The Secret Agent

J >> Joseph Conrad >> The Secret Agent


"I could not conceal it. I was too full of you. I daresay you could not
help seeing it in my eyes. But I could not guess it. You were always so
distant. . . ."

"What else did you expect?" burst out Mrs Verloc. "I was a respectable
woman--"

She paused, then added, as if speaking to herself, in sinister
resentment: "Till he made me what I am."

Ossipon let that pass, and took up his running. "He never did seem to me
to be quite worthy of you," he began, throwing loyalty to the winds. "You
were worthy of a better fate."

Mrs Verloc interrupted bitterly:

"Better fate! He cheated me out of seven years of life."

"You seemed to live so happily with him." Ossipon tried to exculpate the
lukewarmness of his past conduct. "It's that what's made me timid. You
seemed to love him. I was surprised--and jealous," he added.

"Love him!" Mrs Verloc cried out in a whisper, full of scorn and rage.
"Love him! I was a good wife to him. I am a respectable woman. You
thought I loved him! You did! Look here, Tom--"

The sound of this name thrilled Comrade Ossipon with pride. For his name
was Alexander, and he was called Tom by arrangement with the most
familiar of his intimates. It was a name of friendship--of moments of
expansion. He had no idea that she had ever heard it used by anybody. It
was apparent that she had not only caught it, but had treasured it in her
memory--perhaps in her heart.

"Look here, Tom! I was a young girl. I was done up. I was tired. I
had two people depending on what I could do, and it did seem as if I
couldn't do any more. Two people--mother and the boy. He was much more
mine than mother's. I sat up nights and nights with him on my lap, all
alone upstairs, when I wasn't more than eight years old myself. And
then--He was mine, I tell you. . . . You can't understand that. No man
can understand it. What was I to do? There was a young fellow--"

The memory of the early romance with the young butcher survived,
tenacious, like the image of a glimpsed ideal in that heart quailing
before the fear of the gallows and full of revolt against death.

"That was the man I loved then," went on the widow of Mr Verloc. "I
suppose he could see it in my eyes too. Five and twenty shillings a
week, and his father threatened to kick him out of the business if he
made such a fool of himself as to marry a girl with a crippled mother and
a crazy idiot of a boy on her hands. But he would hang about me, till
one evening I found the courage to slam the door in his face. I had to
do it. I loved him dearly. Five and twenty shillings a week! There was
that other man--a good lodger. What is a girl to do? Could I've gone on
the streets? He seemed kind. He wanted me, anyhow. What was I to do
with mother and that poor boy? Eh? I said yes. He seemed good-natured,
he was freehanded, he had money, he never said anything. Seven
years--seven years a good wife to him, the kind, the good, the generous,
the--And he loved me. Oh yes. He loved me till I sometimes wished
myself--Seven years. Seven years a wife to him. And do you know what he
was, that dear friend of yours? Do you know what he was? He was a
devil!"

The superhuman vehemence of that whispered statement completely stunned
Comrade Ossipon. Winnie Verloc turning about held him by both arms,
facing him under the falling mist in the darkness and solitude of Brett
Place, in which all sounds of life seemed lost as if in a triangular well
of asphalt and bricks, of blind houses and unfeeling stones.

"No; I didn't know," he declared, with a sort of flabby stupidity, whose
comical aspect was lost upon a woman haunted by the fear of the gallows,
"but I do now. I--I understand," he floundered on, his mind speculating
as to what sort of atrocities Verloc could have practised under the
sleepy, placid appearances of his married estate. It was positively
awful. "I understand," he repeated, and then by a sudden inspiration
uttered an--"Unhappy woman!" of lofty commiseration instead of the more
familiar "Poor darling!" of his usual practice. This was no usual case.
He felt conscious of something abnormal going on, while he never lost
sight of the greatness of the stake. "Unhappy, brave woman!"

He was glad to have discovered that variation; but he could discover
nothing else.

"Ah, but he is dead now," was the best he could do. And he put a
remarkable amount of animosity into his guarded exclamation. Mrs Verloc
caught at his arm with a sort of frenzy.

"You guessed then he was dead," she murmured, as if beside herself. "You!
You guessed what I had to do. Had to!"

There were suggestions of triumph, relief, gratitude in the indefinable
tone of these words. It engrossed the whole attention of Ossipon to the
detriment of mere literal sense. He wondered what was up with her, why
she had worked herself into this state of wild excitement. He even began
to wonder whether the hidden causes of that Greenwich Park affair did not
lie deep in the unhappy circumstances of the Verlocs' married life. He
went so far as to suspect Mr Verloc of having selected that extraordinary
manner of committing suicide. By Jove! that would account for the utter
inanity and wrong-headedness of the thing. No anarchist manifestation
was required by the circumstances. Quite the contrary; and Verloc was as
well aware of that as any other revolutionist of his standing. What an
immense joke if Verloc had simply made fools of the whole of Europe, of
the revolutionary world, of the police, of the press, and of the cocksure
Professor as well. Indeed, thought Ossipon, in astonishment, it seemed
almost certain that he did! Poor beggar! It struck him as very possible
that of that household of two it wasn't precisely the man who was the
devil.

Alexander Ossipon, nicknamed the Doctor, was naturally inclined to think
indulgently of his men friends. He eyed Mrs Verloc hanging on his arm.
Of his women friends he thought in a specially practical way. Why Mrs
Verloc should exclaim at his knowledge of Mr Verloc's death, which was no
guess at all, did not disturb him beyond measure. They often talked like
lunatics. But he was curious to know how she had been informed. The
papers could tell her nothing beyond the mere fact: the man blown to
pieces in Greenwich Park not having been identified. It was
inconceivable on any theory that Verloc should have given her an inkling
of his intention--whatever it was. This problem interested Comrade
Ossipon immensely. He stopped short. They had gone then along the three
sides of Brett Place, and were near the end of Brett Street again.

"How did you first come to hear of it?" he asked in a tone he tried to
render appropriate to the character of the revelations which had been
made to him by the woman at his side.

She shook violently for a while before she answered in a listless voice.

"From the police. A chief inspector came, Chief Inspector Heat he said
he was. He showed me--"

Mrs Verloc choked. "Oh, Tom, they had to gather him up with a shovel."

Her breast heaved with dry sobs. In a moment Ossipon found his tongue.

"The police! Do you mean to say the police came already? That Chief
Inspector Heat himself actually came to tell you."

"Yes," she confirmed in the same listless tone. "He came just like this.
He came. I didn't know. He showed me a piece of overcoat, and--just
like that. Do you know this? he says."

"Heat! Heat! And what did he do?"

Mrs Verloc's head dropped. "Nothing. He did nothing. He went away. The
police were on that man's side," she murmured tragically. "Another one
came too."

"Another--another inspector, do you mean?" asked Ossipon, in great
excitement, and very much in the tone of a scared child.

"I don't know. He came. He looked like a foreigner. He may have been
one of them Embassy people."

Comrade Ossipon nearly collapsed under this new shock.

"Embassy! Are you aware what you are saying? What Embassy? What on
earth do you mean by Embassy?"

"It's that place in Chesham Square. The people he cursed so. I don't
know. What does it matter!"

"And that fellow, what did he do or say to you?"

"I don't remember. . . . Nothing . . . . I don't care. Don't ask me,"
she pleaded in a weary voice.

"All right. I won't," assented Ossipon tenderly. And he meant it too,
not because he was touched by the pathos of the pleading voice, but
because he felt himself losing his footing in the depths of this
tenebrous affair. Police! Embassy! Phew! For fear of adventuring his
intelligence into ways where its natural lights might fail to guide it
safely he dismissed resolutely all suppositions, surmises, and theories
out of his mind. He had the woman there, absolutely flinging herself at
him, and that was the principal consideration. But after what he had
heard nothing could astonish him any more. And when Mrs Verloc, as if
startled suddenly out of a dream of safety, began to urge upon him wildly
the necessity of an immediate flight on the Continent, he did not exclaim
in the least. He simply said with unaffected regret that there was no
train till the morning, and stood looking thoughtfully at her face,
veiled in black net, in the light of a gas lamp veiled in a gauze of
mist.

Near him, her black form merged in the night, like a figure half
chiselled out of a block of black stone. It was impossible to say what
she knew, how deep she was involved with policemen and Embassies. But if
she wanted to get away, it was not for him to object. He was anxious to
be off himself. He felt that the business, the shop so strangely
familiar to chief inspectors and members of foreign Embassies, was not
the place for him. That must be dropped. But there was the rest. These
savings. The money!

"You must hide me till the morning somewhere," she said in a dismayed
voice.

"Fact is, my dear, I can't take you where I live. I share the room with
a friend."

He was somewhat dismayed himself. In the morning the blessed 'tecs will
be out in all the stations, no doubt. And if they once got hold of her,
for one reason or another she would be lost to him indeed.

"But you must. Don't you care for me at all--at all? What are you
thinking of?"

She said this violently, but she let her clasped hands fall in
discouragement. There was a silence, while the mist fell, and darkness
reigned undisturbed over Brett Place. Not a soul, not even the vagabond,
lawless, and amorous soul of a cat, came near the man and the woman
facing each other.

"It would be possible perhaps to find a safe lodging somewhere," Ossipon
spoke at last. "But the truth is, my dear, I have not enough money to go
and try with--only a few pence. We revolutionists are not rich."

He had fifteen shillings in his pocket. He added:

"And there's the journey before us, too--first thing in the morning at
that."

She did not move, made no sound, and Comrade Ossipon's heart sank a
little. Apparently she had no suggestion to offer. Suddenly she
clutched at her breast, as if she had felt a sharp pain there.

"But I have," she gasped. "I have the money. I have enough money. Tom!
Let us go from here."

"How much have you got?" he inquired, without stirring to her tug; for he
was a cautious man.

"I have the money, I tell you. All the money."

"What do you mean by it? All the money there was in the bank, or what?"
he asked incredulously, but ready not to be surprised at anything in the
way of luck.

"Yes, yes!" she said nervously. "All there was. I've it all."

"How on earth did you manage to get hold of it already?" he marvelled.

"He gave it to me," she murmured, suddenly subdued and trembling. Comrade
Ossipon put down his rising surprise with a firm hand.

"Why, then--we are saved," he uttered slowly.

She leaned forward, and sank against his breast. He welcomed her there.
She had all the money. Her hat was in the way of very marked effusion;
her veil too. He was adequate in his manifestations, but no more. She
received them without resistance and without abandonment, passively, as
if only half-sensible. She freed herself from his lax embraces without
difficulty.

"You will save me, Tom," she broke out, recoiling, but still keeping her
hold on him by the two lapels of his damp coat. "Save me. Hide me.
Don't let them have me. You must kill me first. I couldn't do it
myself--I couldn't, I couldn't--not even for what I am afraid of."

She was confoundedly bizarre, he thought. She was beginning to inspire
him with an indefinite uneasiness. He said surlily, for he was busy with
important thoughts:

"What the devil _are_ you afraid of?"

"Haven't you guessed what I was driven to do!" cried the woman.
Distracted by the vividness of her dreadful apprehensions, her head
ringing with forceful words, that kept the horror of her position before
her mind, she had imagined her incoherence to be clearness itself. She
had no conscience of how little she had audibly said in the disjointed
phrases completed only in her thought. She had felt the relief of a full
confession, and she gave a special meaning to every sentence spoken by
Comrade Ossipon, whose knowledge did not in the least resemble her own.
"Haven't you guessed what I was driven to do!" Her voice fell. "You
needn't be long in guessing then what I am afraid of," she continued, in
a bitter and sombre murmur. "I won't have it. I won't. I won't. I
won't. You must promise to kill me first!" She shook the lapels of his
coat. "It must never be!"

He assured her curtly that no promises on his part were necessary, but he
took good care not to contradict her in set terms, because he had had
much to do with excited women, and he was inclined in general to let his
experience guide his conduct in preference to applying his sagacity to
each special case. His sagacity in this case was busy in other
directions. Women's words fell into water, but the shortcomings of time-
tables remained. The insular nature of Great Britain obtruded itself
upon his notice in an odious form. "Might just as well be put under lock
and key every night," he thought irritably, as nonplussed as though he
had a wall to scale with the woman on his back. Suddenly he slapped his
forehead. He had by dint of cudgelling his brains just thought of the
Southampton--St Malo service. The boat left about midnight. There was a
train at 10.30. He became cheery and ready to act.

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

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

"I've forgotten to shut the shop door as I went out," she whispered,
terribly agitated.

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

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

"Nobody has been in. Look! The light--the light in the parlour."

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

"There is," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Policeman! He has seen me!"

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

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

"If he comes in kill me--kill me, Tom."

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

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

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

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

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

"At the meter then! There. Look. In that corner."

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

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

"I will not be hanged, Tom. I will not--"

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

"Yes," she whispered, invisible.

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

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