第14章

Nothing can equal the everlasting discretion of death.Mr Verloc, sitting perplexed and frightened in the small parlour of the Cheshire Cheese, could not help acknowledging that to himself, because his sensibility did not stand in the way of his judgement.Stevie's violent disintegration, however disturbing to think about, only assured the success; for, of course, the knocking down of a wall was not the aim of Mr Vladimir's menaces, but the production of a moral effect.With much trouble and distress on Mr Verloc's part the effect might be said to have been produced.When, however, most unexpectedly, it came home to roost in Brett Street, Mr Verloc, who had been struggling like a man in a nightmare for the preservation of his position, accepted the blow in the spirit of a convinced fatalist.The position was gone through no one's fault really.A small, tiny fact had done it.It was like slipping on a bit of orange peel in the dark and breaking your leg.

Mr Verloc drew a weary breath.He nourished no resentment against his wife.He thought: `She will have to look after the shop while they keep me locked up.' And thinking also how cruelly she would miss Stevie at first, he felt greatly concerned about her health and spirits.How would she stand her solitude - absolutely alone in that house? It would not do for her to break down while he was locked up.What would become of the shop then?

The shop was an asset.Though Mr Verloc's fatalism accepted his undoing as a secret agent, he had no mind to be utterly ruined, mostly, it must be owned, from regard for his wife.

Silent and out of his line of sight in the kitchen, she frightened him.

If only she had her mother with her.But that silly old woman - An angry dismay possessed Mr Verloc.He must talk with his wife.He could tell her certainly that a man does get desperate under certain circumstances.But he did not go incontinently to impart to her that information.First of all, it was clear to him chat this evening was no time for business.He got up to close the street door and put the gas out in the shop.

Having thus assured a solitude around his hearth-stone Mr Verloc walked into the parlour, and glanced down into the kitchen.Mrs Verloc was sitting in the place where poor Stevie usually established himself of an evening with paper and pencil for the pastime of drawing those coruscations of innumerable circles suggesting chaos and eternity.Her arms were folded on the table, and her head was lying on her arms.Mr Verloc contemplated her back and the arrangement of her hair for a time, then walked away from the kitchen door.Mrs Verloc's philosophical, almost disdainful incuriosity, the foundation of their accord in domestic life, made it extremely difficult to get into contact with her, now this tragic necessity had arisen.Mr Verloc felt this difficulty acutely.He turned around the table in the parlour with his usual air of a large animal in a cage.

Curiosity being one of the forms of self-revelation, a systematically incurious person remains always partly mysterious.Every time he passed near the door Mr Verloc glanced at his wife uneasily.It was not that he was afraid of her.Mr Verloc imagined himself loved by that woman.But she had not accustomed him to make confidences.And the confidence he had to make was of a profound psychological order.How with his want of practice could he tell her what he himself felt but vaguely: that there are conspiracies of fatal destiny, that a notion grows in a mind sometimes till it acquires an outward existence, an independent power of its own, and even a suggestive voice? He could not inform her that a man may be haunted by a fat, witty, clean-shaved face till the wildest expedient to get rid of it appears a child of wisdom.

On this mental reference to a First Secretary of a great Embassy, Mr Verloc stopped in the doorway, and looking down into the kitchen with an angry face and clenched fists, addressed his wife.

`You don't know what a brute I had to deal with.'

He started off to make another perambulation of the table, then when he had come to the door again he stopped, glaring in from the height of two steps.

`A silly, jeering, dangerous brute, with no more sense than - After all these years! A man like me! And I have been playing my head at that game.You didn't know.Quite right, too.What was the good of telling you that I stood the risk of having a knife stuck into me any time these seven years we've been married? I am not a chap to worry a woman that's fond of me.You had no business to know.'

Mr Verloc took another turn round the parlour, fuming.

`A venomous beast,' he began again from the doorway.`Drive me out into a ditch to starve for a joke.I could see he thought it was a damned good joke.A man like me! Look here! Some of the highest in the world got to thank me for walking on their two legs to this day.That's the man you've got married to, my girl!'

He perceived that his wife had sat up.Mrs Verloc's arms remained lying stretched on the table.Mr Verloc watched her back as if he could read there the effect of his words.

`There isn't a murdering plot for the last eleven years that I hadn't my finger in at the risk of my life.There's scores of these revolutionists I've sent off with their bombs in their blamed pockets, to get themselves caught on the frontier.The old Baron knew what I was worth to his country.

And here suddenly a swine comes along - an ignorant, overbearing swine.'

Mr Verloc, stepping slowly down two steps, entered the kitchen, took a tumbler off the dresser, and holding it in his hand, approached the sink, without looking at his wife.

`It wasn't the old Baron who would have had the wicked folly of getting me to call on him at eleven in the morning.There are two or three in this town that, if they had seen me going in, would have made no bones about knocking me on the head sooner or later.It was a silly, murderous trick to expose for nothing a man - like me.'