hurry, I can always get it from him.  Of course, I
+know how to manage our relations.  I haven't seen him to speak to
+three times in the last two years.  I drop him a line, unsigned,
+and he answers me in the same way at my private address."
+
+From time to time the Assistant Commissioner gave an almost
+imperceptible nod.  The Chief Inspector added that he did not
+suppose Mr Verloc to be deep in the confidence of the prominent
+members of the Revolutionary International Council, but that he was
+generally trusted of that there could be no doubt.  "Whenever I've
+had reason to think there was something in the wind," he concluded,
+"I've always found he could tell me something worth knowing."
+
+The Assistant Commissioner made a significant remark.
+
+"He failed you this time."
+
+"Neither had I wind of anything in any other way," retorted Chief
+Inspector Heat.  "I asked him nothing, so he could tell me nothing.
+He isn't one of our men.  It isn't as if he were in our pay."
+
+"No," muttered the Assistant Commissioner.  "He's a spy in the pay
+of a foreign government.  We could never confess to him."
+
+"I must do my work in my own way," declared the Chief Inspector.
+"When it comes to that I would deal with the devil himself, and
+take the consequences.  There are things not fit for everybody to
+know."
+
+"Your idea of secrecy seems to consist in keeping the chief of your
+department in the dark.  That's stretching it perhaps a little too
+far, isn't it?  He lives over his shop?"
+
+"Who - Verloc?  Oh yes.  He lives over his shop.  The wife's
+mother, I fancy, lives with them."
+
+"Is the house watched?"
+
+"Oh dear, no.  It wouldn't do.  Certain people who come there are
+watched.  My opinion is that he knows nothing of this affair."
+
+"How do you account for this?"  The Assistant Commissioner nodded
+at the cloth rag lying before him on the table.
+
+"I don't account for it at all, sir.  It's simply unaccountable.
+It can't be explained by what I know."  The Chief Inspector made
+those admissions with the frankness of a man whose reputation is
+established as if on a rock.  "At any rate not at this present
+moment.  I think that the man who had most to do with it will turn
+out to be Michaelis."
+
+"You do?"
+
+"Yes, sir; because I can answer for all the others."
+
+"What about that other man supposed to have escaped from the park?"
+
+"I should think he's far away by this time," opined the Chief
+Inspector.
+
+The Assistant Commissioner looked hard at him, and rose suddenly,
+as though having made up his mind to some course of action.  As a
+matter of fact, he had that very moment succumbed to a fascinating
+temptation.  The Chief Inspector heard himself dismissed with
+instructions to meet his superior early next morning for further
+consultation upon the case.  He listened with an impenetrable face,
+and walked out of the room with measured steps.
+
+Whatever might have been the plans of the Assistant Commissioner
+they had nothing to do with that desk work, which was the bane of
+his existence because of its confined nature and apparent lack of
+reality.  It could not have had, or else the general air of
+alacrity that came upon the Assistant Commissioner would have been
+inexplicable.  As soon as he was left alone he looked for his hat
+impulsively, and put it on his head.  Having done that, he sat down
+again to reconsider the whole matter.  But as his mind was already
+made up, this did not take long.  And before Chief Inspector Heat
+had gone very far on the way home, he also left the building.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+
+The Assistant Commissioner walked along a short and narrow street
+like a wet, muddy trench, then crossing a very broad thoroughfare
+entered a public edifice, and sought speech with a young private
+secretary (unpaid) of a great personage.
+
+This fair, smooth-faced young man, whose symmetrically arranged
+hair gave him the air of a large and neat schoolboy, met the
+Assistant Commissioner's request with a doubtful look, and spoke
+with bated breath.
+
+"Would he see you?  I don't know about that.  He has walked over
+from the House an hour ago to talk with the permanent Under-
+Secretary, and now he's ready to walk back again.  He might have
+sent for him; but he does it for the sake of a little exercise, I
+suppose.  It's all the exercise he can find time for while this
+session lasts.  I don't complain; I rather enjoy these little
+strolls.  He leans on my arm, and doesn't open, his lips.  But, I
+say, he's very tired, and - well - not in the sweetest of tempers
+just now."
+
+"It's in connection with that Greenwich affair."
+
+"Oh!  I say!  He's very bitter against you people.  But I will go
+and see, if you insist."
+
+"Do.  That's a good fellow," said the Assistant Commissioner.
+
+The unpaid secretary admired this pluck.  Composing for himself an
+innocent face, he opened a door, and went in with the assurance of
+a nice and privileged child.  And presently he reappeared, with a
+nod to the Assistant Commissioner, who passing through the same
+door left open for him, found himself with the great personage in a
+large room.
+
+Vast in bulk and stature, with a long white face, which, broadened
+at the base by a big double chin, appeared egg-shaped in the fringe
+of thin greyish whisker, the great personage seemed an expanding
+man.  Unfortunate from a tailoring point of view, the cross-folds
+in the middle of a buttoned black coat added to the impression, as
+if the fastenings of the garment were tried to the utmost.  From
+the head, set upward on a thick neck, the eyes, with puffy lower
+lids, stared with a haughty droop on each side of a hooked
+aggressive nose, nobly salient in the vast pale circumference of
+the face.  A shiny silk hat and a pair of worn gloves lying ready
+on the end of a long table looked expanded too, enormous.
+
+He stood on the hearthrug in big, roomy boots, and uttered no word
+of greeting.
+
+"I would like to know if this is the beginning of another dynamite
+campaign," he asked at once in a deep, very smooth voice.  "Don't
+go into details.  I have no time for that."
+
+The Assistant Commissioner's figure before this big and rustic
+Presence had the frail slenderness of a reed addresssing an oak.
+And indeed the unbroken record of that man's descent surpassed in
+the number of centuries the age of the oldest oak in the country.
+
+"No.  As far as one can be positive about anything I can assure you
+that it is not."
+
+"Yes.  But your idea of assurances over there," said the great man,
+with a contemptuous wave of his hand towards a window giving on the
+broad thoroughfare, "seems to consist mainly in making the
+Secretary of State look a fool.  I have been told positively in
+this very room less than a month ago that nothing of the sort was
+even possible."
+
+The Assistant Commissioner glanced in the direction of the window
+calmly.
+
+"You will allow me to remark, Sir Ethelred, that so far I have had
+no opportunity to give you assurances of any kind."
+
+The haughty droop of the eyes was focussed now upon the Assistant
+Commissioner.
+
+"True," confessed the deep, smooth voice.  "I sent for Heat.  You
+are still rather a novice in your new berth.  And how are you
+getting on over there?"
+
+"I believe I am learning something every day."
+
+"Of course, of course.  I hope you will get on."
+
+"Thank you, Sir Ethelred.  I've learned something to-day, and even
+within the last hour or so.  There is much in this affair of a kind
+that does not meet the eye in a usual anarchist outrage, even if
+one looked into it as deep as can be.  That's why I am here."
+
+The great man put his arms akimbo, the backs of his big hands
+resting on his hips.
+
+"Very well.  Go on.  Only no details, pray.  Spare me the details."
+
+"You shall not be troubled with them, Sir Ethelred," the Assistant
+Commissioner began, with a calm and untroubled assurance.  While he
+was speaking the hands on the face of the clock behind the great
+man's back - a heavy, glistening affair of massive scrolls in the
+same dark marble as the mantelpiece, and with a ghostly, evanescent
+tick - had moved through the space of seven minutes.  He spoke with
+a studious fidelity to a parenthetical manner, into which every
+little fact - that is, every detail - fitted with delightful ease.
+Not a murmur nor even a movement hinted at interruption.  The great
+Personage might have been the statue of one of his own princely
+ancestors stripped of a crusader's war harness, and put into an
+ill-fitting frock coat.  The Assistant Commissioner felt as though
+he were at liberty to talk for an hour.  But he kept his head, and
+at the end of the time mentioned above he broke off with a sudden
+conclusion, which, reproducing the opening statement, pleasantly
+surprised Sir Ethelred by its apparent swiftness and force.
+
+"The kind of thing which meets us under the surface of this affair,
+otherwise without gravity, is unusual - in this precise form at
+least - and requires special treatment."
+
+The tone of Sir Ethelred was deepened, full of conviction.
+
+"I should think so - involving the Ambassador of a foreign power!"
+
+"Oh!  The Ambassador!" protested the other, erect and slender,
+allowing himself a mere half smile.  "It would be stupid of me to
+advance anything of the kind.  And it is absolutely unnecessary,
+because if I am right in my surmises, whether ambassador or hall
+porter it's a mere detail."
+
+Sir Ethelred opened a wide mouth, like a cavern, into which the
+hooked nose seemed anxious to peer; there came from it a subdued
+rolling sound, as from a distant organ with the scornful
+indignation stop.
+
+"No!  These people are too impossible.  What do they mean by
+importing their methods of Crim-Tartary here?  A Turk would have
+more decency."
+
+"You forget, Sir Ethelred, that strictly speaking we know nothing
+positively - as yet."
+
+"No!  But how would you define it?  Shortly?"
+
+"Barefaced audacity amounting to childishness of a peculiar sort."
+
+"We can't put up with the innocence of nasty little children," said
+the great and expanded personage, expanding a little more, as it
+were.  The haughty drooping glance struck crushingly the carpet at
+the Assistant Commissioner's feet.  "They'll have to get a hard rap
+on the knuckles over this affair.  We must be in a position to -
+What is your general idea, stated shortly?  No need to go into
+details."
+
+"No, Sir Ethelred.  In principle, I should lay it down that the
+existence of secret agents should not be tolerated, as tending to
+augment the positive dangers of the evil against which they are
+used.  That the spy will fabricate his information is a mere
+commonplace.  But in the sphere of political and revolutionary
+action, relying partly on violence, the professional spy has every
+facility to fabricate the very facts themselves, and will spread
+the double evil of emulation in one direction, and of panic, hasty
+legislation, unreflecting hate, on the other.  However, this is an
+imperfect world - "
+
+The deep-voiced Presence on the hearthrug, motionless, with big
+elbows stuck out, said hastily:
+
+"Be lucid, please."
+
+"Yes, Sir Ethelred -  An imperfect world.  Therefore directly the
+character of this affair suggested itself to me, I thought it
+should be dealt with with special secrecy, and ventured to come
+over here."
+
+"That's right," approved the great Personage, glancing down
+complacently over his double chin.  "I am glad there's somebody
+over at your shop who thinks that the Secretary of State may be
+trusted now and then."
+
+The Assistant Commissioner had an amused smile.
+
+"I was really thinking that it might be better at this stage for
+Heat to be replaced by - "
+
+"What!  Heat?  An ass - eh?" exclaimed the great man, with distinct
+animosity.
+
+"Not at all.  Pray, Sir Ethelred, don't put that unjust
+interpretation on my remarks."
+
+"Then what?  Too clever by half?"
+
+"Neither - at least not as a rule.  All the grounds of my surmises
+I have from him.  The only thing I've discovered by myself is that
+he has been making use of that man privately.  Who could blame him?
+He's an old police hand.  He told me virtually that he must have
+tools to work with.  It occurred to me that this tool should be
+surrendered to the Special Crimes division as a whole, instead of
+remaining the private property of Chief Inspector Heat.  I extend
+my conception of our departmental duties to the suppression of the
+secret agent.  But Chief Inspector Heat is an old departmental
+hand.  He would accuse me of perverting its morality and attacking
+its efficiency.  He would define it bitterly as protection extended
+to the criminal class of revolutionises.  It would mean just that
+to him."
+
+"Yes.  But what do you mean?"
+
+"I mean to say, first, that there's but poor comfort in being able
+to declare that any given act of violence - damaging property or
+destroying life - is not the work of anarchism at all, but of
+something else altogether - some species of authorised
+scoundrelism.  This, I fancy, is much more frequent than we
+suppose.  Next, it's obvious that the existence of these people in
+the pay of foreign governments destroys in a measure the efficiency
+of our supervision.  A spy of that sort can afford to be more
+reckless than the most reckless of conspirators.  His occupation is
+free from all restraint.  He's without as much faith as is
+necessary for complete negation, and without that much law as is
+implied in lawlessness.  Thirdly, the existence of these spies
+amongst the revolutionary groups, which we are reproached for
+harbouring here, does away with all certitude.  You have received a
+reassuring statement from Chief Inspector Heat some time ago.  It
+was by no means groundless - and yet this episode happens.  I call
+it an episode, because this affair, I make bold to say, is
+episodic; it is no part of any general scheme, however wild.  The
+very peculiarities which surprise and perplex Chief Inspector Heat
+establish its character in my eyes.  I am keeping clear of details,
+Sir Ethelred."
+
+The Personage on the hearthrug had been listening with profound
+attention.
+
+"Just so.  Be as concise as you can."
+
+The Assistant Commissioner intimated by an earnest deferential
+gesture that he was anxious to be concise.
+
+"There is a peculiar stupidity and feebleness in the conduct of
+this affair which gives me excellent hopes of getting behind it and
+finding there something else than an individual freak of
+fanaticism.  For it is a planned thing, undoubtedly.  The actual
+perpetrator seems to have been led by the hand to the spot, and
+then abandoned hurriedly to his own devices.  The inference is that
+he was imported from abroad for the purpose of committing this
+outrage.  At the same time one is forced to the conclusion that he
+did not know enough English to ask his way, unless one were to
+accept the fantastic theory that he was a deaf mute.  I wonder now
+-  But this is idle.  He has destroyed himself by an accident,
+obviously.  Not an extraordinary accident.  But an extraordinary
+little fact remains: the address on his clothing discovered by the
+merest accident, too.  It is an incredible little fact, so
+incredible that the explanation which will account for it is bound
+to touch the bottom of this affair.  Instead of instructing Heat to
+go on with this case, my intention is to seek this explanation
+personally - by myself, I mean where it may be picked up.  That is
+in a certain shop in Brett Street, and on the lips of a certain
+secret agent once upon a time the confidential and trusted spy of
+the late Baron Stott-Wartenheim, Ambassador of a Great Power to the
+Court of St James."
+
+The Assistant Commissioner paused, then added: "Those fellows are a
+perfect pest."  In order to raise his drooping glance to the
+speaker's face, the Personage on the hearthrug had gradually tilted
+his head farther back, which gave him an aspect of extraordinary
+haughtiness.
+
+"Why not leave it to Heat?"
+
+"Because he is an old departmental hand.  They have their own
+morality.  My line of inquiry would appear to him an awful
+perversion of duty.  For him the plain duty is to fasten the guilt
+upon as many prominent anarchists as he can on some slight
+indications he had picked up in the course of his investigation on
+the spot; whereas I, he would say, am bent upon vindicating their
+innocence.  I am trying to be as lucid as I can in presenting this
+obscure matter to you without details."
+
+"He would, would he?" muttered the proud head of Sir Ethelred from
+its lofty elevation.
+
+"I am afraid so - with an indignation and disgust of which you or I
+can have no idea.  He's an excellent servant.  We must not put an
+undue strain on his loyalty.  That's always a mistake.  Besides, I
+want a free hand - a freer hand than it would be perhaps advisable
+to give Chief Inspector Heat.  I haven't the slightest wish to
+spare this man Verloc.  He will, I imagine, be extremely startled
+to find his connection with this affair, whatever it may be,
+brought home to him so quickly.  Frightening him will not be very
+difficult.  But our true objective lies behind him somewhere.  I
+want your authority to give him such assurances of personal safety
+as I may think proper."
+
+"Certainly," said the Personage on the hearthrug.  "Find out as
+much as you can; find it out in your own way."
+
+"I must set about it without loss of time, this very evening," said
+the Assistant Commissioner.
+
+Sir Ethelred shifted one hand under his coat tails, and tilting
+back his head, looked at him steadily.
+
+"We'll have a late sitting to-night," he said.  "Come to the House
+with your discoveries if we are not gone home.  I'll warn Toodles
+to look out for you.  He'll take you into my room."
+
+The numerous family and the wide connections of the youthful-
+looking Private Secretary cherished for him the hope of an austere
+and exalted destiny.  Meantime the social sphere he adorned in his
+hours of idleness chose to pet him under the above nickname.  And
+Sir Ethelred, hearing it on the lips of his wife and girls every
+day (mostly at breakfast-time), had conferred upon it the dignity
+of unsmiling adoption.
+
+The Assistant Commissioner was surprised and gratified extremely.
+
+"I shall certainly bring my discoveries to the House on the chance
+of you having the time to - "
+
+"I won't have the time," interrupted the great Personage.  "But I
+will see you.  I haven't the time now -  And you are going
+yourself?"
+
+"Yes, Sir Ethelred.  I think it the best way."
+
+The Personage had tilted his head so far back that, in order to
+keep the Assistant Commissioner under his observation, he had to
+nearly close his eyes.
+
+"H'm.  Ha!  And how do you propose -  Will you assume a disguise?"
+
+"Hardly a disguise!  I'll change my clothes, of course."
+
+"Of course," repeated the great man, with a sort of absent-minded
+loftiness.  He turned his big head slowly, and over his shoulder
+gave a haughty oblique stare to the ponderous marble timepiece with
+the sly, feeble tick.  The gilt hands had taken the opportunity to
+steal through no less than five and twenty minutes behind his back.
+
+The Assistant Commissioner, who could not see them, grew a little
+nervous in the interval.  But the great man presented to him a calm
+and undismayed face.
+
+"Very well," he said, and paused, as if in deliberate contempt of
+the official clock.  "But what first put you in motion in this
+direction?"
+
+"I have been always of opinion," began the Assistant Commissioner.
+
+"Ah.  Yes!  Opinion.  That's of course.  But the immediate motive?"
+
+"What shall I say, Sir Ethelred?  A new man's antagonism to old
+methods.  A desire to know something at first hand.  Some
+impatience.  It's my old work, but the harness is different.  It
+has been chafing me a little in one or two tender places."
+
+"I hope you'll get on over there," said the great man kindly,
+extending his hand, soft to the touch, but broad and powerful like
+the hand of a glorified farmer.  The Assistant Commissioner shook
+it, and withdrew.
+
+In the outer room Toodles, who had been waiting perched on the edge
+of a table, advanced to meet him, subduing his natural buoyancy.
+
+"Well?  Satisfactory?" he asked, with airy importance.
+
+"Perfectly.  You've earned my undying gratitude," answered the
+Assistant Commissioner, whose long face looked wooden in contrast
+with the peculiar character of the other's gravity, which seemed
+perpetually ready to break into ripples and chuckles.
+
+"That's all right.  But seriously, you can't imagine how irritated
+he is by the attacks on his Bill for the Nationalisation of
+Fisheries.  They call it the beginning of social revolution.  Of
+course, it is a revolutionary measure.  But these fellows have no
+decency.  The personal attacks - "
+
+"I read the papers," remarked the Assistant Commissioner.
+
+"Odious?  Eh?  And you have no notion what a mass of work he has
+got to get through every day.  He does it all himself.  Seems
+unable to trust anyone with these Fisheries."
+
+"And yet he's given a whole half hour to the consideration of my
+very small sprat," interjected the Assistant Commissioner.
+
+"Small!  Is it?  I'm glad to hear that.  But it's a pity you didn't
+keep away, then.  This fight takes it out of him frightfully.  The
+man's getting exhausted.  I feel it by the way he leans on my arm
+as we walk over.  And, I say, is he safe in the streets?  Mullins
+has been marching his men up here this afternoon.  There's a
+constable stuck by every lamp-post, and every second person we meet
+between this and Palace Yard is an obvious `tec.'  It will get on
+his nerves presently.  I say, these foreign scoundrels aren't
+likely to throw something at him - are they?  It would be a
+national calamity.  The country can't spare him."
+
+"Not to mention yourself.  He leans on your arm," suggested the
+Assistant Commissioner soberly.  "You would both go."
+
+"It would be an easy way for a young man to go down into history?
+Not so many British Ministers have been assassinated as to make it
+a minor incident.  But seriously now - "
+
+"I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you'll have
+to do something for it.  Seriously, there's no danger whatever for
+both of you but from overwork."
+
+The sympathetic Toodles welcomed this opening for a chuckle.
+
+"The Fisheries won't kill me.  I am used to late hours," he
+declared, with ingenuous levity.  But, feeling an instant
+compunction, he began to assume an air of statesman-like moodiness,
+as one draws on a glove.  "His massive intellect will stand any
+amount of work.  It's his nerves that I am afraid of.  The
+reactionary gang, with that abusive brute Cheeseman at their head,
+insult him every night."
+
+"If he will insist on beginning a revolution!" murmured the
+Assistant Commissioner.
+
+"The time has come, and he is the only man great enough for the
+work," protested the revolutionary Toodles, flaring up under the
+calm, speculative gaze of the Assistant Commissioner.  Somewhere in
+a corridor a distant bell tinkled urgently, and with devoted
+vigilance the young man pricked up his ears at the sound.  "He's
+ready to go now," he exclaimed in a whisper, snatched up his hat,
+and vanished from the room.
+
+The Assistant Commissioner went out by another door in a less
+elastic manner.  Again he crossed the wide thoroughfare, walked
+along a narrow street, and re-entered hastily his own departmental
+buildings.  He kept up this accelerated pace to the door of his
+private room.  Before he had closed it fairly his eyes sought his
+desk.  He stood still for a moment, then walked up, looked all
+round on the floor, sat down in his chair, rang a bell, and waited.
+
+"Chief Inspector Heat gone yet?"
+
+"Yes, sir.  Went away half-an-hour ago."
+
+He nodded.  "That will do."  And sitting still, with his hat pushed
+off his forehead, he thought that it was just like Heat's
+confounded cheek to carry off quietly the only piece of material
+evidence.  But he thought this without animosity.  Old and valued
+servants will take liberties.  The piece of overcoat with the
+address sewn on was certainly not a thing to leave about.
+Dismissing from his mind this manifestation of Chief Inspector
+Heat's mistrust, he wrote and despatched a note to his wife,
+charging her to make his apologies to Michaelis' great lady, with
+whom they were engaged to dine that evening.
+
+The short jacket and the low, round hat he assumed in a sort of
+curtained alcove containing a washstand, a row of wooden pegs and a
+shelf, brought out wonderfully the length of his grave, brown face.
+He stepped back into the full light of the room, looking like the
+vision of a cool, reflective Don Quixote, with the sunken eyes of a
+dark enthusiast and a very deliberate manner.  He left the scene of
+his daily labours quickly like an unobtrusive shadow.  His descent
+into the street was like the descent into a slimy aquarium from
+which the water had been run off.  A murky, gloomy dampness
+enveloped him.  The walls of the houses were wet, the mud of the
+roadway glistened with an effect of phosphorescence, and when he
+emerged into the Strand out of a narrow street by the side of
+Charing Cross Station the genius of the locality assimilated him.
+He might have been but one more of the queer foreign fish that can
+be seen of an evening about there flitting round the dark corners.
+
+He came to a stand on the very edge of the pavement, and waited.
+His exercised eyes had made out in the confused movements of lights
+and shadows thronging the roadway the crawling approach of a
+hansom.  He gave no sign; but when the low step gliding along the
+curbstone came to his feet he dodged in skilfully in front of the
+big turning wheel, and spoke up through the little trap door almost
+before the man gazing supinely ahead from his perch was aware of
+having been boarded by a fare.
+
+It was not a long drive.  It ended by signal abruptly, nowhere in
+particular, between two lamp-posts before a large drapery
+establishment - a long range of shops already lapped up in sheets
+of corrugated iron for the night.  Tendering a coin through the
+trap door the fare slipped out and away, leaving an effect of
+uncanny, eccentric ghastliness upon the driver's mind.  But the
+size of the coin was satisfactory to his touch, and his education
+not being literary, he remained untroubled by the fear of finding
+it presently turned to a dead leaf in his pocket.  Raised above the
+world of fares by the nature of his calling, he contemplated their
+actions with a limited interest.  The sharp pulling of his horse
+right round expressed his philosophy.
+
+Meantime the Assistant Commissioner was already giving his order to
+a waiter in a little Italian restaurant round the corner - one of
+those traps for the hungry, long and narrow, baited with a
+perspective of mirrors and white napery; without air, but with an
+atmosphere of their own - an atmosphere of fraudulent cookery
+mocking an abject mankind in the most pressing of its miserable
+necessities.  In this immoral atmosphere the Assistant
+Commissioner, reflecting upon his enterprise, seemed to lose some
+more of his identity.  He had a sense of loneliness, of evil
+freedom.  It was rather pleasant.  When, after paying for his short
+meal, he stood up and waited for his change, he saw himself in the
+sheet of glass, and was struck by his foreign appearance.  He
+contemplated his own image with a melancholy and inquisitive gaze,
+then by sudden inspiration raised the collar of his jacket.  This
+arrangement appeared to him commendable, and he completed it by
+giving an upward twist to the ends of his black moustache.  He was
+satisfied by the subtle modification of his personal aspect caused
+by these small changes.  "That'll do very well," he thought.  "I'll
+get a little wet, a little splashed - "
+
+He became aware of the waiter at his elbow and of a small pile of
+silver coins on the edge of the table before him.  The waiter kept
+one eye on it, while his other eye followed the long back of a
+tall, not very young girl, who passed up to a distant table looking
+perfectly sightless and altogether unapproachable.  She seemed to
+be a habitual customer.
+
+On going out the Assistant Commissioner made to himself the
+observation that the patrons of the place had lost in the
+frequentation of fraudulent cookery all their national and private
+characteristics.  And this was strange, since the Italian
+restaurant is such a peculiarly British institution.  But these
+people were as denationalised as the dishes set before them with
+every circumstance of unstamped respectability.  Neither was their
+personality stamped in any way, professionally, socially or
+racially.  They seemed created for the Italian restaurant, unless
+the Italian restaurant had been perchance created for them.  But
+that last hypothesis was unthinkable, since one could not place
+them anywhere outside those special establishments.  One never met
+these enigmatical persons elsewhere.  It was impossible to form a
+precise idea what occupations they followed by day and where they
+went to bed at night.  And he himself had become unplaced.  It
+would have been impossible for anybody to guess his occupation.  As
+to going to bed, there was a doubt even in his own mind.  Not
+indeed in regard to his domicile itself, but very much so in
+respect of the time when he would be able to return there.  A
+pleasurable feeling of independence possessed him when he heard the
+glass doors swing to behind his back with a sort of imperfect
+baffled thud.  He advanced at once into an immensity of greasy
+slime and damp plaster interspersed with lamps, and enveloped,
+oppressed, penetrated, choked, and suffocated by the blackness of a
+wet London night, which is composed of soot and drops of water.
+
+Brett Street was not very far away.  It branched off, narrow, from
+the side of an open triangular space surrounded by dark and
+mysterious houses, temples of petty commerce emptied of traders for
+the night.  Only a fruiterer's stall at the corner made a violent
+blaze of light and colour.  Beyond all was black, and the few
+people passing in that direction vanished at one stride beyond the
+glowing heaps of oranges and lemons.  No footsteps echoed.  They
+would never be heard of again.  The adventurous head of the Special
+Crimes Department watched these disappearances from a distance with
+an interested eye.  He felt light-hearted, as though he had been
+ambushed all alone in a jungle many thousands of miles away from
+departmental desks and official inkstands.  This joyousness and
+dispersion of thought before a task of some importance seems to
+prove that this world of ours is not such a very serious affair
+after all.  For the Assistant Commissioner was not constitutionally
+inclined to levity.
+
+The policeman on the beat projected his sombre and moving form
+against the luminous glory of oranges and lemons, and entered Brett
+Street without haste.  The Assistant Commissioner, as though he
+were a member of the criminal classes, lingered out of sight,
+awaiting his return.  But this constable seemed to be lost for ever
+to the force.  He never returned: must have gone out at the other
+end of Brett Street.
+
+The Assistant Commissioner, reaching this conclusion, entered the
+street in his turn, and came upon a large van arrested in front of
+the dimly lit window-panes of a carter's eating-house.  The man was
+refreshing himself inside, and the horses, their big heads lowered
+to the ground, fed out of nose-bags steadily.  Farther on, on the
+opposite side of the street, another suspect patch of dim light
+issued from Mr Verloc's shop front, hung with papers, heaving with
+vague piles of cardboard boxes and the shapes of books.  The
+Assistant Commissioner stood observing it across the roadway.
+There could be no mistake.  By the side of the front window,
+encumbered by the shadows of nondescript things, the door, standing
+ajar, let escape on the pavement a narrow, clear streak of gas-
+light within.
+
+Behind the Assistant Commissioner the van and horses, merged into
+one mass, seemed something alive - a square-backed black monster
+blocking half the street, with sudden iron-shod stampings, fierce
+jingles, and heavy, blowing sighs.  The harshly festive, ill-omened
+glare of a large and prosperous public-house faced the other end of
+Brett Street across a wide road.  This barrier of blazing lights,
+opposing the shadows gathered about the humble abode of Mr Verloc's
+domestic happiness, seemed to drive the obscurity of the street
+back upon itself, make it more sullen, brooding, and sinister.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+
+Having infused by persistent importunities some sort of heat into
+the chilly interest of several licensed victuallers (the
+acquaintances once upon a time of her late unlucky husband), Mrs
+Verloc's mother had at last secured her admission to certain
+almshouses founded by a wealthy innkeeper for the destitute widows
+of the trade.
+
+This end, conceived in the astuteness of her uneasy heart, the old
+woman had pursued with secrecy and determination.  That was the
+time when her daughter Winnie could not help passing a remark to Mr
+Verloc that "mother has been spending half-crowns and five
+shillings almost every day this last week in cab fares."  But the
+remark was not made grudgingly.  Winnie respected her mother's
+infirmities.  She was only a little surprised at this sudden mania
+for locomotion.  Mr Verloc, who was sufficiently magnificent in his
+way, had grunted the remark impatiently aside as interfering with
+his meditations.  These were frequent, deep, and prolonged; they
+bore upon a matter more important than five shillings.  Distinctly
+more important, and beyond all comparison more difficult to
+consider in all its aspects with philosophical serenity.
+
+Her object attained in astute secrecy, the heroic old woman had
+made a clean breast of it to Mrs Verloc.  Her soul was triumphant
+and her heart tremulous.  Inwardly she quaked, because she dreaded
+and admired the calm, self-contained character of her daughter
+Winnie, whose displeasure was made redoubtable by a diversity of
+dreadful silences.  But she did not allow her inward apprehensions
+to rob her of the advantage of venerable placidity conferred upon
+her outward person by her triple chin, the floating ampleness of
+her ancient form, and the impotent condition of her legs.
+
+The shock of the information was so unexpected that Mrs Verloc,
+against her usual practice when addressed, interrupted the domestic
+occupation she was engaged upon.  It was the dusting of the
+furniture in the parlour behind the shop.  She turned her head
+towards her mother.
+
+"Whatever did you want to do that for?" she exclaimed, in
+scandalised astonishment.
+
+The shock must have been severe to make her depart from that
+distant and uninquiring acceptance of facts which was her force and
+her safeguard in life.
+
+"Weren't you made comfortable enough here?"
+
+She had lapsed into these inquiries, but next moment she saved the
+consistency of her conduct by resuming her dusting, while the old
+woman sat scared and dumb under her dingy white cap and lustreless
+dark wig.
+
+Winnie finished the chair, and ran the duster along the mahogany at
+the back of the horse-hair sofa on which Mr Verloc loved to take
+his ease in hat and overcoat.  She was intent on her work, but
+presently she permitted herself another question.
+
+"How in the world did you manage it, mother?"
+
+As not affecting the inwardness of things, which it was Mrs
+Verloc's principle to ignore, this curiosity was excusable.  It
+bore merely on the methods.  The old woman welcomed it eagerly as
+bringing forward something that could be talked about with much
+sincerity.
+
+She favoured her daughter by an exhaustive answer, full of names
+and enriched by side comments upon the ravages of time as observed
+in the alteration of human countenances.  The names were
+principally the names of licensed victuallers - "poor daddy's
+friends, my dear."  She enlarged with special appreciation on the
+kindness and condescension of a large brewer, a Baronet and an M.
+P., the Chairman of the Governors of the Charity.  She expressed
+herself thus warmly because she had been allowed to interview by
+appointment his Private Secretary - "a very polite gentleman, all
+in black, with a gentle, sad voice, but so very, very thin and
+quiet.  He was like a shadow, my dear."
+
+Winnie, prolonging her dusting operations till the tale was told to
+the end, walked out of the parlour into the kitchen (down two
+steps) in her usual manner, without the slightest comment.
+
+Shedding a few tears in sign of rejoicing at her daughter's
+mansuetude in this terrible affair, Mrs Verloc's mother gave play
+to her astuteness in the direction of her furniture, because it was
+her own; and sometimes she wished it hadn't been.  Heroism is all
+very well, but there are circumstances when the disposal of a few
+tables and chairs, brass bedsteads, and so on, may be big with
+remote and disastrous consequences.  She required a few pieces
+herself, the Foundation which, after many importunities, had
+gathered her to its charitable breast, giving nothing but bare
+planks and cheaply papered bricks to the objects of its solicitude.
+The delicacy guiding her choice to the least valuable and most
+dilapidated articles passed unacknowledged, because Winnie's
+philosophy consisted in not taking notice of the inside of facts;
+she assumed that mother took what suited her best.  As to Mr
+Verloc, his intense meditation, like a sort of Chinese wall,
+isolated him completely from the phenomena of this world of vain
+effort and illusory appearances.
+
+Her selection made, the disposal of the rest became a perplexing
+question in a particular way.  She was leaving it in Brett Street,
+of course.  But she had two children.  Winnie was provided for by
+her sensible union with that excellent husband, Mr Verloc.  Stevie
+was destitute - and a little peculiar.  His position had to be
+considered before the claims of legal justice and even the
+promptings of partiality.  The possession of the furniture would
+not be in any sense a provision.  He ought to have it - the poor
+boy.  But to give it to him would be like tampering with his
+position of complete dependence.  It was a sort of claim which she
+feared to weaken.  Moreover, the susceptibilities of Mr Verloc
+would perhaps not brook being beholden to his brother-in-law for
+the chairs he sat on.  In a long experience of gentlemen lodgers,
+Mrs Verloc's mother had acquired a dismal but resigned notion of
+the fantastic side of human nature.  What if Mr Verloc suddenly
+took it into his head to tell Stevie to take his blessed sticks
+somewhere out of that?  A division, on the other hand, however
+carefully made, might give some cause of offence to Winnie.  No,
+Stevie must remain destitute and dependent.  And at the moment of
+leaving Brett Street she had said to her daughter: "No use waiting
+till I am dead, is there?  Everything I leave here is altogether
+your own now, my dear."
+
+Winnie, with her hat on, silent behind her mother's back, went on
+arranging the collar of the old woman's cloak.  She got her hand-
+bag, an umbrella, with an impassive face.  The time had come for
+the expenditure of the sum of three-and-sixpence on what might well
+be supposed the last cab drive of Mrs Verloc's mother's life.  They
+went out at the shop door.
+
+The conveyance awaiting them would have illustrated the proverb
+that "truth can be more cruel than caricature," if such a proverb
+existed.  Crawling behind an infirm horse, a metropolitan hackney
+carriage drew up on wobbly wheels and with a maimed driver on the
+box.  This last peculiarity caused some embarrassment.  Catching
+sight of a hooked iron contrivance protruding from the left sleeve
+of the man's coat, Mrs Verloc's mother lost suddenly the heroic
+courage of these days.  She really couldn't trust herself.  "What
+do you think, Winnie?"  She hung back.  The passionate
+expostulations of the big-faced cabman seemed to be squeezed out of
+a blocked throat.  Leaning over from his box, he whispered with
+mysterious indignation.  What was the matter now?  Was it possible
+to treat a man so?  His enormous and unwashed countenance flamed
+red in the muddy stretch of the street.  Was it likely they would
+have given him a licence, he inquired desperately, if -
+
+The police constable of the locality quieted him by a friendly
+glance; then addressing himself to the two women without marked
+consideration, said:
+
+"He's been driving a cab for twenty years.  I never knew him to
+have an accident."
+
+"Accident!" shouted the driver in a scornful whisper.
+
+The policeman's testimony settled it.  The modest assemblage of
+seven people, mostly under age, dispersed.  Winnie followed her
+mother into the cab.  Stevie climbed on the box.  His vacant mouth
+and distressed eyes depicted the state of his mind in regard to the
+transactions which were taking place.  In the narrow streets the
+progress of the journey was made sensible to those within by the
+near fronts of the houses gliding past slowly and shakily, with a
+great rattle and jingling of glass, as if about to collapse behind
+the cab; and the infirm horse, with the harness hung over his sharp
+backbone flapping very loose about his thighs, appeared to be
+dancing mincingly on his toes with infinite patience.  Later on, in
+the wider space of Whitehall, all visual evidences of motion became
+imperceptible.  The rattle and jingle of glass went on indefinitely
+in front of the long Treasury building - and time itself seemed to
+stand still.
+
+At last Winnie observed: "This isn't a very good horse."
+
+Her eyes gleamed in the shadow of the cab straight ahead,
+immovable.  On the box, Stevie shut his vacant mouth first, in
+order to ejaculate earnestly: "Don't."
+
+The driver, holding high the reins twisted around the hook, took no
+notice.  Perhaps he had not heard.  Stevie's breast heaved.
+
+"Don't whip."
+
+The man turned slowly his bloated and sodden face of many colours
+bristling with white hairs.  His little red eyes glistened with
+moisture.  His big lips had a violet tint.  They remained closed.
+With the dirty back of his whip-hand he rubbed the stubble
+sprouting on his enormous chin.
+
+"You mustn't," stammered out Stevie violently.  "It hurts."
+
+"Mustn't whip," queried the other in a thoughtful whisper, and
+immediately whipped.  He did this, not because his soul was cruel
+and his heart evil, but because he had to earn his fare.  And for a
+time the walls of St Stephen's, with its towers and pinnacles,
+contemplated in immobility and silence a cab that jingled.  It
+rolled too, however.  But on the bridge there was a commotion.
+Stevie suddenly proceeded to get down from the box.  There were
+shouts on the pavement, people ran forward, the driver pulled up,
+whispering curses of indignation and astonishment.  Winnie lowered
+the window, and put her head out, white as a ghost.  In the depths
+of the cab, her mother was exclaiming, in tones of anguish: "Is
+that boy hurt?  Is that boy hurt?"
+
+Stevie was not hurt, he had not even fallen, but excitement as
+usual had robbed him of the power of connected speech.  He could do
+no more than stammer at the window.  "Too heavy.  Too heavy."
+Winnie put out her hand on to his shoulder.
+
+"Stevie!  Get up on the box directly, and don't try to get down
+again."
+
+"No.  No.  Walk.  Must walk."
+
+In trying to state the nature of that necessity he stammered
+himself into utter incoherence.  No physical impossibility stood in
+the way of his whim.  Stevie could have managed easily to keep pace
+with the infirm, dancing horse without getting out of breath.  But
+his sister withheld her consent decisively.  "The idea!  Whoever
+heard of such a thing!  Run after a cab!"  Her mother, frightened
+and helpless in the depths of the conveyance, entreated: "Oh, don't
+let him, Winnie.  He'll get lost.  Don't let him."
+
+"Certainly not.  What next!  Mr Verloc will be sorry to hear of
+this nonsense, Stevie, - I can tell you.  He won't be happy at
+all."
+
+The idea of Mr. Verloc's grief and unhappiness acting as usual
+powerfully upon Stevie's fundamentally docile disposition, he
+abandoned all resistance, and climbed up again on the box, with a
+face of despair.
+
+The cabby turned at him his enormous and inflamed countenance
+truculently.  "Don't you go for trying this silly game again, young
+fellow."
+
+After delivering himself thus in a stern whisper, strained almost
+to extinction, he drove on, ruminating solemnly.  To his mind the
+incident remained somewhat obscure.  But his intellect, though it
+had lost its pristine vivacity in the benumbing years of sedentary
+exposure to the weather, lacked not independence or sanity.
+Gravely he dismissed the hypothesis of Stevie being a drunken young
+nipper.
+
+Inside the cab the spell of silence, in which the two women had
+endured shoulder to shoulder the jolting, rattling, and jingling of
+the journey, had been broken by Stevie's outbreak.  Winnie raised
+her voice.
+
+"You've done what you wanted, mother.  You'll have only yourself to
+thank for it if you aren't happy afterwards.  And I don't think
+you'll be.  That I don't.  Weren't you comfortable enough in the
+house?  Whatever people'll think of us - you throwing yourself like
+this on a Charity?"
+
+"My dear," screamed the old woman earnestly above the noise,
+"you've been the best of daughters to me.  As to Mr Verloc - there
+- "
+
+Words failing her on the subject of Mr Verloc's excellence, she
+turned her old tearful eyes to the roof of the cab.  Then she
+averted her head on the pretence of looking out of the window, as
+if to judge of their progress.  It was insignificant, and went on
+close to the curbstone.  Night, the early dirty night, the
+sinister, noisy, hopeless and rowdy night of South London, had
+overtaken her on her last cab drive.  In the gas-light of the low-
+fronted shops her big cheeks glowed with an orange hue under a
+black and mauve bonnet.
+
+Mrs Verloc's mother's complexion had become yellow by the effect of
+age and from a natural predisposition to biliousness, favoured by
+the trials of a difficult and worried existence, first as wife,
+then as widow.  It was a complexion, that under the influence of a
+blush would take on an orange tint.  And this woman, modest indeed
+but hardened in the fires of adversity, of an age, moreover, when
+blushes are not expected, had positively blushed before her
+daughter.  In the privacy of a four-wheeler, on her way to a
+charity cottage (one of a row) which by the exiguity of its
+dimensions and the simplicity of its accommodation, might well have
+been devised in kindness as a place of training for the still more
+straitened circumstances of the grave, she was forced to hid from
+her own child a blush of remorse and shame.
+
+Whatever people will think?  She knew very well what they did
+think, the people Winnie had in her mind - the old friends of her
+husband, and others too, whose interest she had solicited with such
+flattering success.  She had not known before what a good beggar
+she could be.  But she guessed very well what inference was drawn
+from her application.  On account of that shrinking delicacy, which
+exists side by side with aggressive brutality in masculine nature,
+the inquiries into her circumstances had not been pushed very far.
+She had checked them by a visible compression of the lips and some
+display of an emotion determined to be eloquently silent.  And the
+men would become suddenly incurious, after the manner of their
+kind.  She congratulated herself more than once on having nothing
+to do with women, who being naturally more callous and avid of
+details, would have been anxious to be exactly informed by what
+sort of unkind conduct her daughter and son-in-law had driven her
+to that sad extremity.  It was only before the Secretary of the
+great brewer M. P. and Chairman of the Charity, who, acting for his
+principal, felt bound to be conscientiously inquisitive as to the
+real circumstances of the applicant, that she had burst into tears
+outright and aloud, as a cornered woman will weep.  The thin and
+polite gentleman, after contemplating her with an air of being
+"struck all of a heap," abandoned his position under the cover of
+soothing remarks.  She must not distress herself.  The deed of the
+Charity did not absolutely specify "childless widows."  In fact, it
+did not by any means disqualify her.  But the discretion of the
+Committee must be an informed discretion.  One could understand
+very well her unwillingness to be a burden, etc. etc.  Thereupon,
+to his profound disappointment, Mrs Verloc's mother wept some more
+with an augmented vehemence.
+
+The tears of that large female in a dark, dusty wig, and ancient
+silk dress festooned with dingy white cotton lace, were the tears
+of genuine distress.  She had wept because she was heroic and
+unscrupulous and full of love for both her children.  Girls
+frequently get sacrificed to the welfare of the boys.  In this case
+she was sacrificing Winnie.  By the suppression of truth she was
+slandering her.  Of course, Winnie was independent, and need not
+care for the opinion of people that she would never see and who
+would never see her; whereas poor Stevie had nothing in the world
+he could call his own except his mother's heroism and
+unscrupulousness.
+
+The first sense of security following on Winnie's marriage wore off
+in time (for nothing lasts), and Mrs Verloc's mother, in the
+seclusion of the back bedroom, had recalled the teaching of that
+experience which the world impresses upon a widowed woman.  But she
+had recalled it without vain bitterness; her store of resignation
+amounted almost to dignity.  She reflected stoically that
+everything decays, wears out, in this world; that the way of
+kindness should be made easy to the well disposed; that her
+daughter Winnie was a most devoted sister, and a very self-
+confident wife indeed.  As regards Winnie's sisterly devotion, her
+stoicism flinched.  She excepted that sentiment from the rule of
+decay affecting all things human and some things divine.  She could
+not help it; not to do so would have frightened her too much.  But
+in considering the conditions of her daughter's married state, she
+rejected firmly all flattering illusions.  She took the cold and
+reasonable view that the less strain put on Mr Verloc's kindness
+the longer its effects were likely to last.  That excellent man
+loved his wife, of course, but he would, no doubt, prefer to keep
+as few of her relations as was consistent with the proper display
+of that sentiment.  It would be better if its whole effect were
+concentrated on poor Stevie.  And the heroic old woman resolved on
+going away from her children as an act of devotion and as a move of
+deep policy.
+
+The "virtue" of this policy consisted in this (Mrs Verloc's mother
+was subtle in her way), that Stevie's moral claim would be
+strengthened.  The poor boy - a good, useful boy, if a little
+peculiar - had not a sufficient standing.  He had been taken over
+with his mother, somewhat in the same way as the furniture of the
+Belgravian mansion had been taken over, as if on the ground of
+belonging to her exclusively.  What will happen, she asked herself
+(for Mrs Verloc's mother was in a measure imaginative), when I die?
+And when she asked herself that question it was with dread.  It was
+also terrible to think that she would not then have the means of
+knowing what happened to the poor boy.  But by making him over to
+his sister, by going thus away, she gave him the advantage of a
+directly dependent position.  This was the more subtle sanction of
+Mrs Verloc's mother's heroism and unscrupulousness.  Her act of
+abandonment was really an arrangement for settling her son
+permanently in life.  Other people made material sacrifices for
+such an object, she in that way.  It was the only way.  Moreover,
+she would be able to see how it worked.  Ill or well she would
+avoid the horrible incertitude on the death-bed.  But it was hard,
+hard, cruelly hard.
+
+The cab rattled, jingled, jolted; in fact, the last was quite
+extraordinary.  By its disproportionate violence and magnitude it
+obliterated every sensation of onward movement; and the effect was
+of being shaken in a stationary apparatus like a mediaeval device
+for the punishment of crime, or some very newfangled invention for
+the cure of a sluggish liver.  It was extremely distressing; and
+the raising of Mrs Verloc's mother's voice sounded like a wail of
+pain.
+
+"I know, my dear, you'll come to see me as often as you can spare
+the time.  Won't you?"
+
+"Of course," answered Winnie shortly, staring straight before her.
+
+And the cab jolted in front of a steamy, greasy shop in a blaze of
+gas and in the smell of fried fish.
+
+The old woman raised a wail again.
+
+"And, my dear, I must see that poor boy every Sunday.  He won't
+mind spending the day with his old mother - "
+
+Winnie screamed out stolidly:
+
+"Mind!  I should think not.  That poor boy will miss you something
+cruel.  I wish you had thought a little of that, mother."
+
+Not think of it!  The heroic woman swallowed a playful and
+inconvenient object like a billiard ball, which had tried to jump
+out of her throat.  Winnie sat mute for a while, pouting at the
+front of the cab, then snapped out, which was an unusual tone with
+her:
+
+"I expect I'll have a job with him at first, he'll be that restless
+- "
+
+"Whatever you do, don't let him worry your husband, my dear."
+
+Thus they discussed on familiar lines the bearings of a new
+situation.  And the cab jolted.  Mrs Verloc's mother expressed some
+misgivings.  Could Stevie be trusted to come all that way alone?
+Winnie maintained that he was much less "absent-minded" now.  They
+agreed as to that.  It could not be denied.  Much less - hardly at
+all.  They shouted at each other in the jingle with comparative
+cheerfulness.  But suddenly the maternal anxiety broke out afresh.
+There were two omnibuses to take, and a short walk between.  It was
+too difficult!  The old woman gave way to grief and consternation.
+
+Winnie stared forward.
+
+"Don't you upset yourself like this, mother.  You must see him, of
+course."
+
+"No, my dear.  I'll try not to."
+
+She mopped her streaming eyes.
+
+"But you can't spare the time to come with him, and if he should
+forget himself and lose his way and somebody spoke to him sharply,
+his name and address may slip his memory, and he'll remain lost for
+days and days - "
+
+The vision of a workhouse infirmary for poor Stevie - if only
+during inquiries - wrung her heart.  For she was a proud woman.
+Winnie's stare had grown hard, intent, inventive.
+
+"I can't bring him to you myself every week," she cried.  "But
+don't you worry, mother.  I'll see to it that he don't get lost for
+long."
+
+They felt a peculiar bump; a vision of brick pillars lingered
+before the rattling windows of the cab; a sudden cessation of
+atrocious jolting and uproarious jingling dazed the two women.
+What had happened?  They sat motionless and scared in the profound
+stillness, till the door came open, and a rough, strained
+whispering was heard:
+
+"Here you are!"
+
+A range of gabled little houses, each with one dim yellow window,
+on the ground floor, surrounded the dark open space of a grass plot
+planted with shrubs and railed off from the patchwork of lights and
+shadows in the wide road, resounding with the dull rumble of
+traffic.  Before the door of one of these tiny houses - one without
+a light in the little downstairs window - the cab had come to a
+standstill.  Mrs Verloc's mother got out first, backwards, with a
+key in her hand.  Winnie lingered on the flagstone path to pay the
+cabman.  Stevie, after helping to carry inside a lot of small
+parcels, came out and stood under the light of a gas-lamp belonging
+to the Charity.  The cabman looked at the pieces of silver, which,
+appearing very minute in his big, grimy palm, symbolised the
+insignificant results which reward the ambitious courage and toil
+of a mankind whose day is short on this earth of evil.
+
+He had been paid decently - four one-shilling pieces - and he
+contemplated them in perfect stillness, as if they had been the
+surprising terms of a melancholy problem.  The slow transfer of
+that treasure to an inner pocket demanded much laborious groping in
+the depths of decayed clothing.  His form was squat and without
+flexibility.  Stevie, slender, his shoulders a little up, and his
+hands thrust deep in the side pockets of his warm overcoat, stood
+at the edge of the path, pouting.
+
+The cabman, pausing in his deliberate movements, seemed struck by
+some misty recollection.
+
+"Oh!  `Ere you are, young fellow," he whispered.  "You'll know him
+again - won't you?"
+
+Stevie was staring at the horse, whose hind quarters appeared
+unduly elevated by the effect of emaciation.  The little stiff tail
+seemed to have been fitted in for a heartless joke; and at the
+other end the thin, flat neck, like a plank covered with old horse-
+hide, drooped to the ground under the weight of an enormous bony
+head.  The ears hung at different angles, negligently; and the
+macabre figure of that mute dweller on the earth steamed straight
+up from ribs and backbone in the muggy stillness of the air.
+
+The cabman struck lightly Stevie's breast with the iron hook
+protruding from a ragged, greasy sleeve.
+
+"Look `ere, young feller.  `Ow'd YOU like to sit behind this `oss
+up to two o'clock in the morning p'raps?"
+
+Stevie looked vacantly into the fierce little eyes with red-edged
+lids.
+
+"He ain't lame," pursued the other, whispering with energy.  "He
+ain't got no sore places on `im.  `Ere he is.  `Ow would YOU like -
+"
+
+His strained, extinct voice invested his utterance with a character
+of vehement secrecy.  Stevie's vacant gaze was changing slowly into
+dread.
+
+"You may well look!  Till three and four o'clock in the morning.
+Cold and `ungry.  Looking for fares.  Drunks."
+
+His jovial purple cheeks bristled with white hairs; and like
+Virgil's Silenus, who, his face smeared with the juice of berries,
+discoursed of Olympian Gods to the innocent shepherds of Sicily, he
+talked to Stevie of domestic matters and the affairs of men whose
+sufferings are great and immortality by no means assured.
+
+"I am a night cabby, I am," he whispered, with a sort of boastful
+exasperation.  "I've got to take out what they will blooming well
+give me at the yard.  I've got my missus and four kids at `ome."
+
+The monstrous nature of that declaration of paternity seemed to
+strike the world dumb.  A silence reigned during which the flanks
+of the old horse, the steed of apocalyptic misery, smoked upwards
+in the light of the charitable gas-lamp.
+
+The cabman grunted, then added in his mysterious whisper:
+
+"This ain't an easy world."  Stevie's face had been twitching for
+some time, and at last his feelings burst out in their usual
+concise form.
+
+"Bad!  Bad!"
+
+His gaze remained fixed on the ribs of the horse, self-conscious
+and sombre, as though he were afraid to look about him at the
+badness of the world.  And his slenderness, his rosy lips and pale,
+clear complexion, gave him the aspect of a delicate boy,
+notwithstanding the fluffy growth of golden hair on his cheeks.  He
+pouted in a scared way like a child.  The cabman, short and broad,
+eyed him with his fierce little eyes that seemed to smart in a
+clear and corroding liquid.
+
+"'Ard on `osses, but dam' sight `arder on poor chaps like me," he
+wheezed just audibly.
+
+"Poor!  Poor!" stammered out Stevie, pushing his hands deeper into
+his pockets with convulsive sympathy.  He could say nothing; for
+the tenderness to all pain and all misery, the desire to make the
+horse happy and the cabman happy, had reached the point of a
+bizarre longing to take them to bed with him.  And that, he knew,
+was impossible.  For Stevie was not mad.  It was, as it were, a
+symbolic longing; and at the same time it was very distinct,
+because springing from experience, the mother of wisdom.  Thus when
+as a child he cowered in a dark corner scared, wretched, sore, and
+miserable with the black, black misery of the soul, his sister
+Winnie used to come along, and carry him off to bed with her, as
+into a heaven of consoling peace.  Stevie, though apt to forget
+mere facts, such as his name and address for instance, had a
+faithful memory of sensations.  To be taken into a bed of
+compassion was the supreme remedy, with the only one disadvantage
+of being difficult of application on a large scale.  And looking at
+the cabman, Stevie perceived this clearly, because he was
+reasonable.
+
+The cabman went on with his leisurely preparations as if Stevie had
+not existed.  He made as if to hoist himself on the box, but at the
+last moment from some obscure motive, perhaps merely from disgust
+with carriage exercise, desisted.  He approached instead the
+motionless partner of his labours, and stooping to seize the
+bridle, lifted up the big, weary head to the height of his shoulder
+with one effort of his right arm, like a feat of strength.
+
+"Come on," he whispered secretly.
+
+Limping, he led the cab away.  There was an air of austerity in
+this departure, the scrunched gravel of the drive crying out under
+the slowly turning wheels, the horse's lean thighs moving with
+ascetic deliberation away from the light into the obscurity of the
+open space bordered dimly by the pointed roofs and the feebly
+shining windows of the little alms-houses.  The plaint of the
+gravel travelled slowly all round the drive.  Between the lamps of
+the charitable gateway the slow cortege reappeared, lighted up for
+a moment, the short, thick man limping busily, with the horse's
+head held aloft in his fist, the lank animal walking in stiff and
+forlorn dignity, the dark, low box on wheels rolling behind
+comically with an air of waddling.  They turned to the left.  There
+was a pub down the street, within fifty yards of the gate.
+
+Stevie left alone beside the private lamp-post of the Charity, his
+hands thrust deep into his pockets, glared with vacant sulkiness.
+At the bottom of his pockets his incapable weak hands were clinched
+hard into a pair of angry fists.  In the face of anything which
+affected directly or indirectly his morbid dread of pain, Stevie
+ended by turning vicious.  A magnanimous indignation swelled his
+frail chest to bursting, and caused his candid eyes to squint.
+Supremely wise in knowing his own powerlessness, Stevie was not
+wise enough to restrain his passions.  The tenderness of his
+universal charity had two phases as indissolubly joined and
+connected as the reverse and obverse sides of a medal.  The anguish
+of immoderate compassion was succeeded by the pain of an innocent
+but pitiless rage.  Those two states expressing themselves
+outwardly by the same signs of futile bodily agitation, his sister
+Winnie soothed his excitement without ever fathoming its twofold
+character.  Mrs Verloc wasted no portion of this transient life in
+seeking for fundamental information.  This is a sort of economy
+having all the appearances and some of the advantages of prudence.
+Obviously it may be good for one not to know too much.  And such a
+view accords very well with constitutional indolence.
+
+On that evening on which it may be said that Mrs Verloc's mother
+having parted for good from her children had also departed this
+life, Winnie Verloc did not investigate her brother's psychology.
+The poor boy was excited, of course.  After once more assuring the
+old woman on the threshold that she would know how to guard against
+the risk of Stevie losing himself for very long on his pilgrimages
+of filial piety, she took her brother's arm to walk away.  Stevie
+did not even mutter to himself, but with the special sense of
+sisterly devotion developed in her earliest infancy, she felt that
+the boy was very much excited indeed.  Holding tight to his arm,
+under the appearance of leaning on it, she thought of some words
+suitable to the occasion.
+
+"Now, Stevie, you must look well after me at the crossings, and get
+first into the `bus, like a good brother."
+
+This appeal to manly protection was received by Stevie with his
+usual docility.  It flattered him.  He raised his head and threw
+out his chest.
+
+"Don't be nervous, Winnie.  Mustn't be nervous!  `Bus all right,"
+he answered in a brusque, slurring stammer partaking of the
+timorousness of a child and the resolution of a man.  He advanced
+fearlessly with the woman on his arm, but his lower lip dropped.
+Nevertheless, on the pavement of the squalid and wide thoroughfare,
+whose poverty in all the amenities of life stood foolishly exposed
+by a mad profusion of gas-lights, their resemblance to each other
+was so pronounced as to strike the casual passers-by.
+
+Before the doors of the public-house at the corner, where the
+profusion of gas-light reached the height of positive wickedness, a
+four-wheeled cab standing by the curbstone with no one on the box,
+seemed cast out into the gutter on account of irremediable decay.
+Mrs Verloc recognised the conveyance.  Its aspect was so profoundly
+lamentable, with such a perfection of grotesque misery and
+weirdness of macabre detail, as if it were the Cab of Death itself,
+that Mrs Verloc, with that ready compassion of a woman for a horse
+(when she is not sitting behind him), exclaimed vaguely:
+
+"Poor brute:"
+
+Hanging back suddenly, Stevie inflicted an arresting jerk upon his
+sister.
+
+"Poor!  Poor!" he ejaculated appreciatively.  "Cabman poor too.  He
+told me himself."
+
+The contemplation of the infirm and lonely steed overcame him.
+Jostled, but obstinate, he would remain there, trying to express
+the view newly opened to his sympathies of the human and equine
+misery in close association.  But it was very difficult.  "Poor
+brute, poor people!" was all he could repeat.  It did not seem
+forcible enough, and he came to a stop with an angry splutter:
+"Shame!"  Stevie was no master of phrases, and perhaps for that
+very reason his thoughts lacked clearness and precision.  But he
+felt with greater completeness and some profundity.  That little
+word contained all his sense of indignation and horror at one sort
+of wretchedness having to feed upon the anguish of the other - at
+the poor cabman beating the poor horse in the name, as it were, of
+his poor kids at home.  And Stevie knew what it was to be beaten.
+He knew it from experience.  It was a bad world.  Bad!  Bad!
+
+Mrs Verloc, his only sister, guardian, and protector, could not
+pretend to such depths of insight.  Moreover, she had not
+experienced the magic of the cabman's eloquence.  She was in the
+dark as to the inwardness of the word "Shame."  And she said
+placidly:
+
+"Come along, Stevie.  You can't help that."
+
+The docile Stevie went along; but now he went along without pride,
+shamblingly, and muttering half words, and even words that would
+have been whole if they had not been made up of halves that did not
+belong to each other.  It was as though he had been trying to fit
+all the words he could remember to his sentiments in order to get
+some sort of corresponding idea.  And, as a matter of fact, he got
+it at last.  He hung back to utter it at once.
+
+"Bad world for poor people."
+
+Directly he had expressed that thought he became aware that it was
+familiar to him already in all its consequences.  This circumstance
+strengthened his conviction immensely, but also augmented his
+indignation.  Somebody, he felt, ought to be punished for it -
+punished with great severity.  Being no sceptic, but a moral
+creature, he was in a manner at the mercy of his righteous
+passions.
+
+"Beastly!" he added concisely.
+
+It was clear to Mrs Verloc that he was greatly excited.
+
+"Nobody can help that," she said.  "Do come along.  Is that the way
+you're taking care of me?"
+
+Stevie mended his pace obediently.  He prided himself on being a
+good brother.  His morality, which was very complete, demanded that
+from him.  Yet he was pained at the information imparted by his
+sister Winnie who was good.  Nobody could help that!  He came along
+gloomily, but presently he brightened up.  Like the rest of
+mankind, perplexed by the mystery of the universe, he had his
+moments of consoling trust in the organised powers of the earth.
+
+"Police," he suggested confidently.
+
+"The police aren't for that," observed Mrs Verloc cursorily,
+hurrying on her way.
+
+Stevie's face lengthened considerably.  He was thinking.  The more
+intense his thinking, the slacker was the droop of his lower jaw.
+
+And it was with an aspect of hopeless vacancy that he gave up his
+intellectual enterprise.
+
+"Not for that?" he mumbled, resigned but surprised.  "Not for
+that?"  He had formed for himself an ideal conception of the
+metropolitan police as a sort of benevolent institution for the
+suppression of evil.  The notion of benevolence especially was very
+closely associated with his sense of the power of the men in blue.
+He had liked all police constables tenderly, with a guileless
+trustfulness.  And he was pained.  He was irritated, too, by a
+suspicion of duplicity in the members of the force.  For Stevie was
+frank and as open as the day himself.  What did they mean by
+pretending then?  Unlike his sister, who put her trust in face
+values, he wished to go to the bottom of the matter.  He carried on
+his inquiry by means of an angry challenge.
+
+"What for are they then, Winn?  What are they for?  Tell me."
+
+Winnie disliked controversy.  But fearing most a fit of black
+depression consequent on Stevie missing his mother very much at
+first, she did not altogether decline the discussion.  Guiltless of
+all irony, she answered yet in a form which was not perhaps
+unnatural in the wife of Mr Verloc, Delegate of the Central Red
+Committee, personal friend of certain anarchists, and a votary of
+social revolution.
+
+"Don't you know what the police are for, Stevie?  They are there so
+that them as have nothing shouldn't take anything away from them
+who have."
+
+She avoided using the verb "to steal," because it always made her
+brother uncomfortable.  For Stevie was delicately honest.  Certain
+simple principles had been instilled into him so anxiously (on
+account of his "queerness") that the mere names of certain
+transgressions filled him with horror.  He had been always easily
+impressed by speeches.  He was impressed and startled now, and his
+intelligence was very alert.
+
+"What?" he asked at once anxiously.  "Not even if they were hungry?
+Mustn't they?"
+
+The two had paused in their walk.
+
+"Not if they were ever so," said Mrs Verloc, with the equanimity of
+a person untroubled by the problem of the distribution of wealth,
+and exploring the perspective of the roadway for an omnibus of the
+right colour.  "Certainly not.  But what's the use of talking about
+all that?  You aren't ever hungry."
+
+She cast a swift glance at the boy, like a young man, by her side.
+She saw him amiable, attractive, affectionate, and only a little, a
+very little, peculiar.  And she could not see him otherwise, for he
+was connected with what there was of the salt of passion in her
+tasteless life - the passion of indignation, of courage, of pity,
+and even of self-sacrifice.  She did not add: "And you aren't
+likely ever to be as long as I live."  But she might very well have
+done so, since she had taken effectual steps to that end.  Mr
+Verloc was a very good husband.  It was her honest impression that
+nobody could help liking the boy.  She cried out suddenly:
+
+"Quick, Stevie.  Stop that green `bus."
+
+And Stevie, tremulous and important with his sister Winnie on his
+arm, flung up the other high above his head at the approaching
+`bus, with complete success.
+
+An hour afterwards Mr Verloc raised his eyes from a newspaper he
+was reading, or at any rate looking at, behind the counter, and in
+the expiring clatter of the door-bell beheld Winnie, his wife,
+enter and cross the shop on her way upstairs, followed by Stevie,
+his brother-in-law.  The sight of his wife was agreeable to Mr
+Verloc.  It was his idiosyncrasy.  The figure of his brother-in-law
+remained imperceptible to him because of the morose thoughtfulness
+that lately had fallen like a veil between Mr Verloc and the
+appearances of the world of senses.  He looked after his wife
+fixedly, without a word, as though she had been a phantom.  His
+voice for home use was husky and placid, but now it was heard not
+at all.  It was not heard at supper, to which he was called by his
+wife in the usual brief manner: "Adolf."  He sat down to consume it
+without conviction, wearing his hat pushed far back on his head.
+It was not devotion to an outdoor life, but the frequentation of
+foreign cafes which was responsible for that habit, investing with
+a character of unceremonious impermanency Mr Verloc's steady
+fidelity to his own fireside.  Twice at the clatter of the cracked
+bell he arose without a word, disappeared into the shop, and came
+back silently.  During these absences Mrs Verloc, becoming acutely
+aware of the vacant place at her right hand, missed her mother very
+much, and stared stonily; while Stevie, from the same reason, kept
+on shuffling his feet, as though the floor under the table were
+uncomfortably hot.  When Mr Verloc returned to sit in his place,
+like the very embodiment of silence, the character of Mrs Verloc's
+stare underwent a subtle change, and Stevie ceased to fidget with
+his feet, because of his great and awed regard for his sister's
+husband.  He directed at him glances of respectful compassion.  Mr
+Verloc was sorry.  His sister Winnie had impressed upon him (in the
+omnibus) that Mr Verloc would be found at home in a state of
+sorrow, and must not be worried.  His father's anger, the
+irritability of gentlemen lodgers, and Mr Verloc's predisposition
+to immoderate grief, had been the main sanctions of Stevie's self-
+restraint.  Of these sentiments, all easily provoked, but not
+always easy to understand, the last had the greatest moral
+efficiency - because Mr Verloc was GOOD.  His mother and his sister
+had established that ethical fact on an unshakable foundation.
+They had established, erected, consecrated it behind Mr Verloc's
+back, for reasons that had nothing to do with abstract morality.
+And Mr Verloc was not aware of it.  It is but bare justice to him
+to say that he had no notion of appearing good to Stevie.  Yet so
+it was.  He was even the only man so qualified in Stevie's
+knowledge, because the gentlemen lodgers had been too transient and
+too remote to have anything very distinct about them but perhaps
+their boots; and as regards the disciplinary measures of his
+father, the desolation of his mother and sister shrank from setting
+up a theory of goodness before the victim.  It would have been too
+cruel.  And it was even possible that Stevie would not have
+believed them.  As far as Mr Verloc was concerned, nothing could
+stand in the way of Stevie's belief.  Mr Verloc was obviously yet
+mysteriously GOOD.  And the grief of a good man is august.
+
+Stevie gave glances of reverential compassion to his brother-in-
+law.  Mr Verloc was sorry.  The brother of Winnie had never before
+felt himself in such close communion with the mystery of that man's
+goodness.  It was an understandable sorrow.  And Stevie himself was
+sorry.  He was very sorry.  The same sort of sorrow.  And his
+attention being drawn to this unpleasant state, Stevie shuffled his
+feet.  His feelings were habitually manifested by the agitation of
+his limbs.
+
+"Keep your feet quiet, dear," said Mrs Verloc, with authority and
+tenderness; then turning towards her husband in an indifferent
+voice, the masterly achievement of instinctive tact: "Are you going
+out to-night?" she asked.
+
+The mere suggestion seemed repugnant to Mr Verloc.  He shook his
+head moodily, and then sat still with downcast eyes, looking at the
+piece of cheese on his plate for a whole minute.  At the end of
+that time he got up, and went out - went right out in the clatter
+of the shop-door bell.  He acted thus inconsistently, not from any
+desire to make himself unpleasant, but because of an unconquerable
+restlessness.  It was no earthly good going out.  He could not find
+anywhere in London what he wanted.  But he went out.  He led a
+cortege of dismal thoughts along dark streets, through lighted
+streets, in and out of two flash bars, as if in a half-hearted
+attempt to make a night of it, and finally back again to his
+menaced home, where he sat down fatigued behind the counter, and
+they crowded urgently round him, like a pack of hungry black
+hounds.  After locking up the house and putting out the gas he took
+them upstairs with him - a dreadful escort for a man going to bed.
+His wife had preceded him some time before, and with her ample form
+defined vaguely under the counterpane, her head on the pillow, and
+a hand under the cheek offered to his distraction the view of early
+drowsiness arguing the possession of an equable soul.  Her big eyes
+stared wide open, inert and dark against the snowy whiteness of the
+linen.  She did not move.
+
+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.
+
+"Might be father and son," she said to herself.  She thought also
+that Mr Verloc was as much of a father as poor Stevie ever had in
+his life.  She was aware also that it was her work.  And with
+peaceful pride she congratulated herself on a certain resolution
+she had taken a few years before.  It had cost her some effort, and
+even a few tears.
+
+She congratulated herself still more on observing in the course of
+days that Mr Verloc seemed to be taking kindly to Stevie's
+companionship.  Now, when ready to go out for his walk, Mr Verloc
+called aloud to the boy, in the spirit, no doubt, in which a man
+invites the attendance of the household dog, though, of course, in
+a different manner.  In the house Mr Verloc could be detected
+staring curiously at Stevie a good deal.  His own demeanour had
+changed.  Taciturn still, he was not so listless.  Mrs Verloc
+thought that he was rather jumpy at times.  It might have been
+regarded as an improvement.  As to Stevie, he moped no longer at
+the foot of the clock, but muttered to himself in corners instead
+in a threatening tone.  When asked "What is it you're saying,
+Stevie?" he merely opened his mouth, and squinted at his sister.
+At odd times he clenched his fists without apparent cause, and when
+discovered in solitude would be scowling at the wall, with the
+sheet of paper and the pencil given him for drawing circles lying
+blank and idle on the kitchen table.  This was a change, but it was
+no improvement.  Mrs Verloc including all these vagaries under the
+general definition of excitement, began to fear that Stevie was
+hearing more than was good for him of her husband's conversations
+with his friends.  During his "walks" Mr Verloc, of course, met and
+conversed with various persons.  It could hardly be otherwise.  His
+walks were an integral part of his outdoor activities, which his
+wife had never looked deeply into.  Mrs Verloc felt that the
+position was delicate, but she faced it with the same impenetrable
+calmness which impressed and even astonished the customers of the
+shop and made the other visitors keep their distance a little
+wonderingly.  No!  She feared that there were things not good for
+Stevie to hear of, she told her husband.  It only excited the poor
+boy, because he could not help them being so.  Nobody could.
+
+It was in the shop.  Mr Verloc made no comment.  He made no retort,
+and yet the retort was obvious.  But he refrained from pointing out
+to his wife that the idea of making Stevie the companion of his
+walks was her own, and nobody else's.  At that moment, to an
+impartial observer, Mr Verloc would have appeared more than human
+in his magnanimity.  He took down a small cardboard box from a
+shelf, peeped in to see that the contents were all right, and put
+it down gently on the counter.  Not till that was done did he break
+the silence, to the effect that most likely Stevie would profit
+greatly by being sent out of town for a while; only he supposed his
+wife could not get on without him.
+
+"Could not get on without him!" repeated Mrs Verloc slowly.  "I
+couldn't get on without him if it were for his good!  The idea!  Of
+course, I can get on without him.  But there's nowhere for him to
+go."
+
+Mr Verloc got out some brown paper and a ball of string; and
+meanwhile he muttered that Michaelis was living in a little cottage
+in the country.  Michaelis wouldn't mind giving Stevie a room to
+sleep in.  There were no visitors and no talk there.  Michaelis was
+writing a book.
+
+Mrs Verloc declared her affection for Michaelis; mentioned her
+abhorrence of Karl Yundt, "nasty old man"; and of Ossipon she said
+nothing.  As to Stevie, he could be no other than very pleased.  Mr
+Michaelis was always so nice and kind to him.  He seemed to like
+the boy.  Well, the boy was a good boy.
+
+"You too seem to have grown quite fond of him of late," she added,
+after a pause, with her inflexible assurance.
+
+Mr Verloc tying up the cardboard box into a parcel for the post,
+broke the string by an injudicious jerk, and muttered several swear
+words confidentially to himself.  Then raising his tone to the
+usual husky mutter, he announced his willingness to take Stevie
+into the country himself, and leave him all safe with Michaelis.
+
+He carried out this scheme on the very next day.  Stevie offered no
+objection.  He seemed rather eager, in a bewildered sort of way.
+He turned his candid gaze inquisitively to Mr Verloc's heavy
+countenance at frequent intervals, especially when his sister was
+not looking at him.  His expression was proud, apprehensive, and
+concentrated, like that of a small child entrusted for the first
+time with a box of matches and the permission to strike a light.
+But Mrs Verloc, gratified by her brother's docility, recommended
+him not to dirty his clothes unduly in the country.  At this Stevie
+gave his sister, guardian and protector a look, which for the first
+time in his life seemed to lack the quality of perfect childlike
+trustfulness.  It was haughtily gloomy.  Mrs Verloc smiled.
+
+"Goodness me!  You needn't be offended.  You know you do get
+yourself very untidy when you get a chance, Stevie."
+
+Mr Verloc was already gone some way down the street.
+
+Thus in consequence of her mother's heroic proceedings, and of her
+brother's absence on this villegiature, Mrs Verloc found herself
+oftener than usual all alone not only in the shop, but in the
+house.  For Mr Verloc had to take his walks.  She was alone longer
+than usual on the day of the attempted bomb outrage in Greenwich
+Park, because Mr Verloc went out very early that morning and did
+not come back till nearly dusk.  She did not mind being alone.  She
+had no desire to go out.  The weather was too bad, and the shop was
+cosier than the streets.  Sitting behind the counter with some
+sewing, she did not raise her eyes from her work when Mr Verloc
+entered in the aggressive clatter of the bell.  She had recognised
+his step on the pavement outside.
+
+She did not raise her eyes, but as Mr Verloc, silent, and with his
+hat rammed down upon his forehead, made straight for the parlour
+door, she said serenely:
+
+"What a wretched day.  You've been perhaps to see Stevie?"
+
+"No!  I haven't," said Mr Verloc softly, and slammed the glazed
+parlour door behind him with unexpected energy.
+
+For some time Mrs Verloc remained quiescent, with her work dropped
+in her lap, before she put it away under the counter and got up to
+light the gas.  This done, she went into the parlour on her way to
+the kitchen.  Mr Verloc would want his tea presently.  Confident of
+the power of her charms, Winnie did not expect from her husband in
+the daily intercourse of their married life a ceremonious amenity
+of address and courtliness of manner; vain and antiquated forms at
+best, probably never very exactly observed, discarded nowadays even
+in the highest spheres, and always foreign to the standards of her
+class.  She did not look for courtesies from him.  But he was a
+good husband, and she had a loyal respect for his rights.
+
+Mrs Verloc would have gone through the parlour and on to her
+domestic duties in the kitchen with the perfect serenity of a woman
+sure of the power of her charms.  But a slight, very slight, and
+rapid rattling sound grew upon her hearing.  Bizarre and
+incomprehensible, it arrested Mrs Verloc's attention.  Then as its
+character became plain to the ear she stopped short, amazed and
+concerned.  Striking a match on the box she held in her hand, she
+turned on and lighted, above the parlour table, one of the two gas-
+burners, which, being defective, first whistled as if astonished,
+and then went on purring comfortably like a cat.
+
+Mr Verloc, against his usual practice, had thrown off his overcoat.
+It was lying on the sofa.  His hat, which he must also have thrown
+off, rested overturned under the edge of the sofa.  He had dragged
+a chair in front of the fireplace, and his feet planted inside the
+fender, his head held between his hands, he was hanging low over
+the glowing grate.  His teeth rattled with an ungovernable
+violence, causing his whole enormous back to tremble at the same
+rate.  Mrs Verloc was startled.
+
+"You've been getting wet," she said.
+
+"Not very," Mr Verloc managed to falter out, in a profound shudder.
+By a great effort he suppressed the rattling of his teeth.
+
+"I'll have you laid up on my hands," she said, with genuine
+uneasiness.
+
+"I don't think so," remarked Mr Verloc, snuffling huskily.
+
+He had certainly contrived somehow to catch an abominable cold
+between seven in the morning and five in the afternoon.  Mrs Verloc
+looked at his bowed back.
+
+"Where have you been to-day?" she asked.
+
+"Nowhere," answered Mr Verloc in a low, choked nasal tone.  His
+attitude suggested aggrieved sulks or a severe headache.  The
+unsufficiency and uncandidness of his answer became painfully
+apparent in the dead silence of the room.  He snuffled
+apologetically, and added: "I've been to the bank."
+
+Mrs Verloc became attentive.
+
+"You have!" she said dispassionately.  "What for?"
+
+Mr Verloc mumbled, with his nose over the grate, and with marked
+unwillingness.
+
+"Draw the money out!"
+
+"What do you mean?  All of it?"
+
+"Yes.  All of it."
+
+Mrs Verloc spread out with care the scanty table-cloth, got two
+knives and two forks out of the table drawer, and suddenly stopped
+in her methodical proceedings.
+
+"What did you do that for?"
+
+"May want it soon," snuffled vaguely Mr Verloc, who was coming to
+the end of his calculated indiscretions.
+
+"I don't know what you mean," remarked his wife in a tone perfectly
+casual, but standing stock still between the table and the
+cupboard.
+
+"You know you can trust me," Mr Verloc remarked to the grate, with
+hoarse feeling.
+
+Mrs Verloc turned slowly towards the cupboard, saying with
+deliberation:
+
+"Oh yes.  I can trust you."
+
+And she went on with her methodical proceedings.  She laid two
+plates, got the bread, the butter, going to and fro quietly between
+the table and the cupboard in the peace and silence of her home.
+On the point of taking out the jam, she reflected practically: "He
+will be feeling hungry, having been away all day," and she returned
+to the cupboard once more to get the cold beef.  She set it under
+the purring gas-jet, and with a passing glance at her motionless
+husband hugging the fire, she went (down two steps) into the
+kitchen.  It was only when coming back, carving knife and fork in
+hand, that she spoke again.
+
+"If I hadn't trusted you I wouldn't have married you."
+
+Bowed under the overmantel, Mr Verloc, holding his head in both
+hands, seemed to have gone to sleep.  Winnie made the tea, and
+called out in an undertone:
+
+"Adolf."
+
+Mr Verloc got up at once, and staggered a little before he sat down
+at the table.  His wife examining the sharp edge of the carving
+knife, placed it on the dish, and called his attention to the cold
+beef.  He remained insensible to the suggestion, with his chin on
+his breast.
+
+"You should feed your cold," Mrs Verloc said dogmatically.
+
+He looked up, and shook his head.  His eyes were bloodshot and his
+face red.  His fingers had ruffled his hair into a dissipated
+untidiness.  Altogether he had a disreputable aspect, expressive of
+the discomfort, the irritation and the gloom following a heavy
+debauch.  But Mr Verloc was not a debauched man.  In his conduct he
+was respectable.  His appearance might have been the effect of a
+feverish cold.  He drank three cups of tea, but abstained from food
+entirely.  He recoiled from it with sombre aversion when urged by
+Mrs Verloc, who said at last:
+
+"Aren't your feet wet?  You had better put on your slippers.  You
+aren't going out any more this evening."
+
+Mr Verloc intimated by morose grunts and signs that his feet were
+not wet, and that anyhow he did not care.  The proposal as to
+slippers was disregarded as beneath his notice.  But the question
+of going out in the evening received an unexpected development.  It
+was not of going out in the evening that Mr Verloc was thinking.
+His thoughts embraced a vaster scheme.  From moody and incomplete
+phrases it became apparent that Mr Verloc had been considering the
+expediency of emigrating.  It was not very clear whether he had in
+his mind France or California.
+
+The utter unexpectedness, improbability, and inconceivableness of
+such an event robbed this vague declaration of all its effect.  Mrs
+Verloc, as placidly as if her husband had been threatening her with
+the end of the world, said:
+
+"The idea!"
+
+Mr Verloc declared himself sick and tired of everything, and
+besides -  She interrupted him.
+
+"You've a bad cold."
+
+It was indeed obvious that Mr Verloc was not in his usual state,
+physically and even mentally.  A sombre irresolution held him
+silent for a while.  Then he murmured a few ominous generalities on
+the theme of necessity.
+
+"Will have to," repeated Winnie, sitting calmly back, with folded
+arms, opposite her husband.  "I should like to know who's to make
+you.  You ain't a slave.  No one need be a slave in this country -
+and don't you make yourself one."  She paused, and with invincible
+and steady candour.  "The business isn't so bad," she went on.
+"You've a comfortable home."
+
+She glanced all round the parlour, from the corner cupboard to the
+good fire in the grate.  Ensconced cosily behind the shop of
+doubtful wares, with the mysteriously dim window, and its door
+suspiciously ajar in the obscure and narrow street, it was in all
+essentials of domestic propriety and domestic comfort a respectable
+home.  Her devoted affection missed out of it her brother Stevie,
+now enjoying a damp villegiature in the Kentish lanes under the
+care of Mr Michaelis.  She missed him poignantly, with all the
+force of her protecting passion.  This was the boy's home too - the
+roof, the cupboard, the stoked grate.  On this thought Mrs Verloc
+rose, and walking to the other end of the table, said in the
+fulness of her heart:
+
+"And you are not tired of me."
+
+Mr Verloc made no sound.  Winnie leaned on his shoulder from
+behind, and pressed her lips to his forehead.  Thus she lingered.
+Not a whisper reached them from the outside world.
+
+The sound of footsteps on the pavement died out in the discreet
+dimness of the shop.  Only the gas-jet above the table went on
+purring equably in the brooding silence of the parlour.
+
+During the contact of that unexpected and lingering kiss Mr Verloc,
+gripping with both hands the edges of his chair, preserved a
+hieratic immobility.  When the pressure was removed he let go the
+chair, rose, and went to stand before the fireplace.  He turned no
+longer his back to the room.  With his features swollen and an air
+of being drugged, he followed his wife's movements with his eyes.
+
+Mrs Verloc went about serenely, clearing up the table.  Her
+tranquil voice commented the idea thrown out in a reasonable and
+domestic tone.  It wouldn't stand examination.  She condemned it
+from every point of view.  But her only real concern was Stevie's
+welfare.  He appeared to her thought in that connection as
+sufficiently "peculiar" not to be taken rashly abroad.  And that
+was all.  But talking round that vital point, she approached
+absolute vehemence in her delivery.  Meanwhile, with brusque
+movements, she arrayed herself in an apron for the washing up of
+cups.  And as if excited by the sound of her uncontradicted voice,
+she went so far as to say in a tone almost tart:
+
+"If you go abroad you'll have to go without me."
+
+"You know I wouldn't," said Mr Verloc huskily, and the unresonant
+voice of his private life trembled with an enigmatical emotion.
+
+Already Mrs Verloc was regretting her words.  They had sounded more
+unkind than she meant them to be.  They had also the unwisdom of
+unnecessary things.  In fact, she had not meant them at all.  It
+was a sort of phrase that is suggested by the demon of perverse
+inspiration.  But she knew a way to make it as if it had not been.
+
+She turned her head over her shoulder and gave that man planted
+heavily in front of the fireplace a glance, half arch, half cruel,
+out of her large eyes - a glance of which the Winnie of the
+Belgravian mansion days would have been incapable, because of her
+respectability and her ignorance.  But the man was her husband now,
+and she was no longer ignorant.  She kept it on him for a whole
+second, with her grave face motionless like a mask, while she said
+playfully:
+
+"You couldn't.  You would miss me too much."
+
+Mr Verloc started forward.
+
+"Exactly," he said in a louder tone, throwing his arms out and
+making a step towards her.  Something wild and doubtful in his
+expression made it appear uncertain whether he meant to strangle or
+to embrace his wife.  But Mrs Verloc's attention was called away
+from that manifestation by the clatter of the shop bell.
+
+"Shop, Adolf.  You go."
+
+He stopped, his arms came down slowly.
+
+"You go," repeated Mrs Verloc.  "I've got my apron on."
+
+Mr Verloc obeyed woodenly, stony-eyed, and like an automaton whose
+face had been painted red.  And this resemblance to a mechanical
+figure went so far that he had an automaton's absurd air of being
+aware of the machinery inside of him.
+
+He closed the parlour door, and Mrs Verloc moving briskly, carried
+the tray into the kitchen.  She washed the cups and some other
+things before she stopped in her work to listen.  No sound reached
+her.  The customer was a long time in the shop.  It was a customer,
+because if he had not been Mr Verloc would have taken him inside.
+Undoing the strings of her apron with a jerk, she threw it on a
+chair, and walked back to the parlour slowly.
+
+At that precise moment Mr Verloc entered from the shop.
+
+He had gone in red.  He came out a strange papery white.  His face,
+losing its drugged, feverish stupor, had in that short time
+acquired a bewildered and harassed expression.  He walked straight
+to the sofa, and stood looking down at his overcoat lying there, as
+though he were afraid to touch it.
+
+"What's the matter?" asked Mrs Verloc in a subdued voice.  Through
+the door left ajar she could see that the customer was not gone
+yet.
+
+"I find I'll have to go out this evening," said Mr Verloc.  He did
+not attempt to pick up his outer garment.
+
+Without a word Winnie made for the shop, and shutting the door
+after her, walked in behind the counter.  She did not look overtly
+at the customer till she had established herself comfortably on the
+chair.  But by that time she had noted that he was tall and thin,
+and wore his moustaches twisted up.  In fact, he gave the sharp
+points a twist just then.  His long, bony face rose out of a
+turned-up collar.  He was a little splashed, a little wet.  A dark
+man, with the ridge of the cheek-bone well defined under the
+slightly hollow temple.  A complete stranger.  Not a customer
+either.
+
+Mrs Verloc looked at him placidly.
+
+"You came over from the Continent?" she said after a time.
+
+The long, thin stranger, without exactly looking at Mrs Verloc,
+answered only by a faint and peculiar smile.
+
+Mrs Verloc's steady, incurious gaze rested on him.
+
+"You understand English, don't you?"
+
+"Oh yes.  I understand English."
+
+There was nothing foreign in his accent, except that he seemed in
+his slow enunciation to be taking pains with it.  And Mrs Verloc,
+in her varied experience, had come to the conclusion that some
+foreigners could speak better English than the natives.  She said,
+looking at the door of the parlour fixedly:
+
+"You don't think perhaps of staying in England for good?"
+
+The stranger gave her again a silent smile.  He had a kindly mouth
+and probing eyes.  And he shook his head a little sadly, it seemed.
+
+"My husband will see you through all right.  Meantime for a few
+days you couldn't do better than take lodgings with Mr Giugliani.
+Continental Hotel it's called.  Private.  It's quiet.  My husband
+will take you there."
+
+"A good idea," said the thin, dark man, whose glance had hardened
+suddenly.
+
+"You knew Mr Verloc before - didn't you?  Perhaps in France?"
+
+"I have heard of him," admitted the visitor in his slow,
+painstaking tone, which yet had a certain curtness of intention.
+
+There was a pause.  Then he spoke again, in a far less elaborate
+manner.
+
+"Your husband has not gone out to wait for me in the street by
+chance?"
+
+"In the street!" repeated Mrs Verloc, surprised.  "He couldn't.
+There's no other door to the house."
+
+For a moment she sat impassive, then left her seat to go and peep
+through the glazed door.  Suddenly she opened it, and disappeared
+into the parlour.
+
+Mr Verloc had done no more than put on his overcoat.  But why he
+should remain afterwards leaning over the table propped up on his
+two arms as though he were feeling giddy or sick, she could not
+understand.  "Adolf," she called out half aloud; and when he had
+raised himself:
+
+"Do you know that man?" she asked rapidly.
+
+"I've heard of him," whispered uneasily Mr Verloc, darting a wild
+glance at the door.
+
+Mrs Verloc's fine, incurious eyes lighted up with a flash of
+abhorrence.
+
+"One of Karl Yundt's friends - beastly old man."
+
+"No!  No!" protested Mr Verloc, busy fishing for his hat.  But when
+he got it from under the sofa he held it as if he did not know the
+use of a hat.
+
+"Well - he's waiting for you," said Mrs Verloc at last.  "I say,
+Adolf, he ain't one of them Embassy people you have been bothered
+with of late?"
+
+"Bothered with Embassy people," repeated Mr Verloc, with a heavy
+start of surprise and fear.  "Who's been talking to you of the
+Embassy people?"
+
+"Yourself."
+
+"I!  I!  Talked of the Embassy to you!"
+
+Mr Verloc seemed scared and bewildered beyond measure.  His wife
+explained:
+
+"You've been talking a little in your sleep of late, Adolf."
+
+"What - what did I say?  What do you know?"
+
+"Nothing much.  It seemed mostly nonsense.  Enough to let me guess
+that something worried you."
+
+Mr Verloc rammed his hat on his head.  A crimson flood of anger ran
+over his face.
+
+"Nonsense - eh?  The Embassy people!  I would cut their hearts out
+one after another.  But let them look out.  I've got a tongue in my
+head."
+
+He fumed, pacing up and down between the table and the sofa, his
+open overcoat catching against the angles.  The red flood of anger
+ebbed out, and left his face all white, with quivering nostrils.
+Mrs Verloc, for the purposes of practical existence, put down these
+appearances to the cold.
+
+"Well," she said, "get rid of the man, whoever he is, as soon as
+you can, and come back home to me.  You want looking after for a
+day or two."
+
+Mr Verloc calmed down, and, with resolution imprinted on his pale
+face, had already opened the door, when his wife called him back in
+a whisper:
+
+"Adolf!  Adolf!"  He came back startled.  "What about that money
+you drew out?" she asked.  "You've got it in your pocket?  Hadn't
+you better - "
+
+Mr Verloc gazed stupidly into the palm of his wife's extended hand
+for some time before he slapped his brow.
+
+"Money!  Yes!  Yes!  I didn't know what you meant."
+
+He drew out of his breast pocket a new pigskin pocket-book.  Mrs
+Verloc received it without another word, and stood still till the
+bell, clattering after Mr Verloc and Mr Verloc's visitor, had
+quieted down.  Only then she peeped in at the amount, drawing the
+notes out for the purpose.  After this inspection she looked round
+thoughtfully, with an air of mistrust in the silence and solitude
+of the house.  This abode of her married life appeared to her as
+lonely and unsafe as though it had been situated in the midst of a
+forest.  No receptacle she could think of amongst the solid, heavy
+furniture seemed other but flimsy and particularly tempting to her
+conception of a house-breaker.  It was an ideal conception, endowed
+with sublime faculties and a miraculous insight.  The till was not
+to be thought of it was the first spot a thief would make for.  Mrs
+Verloc unfastening hastily a couple of hooks, slipped the pocket-
+book under the bodice of her dress.  Having thus disposed of her
+husband's capital, she was rather glad to hear the clatter of the
+door bell, announcing an arrival.  Assuming the fixed, unabashed
+stare and the stony expression reserved for the casual customer,
+she walked in behind the counter.
+
+A man standing in the middle of the shop was inspecting it with a
+swift, cool, all-round glance.  His eyes ran over the walls, took
+in the ceiling, noted the floor - all in a moment.  The points of a
+long fair moustache fell below the line of the jaw.  He smiled the
+smile of an old if distant acquaintance, and Mrs Verloc remembered
+having seen him before.  Not a customer.  She softened her
+"customer stare" to mere indifference, and faced him across the
+counter.
+
+He approached, on his side, confidentially, but not too markedly
+so.
+
+"Husband at home, Mrs Verloc?" he asked in an easy, full tone.
+
+"No.  He's gone out."
+
+"I am sorry for that.  I've called to get from him a little private
+information."
+
+This was the exact truth.  Chief Inspector Heat had been all the
+way home, and had even gone so far as to think of getting into his
+slippers, since practically he was, he told himself, chucked out of
+that case.  He indulged in some scornful and in a few angry
+thoughts, and found the occupation so unsatisfactory that he
+resolved to seek relief out of doors.  Nothing prevented him paying
+a friendly call to Mr Verloc, casually as it were.  It was in the
+character of a private citizen that walking out privately he made
+use of his customary conveyances.  Their general direction was
+towards Mr Verloc's home.  Chief Inspector Heat respected his own
+private character so consistently that he took especial pains to
+avoid all the police constables on point and patrol duty in the
+vicinity of Brett Street.  This precaution was much more necessary
+for a man of his standing than for an obscure Assistant
+Commissioner.  Private Citizen Heat entered the street, manoeuvring
+in a way which in a member of the criminal classes would have been
+stigmatised as slinking.  The piece of cloth picked up in Greenwich
+was in his pocket.  Not that he had the slightest intention of
+producing it in his private capacity.  On the contrary, he wanted
+to know just what Mr Verloc would be disposed to say voluntarily.
+He hoped Mr Verloc's talk would be of a nature to incriminate
+Michaelis.  It was a conscientiously professional hope in the main,
+but not without its moral value.  For Chief Inspector Heat was a
+servant of justice.  Find - Mr Verloc from home, he felt
+disappointed.
+
+"I would wait for him a little if I were sure he wouldn't be long,"
+he said.
+
+Mrs Verloc volunteered no assurance of any kind.
+
+"The information I need is quite private," he repeated.  "You
+understand what I mean?  I wonder if you could give me a notion
+where he's gone to?"
+
+Mrs Verloc shook her head.
+
+"Can't say."
+
+She turned away to range some boxes on the shelves behind the
+counter.  Chief Inspector Heat looked at her thoughtfully for a
+time.
+
+"I suppose you know who I am?" he said.
+
+Mrs Verloc glanced over her shoulder.  Chief Inspector Heat was
+amazed at her coolness.
+
+"Come!  You know I am in the police," he said sharply.
+
+"I don't trouble my head much about it," Mrs Verloc remarked,
+returning to the ranging of her boxes.
+
+"My name is Heat.  Chief Inspector Heat of the Special Crimes
+section."
+
+Mrs Verloc adjusted nicely in its place a small cardboard box, and
+turning round, faced him again, heavy-eyed, with idle hands hanging
+down.  A silence reigned for a time.
+
+"So your husband went out a quarter of an hour ago!  And he didn't
+say when he would be back?"
+
+"He didn't go out alone," Mrs Verloc let fall negligently.
+
+"A friend?"
+
+Mrs Verloc touched the back of her hair.  It was in perfect order.
+
+"A stranger who called."
+
+"I see.  What sort of man was that stranger?  Would you mind
+telling me?"
+
+Mrs Verloc did not mind.  And when Chief Inspector Heat heard of a
+man dark, thin, with a long face and turned up moustaches, he gave
+signs of perturbation, and exclaimed:
+
+"Dash me if I didn't think so!  He hasn't lost any time."
+
+He was intensely disgusted in the secrecy of his heart at the
+unofficial conduct of his immediate chief.  But he was not
+quixotic.  He lost all desire to await Mr Verloc's return.  What
+they had gone out for he did not know, but he imagined it possible
+that they would return together.  The case is not followed
+properly, it's being tampered with, he thought bitterly.
+
+"I am afraid I haven't time to wait for your husband," he said.
+
+Mrs Verloc received this declaration listlessly.  Her detachment
+had impressed Chief Inspector Heat all along.  At this precise
+moment it whetted his curiosity.  Chief Inspector Heat hung in the
+wind, swayed by his passions like the most private of citizens.
+
+"I think," he said, looking at her steadily, "that you could give
+me a pretty good notion of what's going on if you liked."
+
+Forcing her fine, inert eyes to return his gaze, Mrs Verloc
+murmured:
+
+"Going on!  What IS going on?"
+
+"Why, the affair I came to talk about a little with your husband."
+
+That day Mrs Verloc had glanced at a morning paper as usual.  But
+she had not stirred out of doors.  The newsboys never invaded Brett
+Street.  It was not a street for their business.  And the echo of
+their cries drifting along the populous thoroughfares, expired
+between the dirty brick walls without reaching the threshold of the
+shop.  Her husband had not brought an evening paper home.  At any
+rate she had not seen it.  Mrs Verloc knew nothing whatever of any
+affair.  And she said so, with a genuine note of wonder in her
+quiet voice.
+
+Chief Inspector Heat did not believe for a moment in so much
+ignorance.  Curtly, without amiability, he stated the bare fact.
+
+Mrs Verloc turned away her eyes.
+
+"I call it silly," she pronounced slowly.  She paused.  "We ain't
+downtrodden slaves here."
+
+The Chief Inspector waited watchfully.  Nothing more came.
+
+"And your husband didn't mention anything to you when he came
+home?"
+
+Mrs Verloc simply turned her face from right to left in sign of
+negation.  A languid, baffling silence reigned in the shop.  Chief
+Inspector Heat felt provoked beyond endurance.
+
+"There was another small matter," he began in a detached tone,
+"which I wanted to speak to your husband about.  There came into
+our hands a - a - what we believe is - a stolen overcoat."
+
+Mrs Verloc, with her mind specially aware of thieves that evening,
+touched lightly the bosom of her dress.
+
+"We have lost no overcoat," she said calmly.
+
+"That's funny," continued Private Citizen Heat.  "I see you keep a
+lot of marking ink here - "
+
+He took up a small bottle, and looked at it against the gas-jet in
+the middle of the shop.
+
+"Purple - isn't it?" he remarked, setting it down again.  "As I
+said, it's strange.  Because the overcoat has got a label sewn on
+the inside with your address written in marking ink."
+
+Mrs Verloc leaned over the counter with a low exclamation.
+
+"That's my brother's, then."
+
+"Where's your brother?  Can I see him?" asked the Chief Inspector
+briskly.  Mrs Verloc leaned a little more over the counter.
+
+"No.  He isn't here.  I wrote that label myself."
+
+"Where's your brother now?"
+
+"He's been away living with - a friend - in the country."
+
+"The overcoat comes from the country.  And what's the name of the
+friend?"
+
+"Michaelis," confessed Mrs Verloc in an awed whisper.
+
+The Chief Inspector let out a whistle.  His eyes snapped.
+
+"Just so.  Capital.  And your brother now, what's he like - a
+sturdy, darkish chap - eh?"
+
+"Oh no," exclaimed Mrs Verloc fervently.  "That must be the thief.
+Stevie's slight and fair."
+
+"Good," said the Chief Inspector in an approving tone.  And while
+Mrs Verloc, wavering between alarm and wonder, stared at him, he
+sought for information.  Why have the address sewn like this inside
+the coat?  And he heard that the mangled remains he had inspected
+that morning with extreme repugnance were those of a youth,
+nervous, absent-minded, peculiar, and also that the woman who was
+speaking to him had had the charge of that boy since he was a baby.
+
+"Easily excitable?" he suggested.
+
+"Oh yes.  He is.  But how did he come to lose his coat - "
+
+Chief Inspector Heat suddenly pulled out a pink newspaper he had
+bought less than half-an-hour ago.  He was interested in horses.
+Forced by his calling into an attitude of doubt and suspicion
+towards his fellow-citizens, Chief Inspector Heat relieved the
+instinct of credulity implanted in the human breast by putting
+unbounded faith in the sporting prophets of that particular evening
+publication.  Dropping the extra special on to the counter, he
+plunged his hand again into his pocket, and pulling out the piece
+of cloth fate had presented him with out of a heap of things that
+seemed to have been collected in shambles and rag shops, he offered
+it to Mrs Verloc for inspection.
+
+"I suppose you recognise this?"
+
+She took it mechanically in both her hands.  Her eyes seemed to
+grow bigger as she looked.
+
+"Yes," she whispered, then raised her head, and staggered backward
+a little.
+
+"Whatever for is it torn out like this?"
+
+The Chief Inspector snatched across the counter the cloth out of
+her hands, and she sat heavily on the chair.  He thought:
+identification's perfect.  And in that moment he had a glimpse into
+the whole amazing truth.  Verloc was the "other man."
+
+"Mrs Verloc," he said, "it strikes me that you know more of this
+bomb affair than even you yourself are aware of."
+
+Mrs Verloc sat still, amazed, lost in boundless astonishment.  What
+was the connection?  And she became so rigid all over that she was
+not able to turn her head at the clatter of the bell, which caused
+the private investigator Heat to spin round on his heel.  Mr Verloc
+had shut the door, and for a moment the two men looked at each
+other.
+
+Mr Verloc, without looking at his wife, walked up to the Chief
+Inspector, who was relieved to see him return alone.
+
+"You here!" muttered Mr Verloc heavily.  "Who are you after?"
+
+"No one," said Chief Inspector Heat in a low tone.  "Look here, I
+would like a word or two with you."
+
+Mr Verloc, still pale, had brought an air of resolution with him.
+Still he didn't look at his wife.  He said:
+
+"Come in here, then."  And he led the way into the parlour.
+
+The door was hardly shut when Mrs Verloc, jumping up from the
+chair, ran to it as if to fling it open, but instead of doing so
+fell on her knees, with her ear to the keyhole.  The two men must
+have stopped directly they were through, because she heard plainly
+the Chief Inspector's voice, though she could not see his finger
+pressed against her husband's breast emphatically.
+
+"You are the other man, Verloc.  Two men were seen entering the
+park."
+
+And the voice of Mr Verloc said:
+
+"Well, take me now.  What's to prevent you?  You have the right."
+
+"Oh no!  I know too well who you have been giving yourself away to.
+He'll have to manage this little affair all by himself.  But don't
+you make a mistake, it's I who found you out."
+
+Then she heard only muttering.  Inspector Heat must have been
+showing to Mr Verloc the piece of Stevie's overcoat, because
+Stevie's sister, guardian, and protector heard her husband a little
+louder.
+
+"I never noticed that she had hit upon that dodge."
+
+Again for a time Mrs Verloc heard nothing but murmurs, whose
+mysteriousness was less nightmarish to her brain than the horrible
+suggestions of shaped words.  Then Chief Inspector Heat, on the
+other side of the door, raised his voice.
+
+"You must have been mad."
+
+And Mr Verloc's voice answered, with a sort of gloomy fury:
+
+"I have been mad for a month or more, but I am not mad now.  It's
+all over.  It shall all come out of my head, and hang the
+consequences."
+
+There was a silence, and then Private Citizen Heat murmured:
+
+"What's coming out?"
+
+"Everything," exclaimed the voice of Mr Verloc, and then sank very
+low.
+
+After a while it rose again.
+
+"You have known me for several years now, and you've found me
+useful, too.  You know I was a straight man.  Yes, straight."
+
+This appeal to old acquaintance must have been extremely
+distasteful to the Chief Inspector.
+
+His voice took on a warning note.
+
+"Don't you trust so much to what you have been promised.  If I were
+you I would clear out.  I don't think we will run after you."
+
+Mr Verloc was heard to laugh a little.
+
+"Oh yes; you hope the others will get rid of me for you - don't
+you?  No, no; you don't shake me off now.  I have been a straight
+man to those people too long, and now everything must come out."
+
+"Let it come out, then," the indifferent voice of Chief Inspector
+Heat assented.  "But tell me now how did you get away."
+
+"I was making for Chesterfield Walk," Mrs Verloc heard her
+husband's voice, "when I heard the bang.  I started running then.
+Fog.  I saw no one till I was past the end of George Street.  Don't
+think I met anyone till then."
+
+"So easy as that!" marvelled the voice of Chief Inspector Heat.
+"The bang startled you, eh?"
+
+"Yes; it came too soon," confessed the gloomy, husky voice of Mr
+Verloc.
+
+Mrs Verloc pressed her ear to the keyhole; her lips were blue, her
+hands cold as ice, and her pale face, in which the two eyes seemed
+like two black holes, felt to her as if it were enveloped in
+flames.
+
+On the other side of the door the voices sank very low.  She caught
+words now and then, sometimes in her husband's voice, sometimes in
+the smooth tones of the Chief Inspector.  She heard this last say:
+
+"We believe he stumbled against the root of a tree?"
+
+There was a husky, voluble murmur, which lasted for some time, and
+then the Chief Inspector, as if answering some inquiry, spoke
+emphatically.
+
+"Of course.  Blown to small bits: limbs, gravel, clothing, bones,
+splinters - all mixed up together.  I tell you they had to fetch a
+shovel to gather him up with."
+
+Mrs Verloc sprang up suddenly from her crouching position, and
+stopping her ears, reeled to and fro between the counter and the
+shelves on the wall towards the chair.  Her crazed eyes noted the
+sporting sheet left by the Chief Inspector, and as she knocked
+herself against the counter she snatched it up, fell into the
+chair, tore the optimistic, rosy sheet right across in trying to
+open it, then flung it on the floor.  On the other side of the
+door, Chief Inspector Heat was saying to Mr Verloc, the secret
+agent:
+
+"So your defence will be practically a full confession?"
+
+"It will.  I am going to tell the whole story."
+
+"You won't be believed as much as you fancy you will."
+
+And the Chief Inspector remained thoughtful.  The turn this affair
+was taking meant the disclosure of many things - the laying waste
+of fields of knowledge, which, cultivated by a capable man, had a
+distinct value for the individual and for the society.  It was
+sorry, sorry meddling.  It would leave Michaelis unscathed; it
+would drag to light the Professor's home industry; disorganise the
+whole system of supervision; make no end of a row in the papers,
+which, from that point of view, appeared to him by a sudden
+illumination as invariably written by fools for the reading of
+imbeciles.  Mentally he agreed with the words Mr Verloc let fall at
+last in answer to his last remark.
+
+"Perhaps not.  But it will upset many things.  I have been a
+straight man, and I shall keep straight in this - "
+
+"If they let you," said the Chief Inspector cynically.  "You will
+be preached to, no doubt, before they put you into the dock.  And
+in the end you may yet get let in for a sentence that will surprise
+you.  I wouldn't trust too much the gentleman who's been talking to
+you."
+
+Mr Verloc listened, frowning.
+
+"My advice to you is to clear out while you may.  I have no
+instructions.  There are some of them," continued Chief Inspector
+Heat, laying a peculiar stress on the word "them," "who think you
+are already out of the world."
+
+"Indeed!" Mr Verloc was moved to say.  Though since his return from
+Greenwich he had spent most of his time sitting in the tap-room of
+an obscure little public-house, he could hardly have hoped for such
+favourable news.
+
+"That's the impression about you."  The Chief Inspector nodded at
+him.  "Vanish.  Clear out."
+
+"Where to?" snarled Mr Verloc.  He raised his head, and gazing at
+the closed door of the parlour, muttered feelingly: "I only wish
+you would take me away to-night.  I would go quietly."
+
+"I daresay," assented sardonically the Chief Inspector, following
+the direction of his glance.
+
+The brow of Mr Verloc broke into slight moisture.  He lowered his
+husky voice confidentially before the unmoved Chief Inspector.
+
+"The lad was half-witted, irresponsible.  Any court would have seen
+that at once.  Only fit for the asylum.  And that was the worst
+that would've happened to him if - "
+
+The Chief Inspector, his hand on the door handle, whispered into Mr
+Verloc's face.
+
+"He may've been half-witted, but you must have been crazy.  What
+drove you off your head like this?"
+
+Mr Verloc, thinking of Mr Vladimir, did not hesitate in the choice
+of words.
+
+"A Hyperborean swine," he hissed forcibly.  "A what you might call
+a - a gentleman."
+
+The Chief Inspector, steady-eyed, nodded briefly his comprehension,
+and opened the door.  Mrs Verloc, behind the counter, might have
+heard but did not see his departure, pursued by the aggressive
+clatter of the bell.  She sat at her post of duty behind the
+counter.  She sat rigidly erect in the chair with two dirty pink
+pieces of paper lying spread out at her feet.  The palms of her
+hands were pressed convulsively to her face, with the tips of the
+fingers contracted against the forehead, as though the skin had
+been a mask which she was ready to tear off violently.  The perfect
+immobility of her pose expressed the agitation of rage and despair,
+all the potential violence of tragic passions, better than any
+shallow display of shrieks, with the beating of a distracted head
+against the walls, could have done.  Chief Inspector Heat, crossing
+the shop at his busy, swinging pace, gave her only a cursory
+glance.  And when the cracked bell ceased to tremble on its curved
+ribbon of steel nothing stirred near Mrs Verloc, as if her attitude
+had the locking power of a spell.  Even the butterfly-shaped gas
+flames posed on the ends of the suspended T-bracket burned without
+a quiver.  In that shop of shady wares fitted with deal shelves
+painted a dull brown, which seemed to devour the sheen of the
+light, the gold circlet of the wedding ring on Mrs Verloc's left
+hand glittered exceedingly with the untarnished glory of a piece
+from some splendid treasure of jewels, dropped in a dust-bin.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+
+The Assistant Commissioner, driven rapidly in a hansom from the
+neighbourhood of Soho in the direction of Westminster, got out at
+the very centre of the Empire on which the sun never sets.  Some
+stalwart constables, who did not seem particularly impressed by the
+duty of watching the august spot, saluted him.  Penetrating through
+a portal by no means lofty into the precincts of the House which is
+THE House, PAR EXCELLENCE in the minds of many millions of men, he
+was met at last by the volatile and revolutionary Toodles.
+
+That neat and nice young man concealed his astonishment at the
+early appearance of the Assistant Commissioner, whom he had been
+told to look out for some time about midnight.  His turning up so
+early he concluded to be the sign that things, whatever they were,
+had gone wrong.  With an extremely ready sympathy, which in nice
+youngsters goes often with a joyous temperament, he felt sorry for
+the great Presence he called "The Chief," and also for the
+Assistant Commissioner, whose face appeared to him more ominously
+wooden than ever before, and quite wonderfully long.  "What a
+queer, foreign-looking chap he is," he thought to himself, smiling
+from a distance with friendly buoyancy.  And directly they came
+together he began to talk with the kind intention of burying the
+awkwardness of failure under a heap of words.  It looked as if the
+great assault threatened for that night were going to fizzle out.
+An inferior henchman of "that brute Cheeseman" was up boring
+mercilessly a very thin House with some shamelessly cooked
+statistics.  He, Toodles, hoped he would bore them into a count out
+every minute.  But then he might be only marking time to let that
+guzzling Cheeseman dine at his leisure.  Anyway, the Chief could
+not be persuaded to go home.
+
+"He will see you at once, I think.  He's sitting all alone in his
+room thinking of all the fishes of the sea," concluded Toodles
+airily.  "Come along."
+
+Notwithstanding the kindness of his disposition, the young private
+secretary (unpaid) was accessible to the common failings of
+humanity.  He did not wish to harrow the feelings of the Assistant
+Commissioner, who looked to him uncommonly like a man who has made
+a mess of his job.  But his curiosity was too strong to be
+restrained by mere compassion.  He could not help, as they went
+along, to throw over his shoulder lightly:
+
+"And your sprat?"
+
+"Got him," answered the Assistant Commissioner with a concision
+which did not mean to be repellent in the least.
+
+"Good.  You've no idea how these great men dislike to be
+disappointed in small things."
+
+After this profound observation the experienced Toodles seemed to
+reflect.  At any rate he said nothing for quite two seconds.  Then:
+
+"I'm glad.  But - I say - is it really such a very small thing as
+you make it out?"
+
+"Do you know what may be done with a sprat?" the Assistant
+Commissioner asked in his turn.
+
+"He's sometimes put into a sardine box," chuckled Toodles, whose
+erudition on the subject of the fishing industry was fresh and, in
+comparison with his ignorance of all other industrial matters,
+immense.  "There are sardine canneries on the Spanish coast which -
+"
+
+The Assistant Commissioner interrupted the apprentice statesman.
+
+"Yes.  Yes.  But a sprat is also thrown away sometimes in order to
+catch a whale."
+
+"A whale.  Phew!" exclaimed Toodles, with bated breath.  "You're
+after a whale, then?"
+
+"Not exactly.  What I am after is more like a dog-fish.  You don't
+know perhaps what a dog-fish is like."
+
+"Yes; I do.  We're buried in special books up to our necks - whole
+shelves full of them - with plates. . . . It's a noxious, rascally-
+looking, altogether detestable beast, with a sort of smooth face
+and moustaches."
+
+"Described to a T," commended the Assistant Commissioner.  "Only
+mine is clean-shaven altogether.  You've seen him.  It's a witty
+fish."
+
+"I have seen him!" said Toodles incredulously.  "I can't conceive
+where I could have seen him."
+
+"At the Explorers, I should say," dropped the Assistant
+Commissioner calmly.  At the name of that extremely exclusive club
+Toodles looked scared, and stopped short.
+
+"Nonsense," he protested, but in an awe-struck tone.  "What do you
+mean?  A member?"
+
+"Honorary," muttered the Assistant Commissioner through his teeth.
+
+"Heavens!"
+
+Toodles looked so thunderstruck that the Assistant Commissioner
+smiled faintly.
+
+"That's between ourselves strictly," he said.
+
+"That's the beastliest thing I've ever heard in my life," declared
+Toodles feebly, as if astonishment had robbed him of all his
+buoyant strength in a second.
+
+The Assistant Commissioner gave him an unsmiling glance.  Till they
+came to the door of the great man's room, Toodles preserved a
+scandalised and solemn silence, as though he were offended with the
+Assistant Commissioner for exposing such an unsavoury and
+disturbing fact.  It revolutionised his idea of the Explorers'
+Club's extreme selectness, of its social purity.  Toodles was
+revolutionary only in politics; his social beliefs and personal
+feelings he wished to preserve unchanged through all the years
+allotted to him on this earth which, upon the whole, he believed to
+be a nice place to live on.
+
+He stood aside.
+
+"Go in without knocking," he said.
+
+Shades of green silk fitted low over all the lights imparted to the
+room something of a forest's deep gloom.  The haughty eyes were
+physically the great man's weak point.  This point was wrapped up
+in secrecy.  When an opportunity offered, he rested them
+conscientiously.
+
+The Assistant Commissioner entering saw at first only a big pale
+hand supporting a big head, and concealing the upper part of a big
+pale face.  An open despatch-box stood on the writing-table near a
+few oblong sheets of paper and a scattered handful of quill pens.
+There was absolutely nothing else on the large flat surface except
+a little bronze statuette draped in a toga, mysteriously watchful
+in its shadowy immobility.  The Assistant Commissioner, invited to
+take a chair, sat down.  In the dim light, the salient points of
+his personality, the long face, the black hair, his lankness, made
+him look more foreign than ever.
+
+The great man manifested no surprise, no eagerness, no sentiment
+whatever.  The attitude in which he rested his menaced eyes was
+profoundly meditative.  He did not alter it the least bit.  But his
+tone was not dreamy.
+
+"Well!  What is it that you've found out already?  You came upon
+something unexpected on the first step."
+
+"Not exactly unexpected, Sir Ethelred.  What I mainly came upon was
+a psychological state."
+
+The Great Presence made a slight movement.  "You must be lucid,
+please."
+
+"Yes, Sir Ethelred.  You know no doubt that most criminals at some
+time or other feel an irresistible need of confessing - of making a
+clean breast of it to somebody - to anybody.  And they do it often
+to the police.  In that Verloc whom Heat wished so much to screen
+I've found a man in that particular psychological state.  The man,
+figuratively speaking, flung himself on my breast.  It was enough
+on my part to whisper to him who I was and to add `I know that you
+are at the bottom of this affair.'  It must have seemed miraculous
+to him that we should know already, but he took it all in the
+stride.  The wonderfulness of it never checked him for a moment.
+There remained for me only to put to him the two questions: Who put
+you up to it? and Who was the man who did it?  He answered the
+first with remarkable emphasis.  As to the second question, I
+gather that the fellow with the bomb was his brother-in-law - quite
+a lad - a weak-minded creature. . . . It is rather a curious affair
+- too long perhaps to state fully just now."
+
+"What then have you learned?" asked the great man.
+
+"First, I've learned that the ex-convict Michaelis had nothing to
+do with it, though indeed the lad had been living with him
+temporarily in the country up to eight o'clock this morning.  It is
+more than likely that Michaelis knows nothing of it to this
+moment."
+
+"You are positive as to that?" asked the great man.
+
+"Quite certain, Sir Ethelred.  This fellow Verloc went there this
+morning, and took away the lad on the pretence of going out for a
+walk in the lanes.  As it was not the first time that he did this,
+Michaelis could not have the slightest suspicion of anything
+unusual.  For the rest, Sir Ethelred, the indignation of this man
+Verloc had left nothing in doubt - nothing whatever.  He had been
+driven out of his mind almost by an extraordinary performance,
+which for you or me it would be difficult to take as seriously
+meant, but which produced a great impression obviously on him."
+
+The Assistant Commissioner then imparted briefly to the great man,
+who sat still, resting his eyes under the screen of his hand, Mr
+Verloc's appreciation of Mr Vladimir's proceedings and character.
+The Assistant Commissioner did not seem to refuse it a certain
+amount of competency.  But the great personage remarked:
+
+"All this seems very fantastic."
+
+"Doesn't it?  One would think a ferocious joke.  But our man took
+it seriously, it appears.  He felt himself threatened.  In the
+time, you know, he was in direct communication with old Stott-
+Wartenheim himself, and had come to regard his services as
+indispensable.  It was an extremely rude awakening.  I imagine that
+he lost his head.  He became angry and frightened.  Upon my word,
+my impression is that he thought these Embassy people quite capable
+not only to throw him out but, to give him away too in some manner
+or other - "
+
+"How long were you with him," interrupted the Presence from behind
+his big hand.
+
+"Some forty minutes Sir Ethelred, in a house of bad repute called
+Continental Hotel, closeted in a room which by-the-by I took for
+the night.  I found him under the influence of that reaction which
+follows the effort of crime.  The man cannot be defined as a
+hardened criminal.  It is obvious that he did not plan the death of
+that wretched lad - his brother-in-law.  That was a shock to him -
+I could see that.  Perhaps he is a man of strong sensibilities.
+Perhaps he was even fond of the lad - who knows?  He might have
+hoped that the fellow would get clear away; in which case it would
+have been almost impossible to bring this thing home to anyone.  At
+any rate he risked consciously nothing more but arrest for him."
+
+The Assistant Commissioner paused in his speculations to reflect
+for a moment.
+
+"Though how, in that last case, he could hope to have his own share
+in the business concealed is more than I can tell," he continued,
+in his ignorance of poor Stevie's devotion to Mr Verloc (who was
+GOOD), and of his truly peculiar dumbness, which in the old affair
+of fireworks on the stairs had for many years resisted entreaties,
+coaxing, anger, and other means of investigation used by his
+beloved sister.  For Stevie was loyal. . . .  "No, I can't imagine.
+It's possible that he never thought of that at all.  It sounds an
+extravagant way of putting it, Sir Ethelred, but his state of
+dismay suggested to me an impulsive man who, after committing
+suicide with the notion that it would end all his troubles, had
+discovered that it did nothing of the kind."
+
+The Assistant Commissioner gave this definition in an apologetic
+voice.  But in truth there is a sort of lucidity proper to
+extravagant language, and the great man was not offended.  A slight
+jerky movement of the big body half lost in the gloom of the green
+silk shades, of the big head leaning on the big hand, accompanied
+an intermittent stifled but powerful sound.  The great man had
+laughed.
+
+"What have you done with him?"
+
+The Assistant Commissioner answered very readily:
+
+"As he seemed very anxious to get back to his wife in the shop I
+let him go, Sir Ethelred."
+
+"You did?  But the fellow will disappear."
+
+"Pardon me.  I don't think so.  Where could he go to?  Moreover,
+you must remember that he has got to think of the danger from his
+comrades too.  He's there at his post.  How could he explain
+leaving it?  But even if there were no obstacles to his freedom of
+action he would do nothing.  At present he hasn't enough moral
+energy to take a resolution of any sort.  Permit me also to point
+out that if I had detained him we would have been committed to a
+course of action on which I wished to know your precise intentions
+first."
+
+The great personage rose heavily, an imposing shadowy form in the
+greenish gloom of the room.
+
+"I'll see the Attorney-General to-night, and will send for you to-
+morrow morning.  Is there anything more you'd wish to tell me now?"
+
+The Assistant Commissioner had stood up also, slender and flexible.
+
+"I think not, Sir Ethelred, unless I were to enter into details
+which - "
+
+"No.  No details, please."
+
+The great shadowy form seemed to shrink away as if in physical
+dread of details; then came forward, expanded, enormous, and
+weighty, offering a large hand.  "And you say that this man has got
+a wife?"
+
+"Yes, Sir Ethelred," said the Assistant Commissioner, pressing
+deferentially the extended hand.  "A genuine wife and a genuinely,
+respectably, marital relation.  He told me that after his interview
+at the Embassy he would have thrown everything up, would have tried
+to sell his shop, and leave the country, only he felt certain that
+his wife would not even hear of going abroad.  Nothing could be
+more characteristic of the respectable bond than that," went on,
+with a touch of grimness, the Assistant Commissioner, whose own
+wife too had refused to hear of going abroad.  "Yes, a genuine
+wife.  And the victim was a genuine brother-in-law.  From a certain
+point of view we are here in the presence of a domestic drama."
+
+The Assistant Commissioner laughed a little; but the great man's
+thoughts seemed to have wandered far away, perhaps to the questions
+of his country's domestic policy, the battle-ground of his
+crusading valour against the paynim Cheeseman.  The Assistant
+Commissioner withdrew quietly, unnoticed, as if already forgotten.
+
+He had his own crusading instincts.  This affair, which, in one way
+or another, disgusted Chief Inspector Heat, seemed to him a
+providentially given starting-point for a crusade.  He had it much
+at heart to begin.  He walked slowly home, meditating that
+enterprise on the way, and thinking over Mr Verloc's psychology in
+a composite mood of repugnance and satisfaction.  He walked all the
+way home.  Finding the drawing-room dark, he went upstairs, and
+spent some time between the bedroom and the dressing-room, changing
+his clothes, going to and fro with the air of a thoughtful
+somnambulist.  But he shook it off before going out again to join
+his wife at the house of the great lady patroness of Michaelis.
+
+He knew he would be welcomed there.  On entering the smaller of the
+two drawing-rooms he saw his wife in a small group near the piano.
+A youngish composer in pass of becoming famous was discoursing from
+a music stool to two thick men whose backs looked old, and three
+slender women whose backs looked young.  Behind the screen the
+great lady had only two persons with her: a man and a woman, who
+sat side by side on arm-chairs at the foot of her couch.  She
+extended her hand to the Assistant Commissioner.
+
+"I never hoped to see you here to-night.  Annie told me - "
+
+"Yes.  I had no idea myself that my work would be over so soon."
+
+The Assistant Commissioner added in a low tone.  "I am glad to tell
+you that Michaelis is altogether clear of this - "
+
+The patroness of the ex-convict received this assurance
+indignantly.
+
+"Why?  Were your people stupid enough to connect him with - "
+
+"Not stupid," interrupted the Assistant Commissioner, contradicting
+deferentially.  "Clever enough - quite clever enough for that."
+
+A silence fell.  The man at the foot of the couch had stopped
+speaking to the lady, and looked on with a faint smile.
+
+"I don't know whether you ever met before," said the great lady.
+
+Mr Vladimir and the Assistant Commissioner, introduced,
+acknowledged each other's existence with punctilious and guarded
+courtesy.
+
+"He's been frightening me," declared suddenly the lady who sat by
+the side of Mr Vladimir, with an inclination of the head towards
+that gentleman.  The Assistant Commissioner knew the lady.
+
+"You do not look frightened," he pronounced, after surveying her
+conscientiously with his tired and equable gaze.  He was thinking
+meantime to himself that in this house one met everybody sooner or
+later.  Mr Vladimir's rosy countenance was wreathed in smiles,
+because he was witty, but his eyes remained serious, like the eyes
+of convinced man.
+
+"Well, he tried to at least," amended the lady.
+
+"Force of habit perhaps," said the Assistant Commissioner, moved by
+an irresistible inspiration.
+
+"He has been threatening society with all sorts of horrors,"
+continued the lady, whose enunciation was caressing and slow,
+"apropos of this explosion in Greenwich Park.  It appears we all
+ought to quake in our shoes at what's coming if those people are
+not suppressed all over the world.  I had no idea this was such a
+grave affair."
+
+Mr Vladimir, affecting not to listen, leaned towards the couch,
+talking amiably in subdued tones, but he heard the Assistant
+Commissioner say:
+
+"I've no doubt that Mr Vladimir has a very precise notion of the
+true importance of this affair."
+
+Mr Vladimir asked himself what that confounded and intrusive
+policeman was driving at.  Descended from generations victimised by
+the instruments of an arbitrary power, he was racially, nationally,
+and individually afraid of the police.  It was an inherited
+weakness, altogether independent of his judgment, of his reason, of
+his experience.  He was born to it.  But that sentiment, which
+resembled the irrational horror some people have of cats, did not
+stand in the way of his immense contempt for the English police.
+He finished the sentence addressed to the great lady, and turned
+slightly in his chair.
+
+"You mean that we have a great experience of these people.  Yes;
+indeed, we suffer greatly from their activity, while you" - Mr
+Vladimir hesitated for a moment, in smiling perplexity - "while you
+suffer their presence gladly in your midst," he finished,
+displaying a dimple on each clean-shaven cheek.  Then he added more
+gravely: "I may even say - because you do."
+
+When Mr Vladimir ceased speaking the Assistant Commissioner lowered
+his glance, and the conversation dropped.  Almost immediately
+afterwards Mr Vladimir took leave.
+
+Directly his back was turned on the couch the Assistant
+Commissioner rose too.
+
+"I thought you were going to stay and take Annie home," said the
+lady patroness of Michaelis.
+
+"I find that I've yet a little work to do to-night."
+
+"In connection - ?"
+
+"Well, yes - in a way."
+
+"Tell me, what is it really - this horror?"
+
+"It's difficult to say what it is, but it may yet be a CAUSE
+CELEBRE," said the Assistant Commissioner.
+
+He left the drawing-room hurriedly, and found Mr Vladimir still in
+the hall, wrapping up his throat carefully in a large silk
+handkerchief.  Behind him a footman waited, holding his overcoat.
+Another stood ready to open the door.  The Assistant Commissioner
+was duly helped into his coat, and let out at once.  After
+descending the front steps he stopped, as if to consider the way he
+should take.  On seeing this through the door held open, Mr
+Vladimir lingered in the hall to get out a cigar and asked for a
+light.  It was furnished to him by an elderly man out of livery
+with an air of calm solicitude.  But the match went out; the
+footman then closed the door, and Mr Vladimir lighted his large
+Havana with leisurely care.
+
+When at last he got out of the house, he saw with disgust the
+"confounded policeman" still standing on the pavement.
+
+"Can he be waiting for me," thought Mr Vladimir, looking up and
+down for some signs of a hansom.  He saw none.  A couple of
+carriages waited by the curbstone, their lamps blazing steadily,
+the horses standing perfectly still, as if carved in stone, the
+coachmen sitting motionless under the big fur capes, without as
+much as a quiver stirring the white thongs of their big whips.  Mr
+Vladimir walked on, and the "confounded policeman" fell into step
+at his elbow.  He said nothing.  At the end of the fourth stride Mr
+Vladimir felt infuriated and uneasy.  This could not last.
+
+"Rotten weather," he growled savagely.
+
+"Mild," said the Assistant Commissioner without passion.  He
+remained silent for a little while.  "We've got hold of a man
+called Verloc," he announced casually.
+
+Mr Vladimir did not stumble, did not stagger back, did not change
+his stride.  But he could not prevent himself from exclaiming:
+"What?"  The Assistant Commissioner did not repeat his statement.
+"You know him," he went on in the same tone.
+
+Mr Vladimir stopped, and became guttural.  "What makes you say
+that?"
+
+"I don't.  It's Verloc who says that."
+
+"A lying dog of some sort," said Mr Vladimir in somewhat Oriental
+phraseology.  But in his heart he was almost awed by the miraculous
+cleverness of the English police.  The change of his opinion on the
+subject was so violent that it made him for a moment feel slightly
+sick.  He threw away his cigar, and moved on.
+
+"What pleased me most in this affair," the Assistant went on,
+talking slowly, "is that it makes such an excellent starting-point
+for a piece of work which I've felt must be taken in hand - that
+is, the clearing out of this country of all the foreign political
+spies, police, and that sort of - of - dogs.  In my opinion they
+are a ghastly nuisance; also an element of danger.  But we can't
+very well seek them out individually.  The only way is to make
+their employment unpleasant to their employers.  The thing's
+becoming indecent.  And dangerous too, for us, here."
+
+Mr Vladimir stopped again for a moment.
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"The prosecution of this Verloc will demonstrate to the public both
+the danger and the indecency."
+
+"Nobody will believe what a man of that sort says," said Mr
+Vladimir contemptuously.
+
+"The wealth and precision of detail will carry conviction to the
+great mass of the public," advanced the Assistant Commissioner
+gently.
+
+"So that is seriously what you mean to do."
+
+"We've got the man; we have no choice."
+
+"You will be only feeding up the lying spirit of these
+revolutionary scoundrels," Mr Vladimir protested.  "What do you
+want to make a scandal for? - from morality - or what?"
+
+Mr Vladimir's anxiety was obvious.  The Assistant Commissioner
+having ascertained in this way that there must be some truth in the
+summary statements of Mr Verloc, said indifferently:
+
+"There's a practical side too.  We have really enough to do to look
+after the genuine article.  You can't say we are not effective.
+But we don't intend to let ourselves be bothered by shams under any
+pretext whatever."
+
+Mr Vladimir's tone became lofty.
+
+"For my part, I can't share your view.  It is selfish.  My
+sentiments for my own country cannot be doubted; but I've always
+felt that we ought to be good Europeans besides - I mean
+governments and men."
+
+"Yes," said the Assistant Commissioner simply.  "Only you look at
+Europe from its other end.  But," he went on in a good-natured
+tone, "the foreign governments cannot complain of the inefficiency
+of our police.  Look at this outrage; a case specially difficult to
+trace inasmuch as it was a sham.  In less than twelve hours we have
+established the identity of a man literally blown to shreds, have
+found the organiser of the attempt, and have had a glimpse of the
+inciter behind him.  And we could have gone further; only we
+stopped at the limits of our territory."
+
+"So this instructive crime was planned abroad," Mr Vladimir said
+quickly.  "You admit it was planned abroad?"
+
+"Theoretically.  Theoretically only, on foreign territory; abroad
+only by a fiction," said the Assistant Commissioner, alluding to
+the character of Embassies, which are supposed to be part and
+parcel of the country to which they belong.  "But that's a detail.
+I talked to you of this business because its your government that
+grumbles most at our police.  You see that we are not so bad.  I
+wanted particularly to tell you of our success."
+
+"I'm sure I'm very grateful," muttered Mr Vladimir through his
+teeth.
+
+"We can put our finger on every anarchist here," went on the
+Assistant Commissioner, as though he were quoting Chief Inspector
+Heat.  "All that's wanted now is to do away with the agent
+provocateur to make everything safe."
+
+Mr Vladimir held up his hand to a passing hansom.
+
+"You're not going in here," remarked the Assistant Commissioner,
+looking at a building of noble proportions and hospitable aspect,
+with the light of a great hall falling through its glass doors on a
+broad flight of steps.
+
+But Mr Vladimir, sitting, stony-eyed, inside the hansom, drove off
+without a word.
+
+The Assistant Commissioner himself did not turn into the noble
+building.  It was the Explorers' Club.  The thought passed through
+his mind that Mr Vladimir, honorary member, would not be seen very
+often there in the future.  He looked at his watch.  It was only
+half-past ten.  He had had a very full evening.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+
+After Chief Inspector Heat had left him Mr Verloc moved about the
+parlour.
+
+From time to time he eyed his wife through the open door.  "She
+knows all about it now," he thought to himself with commiseration
+for her sorrow and with some satisfaction as regarded himself.  Mr
+Verloc's soul, if lacking greatness perhaps, was capable of tender
+sentiments.  The prospect of having to break the news to her had
+put him into a fever.  Chief Inspector Heat had relieved him of the
+task.  That was good as far as it went.  It remained for him now to
+face her grief.
+
+Mr Verloc had never expected to have to face it on account of
+death, whose catastrophic character cannot be argued away by
+sophisticated reasoning or persuasive eloquence.  Mr Verloc never
+meant Stevie to perish with such abrupt violence.  He did not mean
+him to perish at all.  Stevie dead was a much greater nuisance than
+ever he had been when alive.  Mr Verloc had augured a favourable
+issue to his enterprise, basing himself not on Stevie's
+intelligence, which sometimes plays queer tricks with a man, but on
+the blind docility and on the blind devotion of the boy.  Though
+not much of a psychologist, Mr Verloc had gauged the depth of
+Stevie's fanaticism.  He dared cherish the hope of Stevie walking
+away from the walls of the Observatory as he had been instructed to
+do, taking the way shown to him several times previously, and
+rejoining his brother-in-law, the wise and good Mr Verloc, outside
+the precincts of the park.  Fifteen minutes ought to have been
+enough for the veriest fool to deposit the engine and walk away.
+And the Professor had guaranteed more than fifteen minutes.  But
+Stevie had stumbled within five minutes of being left to himself.
+And Mr Verloc was shaken morally to pieces.  He had foreseen
+everything but that.  He had foreseen Stevie distracted and lost -
+sought for - found in some police station or provincial workhouse
+in the end.  He had foreseen Stevie arrested, and was not afraid,
+because Mr Verloc had a great opinion of Stevie's loyalty, which
+had been carefully indoctrinated with the necessity of silence in
+the course of many walks.  Like a peripatetic philosopher, Mr
+Verloc, strolling along the streets of London, had modified
+Stevie's view of the police by conversations full of subtle
+reasonings.  Never had a sage a more attentive and admiring
+disciple.  The submission and worship were so apparent that Mr
+Verloc had come to feel something like a liking for the boy.  In
+any case, he had not foreseen the swift bringing home of his
+connection.  That his wife should hit upon the precaution of sewing
+the boy's address inside his overcoat was the last thing Mr Verloc
+would have thought of.  One can't think of everything.  That was
+what she meant when she said that he need not worry if he lost
+Stevie during their walks.  She had assured him that the boy would
+turn up all right.  Well, he had turned up with a vengeance!
+
+"Well, well," muttered Mr Verloc in his wonder.  What did she mean
+by it?  Spare him the trouble of keeping an anxious eye on Stevie?
+Most likely she had meant well.  Only she ought to have told him of
+the precaution she had taken.
+
+Mr Verloc walked behind the counter of the shop.  His intention was
+not to overwhelm his wife with bitter reproaches.  Mr Verloc felt
+no bitterness.  The unexpected march of events had converted him to
+the doctrine of fatalism.  Nothing could be helped now.  He said:
+
+"I didn't mean any harm to come to the boy."
+
+Mrs Verloc shuddered at the sound of her husband's voice.  She did
+not uncover her face.  The trusted secret agent of the late Baron
+Stott-Wartenheim looked at her for a time with a heavy, persistent,
+undiscerning glance.  The torn evening paper was lying at her feet.
+It could not have told her much.  Mr Verloc felt the need of
+talking to his wife.
+
+"It's that damned Heat - eh?" he said.  "He upset you.  He's a
+brute, blurting it out like this to a woman.  I made myself ill
+thinking how to break it to you.  I sat for hours in the little
+parlour of Cheshire Cheese thinking over the best way.  You
+understand I never meant any harm to come to that boy."
+
+Mr Verloc, the Secret Agent, was speaking the truth.  It was his
+marital affection that had received the greatest shock from the
+premature explosion.  He added:
+
+"I didn't feel particularly gay sitting there and thinking of you."
+
+He observed another slight shudder of his wife, which affected his
+sensibility.  As she persisted in hiding her face in her hands, he
+thought he had better leave her alone for a while.  On this
+delicate impulse Mr Verloc withdrew into the parlour again, where
+the gas jet purred like a contented cat.  Mrs Verloc's wifely
+forethought had left the cold beef on the table with carving knife
+and fork and half a loaf of bread for Mr Verloc's supper.  He
+noticed all these things now for the first time, and cutting
+himself a piece of bread and meat, began to eat.
+
+His appetite did not proceed from callousness.  Mr Verloc had not
+eaten any breakfast that day.  He had left his home fasting.  Not
+being an energetic man, he found his resolution in nervous
+excitement, which seemed to hold him mainly by the throat.  He
+could not have swallowed anything solid.  Michaelis' cottage was as
+destitute of provisions as the cell of a prisoner.  The ticket-of-
+leave apostle lived on a little milk and crusts of stale bread.
+Moreover, when Mr Verloc arrived he had already gone upstairs after
+his frugal meal.  Absorbed in the toil and delight of literary
+composition, he had not even answered Mr Verloc's shout up the
+little staircase.
+
+"I am taking this young fellow home for a day or two."
+
+And, in truth, Mr Verloc did not wait for an answer, but had
+marched out of the cottage at once, followed by the obedient
+Stevie.
+
+Now that all action was over and his fate taken out of his hands
+with unexpected swiftness, Mr Verloc felt terribly empty
+physically.  He carved the meat, cut the bread, and devoured his
+supper standing by the table, and now and then casting a glance
+towards his wife.  Her prolonged immobility disturbed the comfort
+of his refection.  He walked again into the shop, and came up very
+close to her.  This sorrow with a veiled face made Mr Verloc
+uneasy.  He expected, of course, his wife to be very much upset,
+but he wanted her to pull herself together.  He needed all her
+assistance and all her loyalty in these new conjunctures his
+fatalism had already accepted.
+
+"Can't be helped," he said in a tone of gloomy sympathy.  "Come,
+Winnie, we've got to think of to-morrow.  You'll want all your wits
+about you after I am taken away."
+
+He paused.  Mrs Verloc's breast heaved convulsively.  This was not
+reassuring to Mr Verloc, in whose view the newly created situation
+required from the two people most concerned in it calmness,
+decision, and other qualities incompatible with the mental disorder
+of passionate sorrow.  Mr Verloc was a humane man; he had come home
+prepared to allow every latitude to his wife's affection for her
+brother.
+
+Only he did not understand either the nature or the whole extent of
+that sentiment.  And in this he was excusable, since it was
+impossible for him to understand it without ceasing to be himself.
+He was startled and disappointed, and his speech conveyed it by a
+certain roughness of tone.
+
+"You might look at a fellow," he observed after waiting a while.
+
+As if forced through the hands covering Mrs Verloc's face the
+answer came, deadened, almost pitiful.
+
+"I don't want to look at you as long as I live."
+
+"Eh?  What!"  Mr Verloc was merely startled by the superficial and
+literal meaning of this declaration.  It was obviously
+unreasonable, the mere cry of exaggerated grief.  He threw over it
+the mantle of his marital indulgence.  The mind of Mr Verloc lacked
+profundity.  Under the mistaken impression that the value of
+individuals consists in what they are in themselves, he could not
+possibly comprehend the value of Stevie in the eyes of Mrs Verloc.
+She was taking it confoundedly hard, he thought to himself.  It was
+all the fault of that damned Heat.  What did he want to upset the
+woman for?  But she mustn't be allowed, for her own good, to carry
+on so till she got quite beside herself.
+
+"Look here!  You can't sit like this in the shop," he said with
+affected severity, in which there was some real annoyance; for
+urgent practical matters must be talked over if they had to sit up
+all night.  "Somebody might come in at any minute," he added, and
+waited again.  No effect was produced, and the idea of the finality
+of death occurred to Mr Verloc during the pause.  He changed his
+tone.  "Come.  This won't bring him back," he said gently, feeling
+ready to take her in his arms and press her to his breast, where
+impatience and compassion dwelt side by side.  But except for a
+short shudder Mrs Verloc remained apparently unaffected by the
+force of that terrible truism.  It was Mr Verloc himself who was
+moved.  He was moved in his simplicity to urge moderation by
+asserting the claims of his own personality.
+
+"Do be reasonable, Winnie.  What would it have been if you had lost
+me!"
+
+He had vaguely expected to hear her cry out.  But she did not
+budge.  She leaned back a little, quieted down to a complete
+unreadable stillness.  Mr Verloc's heart began to beat faster with
+exasperation and something resembling alarm.  He laid his hand on
+her shoulder, saying:
+
+"Don't be a fool, Winnie."
+
+She gave no sign.  It was impossible to talk to any purpose with a
+woman whose face one cannot see.  Mr Verloc caught hold of his
+wife's wrists.  But her hands seemed glued fast.  She swayed
+forward bodily to his tug, and nearly went off the chair.  Startled
+to feel her so helplessly limp, he was trying to put her back on
+the chair when she stiffened suddenly all over, tore herself out of
+his hands, ran out of the shop, across the parlour, and into the
+kitchen.  This was very swift.  He had just a glimpse of her face
+and that much of her eyes that he knew she had not looked at him.
+
+It all had the appearance of a struggle for the possession of a
+chair, because Mr Verloc instantly took his wife's place in it.  Mr
+Verloc did not cover his face with his hands, but a sombre
+thoughtfulness veiled his features.  A term of imprisonment could
+not be avoided.  He did not wish now to avoid it.  A prison was a
+place as safe from certain unlawful vengeances as the grave, with
+this advantage, that in a prison there is room for hope.  What he
+saw before him was a term of imprisonment, an early release and
+then life abroad somewhere, such as he had contemplated already, in
+case of failure.  Well, it was a failure, if not exactly the sort
+of failure he had feared.  It had been so near success that he
+could have positively terrified Mr Vladimir out of his ferocious
+scoffing with this proof of occult efficiency.  So at least it
+seemed now to Mr Verloc.  His prestige with the Embassy would have
+been immense if - if his wife had not had the unlucky notion of
+sewing on the address inside Stevie's overcoat.  Mr Verloc, who was
+no fool, had soon perceived the extraordinary character of the
+influence he had over Stevie, though he did not understand exactly
+its origin - the doctrine of his supreme wisdom and goodness
+inculcated by two anxious women.  In all the eventualities he had
+foreseen Mr Verloc had calculated with correct insight on Stevie's
+instinctive loyalty and blind discretion.  The eventuality he had
+not foreseen had appalled him as a humane man and a fond husband.
+From every other point of view it was rather advantageous.  Nothing
+can equal the everlasting discretion of death.  Mr Verloc, sitting
+perplexed and frightened in the small parlour of the Cheshire
+Cheese, could not help acknowledging that to himself, because his
+sensibility did not stand in the way of his judgment.  Stevie's
+violent disintegration, however disturbing to think about, only
+assured the success; for, of course, the knocking down of a wall
+was not the aim of Mr Vladimir's menaces, but the production of a
+moral effect.  With much trouble and distress on Mr Verloc's part
+the effect might be said to have been produced.  When, however,
+most unexpectedly, it came home to roost in Brett Street, Mr
+Verloc, who had been struggling like a man in a nightmare for the
+preservation of his position, accepted the blow in the spirit of a
+convinced fatalist.  The position was gone through no one's fault
+really.  A small, tiny fact had done it.  It was like slipping on a
+bit of orange peel in the dark and breaking your leg.
+
+Mr Verloc drew a weary breath.  He nourished no resentment against
+his wife.  He thought: She will have to look after the shop while
+they keep me locked up.  And thinking also how cruelly she would
+miss Stevie at first, he felt greatly concerned about her health
+and spirits.  How would she stand her solitude - absolutely alone
+in that house?  It would not do for her to break down while he was
+locked up?  What would become of the shop then?  The shop was an
+asset.  Though Mr Verloc's fatalism accepted his undoing as a
+secret agent, he had no mind to be utterly ruined, mostly, it must
+be owned, from regard for his wife.
+
+Silent, and out of his line of sight in the kitchen, she frightened
+him.  If only she had had her mother with her.  But that silly old
+woman - An angry dismay possessed Mr Verloc.  He must talk with his
+wife.  He could tell her certainly that a man does get desperate
+under certain circumstances.  But he did not go incontinently to
+impart to her that information.  First of all, it was clear to him
+that this evening was no time for business.  He got up to close the
+street door and put the gas out in the shop.
+
+Having thus assured a solitude around his hearthstone Mr Verloc
+walked into the parlour, and glanced down into the kitchen.  Mrs
+Verloc was sitting in the place where poor Stevie usually
+established himself of an evening with paper and pencil for the
+pastime of drawing these coruscations of innumerable circles
+suggesting chaos and eternity.  Her arms were folded on the table,
+and her head was lying on her arms.  Mr Verloc contemplated her
+back and the arrangement of her hair for a time, then walked away
+from the kitchen door.  Mrs Verloc's philosophical, almost
+disdainful incuriosity, the foundation of their accord in domestic
+life made it extremely difficult to get into contact with her, now
+this tragic necessity had arisen.  Mr Verloc felt this difficulty
+acutely.  He turned around the table in the parlour with his usual
+air of a large animal in a cage.
+
+Curiosity being one of the forms of self-revelation, - a
+systematically incurious person remains always partly mysterious.
+Every time he passed near the door Mr Verloc glanced at his wife
+uneasily.  It was not that he was afraid of her.  Mr Verloc
+imagined himself loved by that woman.  But she had not accustomed
+him to make confidences.  And the confidence he had to make was of
+a profound psychological order.  How with his want of practice
+could he tell her what he himself felt but vaguely: that there are
+conspiracies of fatal destiny, that a notion grows in a mind
+sometimes till it acquires an outward existence, an independent
+power of its own, and even a suggestive voice?  He could not inform
+her that a man may be haunted by a fat, witty, clean-shaved face
+till the wildest expedient to get rid of it appears a child of
+wisdom.
+
+On this mental reference to a First Secretary of a great Embassy,
+Mr Verloc stopped in the doorway, and looking down into the kitchen
+with an angry face and clenched fists, addressed his wife.
+
+"You don't know what a brute I had to deal with."
+
+He started off to make another perambulation of the table; then
+when he had come to the door again he stopped, glaring in from the
+height of two steps.
+
+"A silly, jeering, dangerous brute, with no more sense than -
+After all these years!  A man like me!  And I have been playing my
+head at that game.  You didn't know.  Quite right, too.  What was
+the good of telling you that I stood the risk of having a knife
+stuck into me any time these seven years we've been married?  I am
+not a chap to worry a woman that's fond of me.  You had no business
+to know."  Mr Verloc took another turn round the parlour, fuming.
+
+"A venomous beast," he began again from the doorway.  "Drive me out
+into a ditch to starve for a joke.  I could see he thought it was a
+damned good joke.  A man like me!  Look here!  Some of the highest
+in the world got to thank me for walking on their two legs to this
+day.  That's the man you've got married to, my girl!"
+
+He perceived that his wife had sat up.  Mrs Verloc's arms remained
+lying stretched on the table.  Mr Verloc watched at her back as if
+he could read there the effect of his words.
+
+"There isn't a murdering plot for the last eleven years that I
+hadn't my finger in at the risk of my life.  There's scores of
+these revolutionists I've sent off, with their bombs in their
+blamed pockets, to get themselves caught on the frontier.  The old
+Baron knew what I was worth to his country.  And here suddenly a
+swine comes along - an ignorant, overbearing swine."
+
+Mr Verloc, stepping slowly down two steps, entered the kitchen,
+took a tumbler off the dresser, and holding it in his hand,
+approached the sink, without looking at his wife.  "It wasn't the
+old Baron who would have had the wicked folly of getting me to call
+on him at eleven in the morning.  There are two or three in this
+town that, if they had seen me going in, would have made no bones
+about knocking me on the head sooner or later.  It was a silly,
+murderous trick to expose for nothing a man - like me."
+
+Mr Verloc, turning on the tap above the sink, poured three glasses
+of water, one after another, down his throat to quench the fires of
+his indignation.  Mr Vladimir's conduct was like a hot brand which
+set his internal economy in a blaze.  He could not get over the
+disloyalty of it.  This man, who would not work at the usual hard
+tasks which society sets to its humbler members, had exercised his
+secret industry with an indefatigable devotion.  There was in Mr
+Verloc a fund of loyalty.  He had been loyal to his employers, to
+the cause of social stability, - and to his affections too - as
+became apparent when, after standing the tumbler in the sink, he
+turned about, saying:
+
+"If I hadn't thought of you I would have taken the bullying brute
+by the throat and rammed his head into the fireplace.  I'd have
+been more than a match for that pink-faced, smooth-shaved - "
+
+Mr Verloc, neglected to finish the sentence, as if there could be
+no doubt of the terminal word.  For the first time in his life he
+was taking that incurious woman into his confidence.  The
+singularity of the event, the force and importance of the personal
+feelings aroused in the course of this confession, drove Stevie's
+fate clean out of Mr Verloc's mind.  The boy's stuttering existence
+of fears and indignations, together with the violence of his end,
+had passed out of Mr Verloc's mental sight for a time.  For that
+reason, when he looked up he was startled by the inappropriate
+character of his wife's stare.  It was not a wild stare, and it was
+not inattentive, but its attention was peculiar and not
+satisfactory, inasmuch that it seemed concentrated upon some point
+beyond Mr Verloc's person.  The impression was so strong that Mr
+Verloc glanced over his shoulder.  There was nothing behind him:
+there was just the whitewashed wall.  The excellent husband of
+Winnie Verloc saw no writing on the wall.  He turned to his wife
+again, repeating, with some emphasis:
+
+"I would have taken him by the throat.  As true as I stand here, if
+I hadn't thought of you then I would have half choked the life out
+of the brute before I let him get up.  And don't you think he would
+have been anxious to call the police either.  He wouldn't have
+dared.  You understand why - don't you?"
+
+He blinked at his wife knowingly.
+
+"No," said Mrs Verloc in an unresonant voice, and without looking
+at him at all.  "What are you talking about?"
+
+A great discouragement, the result of fatigue, came upon Mr Verloc.
+He had had a very full day, and his nerves had been tried to the
+utmost.  After a month of maddening worry, ending in an unexpected
+catastrophe, the storm-tossed spirit of Mr Verloc longed for
+repose.  His career as a secret agent had come to an end in a way
+no one could have foreseen; only, now, perhaps he could manage to
+get a night's sleep at last.  But looking at his wife, he doubted
+it.  She was taking it very hard - not at all like herself, he
+thought.  He made an effort to speak.
+
+"You'll have to pull yourself together, my girl," he said
+sympathetically.  "What's done can't be undone."
+
+Mrs Verloc gave a slight start, though not a muscle of her white
+face moved in the least.  Mr Verloc, who was not looking at her,
+continued ponderously.
+
+"You go to bed now.  What you want is a good cry."
+
+This opinion had nothing to recommend it but the general consent of
+mankind.  It is universally understood that, as if it were nothing
+more substantial than vapour floating in the sky, every emotion of
+a woman is bound to end in a shower.  And it is very probable that
+had Stevie died in his bed under her despairing gaze, in her
+protecting arms, Mrs Verloc's grief would have found relief in a
+flood of bitter and pure tears.  Mrs Verloc, in common with other
+human beings, was provided with a fund of unconscious resignation
+sufficient to meet the normal manifestation of human destiny.
+Without "troubling her head about it," she was aware that it "did
+not stand looking into very much."  But the lamentable
+circumstances of Stevie's end, which to Mr Verloc's mind had only
+an episodic character, as part of a greater disaster, dried her
+tears at their very source.  It was the effect of a white-hot iron
+drawn across her eyes; at the same time her heart, hardened and
+chilled into a lump of ice, kept her body in an inward shudder, set
+her features into a frozen contemplative immobility addressed to a
+whitewashed wall with no writing on it.  The exigencies of Mrs
+Verloc's temperament, which, when stripped of its philosophical
+reserve, was maternal and violent, forced her to roll a series of
+thoughts in her motionless head.  These thoughts were rather
+imagined than expressed.  Mrs Verloc was a woman of singularly few
+words, either for public or private use.  With the rage and dismay
+of a betrayed woman, she reviewed the tenor of her life in visions
+concerned mostly with Stevie's difficult existence from its
+earliest days.  It was a life of single purpose and of a noble
+unity of inspiration, like those rare lives that have left their
+mark on the thoughts and feelings of mankind.  But the visions of
+Mrs Verloc lacked nobility and magnificence.  She saw herself
+putting the boy to bed by the light of a single candle on the
+deserted top floor of a "business house," dark under the roof and
+scintillating exceedingly with lights and cut glass at the level of
+the street like a fairy palace.  That meretricious splendour was
+the only one to be met in Mrs Verloc's visions.  She remembered
+brushing the boy's hair and tying his pinafores - herself in a
+pinafore still; the consolations administered to a small and badly
+scared creature by another creature nearly as small but not quite
+so badly scared; she had the vision of the blows intercepted (often
+with her own head), of a door held desperately shut against a man's
+rage (not for very long); of a poker flung once (not very far),
+which stilled that particular storm into the dumb and awful silence
+which follows a thunder-clap.  And all these scenes of violence
+came and went accompanied by the unrefined noise of deep
+vociferations proceeding from a man wounded in his paternal pride,
+declaring himself obviously accursed since one of his kids was a
+"slobbering idjut and the other a wicked she-devil."  It was of her
+that this had been said many years ago.
+
+Mrs Verloc heard the words again in a ghostly fashion, and then the
+dreary shadow of the Belgravian mansion descended upon her
+shoulders.  It was a crushing memory, an exhausting vision of
+countless breakfast trays carried up and down innumerable stairs,
+of endless haggling over pence, of the endless drudgery of
+sweeping, dusting, cleaning, from basement to attics; while the
+impotent mother, staggering on swollen legs, cooked in a grimy
+kitchen, and poor Stevie, the unconscious presiding genius of all
+their toil, blacked the gentlemen's boots in the scullery.  But
+this vision had a breath of a hot London summer in it, and for a
+central figure a young man wearing his Sunday best, with a straw
+hat on his dark head and a wooden pipe in his mouth.  Affectionate
+and jolly, he was a fascinating companion for a voyage down the
+sparkling stream of life; only his boat was very small.  There was
+room in it for a girl-partner at the oar, but no accommodation for
+passengers.  He was allowed to drift away from the threshold of the
+Belgravian mansion while Winnie averted her tearful eyes.  He was
+not a lodger.  The lodger was Mr Verloc, indolent, and keeping late
+hours, sleepily jocular of a morning from under his bed-clothes,
+but with gleams of infatuation in his heavy lidded eyes, and always
+with some money in his pockets.  There was no sparkle of any kind
+on the lazy stream of his life.  It flowed through secret places.
+But his barque seemed a roomy craft, and his taciturn magnanimity
+accepted as a matter of course the presence of passengers.
+
+Mrs Verloc pursued the visions of seven years' security for Stevie,
+loyally paid for on her part; of security growing into confidence,
+into a domestic feeling, stagnant and deep like a placid pool,
+whose guarded surface hardly shuddered on the occasional passage of
+Comrade Ossipon, the robust anarchist with shamelessly inviting
+eyes, whose glance had a corrupt clearness sufficient to enlighten
+any woman not absolutely imbecile.
+
+A few seconds only had elapsed since the last word had been uttered
+aloud in the kitchen, and Mrs Verloc was staring already at the
+vision of an episode not more than a fortnight old.  With eyes
+whose pupils were extremely dilated she stared at the vision of her
+husband and poor Stevie walking up Brett Street side by side away
+from the shop.  It was the last scene of an existence created by
+Mrs Verloc's genius; an existence foreign to all grace and charm,
+without beauty and almost without decency, but admirable in the
+continuity of feeling and tenacity of purpose.  And this last
+vision has such plastic relief, such nearness of form, such a
+fidelity of suggestive detail, that it wrung from Mrs Verloc an
+anguished and faint murmur, reproducing the supreme illusion of her
+life, an appalled murmur that died out on her blanched lips.
+
+"Might have been father and son."
+
+Mr Verloc stopped, and raised a care-worn face.  "Eh?  What did you
+say?" he asked.  Receiving no reply, he resumed his sinister
+tramping.  Then with a menacing flourish of a thick, fleshy fist,
+he burst out:
+
+"Yes.  The Embassy people.  A pretty lot, ain't they!  Before a
+week's out I'll make some of them wish themselves twenty feet
+underground.  Eh?  What?"
+
+He glanced sideways, with his head down.  Mrs Verloc gazed at the
+whitewashed wall.  A blank wall - perfectly blank.  A blankness to
+run at and dash your head against.  Mrs Verloc remained immovably
+seated.  She kept still as the population of half the globe would
+keep still in astonishment and despair, were the sun suddenly put
+out in the summer sky by the perfidy of a trusted providence.
+
+"The Embassy," Mr Verloc began again, after a preliminary grimace
+which bared his teeth wolfishly.  "I wish I could get loose in
+there with a cudgel for half-an-hour.  I would keep on hitting till
+there wasn't a single unbroken bone left amongst the whole lot.
+But never mind, I'll teach them yet what it means trying to throw
+out a man like me to rot in the streets.  I've a tongue in my head.
+All the world shall know what I've done for them.  I am not afraid.
+I don't care.  Everything'll come out.  Every damned thing.  Let
+them look out!"
+
+In these terms did Mr Verloc declare his thirst for revenge.  It
+was a very appropriate revenge.  It was in harmony with the
+promptings of Mr Verloc's genius.  It had also the advantage of
+being within the range of his powers and of adjusting itself easily
+to the practice of his life, which had consisted precisely in
+betraying the secret and unlawful proceedings of his fellow-men.
+Anarchists or diplomats were all one to him.  Mr Verloc was
+temperamentally no respecter of persons.  His scorn was equally
+distributed over the whole field of his operations.  But as a
+member of a revolutionary proletariat - which he undoubtedly was -
+he nourished a rather inimical sentiment against social
+distinction.
+
+"Nothing on earth can stop me now," he added, and paused, looking
+fixedly at his wife, who was looking fixedly at a blank wall.
+
+The silence in the kitchen was prolonged, and Mr Verloc felt
+disappointed.  He had expected his wife to say something.  But Mrs
+Verloc's lips, composed in their usual form, preserved a statuesque
+immobility like the rest of her face.  And Mr Verloc was
+disappointed.  Yet the occasion did not, he recognised, demand
+speech from her.  She was a woman of very few words.  For reasons
+involved in the very foundation of his psychology, Mr Verloc was
+inclined to put his trust in any woman who had given herself to
+him.  Therefore he trusted his wife.  Their accord was perfect, but
+it was not precise.  It was a tacit accord, congenial to Mrs
+Verloc's incuriosity and to Mr Verloc's habits of mind, which were
+indolent and secret.  They refrained from going to the bottom of
+facts and motives.
+
+This reserve, expressing, in a way, their profound confidence in
+each other, introduced at the same time a certain element of
+vagueness into their intimacy.  No system of conjugal relations is
+perfect.  Mr Verloc presumed that his wife had understood him, but
+he would have been glad to hear her say what she thought at the
+moment.  It would have been a comfort.
+
+There were several reasons why this comfort was denied him.  There
+was a physical obstacle: Mrs Verloc had no sufficient command over
+her voice.  She did not see any alternative between screaming and
+silence, and instinctively she chose the silence.  Winnie Verloc
+was temperamentally a silent person.  And there was the paralysing
+atrocity of the thought which occupied her.  Her cheeks were
+blanched, her lips ashy, her immobility amazing.  And she thought
+without looking at Mr Verloc: "This man took the boy away to murder
+him.  He took the boy away from his home to murder him.  He took
+the boy away from me to murder him!"
+
+Mrs Verloc's whole being was racked by that inconclusive and
+maddening thought.  It was in her veins, in her bones, in the roots
+of her hair.  Mentally she assumed the biblical attitude of
+mourning - the covered face, the rent garments; the sound of
+wailing and lamentation filled her head.  But her teeth were
+violently clenched, and her tearless eyes were hot with rage,
+because she was not a submissive creature.  The protection she had
+extended over her brother had been in its origin of a fierce an
+indignant complexion.  She had to love him with a militant love.
+She had battled for him - even against herself.  His loss had the
+bitterness of defeat, with the anguish of a baffled passion.  It
+was not an ordinary stroke of death.  Moreover, it was not death
+that took Stevie from her.  It was Mr Verloc who took him away.
+She had seen him.  She had watched him, without raising a hand,
+take the boy away.  And she had let him go, like - like a fool - a
+blind fool.  Then after he had murdered the boy he came home to
+her.  Just came home like any other man would come home to his
+wife. . . .
+
+Through her set teeth Mrs Verloc muttered at the wall:
+
+"And I thought he had caught a cold."
+
+Mr Verloc heard these words and appropriated them.
+
+"It was nothing," he said moodily.  "I was upset.  I was upset on
+your account."
+
+Mrs Verloc, turning her head slowly, transferred her stare from the
+wall to her husband's person.  Mr Verloc, with the tips of his
+fingers between his lips, was looking on the ground.
+
+"Can't be helped," he mumbled, letting his hand fall.  "You must
+pull yourself together.  You'll want all your wits about you.  It
+is you who brought the police about our ears.  Never mind, I won't
+say anything more about it," continued Mr Verloc magnanimously.
+"You couldn't know."
+
+"I couldn't," breathed out Mrs Verloc.  It was as if a corpse had
+spoken.  Mr Verloc took up the thread of his discourse.
+
+"I don't blame you.  I'll make them sit up.  Once under lock and
+key it will be safe enough for me to talk - you understand.  You
+must reckon on me being two years away from you," he continued, in
+a tone of sincere concern.  "It will be easier for you than for me.
+You'll have something to do, while I -  Look here, Winnie, what you
+must do is to keep this business going for two years.  You know
+enough for that.  You've a good head on you.  I'll send you word
+when it's time to go about trying to sell.  You'll have to be extra
+careful.  The comrades will be keeping an eye on you all the time.
+You'll have to be as artful as you know how, and as close as the
+grave.  No one must know what you are going to do.  I have no mind
+to get a knock on the head or a stab in the back directly I am let
+out."
+
+Thus spoke Mr Verloc, applying his mind with ingenuity and
+forethought to the problems of the future.  His voice was sombre,
+because he had a correct sentiment of the situation.  Everything
+which he did not wish to pass had come to pass.  The future had
+become precarious.  His judgment, perhaps, had been momentarily
+obscured by his dread of Mr Vladimir's truculent folly.  A man
+somewhat over forty may be excusably thrown into considerable
+disorder by the prospect of losing his employment, especially if
+the man is a secret agent of political police, dwelling secure in
+the consciousness of his high value and in the esteem of high
+personages.  He was excusable.
+
+Now the thing had ended in a crash.  Mr Verloc was cool; but he was
+not cheerful.  A secret agent who throws his secrecy to the winds
+from desire of vengeance, and flaunts his achievements before the
+public eye, becomes the mark for desperate and bloodthirsty
+indignations.  Without unduly exaggerating the danger, Mr Verloc
+tried to bring it clearly before his wife's mind.  He repeated that
+he had no intention to let the revolutionises do away with him.
+
+He looked straight into his wife's eyes.  The enlarged pupils of
+the woman received his stare into their unfathomable depths.
+
+"I am too fond of you for that," he said, with a little nervous
+laugh.
+
+A faint flush coloured Mrs Verloc's ghastly and motionless face.
+Having done with the visions of the past, she had not only heard,
+but had also understood the words uttered by her husband.  By their
+extreme disaccord with her mental condition these words produced on
+her a slightly suffocating effect.  Mrs Verloc's mental condition
+had the merit of simplicity; but it was not sound.  It was governed
+too much by a fixed idea.  Every nook and cranny of her brain was
+filled with the thought that this man, with whom she had lived
+without distaste for seven years, had taken the "poor boy" away
+from her in order to kill him - the man to whom she had grown
+accustomed in body and mind; the man whom she had trusted, took the
+boy away to kill him!  In its form, in its substance, in its
+effect, which was universal, altering even the aspect of inanimate
+things, it was a thought to sit still and marvel at for ever and
+ever.  Mrs Verloc sat still.  And across that thought (not across
+the kitchen) the form of Mr Verloc went to and fro, familiarly in
+hat and overcoat, stamping with his boots upon her brain.  He was
+probably talking too; but Mrs Verloc's thought for the most part
+covered the voice.
+
+Now and then, however, the voice would make itself heard.  Several
+connected words emerged at times.  Their purport was generally
+hopeful.  On each of these occasions Mrs Verloc's dilated pupils,
+losing their far-off fixity, followed her husband's movements with
+the effect of black care and, impenetrable attention.  Well
+informed upon all matters relating to his secret calling, Mr Verloc
+augured well for the success of his plans and combinations.  He
+really believed that it would be upon the whole easy for him to
+escape the knife of infuriated revolutionists.  He had exaggerated
+the strength of their fury and the length of their arm (for
+professional purposes) too often to have many illusions one way or
+the other.  For to exaggerate with judgment one must begin by
+measuring with nicety.  He knew also how much virtue and how much
+infamy is forgotten in two years - two long years.  His first
+really confidential discourse to his wife was optimistic from
+conviction.  He also thought it good policy to display all the
+assurance he could muster.  It would put heart into the poor woman.
+On his liberation, which, harmonising with the whole tenor of his
+life, would be secret, of course, they would vanish together
+without loss of time.  As to covering up the tracks, he begged his
+wife to trust him for that.  He knew how it was to be done so that
+the devil himself -
+
+He waved his hand.  He seemed to boast.  He wished only to put
+heart into her.  It was a benevolent intention, but Mr Verloc had
+the misfortune not to be in accord with his audience.
+
+The self-confident tone grew upon Mrs Verloc's ear which let most
+of the words go by; for what were words to her now?  What could
+words do to her, for good or evil in the face of her fixed idea?
+Her black glance followed that man who was asserting his impunity -
+the man who had taken poor Stevie from home to kill him somewhere.
+Mrs Verloc could not remember exactly where, but her heart began to
+beat very perceptibly.
+
+Mr Verloc, in a soft and conjugal tone, was now expressing his firm
+belief that there were yet a good few years of quiet life before
+them both.  He did not go into the question of means.  A quiet life
+it must be and, as it were, nestling in the shade, concealed among
+men whose flesh is grass; modest, like the life of violets.  The
+words used by Mr Verloc were: "Lie low for a bit."  And far from
+England, of course.  It was not clear whether Mr Verloc had in his
+mind Spain or South America; but at any rate somewhere abroad.
+
+This last word, falling into Mrs Verloc's ear, produced a definite
+impression.  This man was talking of going abroad.  The impression
+was completely disconnected; and such is the force of mental habit
+that Mrs Verloc at once and automatically asked herself: "And what
+of Stevie?"
+
+It was a sort of forgetfulness; but instantly she became aware that
+there was no longer any occasion for anxiety on that score.  There
+would never be any occasion any more.  The poor boy had been taken
+out and killed.  The poor boy was dead.
+
+This shaking piece of forgetfulness stimulated Mrs Verloc's
+intelligence.  She began to perceive certain consequences which
+would have surprised Mr Verloc.  There was no need for her now to
+stay there, in that kitchen, in that house, with that man - since
+the boy was gone for ever.  No need whatever.  And on that Mrs
+Verloc rose as if raised by a spring.  But neither could she see
+what there was to keep her in the world at all.  And this inability
+arrested her.  Mr Verloc watched her with marital solicitude.
+
+"You're looking more like yourself," he said uneasily.  Something
+peculiar in the blackness of his wife's eyes disturbed his
+optimism.  At that precise moment Mrs Verloc began to look upon
+herself as released from all earthly ties.
+
+She had her freedom.  Her contract with existence, as represented
+by that man standing over there, was at an end.  She was a free
+woman.  Had this view become in some way perceptible to Mr Verloc
+he would have been extremely shocked.  In his affairs of the heart
+Mr Verloc had been always carelessly generous, yet always with no
+other idea than that of being loved for himself.  Upon this matter,
+his ethical notions being in agreement with his vanity, he was
+completely incorrigible.  That this should be so in the case of his
+virtuous and legal connection he was perfectly certain.  He had
+grown older, fatter, heavier, in the belief that he lacked no
+fascination for being loved for his own sake.  When he saw Mrs
+Verloc starting to walk out of the kitchen without a word he was
+disappointed.
+
+"Where are you going to?" he called out rather sharply.
+"Upstairs?"
+
+Mrs Verloc in the doorway turned at the voice.  An instinct of
+prudence born of fear, the excessive fear of being approached and
+touched by that man, induced her to nod at him slightly (from the
+height of two steps), with a stir of the lips which the conjugal
+optimism of Mr Verloc took for a wan and uncertain smile.
+
+"That's right," he encouraged her gruffly.  "Rest and quiet's what
+you want.  Go on.  It won't be long before I am with you."
+
+Mrs Verloc, the free woman who had had really no idea where she was
+going to, obeyed the suggestion with rigid steadiness.
+
+Mr Verloc watched her.  She disappeared up the stairs.  He was
+disappointed.  There was that within him which would have been more
+satisfied if she had been moved to throw herself upon his breast.
+But he was generous and indulgent.  Winnie was always
+undemonstrative and silent.  Neither was Mr Verloc himself prodigal
+of endearments and words as a rule.  But this was not an ordinary
+evening.  It was an occasion when a man wants to be fortified and
+strengthened by open proofs of sympathy and affection.  Mr Verloc
+sighed, and put out the gas in the kitchen.  Mr Verloc's sympathy
+with his wife was genuine and intense.  It almost brought tears
+into his eyes as he stood in the parlour reflecting on the
+loneliness hanging over her head.  In this mood Mr Verloc missed
+Stevie very much out of a difficult world.  He thought mournfully
+of his end.  If only that lad had not stupidly destroyed himself!
+
+The sensation of unappeasable hunger, not unknown after the strain
+of a hazardous enterprise to adventurers of tougher fibre than Mr
+Verloc, overcame him again.  The piece of roast beef, laid out in
+the likeness of funereal baked meats for Stevie's obsequies,
+offered itself largely to his notice.  And Mr Verloc again partook.
+He partook ravenously, without restraint and decency, cutting thick
+slices with the sharp carving knife, and swallowing them without
+bread.  In the course of that refection it occurred to Mr Verloc
+that he was not hearing his wife move about the bedroom as he
+should have done.  The thought of finding her perhaps sitting on
+the bed in the dark not only cut Mr Verloc's appetite, but also
+took from him the inclination to follow her upstairs just yet.
+Laying down the carving knife, Mr Verloc listened with careworn
+attention.
+
+He was comforted by hearing her move at last.  She walked suddenly
+across the room, and threw the window up.  After a period of
+stillness up there, during which he figured her to himself with her
+head out, he heard the sash being lowered slowly.  Then she made a
+few steps, and sat down.  Every resonance of his house was familiar
+to Mr Verloc, who was thoroughly domesticated.  When next he heard
+his wife's footsteps overhead he knew, as well as if he had seen
+her doing it, that she had been putting on her walking shoes.  Mr
+Verloc wriggled his shoulders slightly at this ominous symptom, and
+moving away from the table, stood with his back to the fireplace,
+his head on one side, and gnawing perplexedly at the tips of his
+fingers.  He kept track of her movements by the sound.  She walked
+here and there violently, with abrupt stoppages, now before the
+chest of drawers, then in front of the wardrobe.  An immense load
+of weariness, the harvest of a day of shocks and surprises, weighed
+Mr Verloc's energies to the ground.
+
+He did not raise his eyes till he heard his wife descending the
+stairs.  It was as he had guessed.  She was dressed for going out.
+
+Mrs Verloc was a free woman.  She had thrown open the window of the
+bedroom either with the intention of screaming Murder!  Help! or of
+throwing herself out.  For she did not exactly know what use to
+make of her freedom.  Her personality seemed to have been torn into
+two pieces, whose mental operations did not adjust themselves very
+well to each other.  The street, silent and deserted from end to
+end, repelled her by taking sides with that man who was so certain
+of his impunity.  She was afraid to shout lest no one should come.
+Obviously no one would come.  Her instinct of self-preservation
+recoiled from the depth of the fall into that sort of slimy, deep
+trench.  Mrs Verloc closed the window, and dressed herself to go
+out into the street by another way.  She was a free woman.  She had
+dressed herself thoroughly, down to the tying of a black veil over
+her face.  As she appeared before him in the light of the parlour,
+Mr Verloc observed that she had even her little handbag hanging
+from her left wrist. . . . Flying off to her mother, of course.
+
+The thought that women were wearisome creatures after all presented
+itself to his fatigued brain.  But he was too generous to harbour
+it for more than an instant.  This man, hurt cruelly in his vanity,
+remained magnanimous in his conduct, allowing himself no
+satisfaction of a bitter smile or of a contemptuous gesture.  With
+true greatness of soul, he only glanced at the wooden clock on the
+wall, and said in a perfectly calm but forcible manner:
+
+"Five and twenty minutes past eight, Winnie.  There's no sense in
+going over there so late.  You will never manage to get back to-
+night."
+
+Before his extended hand Mrs Verloc had stopped short.  He added
+heavily: "Your mother will be gone to bed before you get there.
+This is the sort of news that can wait."
+
+Nothing was further from Mrs Verloc's thoughts than going to her
+mother.  She recoiled at the mere idea, and feeling a chair behind
+her, she obeyed the suggestion of the touch, and sat down.  Her
+intention had been simply to get outside the door for ever.  And if
+this feeling was correct, its mental form took an unrefined shape
+corresponding to her origin and station.  "I would rather walk the
+streets all the days of my life," she thought.  But this creature,
+whose moral nature had been subjected to a shock of which, in the
+physical order, the most violent earthquake of history could only
+be a faint and languid rendering, was at the mercy of mere trifles,
+of casual contacts.  She sat down.  With her hat and veil she had
+the air of a visitor, of having looked in on Mr Verloc for a
+moment.  Her instant docility encouraged him, whilst her aspect of
+only temporary and silent acquiescence provoked him a little.
+
+"Let me tell you, Winnie," he said with authority, "that your place
+is here this evening.  Hang it all! you brought the damned police
+high and low about my ears.  I don't blame you - but it's your
+doing all the same.  You'd better take this confounded hat off.  I
+can't let you go out, old girl," he added in a softened voice.
+
+Mrs Verloc's mind got hold of that declaration with morbid
+tenacity.  The man who had taken Stevie out from under her very
+eyes to murder him in a locality whose name was at the moment not
+present to her memory would not allow her go out.  Of course he
+wouldn't.
+
+Now he had murdered Stevie he would never let her go.  He would
+want to keep her for nothing.  And on this characteristic
+reasoning, having all the force of insane logic, Mrs Verloc's
+disconnected wits went to work practically.  She could slip by him,
+open the door, run out.  But he would dash out after her, seize her
+round the body, drag her back into the shop.  She could scratch,
+kick, and bite - and stab too; but for stabbing she wanted a knife.
+Mrs Verloc sat still under her black veil, in her own house, like a
+masked and mysterious visitor of impenetrable intentions.
+
+Mr Verloc's magnanimity was not more than human.  She had
+exasperated him at last.
+
+"Can't you say something?  You have your own dodges for vexing a
+man.  Oh yes!  I know your deaf-and-dumb trick.  I've seen you at
+it before to-day.  But just now it won't do.  And to begin with,
+take this damned thing off.  One can't tell whether one is talking
+to a dummy or to a live woman."
+
+He advanced, and stretching out his hand, dragged the veil off,
+unmasking a still, unreadable face, against which his nervous
+exasperation was shattered like a glass bubble flung against a
+rock.  "That's better," he said, to cover his momentary uneasiness,
+and retreated back to his old station by the mantelpiece.  It never
+entered his head that his wife could give him up.  He felt a little
+ashamed of himself, for he was fond and generous.  What could he
+do?  Everything had been said already.  He protested vehemently.
+
+"By heavens!  You know that I hunted high and low.  I ran the risk
+of giving myself away to find somebody for that accursed job.  And
+I tell you again I couldn't find anyone crazy enough or hungry
+enough.  What do you take me for - a murderer, or what?  The boy is
+gone.  Do you think I wanted him to blow himself up?  He's gone.
+His troubles are over.  Ours are just going to begin, I tell you,
+precisely because he did blow himself.  I don't blame you.  But
+just try to understand that it was a pure accident; as much an
+accident as if he had been run over by a `bus while crossing the
+street."
+
+His generosity was not infinite, because he was a human being - and
+not a monster, as Mrs Verloc believed him to be.  He paused, and a
+snarl lifting his moustaches above a gleam of white teeth gave him
+the expression of a reflective beast, not very dangerous - a slow
+beast with a sleek head, gloomier than a seal, and with a husky
+voice.
+
+"And when it comes to that, it's as much your doing as mine.
+That's so.  You may glare as much as you like.  I know what you can
+do in that way.  Strike me dead if I ever would have thought of the
+lad for that purpose.  It was you who kept on shoving him in my way
+when I was half distracted with the worry of keeping the lot of us
+out of trouble.  What the devil made you?  One would think you were
+doing it on purpose.  And I am damned if I know that you didn't.
+There's no saying how much of what's going on you have got hold of
+on the sly with your infernal don't-care-a-damn way of looking
+nowhere in particular, and saying nothing at all. . . . "
+
+His husky domestic voice ceased for a while.  Mrs Verloc made no
+reply.  Before that silence he felt ashamed of what he had said.
+But as often happens to peaceful men in domestic tiffs, being
+ashamed he pushed another point.
+
+"You have a devilish way of holding your tongue sometimes," he
+began again, without raising his voice.  "Enough to make some men
+go mad.  It's lucky for you that I am not so easily put out as some
+of them would be by your deaf-and-dumb sulks.  I am fond of you.
+But don't you go too far.  This isn't the time for it.  We ought to
+be thinking of what we've got to do.  And I can't let you go out
+to-night, galloping off to your mother with some crazy tale or
+other about me.  I won't have it.  Don't you make any mistake about
+it: if you will have it that I killed the boy, then you've killed
+him as much as I."
+
+In sincerity of feeling and openness of statement, these words went
+far beyond anything that had ever been said in this home, kept up
+on the wages of a secret industry eked out by the sale of more or
+less secret wares: the poor expedients devised by a mediocre
+mankind for preserving an imperfect society from the dangers of
+moral and physical corruption, both secret too of their kind.  They
+were spoken because Mr Verloc had felt himself really outraged; but
+the reticent decencies of this home life, nestling in a shady
+street behind a shop where the sun never shone, remained apparently
+undisturbed.  Mrs Verloc heard him out with perfect propriety, and
+then rose from her chair in her hat and jacket like a visitor at
+the end of a call.  She advanced towards her husband, one arm
+extended as if for a silent leave-taking.  Her net veil dangling
+down by one end on the left side of her face gave an air of
+disorderly formality to her restrained movements.  But when she
+arrived as far as the hearthrug, Mr Verloc was no longer standing
+there.  He had moved off in the direction of the sofa, without
+raising his eyes to watch the effect of his tirade.  He was tired,
+resigned in a truly marital spirit.  But he felt hurt in the tender
+spot of his secret weakness.  If she would go on sulking in that
+dreadful overcharged silence - why then she must.  She was a master
+in that domestic art.  Mr Verloc flung himself heavily upon the
+sofa, disregarding as usual the fate of his hat, which, as if
+accustomed to take care of itself, made for a safe shelter under
+the table.
+
+He was tired.  The last particle of his nervous force had been
+expended in the wonders and agonies of this day full of surprising
+failures coming at the end of a harassing month of scheming and
+insomnia.  He was tired.  A man isn't made of stone.  Hang
+everything!  Mr Verloc reposed characteristically, clad in his
+outdoor garments.  One side of his open overcoat was lying partly
+on the ground.  Mr Verloc wallowed on his back.  But he longed for
+a more perfect rest - for sleep - for a few hours of delicious
+forgetfulness.  That would come later.  Provisionally he rested.
+And he thought: "I wish she would give over this damned nonsense.
+It's exasperating."
+
+There must have been something imperfect in Mrs Verloc's sentiment
+of regained freedom.  Instead of taking the way of the door she
+leaned back, with her shoulders against the tablet of the
+mantelpiece, as a wayfarer rests against a fence.  A tinge of
+wildness in her aspect was derived from the black veil hanging like
+a rag against her cheek, and from the fixity of her black gaze
+where the light of the room was absorbed and lost without the trace
+of a single gleam.  This woman, capable of a bargain the mere
+suspicion of which would have been infinitely shocking to Mr
+Verloc's idea of love, remained irresolute, as if scrupulously
+aware of something wanting on her part for the formal closing of
+the transaction.
+
+On the sofa Mr Verloc wriggled his shoulders into perfect comfort,
+and from the fulness of his heart emitted a wish which was
+certainly as pious as anything likely to come from such a source.
+
+"I wish to goodness," he growled huskily, "I had never seen
+Greenwich Park or anything belonging to it."
+
+The veiled sound filled the small room with its moderate volume,
+well adapted to the modest nature of the wish.  The waves of air of
+the proper length, propagated in accordance with correct
+mathematical formulas, flowed around all the inanimate things in
+the room, lapped against Mrs Verloc's head as if it had been a head
+of stone.  And incredible as it may appear, the eyes of Mrs Verloc
+seemed to grow still larger.  The audible wish of Mr Verloc's
+overflowing heart flowed into an empty place in his wife's memory.
+Greenwich Park.  A park!  That's where the boy was killed.  A park
+- smashed branches, torn leaves, gravel, bits of brotherly flesh
+and bone, all spouting up together in the manner of a firework.
+She remembered now what she had heard, and she remembered it
+pictorially.  They had to gather him up with the shovel.  Trembling
+all over with irrepressible shudders, she saw before her the very
+implement with its ghastly load scraped up from the ground.  Mrs
+Verloc closed her eyes desperately, throwing upon that vision the
+night of her eyelids, where after a rainlike fall of mangled limbs
+the decapitated head of Stevie lingered suspended alone, and fading
+out slowly like the last star of a pyrotechnic display.  Mrs Verloc
+opened her eyes.
+
+Her face was no longer stony.  Anybody could have noted the subtle
+change on her features, in the stare of her eyes, giving her a new
+and startling expression; an expression seldom observed by
+competent persons under the conditions of leisure and security
+demanded for thorough analysis, but whose meaning could not be
+mistaken at a glance.  Mrs Verloc's doubts as to the end of the
+bargain no longer existed; her wits, no longer disconnected, were
+working under the control of her will.  But Mr Verloc observed
+nothing.  He was reposing in that pathetic condition of optimism
+induced by excess of fatigue.  He did not want any more trouble -
+with his wife too - of all people in the world.  He had been
+unanswerable in his vindication.  He was loved for himself.  The
+present phase of her silence he interpreted favourably.  This was
+the time to make it up with her.  The silence had lasted long
+enough.  He broke it by calling to her in an undertone.
+
+"Winnie."
+
+"Yes," answered obediently Mrs Verloc the free woman.  She
+commanded her wits now, her vocal organs; she felt herself to be in
+an almost preternaturally perfect control of every fibre of her
+body.  It was all her own, because the bargain was at an end.  She
+was clear sighted.  She had become cunning.  She chose to answer
+him so readily for a purpose.  She did not wish that man to change
+his position on the sofa which was very suitable to the
+circumstances.  She succeeded.  The man did not stir.  But after
+answering him she remained leaning negligently against the
+mantelpiece in the attitude of a resting wayfarer.  She was
+unhurried.  Her brow was smooth.  The head and shoulders of Mr
+Verloc were hidden from her by the high side of the sofa.  She kept
+her eyes fixed on his feet.
+
+She remained thus mysteriously still and suddenly collected till Mr
+Verloc was heard with an accent of marital authority, and moving
+slightly to make room for her to sit on the edge of the sofa.
+
+"Come here," he said in a peculiar tone, which might have been the
+tone of brutality, but, was intimately known to Mrs Verloc as the
+note of wooing.
+
+She started forward at once, as if she were still a loyal woman
+bound to that man by an unbroken contract.  Her right hand skimmed
+slightly the end of the table, and when she had passed on towards
+the sofa the carving knife had vanished without the slightest sound
+from the side of the dish.  Mr Verloc heard the creaky plank in the
+floor, and was content.  He waited.  Mrs Verloc was coming.  As if
+the homeless soul of Stevie had flown for shelter straight to the
+breast of his sister, guardian and protector, the resemblance of
+her face with that of her brother grew at every step, even to the
+droop of the lower lip, even to the slight divergence of the eyes.
+But Mr Verloc did not see that.  He was lying on his back and
+staring upwards.  He saw partly on the ceiling and partly on the
+wall the moving shadow of an arm with a clenched hand holding a
+carving knife.  It flickered up and down.  It's movements were
+leisurely.  They were leisurely enough for Mr Verloc to recognise
+the limb and the weapon.
+
+They were leisurely enough for him to take in the full meaning of
+the portent, and to taste the flavour of death rising in his gorge.
+His wife had gone raving mad - murdering mad.  They were leisurely
+enough for the first paralysing effect of this discovery to pass
+away before a resolute determination to come out victorious from
+the ghastly struggle with that armed lunatic.  They were leisurely
+enough for Mr Verloc to elaborate a plan of defence involving a
+dash behind the table, and the felling of the woman to the ground
+with a heavy wooden chair.  But they were not leisurely enough to
+allow Mr Verloc the time to move either hand or foot.  The knife
+was already planted in his breast.  It met no resistance on its
+way.  Hazard has such accuracies.  Into that plunging blow,
+delivered over the side of the couch, Mrs Verloc had put all the
+inheritance of her immemorial and obscure descent, the simple
+ferocity of the age of caverns, and the unbalanced nervous fury of
+the age of bar-rooms.  Mr Verloc, the Secret Agent, turning
+slightly on his side with the force of the blow, expired without
+stirring a limb, in the muttered sound of the word "Don't" by way
+of protest.
+
+Mrs Verloc had let go the knife, and her extraordinary resemblance
+to her late brother had faded, had become very ordinary now.  She
+drew a deep breath, the first easy breath since Chief Inspector
+Heat had exhibited to her the labelled piece of Stevie's overcoat.
+She leaned forward on her folded arms over the side of the sofa.
+She adopted that easy attitude not in order to watch or gloat over
+the body of Mr Verloc, but because of the undulatory and swinging
+movements of the parlour, which for some time behaved as though it
+were at sea in a tempest.  She was giddy but calm.  She had become
+a free woman with a perfection of freedom which left her nothing to
+desire and absolutely nothing to do, since Stevie's urgent claim on
+her devotion no longer existed.  Mrs Verloc, who thought in images,
+was not troubled now by visions, because she did not think at all.
+And she did not move.  She was a woman enjoying her complete
+irresponsibility and endless leisure, almost in the manner of a
+corpse.  She did not move, she did not think.  Neither did the
+mortal envelope of the late Mr Verloc reposing on the sofa.  Except
+for the fact that Mrs Verloc breathed these two would have been
+perfect in accord: that accord of prudent reserve without
+superfluous words, and sparing of signs, which had been the
+foundation of their respectable home life.  For it had been
+respectable, covering by a decent reticence the problems that may
+arise in the practice of a secret profession and the commerce of
+shady wares.  To the last its decorum had remained undisturbed by
+unseemly shrieks and other misplaced sincerities of conduct.  And
+after the striking of the blow, this respectability was continued
+in immobility and silence.
+
+Nothing moved in the parlour till Mrs Verloc raised her head slowly
+and looked at the clock with inquiring mistrust.  She had become
+aware of a ticking sound in the room.  It grew upon her ear, while
+she remembered clearly that the clock on the wall was silent, had
+no audible tick.  What did it mean by beginning to tick so loudly
+all of a sudden?  Its face indicated ten minutes to nine.  Mrs
+Verloc cared nothing for time, and the ticking went on.  She
+concluded it could not be the clock, and her sullen gaze moved
+along the walls, wavered, and became vague, while she strained her
+hearing to locate the sound.  Tic, tic, tic.
+
+After listening for some time Mrs Verloc lowered her gaze
+deliberately on her husband's body.  It's attitude of repose was so
+home-like and familiar that she could do so without feeling
+embarrassed by any pronounced novelty in the phenomena of her home
+life.  Mr Verloc was taking his habitual ease.  He looked
+comfortable.
+
+By the position of the body the face of Mr Verloc was not visible
+to Mrs Verloc, his widow.  Her fine, sleepy eyes, travelling
+downward on the track of the sound, became contemplative on meeting
+a flat object of bone which protruded a little beyond the edge of
+the sofa.  It was the handle of the domestic carving knife with
+nothing strange about it but its position at right angles to Mr
+Verloc's waistcoat and the fact that something dripped from it.
+Dark drops fell on the floorcloth one after another, with a sound
+of ticking growing fast and furious like the pulse of an insane
+clock.  At its highest speed this ticking changed into a continuous
+sound of trickling.  Mrs Verloc watched that transformation with
+shadows of anxiety coming and going on her face.  It was a trickle,
+dark, swift, thin. . . . Blood!
+
+At this unforeseen circumstance Mrs Verloc abandoned her pose of
+idleness and irresponsibility.
+
+With a sudden snatch at her skirts and a faint shriek she ran to
+the door, as if the trickle had been the first sign of a destroying
+flood.  Finding the table in her way she gave it a push with both
+hands as though it had been alive, with such force that it went for
+some distance on its four legs, making a loud, scraping racket,
+whilst the big dish with the joint crashed heavily on the floor.
+
+Then all became still.  Mrs Verloc on reaching the door had
+stopped.  A round hat disclosed in the middle of the floor by the
+moving of the table rocked slightly on its crown in the wind of her
+flight.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+
+Winnie Verloc, the widow of Mr Verloc, the sister of the late
+faithful Stevie (blown to fragments in a state of innocence and in
+the conviction of being engaged in a humanitarian enterprise), did
+not run beyond the door of the parlour.  She had indeed run away so
+far from a mere trickle of blood, but that was a movement of
+instinctive repulsion.  And there she had paused, with staring eyes
+and lowered head.  As though she had run through long years in her
+flight across the small parlour, Mrs Verloc by the door was quite a
+different person from the woman who had been leaning over the sofa,
+a little swimmy in her head, but otherwise free to enjoy the
+profound calm of idleness and irresponsibility.  Mrs Verloc was no
+longer giddy.  Her head was steady.  On the other hand, she was no
+longer calm.  She was afraid.
+
+If she avoided looking in the direction of her reposing husband it
+was not because she was afraid of him.  Mr Verloc was not frightful
+to behold.  He looked comfortable.  Moreover, he was dead.  Mrs
+Verloc entertained no vain delusions on the subject of the dead.
+Nothing brings them back, neither love nor hate.  They can do
+nothing to you.  They are as nothing.  Her mental state was tinged
+by a sort of austere contempt for that man who had let himself be
+killed so easily.  He had been the master of a house, the husband
+of a woman, and the murderer of her Stevie.  And now he was of no
+account in every respect.  He was of less practical account than
+the clothing on his body, than his overcoat, than his boots - than
+that hat lying on the floor.  He was nothing.  He was not worth
+looking at.  He was even no longer the murderer of poor Stevie.
+The only murderer that would be found in the room when people came
+to look for Mr Verloc would be - herself!
+
+Her hands shook so that she failed twice in the task of refastening
+her veil.  Mrs Verloc was no longer a person of leisure and
+responsibility.  She was afraid.  The stabbing of Mr Verloc had
+been only a blow.  It had relieved the pent-up agony of shrieks
+strangled in her throat, of tears dried up in her hot eyes, of the
+maddening and indignant rage at the atrocious part played by that
+man, who was less than nothing now, in robbing her of the boy.
+
+It had been an obscurely prompted blow.  The blood trickling on the
+floor off the handle of the knife had turned it into an extremely
+plain case of murder.  Mrs Verloc, who always refrained from
+looking deep into things, was compelled to look into the very
+bottom of this thing.  She saw there no haunting face, no
+reproachful shade, no vision of remorse, no sort of ideal
+conception.  She saw there an object.  That object was the gallows.
+Mrs Verloc was afraid of the gallows.
+
+She was terrified of them ideally.  Having never set eyes on that
+last argument of men's justice except in illustrative woodcuts to a
+certain type of tales, she first saw them erect against a black and
+stormy background, festooned with chains and human bones, circled
+about by birds that peck at dead men's eyes.  This was frightful
+enough, but Mrs Verloc, though not a well-informed woman, had a
+sufficient knowledge of the institutions of her country to know
+that gallows are no longer erected romantically on the banks of
+dismal rivers or on wind-swept headlands, but in the yards of
+jails.  There within four high walls, as if into a pit, at dawn of
+day, the murderer was brought out to be executed, with a horrible
+quietness and, as the reports in the newspapers always said, "in
+the presence of the authorities."  With her eyes staring on the
+floor, her nostrils quivering with anguish and shame, she imagined
+herself all alone amongst a lot of strange gentlemen in silk hats
+who were calmly proceeding about the business of hanging her by the
+neck.  That - never!  Never!  And how was it done?  The
+impossibility of imagining the details of such quiet execution
+added something maddening to her abstract terror.  The newspapers
+never gave any details except one, but that one with some
+affectation was always there at the end of a meagre report.  Mrs
+Verloc remembered its nature.  It came with a cruel burning pain
+into her head, as if the words "The drop given was fourteen feet"
+had been scratched on her brain with a hot needle.  "The drop given
+was fourteen feet."
+
+These words affected her physically too.  Her throat became
+convulsed in waves to resist strangulation; and the apprehension of
+the jerk was so vivid that she seized her head in both hands as if
+to save it from being torn off her shoulders.  "The drop given was
+fourteen feet."  No! that must never be.  She could not stand THAT.
+The thought of it even was not bearable.  She could not stand
+thinking of it.  Therefore Mrs Verloc formed the resolution to go
+at once and throw herself into the river off one of the bridges.
+
+This time she managed to refasten her veil.  With her face as if
+masked, all black from head to foot except for some flowers in her
+hat, she looked up mechanically at the clock.  She thought it must
+have stopped.  She could not believe that only two minutes had
+passed since she had looked at it last.  Of course not.  It had
+been stopped all the time.  As a matter of fact, only three minutes
+had elapsed from the moment she had drawn the first deep, easy
+breath after the blow, to this moment when Mrs Verloc formed the
+resolution to drown herself in the Thames.  But Mrs Verloc could
+not believe that.  She seemed to have heard or read that clocks and
+watches always stopped at the moment of murder for the undoing of
+the murderer.  She did not care.  "To the bridge - and over I go."
+. . . But her movements were slow.
+
+She dragged herself painfully across the shop, and had to hold on
+to the handle of the door before she found the necessary fortitude
+to open it.  The street frightened her, since it led either to the
+gallows or to the river.  She floundered over the doorstep head
+forward, arms thrown out, like a person falling over the parapet of
+a bridge.  This entrance into the open air had a foretaste of
+drowning; a slimy dampness enveloped her, entered her nostrils,
+clung to her hair.  It was not actually raining, but each gas lamp
+had a rusty little halo of mist.  The van and horses were gone, and
+in the black street the curtained window of the carters' eating-
+house made a square patch of soiled blood-red light glowing faintly
+very near the level of the pavement.  Mrs Verloc, dragging herself
+slowly towards it, thought that she was a very friendless woman.
+It was true.  It was so true that, in a sudden longing to see some
+friendly face, she could think of no one else but of Mrs Neale, the
+charwoman.  She had no acquaintances of her own.  Nobody would miss
+her in a social way.  It must not be imagined that the Widow Verloc
+had forgotten her mother.  This was not so.  Winnie had been a good
+daughter because she had been a devoted sister.  Her mother had
+always leaned on her for support.  No consolation or advice could
+be expected there.  Now that Stevie was dead the bond seemed to be
+broken.  She could not face the old woman with the horrible tale.
+Moreover, it was too far.  The river was her present destination.
+Mrs Verloc tried to forget her mother.
+
+Each step cost her an effort of will which seemed the last
+possible.  Mrs Verloc had dragged herself past the red glow of the
+eating-house window.  "To the bridge - and over I go," she repeated
+to herself with fierce obstinacy.  She put out her hand just in
+time to steady herself against a lamp-post.  "I'll never get there
+before morning," she thought.  The fear of death paralysed her
+efforts to escape the gallows.  It seemed to her she had been
+staggering in that street for hours.  "I'll never get there," she
+thought.  "They'll find me knocking about the streets.  It's too
+far."  She held on, panting under her black veil.
+
+"The drop given was fourteen feet."
+
+She pushed the lamp-post away from her violently, and found herself
+walking.  But another wave of faintness overtook her like a great
+sea, washing away her heart clean out of her breast.  "I will never
+get there," she muttered, suddenly arrested, swaying lightly where
+she stood.  "Never."
+
+And perceiving the utter impossibility of walking as far as the
+nearest bridge, Mrs Verloc thought of a flight abroad.
+
+It came to her suddenly.  Murderers escaped.  They escaped abroad.
+Spain or California.  Mere names.  The vast world created for the
+glory of man was only a vast blank to Mrs Verloc.  She did not know
+which way to turn.  Murderers had friends, relations, helpers -
+they had knowledge.  She had nothing.  She was the most lonely of
+murderers that ever struck a mortal blow.  She was alone in London:
+and the whole town of marvels and mud, with its maze of streets and
+its mass of lights, was sunk in a hopeless night, rested at the
+bottom of a black abyss from which no unaided woman could hope to
+scramble out.
+
+She swayed forward, and made a fresh start blindly, with an awful
+dread of falling down; but at the end of a few steps, unexpectedly,
+she found a sensation of support, of security.  Raising her head,
+she saw a man's face peering closely at her veil.  Comrade Ossipon
+was not afraid of strange women, and no feeling of false delicacy
+could prevent him from striking an acquaintance with a woman
+apparently very much intoxicated.  Comrade Ossipon was interested
+in women.  He held up this one between his two large palms, peering
+at her in a business-like way till he heard her say faintly "Mr
+Ossipon!" and then he very nearly let her drop to the ground.
+
+"Mrs Verloc!" he exclaimed.  "You here!"
+
+It seemed impossible to him that she should have been drinking.
+But one never knows.  He did not go into that question, but
+attentive not to discourage kind fate surrendering to him the widow
+of Comrade Verloc, he tried to draw her to his breast.  To his
+astonishment she came quite easily, and even rested on his arm for
+a moment before she attempted to disengage herself.  Comrade
+Ossipon would not be brusque with kind fate.  He withdrew his arm
+in a natural way.
+
+"You recognised me," she faltered out, standing before him, fairly
+steady on her legs.
+
+"Of course I did," said Ossipon with perfect readiness.  "I was
+afraid you were going to fall.  I've thought of you too often
+lately not to recognise you anywhere, at any time.  I've always
+thought of you - ever since I first set eyes on you."
+
+Mrs Verloc seemed not to hear.  "You were coming to the shop?" she
+said nervously.
+
+"Yes; at once," answered Ossipon.  "Directly I read the paper."
+
+In fact, Comrade Ossipon had been skulking for a good two hours in
+the neighbourhood of Brett Street, unable to make up his mind for a
+bold move.  The robust anarchist was not exactly a bold conqueror.
+He remembered that Mrs Verloc had never responded to his glances by
+the slightest sign of encouragement.  Besides, he thought the shop
+might be watched by the police, and Comrade Ossipon did not wish
+the police to form an exaggerated notion of his revolutionary
+sympathies.  Even now he did not know precisely what to do.  In
+comparison with his usual amatory speculations this was a big and
+serious undertaking.  He ignored how much there was in it and how
+far he would have to go in order to get hold of what there was to
+get - supposing there was a chance at all.  These perplexities
+checking his elation imparted to his tone a soberness well in
+keeping with the circumstances.
+
+"May I ask you where you were going?" he inquired in a subdued
+voice.
+
+"Don't ask me!" cried Mrs Verloc with a shuddering, repressed
+violence.  All her strong vitality recoiled from the idea of death.
+"Never mind where I was going. . . ."
+
+Ossipon concluded that she was very much excited but perfectly
+sober.  She remained silent by his side for moment, then all at
+once she did something which he did not expect.  She slipped her
+hand under his arm.  He was startled by the act itself certainly,
+and quite as much too by the palpably resolute character of this
+movement.  But this being a delicate affair, Comrade Ossipon
+behaved with delicacy.  He contented himself by pressing the hand
+slightly against his robust ribs.  At the same time he felt himself
+being impelled forward, and yielded to the impulse.  At the end of
+Brett Street he became aware of being directed to the left.  He
+submitted.
+
+The fruiterer at the corner had put out the blazing glory of his
+oranges and lemons, and Brett Place was all darkness, interspersed
+with the misty halos of the few lamps defining its triangular
+shape, with a cluster of three lights on one stand in the middle.
+The dark forms of the man and woman glided slowly arm in arm along
+the walls with a loverlike and homeless aspect in the miserable
+night.
+
+"What would you say if I were to tell you that I was going to find
+you?" Mrs Verloc asked, gripping his arm with force.
+
+"I would say that you couldn't find anyone more ready to help you
+in your trouble," answered Ossipon, with a notion of making
+tremendous headway.  In fact, the progress of this delicate affair
+was almost taking his breath away.
+
+"In my trouble!" Mrs Verloc repeated slowly.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And do you know what my trouble is?" she whispered with strange
+intensity.
+
+"Ten minutes after seeing the evening paper," explained Ossipon
+with ardour, "I met a fellow whom you may have seen once or twice
+at the shop perhaps, and I had a talk with him which left no doubt
+whatever in my mind.  Then I started for here, wondering whether
+you - I've been fond of you beyond words ever since I set eyes on
+your face," he cried, as if unable to command his feelings.
+
+Comrade Ossipon assumed correctly that no woman was capable of
+wholly disbelieving such a statement.  But he did not know that Mrs
+Verloc accepted it with all the fierceness the instinct of self-
+preservation puts into the grip of a drowning person.  To the widow
+of Mr Verloc the robust anarchist was like a radiant messenger of
+life.
+
+They walked slowly, in step.  "I thought so," Mrs Verloc murmured
+faintly.
+
+"You've read it in my eyes," suggested Ossipon with great
+assurance.
+
+"Yes," she breathed out into his inclined ear.
+
+"A love like mine could not be concealed from a woman like you," he
+went on, trying to detach his mind from material considerations
+such as the business value of the shop, and the amount of money Mr
+Verloc might have left in the bank.  He applied himself to the
+sentimental side of the affair.  In his heart of hearts he was a
+little shocked at his success.  Verloc had been a good fellow, and
+certainly a very decent husband as far as one could see.  However,
+Comrade Ossipon was not going to quarrel with his luck for the sake
+of a dead man.  Resolutely he suppressed his sympathy for the ghost
+of Comrade Verloc, and went on.
+
+"I could not conceal it.  I was too full of you.  I daresay you
+could not help seeing it in my eyes.  But I could not guess it.
+You were always so distant. . . ."
+
+"What else did you expect?" burst out Mrs Verloc.  "I was a
+respectable woman - "
+
+She paused, then added, as if speaking to herself, in sinister
+resentment: "Till he made me what I am."
+
+Ossipon let that pass, and took up his running.  "He never did seem
+to me to be quite worthy of you," he began, throwing loyalty to the
+winds.  "You were worthy of a better fate."
+
+Mrs Verloc interrupted bitterly:
+
+"Better fate!  He cheated me out of seven years of life."
+
+"You seemed to live so happily with him."  Ossipon tried to
+exculpate the lukewarmness of his past conduct.  "It's that what's
+made me timid.  You seemed to love him.  I was surprised - and
+jealous," he added.
+
+"Love him!" Mrs Verloc cried out in a whisper, full of scorn and
+rage.  "Love him!  I was a good wife to him.  I am a respectable
+woman.  You thought I loved him!  You did!  Look here, Tom - "
+
+The sound of this name thrilled Comrade Ossipon with pride.  For
+his name was Alexander, and he was called Tom by arrangement with
+the most familiar of his intimates.  It was a name of friendship -
+of moments of expansion.  He had no idea that she had ever heard it
+used by anybody.  It was apparent that she had not only caught it,
+but had treasured it in her memory - perhaps in her heart.
+
+"Look here, Tom!  I was a young girl.  I was done up.  I was tired.
+I had two people depending on what I could do, and it did seem as
+if I couldn't do any more.  Two people - mother and the boy.  He
+was much more mine than mother's.  I sat up nights and nights with
+him on my lap, all alone upstairs, when I wasn't more than eight
+years old myself.  And then -  He was mine, I tell you. . . . You
+can't understand that.  No man can understand it.  What was I to
+do?  There was a young fellow - "
+
+The memory of the early romance with the young butcher survived,
+tenacious, like the image of a glimpsed ideal in that heart
+quailing before the fear of the gallows and full of revolt against
+death.
+
+"That was the man I loved then," went on the widow of Mr Verloc.
+"I suppose he could see it in my eyes too.  Five and twenty
+shillings a week, and his father threatened to kick him out of the
+business if he made such a fool of himself as to marry a girl with
+a crippled mother and a crazy idiot of a boy on her hands.  But he
+would hang about me, till one evening I found the courage to slam
+the door in his face.  I had to do it.  I loved him dearly.  Five
+and twenty shillings a week!  There was that other man - a good
+lodger.  What is a girl to do?  Could I've gone on the streets?  He
+seemed kind.  He wanted me, anyhow.  What was I to do with mother
+and that poor boy?  Eh?  I said yes.  He seemed good-natured, he
+was freehanded, he had money, he never said anything.  Seven years
+- seven years a good wife to him, the kind, the good, the generous,
+the -  And he loved me.  Oh yes.  He loved me till I sometimes
+wished myself -  Seven years.  Seven years a wife to him.  And do
+you know what he was, that dear friend of yours?  Do you know what
+he was?  He was a devil!"
+
+The superhuman vehemence of that whispered statement completely
+stunned Comrade Ossipon.  Winnie Verloc turning about held him by
+both arms, facing him under the falling mist in the darkness and
+solitude of Brett Place, in which all sounds of life seemed lost as
+if in a triangular well of asphalt and bricks, of blind houses and
+unfeeling stones.
+
+"No; I didn't know," he declared, with a sort of flabby stupidity,
+whose comical aspect was lost upon a woman haunted by the fear of
+the gallows, "but I do now.  I - I understand," he floundered on,
+his mind speculating as to what sort of atrocities Verloc could
+have practised under the sleepy, placid appearances of his married
+estate.  It was positively awful.  "I understand," he repeated, and
+then by a sudden inspiration uttered an - "Unhappy woman!" of lofty
+commiseration instead of the more familiar "Poor darling!" of his
+usual practice.  This was no usual case.  He felt conscious of
+something abnormal going on, while he never lost sight of the
+greatness of the stake.  "Unhappy, brave woman!"
+
+He was glad to have discovered that variation; but he could
+discover nothing else.
+
+"Ah, but he is dead now," was the best he could do.  And he put a
+remarkable amount of animosity into his guarded exclamation.  Mrs
+Verloc caught at his arm with a sort of frenzy.
+
+"You guessed then he was dead," she murmured, as if beside herself.
+"You!  You guessed what I had to do.  Had to!"
+
+There were suggestions of triumph, relief, gratitude in the
+indefinable tone of these words.  It engrossed the whole attention
+of Ossipon to the detriment of mere literal sense.  He wondered
+what was up with her, why she had worked herself into this state of
+wild excitement.  He even began to wonder whether the hidden causes
+of that Greenwich Park affair did not lie deep in the unhappy
+circumstances of the Verlocs' married life.  He went so far as to
+suspect Mr Verloc of having selected that extraordinary manner of
+committing suicide.  By Jove! that would account for the utter
+inanity and wrong-headedness of the thing.  No anarchist
+manifestation was required by the circumstances.  Quite the
+contrary; and Verloc was as well aware of that as any other
+revolutionist of his standing.  What an immense joke if Verloc had
+simply made fools of the whole of Europe, of the revolutionary
+world, of the police, of the press, and of the cocksure Professor
+as well.  Indeed, thought Ossipon, in astonishment, it seemed
+almost certain that he did!  Poor beggar!  It struck him as very
+possible that of that household of two it wasn't precisely the man
+who was the devil.
+
+Alexander Ossipon, nicknamed the Doctor, was naturally inclined to
+think indulgently of his men friends.  He eyed Mrs Verloc hanging
+on his arm.  Of his women friends he thought in a specially
+practical way.  Why Mrs Verloc should exclaim at his knowledge of
+Mr Verloc's death, which was no guess at all, did not disturb him
+beyond measure.  They often talked like lunatics.  But he was
+curious to know how she had been informed.  The papers could tell
+her nothing beyond the mere fact: the man blown to pieces in
+Greenwich Park not having been identified.  It was inconceivable on
+any theory that Verloc should have given her an inkling of his
+intention - whatever it was.  This problem interested Comrade
+Ossipon immensely.  He stopped short.  They had gone then along the
+three sides of Brett Place, and were near the end of Brett Street
+again.
+
+"How did you first come to hear of it?" he asked in a tone he tried
+to render appropriate to the character of the revelations which had
+been made to him by the woman at his side.
+
+She shook violently for a while before she answered in a listless
+voice.
+
+"From the police.  A chief inspector came, Chief Inspector Heat he
+said he was.  He showed me - "
+
+Mrs Verloc choked.  "Oh, Tom, they had to gather him up with a
+shovel."
+
+Her breast heaved with dry sobs.  In a moment Ossipon found his
+tongue.
+
+"The police!  Do you mean to say the police came already?  That
+Chief Inspector Heat himself actually came to tell you."
+
+"Yes," she confirmed in the same listless tone.  "He came just like
+this.  He came.  I didn't know.  He showed me a piece of overcoat,
+and - just like that.  Do you know this? he says."
+
+"Heat!  Heat!  And what did he do?"
+
+Mrs Verloc's head dropped.  "Nothing.  He did nothing.  He went
+away.  The police were on that man's side," she murmured
+tragically.  "Another one came too."
+
+"Another - another inspector, do you mean?" asked Ossipon, in great
+excitement, and very much in the tone of a scared child.
+
+"I don't know.  He came.  He looked like a foreigner.  He may have
+been one of them Embassy people."
+
+Comrade Ossipon nearly collapsed under this new shock.
+
+"Embassy!  Are you aware what you are saying?  What Embassy?  What
+on earth do you mean by Embassy?"
+
+"It's that place in Chesham Square.  The people he cursed so.  I
+don't know.  What does it matter!"
+
+"And that fellow, what did he do or say to you?"
+
+"I don't remember. . . . Nothing . . . . I don't care.  Don't ask
+me," she pleaded in a weary voice.
+
+"All right.  I won't," assented Ossipon tenderly.  And he meant it
+too, not because he was touched by the pathos of the pleading
+voice, but because he felt himself losing his footing in the depths
+of this tenebrous affair.  Police!  Embassy!  Phew!  For fear of
+adventuring his intelligence into ways where its natural lights
+might fail to guide it safely he dismissed resolutely all
+suppositions, surmises, and theories out of his mind.  He had the
+woman there, absolutely flinging herself at him, and that was the
+principal consideration.  But after what he had heard nothing could
+astonish him any more.  And when Mrs Verloc, as if startled
+suddenly out of a dream of safety, began to urge upon him wildly
+the necessity of an immediate flight on the Continent, he did not
+exclaim in the least.  He simply said with unaffected regret that
+there was no train till the morning, and stood looking thoughtfully
+at her face, veiled in black net, in the light of a gas lamp veiled
+in a gauze of mist.
+
+Near him, her black form merged in the night, like a figure half
+chiselled out of a block of black stone.  It was impossible to say
+what she knew, how deep she was involved with policemen and
+Embassies.  But if she wanted to get away, it was not for him to
+object.  He was anxious to be off himself.  He felt that the
+business, the shop so strangely familiar to chief inspectors and
+members of foreign Embassies, was not the place for him.  That must
+be dropped.  But there was the rest.  These savings.  The money!
+
+"You must hide me till the morning somewhere," she said in a
+dismayed voice.
+
+"Fact is, my dear, I can't take you where I live.  I share the room
+with a friend."
+
+He was somewhat dismayed himself.  In the morning the blessed `tecs
+will be out in all the stations, no doubt.  And if they once got
+hold of her, for one reason or another she would be lost to him
+indeed.
+
+"But you must.  Don't you care for me at all - at all?  What are
+you thinking of?"
+
+She said this violently, but she let her clasped hands fall in
+discouragement.  There was a silence, while the mist fell, and
+darkness reigned undisturbed over Brett Place.  Not a soul, not
+even the vagabond, lawless, and amorous soul of a cat, came near
+the man and the woman facing each other.
+
+"It would be possible perhaps to find a safe lodging somewhere,"
+Ossipon spoke at last.  "But the truth is, my dear, I have not
+enough money to go and try with - only a few pence.  We
+revolutionists are not rich."
+
+He had fifteen shillings in his pocket.  He added:
+
+"And there's the journey before us, too - first thing in the
+morning at that."
+
+She did not move, made no sound, and Comrade Ossipon's heart sank a
+little.  Apparently she had no suggestion to offer.  Suddenly she
+clutched at her breast, as if she had felt a sharp pain there.
+
+"But I have," she gasped.  "I have the money.  I have enough money.
+Tom!  Let us go from here."
+
+"How much have you got?" he inquired, without stirring to her tug;
+for he was a cautious man.
+
+"I have the money, I tell you.  All the money."
+
+"What do you mean by it?  All the money there was in the bank, or
+what?" he asked incredulously, but ready not to be surprised at
+anything in the way of luck.
+
+"Yes, yes!" she said nervously.  "All there was.  I've it all."
+
+"How on earth did you manage to get hold of it already?" he
+marvelled.
+
+"He gave it to me," she murmured, suddenly subdued and trembling.
+Comrade Ossipon put down his rising surprise with a firm hand.
+
+"Why, then - we are saved," he uttered slowly.
+
+She leaned forward, and sank against his breast.  He welcomed her
+there.  She had all the money.  Her hat was in the way of very
+marked effusion; her veil too.  He was adequate in his
+manifestations, but no more.  She received them without resistance
+and without abandonment, passively, as if only half-sensible.  She
+freed herself from his lax embraces without difficulty.
+
+"You will save me, Tom," she broke out, recoiling, but still
+keeping her hold on him by the two lapels of his damp coat.  "Save
+me.  Hide me.  Don't let them have me.  You must kill me first.  I
+couldn't do it myself - I couldn't, I couldn't - not even for what
+I am afraid of."
+
+She was confoundedly bizarre, he thought.  She was beginning to
+inspire him with an indefinite uneasiness.  He said surlily, for he
+was busy with important thoughts:
+
+"What the devil ARE you afraid of?"
+
+"Haven't you guessed what I was driven to do!" cried the woman.
+Distracted by the vividness of her dreadful apprehensions, her head
+ringing with forceful words, that kept the horror of her position
+before her mind, she had imagined her incoherence to be clearness
+itself.  She had no conscience of how little she had audibly said
+in the disjointed phrases completed only in her thought.  She had
+felt the relief of a full confession, and she gave a special
+meaning to every sentence spoken by Comrade Ossipon, whose
+knowledge did not in the least resemble her own.  "Haven't you
+guessed what I was driven to do!"  Her voice fell.  "You needn't be
+long in guessing then what I am afraid of," she continued, in a
+bitter and sombre murmur.  "I won't have it.  I won't.  I won't.  I
+won't.  You must promise to kill me first!"  She shook the lapels
+of his coat.  "It must never be!"
+
+He assured her curtly that no promises on his part were necessary,
+but he took good care not to contradict her in set terms, because
+he had had much to do with excited women, and he was inclined in
+general to let his experience guide his conduct in preference to
+applying his sagacity to each special case.  His sagacity in this
+case was busy in other directions.  Women's words fell into water,
+but the shortcomings of time-tables remained.  The insular nature
+of Great Britain obtruded itself upon his notice in an odious form.
+"Might just as well be put under lock and key every night," he
+thought irritably, as nonplussed as though he had a wall to scale
+with the woman on his back.  Suddenly he slapped his forehead.  He
+had by dint of cudgelling his brains just thought of the
+Southampton - St Malo service.  The boat left about midnight.
+There was a train at 10.30.  He became cheery and ready to act.
+
+"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.
+
+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. . . . 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."
+
+Ossipon came out.  Notwithstanding his endeavours 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.
+
+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 wasting 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 beyond the splashboard, handed over to him the new
+pigskin pocket-book.  He received it without a word, and seemed to
+plunge it deep somewhere 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 looking 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 Ossipon could not
+repress a shudder.  He exaggerated it then purposely, and muttered:
+
+"I am cold.  I got chilled through."
+
+Mrs Verloc looked straight ahead at the perspective 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 extremely 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."
+
+"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:
+
+"I remember now!  He didn't bank in his own name.  He told me once
+that it was on deposit in the name of Prozor."
+
+"You are sure?"
+
+"Certain."
+
+"You don't think the bank had any knowledge of his real name?  Or
+anybody in the bank or - "
+
+She shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"How can I know?  Is it likely, Tom?
+
+"No.  I suppose it's not likely.  It would have been more
+comfortable to know. . . . Here 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 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 Ossipon 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 conventional 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 murdering 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!"
+
+He spoke scientifically in his secret fear.  And Mrs Verloc,
+hearing these words of commendation vouchsafed to her beloved dead,
+swayed forward 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.
+
+"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 purpose, 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. . . . "
+
+She paused.  Then in a gust of confidence and gratitude, "I will
+live all my days for you, Tom!" she sobbed out.
+
+"Go over into the other corner of the carriage, away from the
+platform," said Ossipon solicitously.  She let her saviour settle
+her comfortably, and he watched the coming on of another crisis of
+weeping, still more violent than the first.  He watched the
+symptoms with a sort of medical air, as if counting seconds.  He
+heard the guard's whistle at last.  An involuntary contraction of
+the upper lip bared his teeth with all the aspect of savage
+resolution as he felt the train beginning to move.  Mrs Verloc
+heard and felt nothing, and Ossipon, her saviour, stood still.  He
+felt the train roll quicker, rumbling heavily to the sound of the
+woman's loud sobs, and then crossing the carriage in two long
+strides he opened the door deliberately, and leaped out.
+
+He had leaped out at the very end of the platform; and such was his
+determination in sticking to his desperate plan that he managed by
+a sort of miracle, performed almost in the air, to slam to the door
+of the carriage.  Only then did he find himself rolling head over
+heels like a shot rabbit.  He was bruised, shaken, pale as death,
+and out of breath when he got up.  But he was calm, and perfectly
+able to meet the excited crowd of railway men who had gathered
+round him in a moment.  He explained, in gentle and convincing
+tones, that his wife had started at a moment's notice for Brittany
+to her dying mother; that, of course, she was greatly up-set, and
+he considerably concerned at her state; that he was trying to cheer
+her up, and had absolutely failed to notice at first that the train
+was moving out.  To the general exclamation, "Why didn't you go on
+to Southampton, then, sir?" he objected the inexperience of a young
+sister-in-law left alone in the house with three small children,
+and her alarm at his absence, the telegraph offices being closed.
+He had acted on impulse.  "But I don't think I'll ever try that
+again," he concluded; smiled all round; distributed some small
+change, and marched without a limp out of the station.
+
+Outside, Comrade Ossipon, flush of safe banknotes as never before
+in his life, refused the offer of a cab.
+
+"I can walk," he said, with a little friendly laugh to the civil
+driver.
+
+He could walk.  He walked.  He crossed the bridge.  Later on the
+towers of the Abbey saw in their massive immobility the yellow bush
+of his hair passing under the lamps.  The lights of Victoria saw
+him too, and Sloane Square, and the railings of the park.  And
+Comrade Ossipon once more found himself on a bridge.  The river, a
+sinister marvel of still shadows and flowing gleams mingling below
+in a black silence, arrested his attention.  He stood looking over
+the parapet for a long time.  The clock tower boomed a brazen blast
+above his drooping head.  He looked up at the dial. . . . Half-past
+twelve of a wild night in the Channel.
+
+And again Comrade Ossipon walked.  His robust form was seen that
+night in distant parts of the enormous town slumbering monstrously
+on a carpet of mud under a veil of raw mist.  It was seen crossing
+the streets without life and sound, or diminishing in the
+interminable straight perspectives of shadowy houses bordering
+empty roadways lined by strings of gas lamps.  He walked through
+Squares, Places, Ovals, Commons, through monotonous streets with
+unknown names where the dust of humanity settles inert and hopeless
+out of the stream of life.  He walked.  And suddenly turning into a
+strip of a front garden with a mangy grass plot, he let himself
+into a small grimy house with a latch-key he took out of his
+pocket.
+
+He threw himself down on his bed all dressed, and lay still for a
+whole quarter of an hour.  Then he sat up suddenly, drawing up his
+knees, and clasping his legs.  The first dawn found him open-eyed,
+in that same posture.  This man who could walk so long, so far, so
+aimlessly, without showing a sign of fatigue, could also remain
+sitting still for hours without stirring a limb or an eyelid.  But
+when the late sun sent its rays into the room he unclasped his
+hands, and fell back on the pillow.  His eyes stared at the
+ceiling.  And suddenly they closed.  Comrade Ossipon slept in the
+sunlight.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+
+The enormous iron padlock on the doors of the wall cupboard was the
+only object in the room on which the eye could rest without
+becoming afflicted by the miserable unloveliness of forms and the
+poverty of material.  Unsaleable in the ordinary course of business
+on account of its noble proportions, it had been ceded to the
+Professor for a few pence by a marine dealer in the east of London.
+The room was large, clean, respectable, and poor with that poverty
+suggesting the starvation of every human need except mere bread.
+There was nothing on the walls but the paper, an expanse of
+arsenical green, soiled with indelible smudges here and there, and
+with stains resembling faded maps of uninhabited continents.
+
+At a deal table near a window sat Comrade Ossipon, holding his head
+between his fists.  The Professor, dressed in his only suit of
+shoddy tweeds, but flapping to and fro on the bare boards a pair of
+incredibly dilapidated slippers, had thrust his hands deep into the
+overstrained pockets of his jacket.  He was relating to his robust
+guest a visit he had lately been paying to the Apostle Michaelis.
+The Perfect Anarchist had even been unbending a little.
+
+"The fellow didn't know anything of Verloc's death.  Of course!  He
+never looks at the newspapers.  They make him too sad, he says.
+But never mind.  I walked into his cottage.  Not a soul anywhere.
+I had to shout half-a-dozen times before he answered me.  I thought
+he was fast asleep yet, in bed.  But not at all.  He had been
+writing his book for four hours already.  He sat in that tiny cage
+in a litter of manuscript.  There was a half-eaten raw carrot on
+the table near him.  His breakfast.  He lives on a diet of raw
+carrots and a little milk now."
+
+"How does he look on it?" asked Comrade Ossipon listlessly.
+
+"Angelic. . . . I picked up a handful of his pages from the floor.
+The poverty of reasoning is astonishing.  He has no logic.  He
+can't think consecutively.  But that's nothing.  He has divided his
+biography into three parts, entitled - `Faith, Hope, Charity.'  He
+is elaborating now the idea of a world planned out like an immense
+and nice hospital, with gardens and flowers, in which the strong
+are to devote themselves to the nursing of the weak."
+
+The Professor paused.
+
+"Conceive you this folly, Ossipon?  The weak!  The source of all
+evil on this earth!" he continued with his grim assurance.  "I told
+him that I dreamt of a world like shambles, where the weak would be
+taken in hand for utter extermination."
+
+"Do you understand, Ossipon?  The source of all evil!  They are our
+sinister masters - the weak, the flabby, the silly, the cowardly,
+the faint of heart, and the slavish of mind.  They have power.
+They are the multitude.  Theirs is the kingdom of the earth.
+Exterminate, exterminate!  That is the only way of progress.  It
+is!  Follow me, Ossipon.  First the great multitude of the weak
+must go, then the only relatively strong.  You see?  First the
+blind, then the deaf and the dumb, then the halt and the lame - and
+so on.  Every taint, every vice, every prejudice, every convention
+must meet its doom."
+
+"And what remains?" asked Ossipon in a stifled voice.
+
+"I remain - if I am strong enough," asserted the sallow little
+Professor, whose large ears, thin like membranes, and standing far
+out from the sides of his frail skull, took on suddenly a deep red
+tint.
+
+"Haven't I suffered enough from this oppression of the weak?" he
+continued forcibly.  Then tapping the breast-pocket of his jacket:
+"And yet I AM the force," he went on.  "But the time!  The time!
+Give me time!  Ah! that multitude, too stupid to feel either pity
+or fear.  Sometimes I think they have everything on their side.
+Everything - even death - my own weapon."
+
+"Come and drink some beer with me at the Silenus," said the robust
+Ossipon after an interval of silence pervaded by the rapid flap,
+flap of the slippers on the feet of the Perfect Anarchist.  This
+last accepted.  He was jovial that day in his own peculiar way.  He
+slapped Ossipon's shoulder.
+
+"Beer!  So be it!  Let us drink and he merry, for we are strong,
+and to-morrow we die."
+
+He busied himself with putting on his boots, and talked meanwhile
+in his curt, resolute tones.
+
+"What's the matter with you, Ossipon?  You look glum and seek even
+my company.  I hear that you are seen constantly in places where
+men utter foolish things over glasses of liquor.  Why?  Have you
+abandoned your collection of women?  They are the weak who feed the
+strong - eh?"
+
+He stamped one foot, and picked up his other laced boot, heavy,
+thick-soled, unblacked, mended many times.  He smiled to himself
+grimly.
+
+"Tell me, Ossipon, terrible man, has ever one of your victims
+killed herself for you - or are your triumphs so far incomplete -
+for blood alone puts a seal on greatness?  Blood.  Death.  Look at
+history."
+
+"You be damned," said Ossipon, without turning his head.
+
+"Why?  Let that be the hope of the weak, whose theology has
+invented hell for the strong.  Ossipon, my feeling for you is
+amicable contempt.  You couldn't kill a fly."
+
+But rolling to the feast on the top of the omnibus the Professor
+lost his high spirits.  The contemplation of the multitudes
+thronging the pavements extinguished his assurance under a load of
+doubt and uneasiness which he could only shake off after a period
+of seclusion in the room with the large cupboard closed by an
+enormous padlock.
+
+"And so," said over his shoulder Comrade Ossipon, who sat on the
+seat behind.  "And so Michaelis dreams of a world like a beautiful
+and cheery hospital."
+
+"Just so.  An immense charity for the healing of the weak,"
+assented the Professor sardonically.
+
+"That's silly," admitted Ossipon.  "You can't heal weakness.  But
+after all Michaelis may not be so far wrong.  In two hundred years
+doctors will rule the world.  Science reigns already.  It reigns in
+the shade maybe - but it reigns.  And all science must culminate at
+last in the science of healing - not the weak, but the strong.
+Mankind wants to live - to live."
+
+"Mankind," asserted the Professor with a self-confident glitter of
+his iron-rimmed spectacles, "does not know what it wants."
+
+"But you do," growled Ossipon.  "Just now you've been crying for
+time - time.  Well.  The doctors will serve you out your time - if
+you are good.  You profess yourself to be one of the strong -
+because you carry in your pocket enough stuff to send yourself and,
+say, twenty other people into eternity.  But eternity is a damned
+hole.  It's time that you need.  You - if you met a man who could
+give you for certain ten years of time, you would call him your
+master."
+
+"My device is: No God!  No Master," said the Professor
+sententiously as he rose to get off the `bus.
+
+Ossipon followed.  "Wait till you are lying flat on your back at
+the end of your time," he retorted, jumping off the footboard after
+the other.  "Your scurvy, shabby, mangy little bit of time," he
+continued across the street, and hopping on to the curbstone.
+
+"Ossipon, I think that you are a humbug," the Professor said,
+opening masterfully the doors of the renowned Silenus.  And when
+they had established themselves at a little table he developed
+further this gracious thought.  "You are not even a doctor.  But
+you are funny.  Your notion of a humanity universally putting out
+the tongue and taking the pill from pole to pole at the bidding of
+a few solemn jokers is worthy of the prophet.  Prophecy!  What's
+the good of thinking of what will be!"  He raised his glass.  "To
+the destruction of what is," he said calmly.
+
+He drank and relapsed into his peculiarly close manner of silence.
+The thought of a mankind as numerous as the sands of the sea-shore,
+as indestructible, as difficult to handle, oppressed him.  The
+sound of exploding bombs was lost in their immensity of passive
+grains without an echo.  For instance, this Verloc affair.  Who
+thought of it now?
+
+Ossipon, as if suddenly compelled by some mysterious force, pulled
+a much-folded newspaper out of is pocket.  The Professor raised his
+head at the rustle.
+
+"What's that paper?  Anything in it?" he asked.
+
+Ossipon started like a scared somnambulist.
+
+"Nothing.  Nothing whatever.  The thing's ten days old.  I forgot
+it in my pocket, I suppose."
+
+But he did not throw the old thing away.  Before returning it to
+his pocket he stole a glance at the last lines of a paragraph.
+They ran thus: "AN IMPENETRABLE MYSTERY SEEMS DESTINED TO HANG FOR
+EVER OVER THIS ACT OF MADNESS OR DESPAIR."
+
+Such were the end words of an item of news headed: "Suicide of Lady
+Passenger from a cross-Channel Boat."  Comrade Ossipon was familiar
+with the beauties of its journalistic style.  "AN IMPENETRABLE
+MYSTERY SEEMS DESTINED TO HANG FOR EVER. . . "  He knew every word
+by heart.  "AN IMPENETRABLE MYSTERY. . . . "
+
+And the robust anarchist, hanging his head on his breast, fell into
+a long reverie.
+
+He was menaced by this thing in the very sources of his existence.
+He could not issue forth to meet his various conquests, those that
+he courted on benches in Kensington Gardens, and those he met near
+area railings, without the dread of beginning to talk to them of an
+impenetrable mystery destined. . . . He was becoming scientifically
+afraid of insanity lying in wait for him amongst these lines.  "TO
+HANG FOR EVER OVER."  It was an obsession, a torture.  He had
+lately failed to keep several of these appointments, whose note
+used to be an unbounded trustfulness in the language of sentiment
+and manly tenderness.  The confiding disposition of various classes
+of women satisfied the needs of his self-love, and put some
+material means into his hand.  He needed it to live.  It was there.
+But if he could no longer make use of it, he ran the risk of
+starving his ideals and his body . . . "THIS ACT OF MADNESS OR
+DESPAIR."
+
+"An impenetrable mystery" was sure "to hang for ever" as far as all
+mankind was concerned.  But what of that if he alone of all men
+could never get rid of the cursed knowledge?  And Comrade Ossipon's
+knowledge was as precise as the newspaper man could make it - up to
+the very threshold of the "MYSTERY DESTINED TO HANG FOR EVER. . .
+."
+
+Comrade Ossipon was well informed.  He knew what the gangway man of
+the steamer had seen: "A lady in a black dress and a black veil,
+wandering at midnight alongside, on the quay.  `Are you going by
+the boat, ma'am,' he had asked her encouragingly.  `This way.'  She
+seemed not to know what to do.  He helped her on board.  She seemed
+weak."
+
+And he knew also what the stewardess had seen: A lady in black with
+a white face standing in the middle of the empty ladies' cabin.
+The stewardess induced her to lie down there.  The lady seemed
+quite unwilling to speak, and as if she were in some awful trouble.
+The next the stewardess knew she was gone from the ladies' cabin.
+The stewardess then went on deck to look for her, and Comrade
+Ossipon was informed that the good woman found the unhappy lady
+lying down in one of the hooded seats.  Her eyes were open, but she
+would not answer anything that was said to her.  She seemed very
+ill.  The stewardess fetched the chief steward, and those two
+people stood by the side of the hooded seat consulting over their
+extraordinary and tragic passenger.  They talked in audible
+whispers (for she seemed past hearing) of St Malo and the Consul
+there, of communicating with her people in England.  Then they went
+away to arrange for her removal down below, for indeed by what they
+could see of her face she seemed to them to be dying.  But Comrade
+Ossipon knew that behind that white mask of despair there was
+struggling against terror and despair a vigour of vitality, a love
+of life that could resist the furious anguish which drives to
+murder and the fear, the blind, mad fear of the gallows.  He knew.
+But the stewardess and the chief steward knew nothing, except that
+when they came back for her in less than five minutes the lady in
+black was no longer in the hooded seat.  She was nowhere.  She was
+gone.  It was then five o'clock in the morning, and it was no
+accident either.  An hour afterwards one of the steamer's hands
+found a wedding ring left lying on the seat.  It had stuck to the
+wood in a bit of wet, and its glitter caught the man's eye.  There
+was a date, 24th June 1879, engraved inside.  "AN IMPENETRABLE
+MYSTERY IS DESTINED TO HANG FOR EVER. . . . "
+
+And Comrade Ossipon raised his bowed head, beloved of various
+humble women of these isles, Apollo-like in the sunniness of its
+bush of hair.
+
+The Professor had grown restless meantime.  He rose.
+
+"Stay," said Ossipon hurriedly.  "Here, what do you know of madness
+and despair?"
+
+The Professor passed the tip of his tongue on his dry, thin lips,
+and said doctorally:
+
+"There are no such things.  All passion is lost now.  The world is
+mediocre, limp, without force.  And madness and despair are a
+force.  And force is a crime in the eyes of the fools, the weak and
+the silly who rule the roost.  You are mediocre.  Verloc, whose
+affair the police has managed to smother so nicely, was mediocre.
+And the police murdered him.  He was mediocre.  Everybody is
+mediocre.  Madness and despair!  Give me that for a lever, and I'll
+move the world.  Ossipon, you have my cordial scorn.  You are
+incapable of conceiving even what the fat-fed citizen would call a
+crime.  You have no force."  He paused, smiling sardonically under
+the fierce glitter of his thick glasses.
+
+"And let me tell you that this little legacy they say you've come
+into has not improved your intelligence.  You sit at your beer like
+a dummy.  Good-bye."
+
+"Will you have it?" said Ossipon, looking up with an idiotic grin.
+
+"Have what?"
+
+"The legacy.  All of it."
+
+The incorruptible Professor only smiled.  His clothes were all but
+falling off him, his boots, shapeless with repairs, heavy like
+lead, let water in at every step.  He said:
+
+"I will send you by-and-by a small bill for certain chemicals which
+I shall order to-morrow.  I need them badly.  Understood - eh?"
+
+Ossipon lowered his head slowly.  He was alone.  "AN IMPENETRABLE
+MYSTERY.  .  . . . "  It seemed to him that suspended in the air
+before him he saw his own brain pulsating to the rhythm of an
+impenetrable mystery.  It was diseased clearly. . . .  "THIS ACT OF
+MADNESS OR DESPAIR."
+
+The mechanical piano near the door played through a valse cheekily,
+then fell silent all at once, as if gone grumpy.
+
+Comrade Ossipon, nicknamed the Doctor, went out of the Silenus
+beer-hall.  At the door he hesitated, blinking at a not too
+splendid sunlight - and the paper with the report of the suicide of
+a lady was in his pocket.  His heart was beating against it.  The
+suicide of a lady - THIS ACT OF MADNESS OR DESPAIR.
+
+He walked along the street without looking where he put his feet;
+and he walked in a direction which would not bring him to the place
+of appointment with another lady (an elderly nursery governess
+putting her trust in an Apollo-like ambrosial head).  He was
+walking away from it.  He could face no woman.  It was ruin.  He
+could neither think, work, sleep, nor eat.  But he was beginning to
+drink with pleasure, with anticipation, with hope.  It was ruin.
+His revolutionary career, sustained by the sentiment and
+trustfulness of many women, was menaced by an impenetrable mystery
+- the mystery of a human brain pulsating wrongfully to the rhythm
+of journalistic phrases.  " . . . WILL HANG FOR EVER OVER THIS ACT.
+. . . It was inclining towards the gutter . . . OF MADNESS OR
+DESPAIR."
+
+"I am seriously ill," he muttered to himself with scientific
+insight.  Already his robust form, with an Embassy's secret-service
+money (inherited from Mr Verloc) in his pockets, was marching in
+the gutter as if in training for the task of an inevitable future.
+Already he bowed his broad shoulders, his head of ambrosial locks,
+as if ready to receive the leather yoke of the sandwich board.  As
+on that night, more than a week ago, Comrade Ossipon walked without
+looking where he put his feet, feeling no fatigue, feeling nothing,
+seeing nothing, hearing not a sound.  "AN IMPENETRABLE MYSTERY. . .
+."  He walked disregarded. . . .  "THIS ACT OF MADNESS OR DESPAIR."
+
+And the incorruptible Professor walked too, averting his eyes from
+the odious multitude of mankind.  He had no future.  He disdained
+it.  He was a force.  His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and
+destruction.  He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable -
+and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and
+despair to the regeneration of the world.  Nobody looked at him.
+He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full
+of men.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Etext of The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad
+