Chapter 3

“ . . . 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.”

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.