The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
by Joseph Conrad · English · Gutenberg #974 · 541,194 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
Author: Joseph Conrad
Release date: July 1, 1997 [eBook #974]
Most recently updated: February 12, 2023
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/974
Credits: David Price
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SECRET AGENT: A SIMPLE TALE ***
THE
SECRET AGENT
A SIMPLE TALE
BY
JOSEPH CONRAD
SECOND EDITION
METHUEN & CO.,
36 ESSEX STREET W C.
LONDON
_First Published_ . . . _September_ 1907
_Second Edition_ . . . _October_ 1907
TO
H. G. WELLS
THE CHRONICLER OF MR LEWISHAM’S LOVE
THE BIOGRAPHER OF KIPPS AND THE
HISTORIAN OF THE AGES TO COME
THIS SIMPLE TALE OF THE XIX CENTURY
IS AFFECTIONATELY OFFERED
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 æsthetic 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 revolutionists are the enemies of discipline and fatigue
mostly. There are natures too, to whose sense of justice the price
exacted looms up monstrously enormous, odious, oppressive, worrying,
humiliating, extortionate, intolerable. Those are the fanatics. The
remaining portion of social rebels is accounted for by vanity, the mother
of all noble and vile illusions, the 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 mediæval 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 revolutionists,” 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 revolutionists 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
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/974