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spy of that sort can afford to be more reckless than the most reckless of conspirators. His occupation is free from all restraint. He’s without as much faith as is necessary for complete negation, and without that much law as is implied in lawlessness.
the confidential and trusted spy of the late Baron Stott-Wartenheim, Ambassador of a Great Power to the Court of St James.”
No country mentioned - just a "Great Power."
My line of inquiry would appear to him an awful perversion of duty. For him the plain duty is to fasten the guilt upon as many prominent anarchists as he can on some slight indications he had picked up in the course of his investigation on the spot; whereas I, he would say, am bent upon vindicating their innocence.
“But what first put you in motion in this direction?” “I have been always of opinion,” began the Assistant Commissioner. “Ah. Yes! Opinion. That’s of course. But the immediate motive?” “What shall I say, Sir Ethelred? A new man’s antagonism to old methods. A desire to know something at first hand. Some impatience. It’s my old work, but the harness is different. It has been chafing me a little in one or two tender places.”
Tendering a coin through the trap door the fare slipped out and away, leaving an effect of uncanny, eccentric ghastliness upon the driver’s mind. But the size of the coin was satisfactory to his touch, and his education not being literary, he remained untroubled by the fear of finding it presently turned to a dead leaf in his pocket.
On going out the Assistant Commissioner made to himself the observation that the patrons of the place had lost in the frequentation of fraudulent cookery all their national and private characteristics. And this was strange, since the Italian restaurant is such a peculiarly British institution. But these people were as denationalised as the dishes set before them with every circumstance of unstamped respectability.
This joyousness and dispersion of thought before a task of some importance seems to prove that this world of ours is not such a very serious affair after all.
Stevie was destitute—and a little peculiar. His position had to be considered before the claims of legal justice and even the promptings of partiality. The possession of the furniture would not be in any sense a provision. He ought to have it—the poor boy. But to give it to him would be like tampering with his position of complete dependence. It was a sort of claim which she feared to weaken.
“Mustn’t whip,” queried the other in a thoughtful whisper, and immediately whipped. He did this, not because his soul was cruel and his heart evil, but because he had to earn his fare.
charity cottage (one of a row) which by the exiguity of its dimensions and the simplicity of its accommodation, might well have been devised in kindness as a place of training for the still more straitened circumstances of the grave,
On account of that shrinking delicacy, which exists side by side with aggressive brutality in masculine nature, the inquiries into her circumstances had not been pushed very far. She had checked them by a visible compression of the lips and some display of an emotion determined to be eloquently silent. And the men would become suddenly incurious, after the manner of their kind.
She took the cold and reasonable view that the less strain put on Mr Verloc’s kindness the longer its effects were likely to last. That excellent man loved his wife, of course, but he would, no doubt, prefer to keep as few of her relations as was consistent with the proper display of that sentiment. It would be better if its whole effect were concentrated on poor Stevie. And the heroic old woman resolved on going away from her children as an act of devotion and as a move of deep policy.
Her act of abandonment was really an arrangement for settling her son permanently in life.
The cabman looked at the pieces of silver, which, appearing very minute in his big, grimy palm, symbolised the insignificant results which reward the ambitious courage and toil of a mankind whose day is short on this earth of evil.
In the face of anything which affected directly or indirectly his morbid dread of pain, Stevie ended by turning vicious.
The tenderness of his universal charity had two phases as indissolubly joined and connected as the reverse and obverse sides of a medal. The anguish of immoderate compassion was succeeded by the pain of an innocent but pitiless rage.
Mrs Verloc wasted no portion of this transient life in seeking for fundamental information. This is a sort of economy having all the appearances and some of the advantages of prudence. Obviously it may be good for one not to know too much. And such a view accords very well with constitutional indolence.
Are both the Verlocs lazy?
Stevie was no master of phrases, and perhaps for that very reason his thoughts lacked clearness and precision. But he felt with greater completeness and some profundity.
“Bad world for poor people.” Directly he had expressed that thought he became aware that it was familiar to him already in all its consequences.
“Police,” he suggested confidently. “The police aren’t for that,” observed Mrs Verloc cursorily, hurrying on her way.
“Don’t you know what the police are for, Stevie? They are there so that them as have nothing shouldn’t take anything away from them who have.”
His father’s anger, the irritability of gentlemen lodgers, and Mr Verloc’s predisposition to immoderate grief, had been the main sanctions of Stevie’s self-restraint.
He led a cortege of dismal thoughts along dark streets, through lighted streets, in and out of two flash bars, as if in a half-hearted attempt to make a night of it, and finally back again to his menaced home, where he sat down fatigued behind the counter, and they crowded urgently round him, like a pack of hungry black hounds.
Mr Verloc loved his wife as a wife should be loved—that is, maritally, with the regard one has for one’s chief possession.
He was easily intimidated. And he was also indolent, with the indolence which is so often the secret of good nature. He forbore touching that mystery out of love, timidity, and indolence.
Mr Verloc returning from the Continent at the end of ten days, brought back a mind evidently unrefreshed by the wonders of foreign travel and a countenance unlighted by the joys of home-coming.
Mr Verloc neither said, “Damn!” nor yet “Stevie be hanged!” And Mrs Verloc, not let into the secret of his thoughts, failed to appreciate the generosity of this restraint.
“You could do anything with that boy, Adolf,” Mrs Verloc said, with her best air of inflexible calmness. “He would go through fire for you. He—”
He turned away his heavy eyes, saying huskily: “Well, let him come along, then,” and relapsed into the clutches of black care, that perhaps prefers to sit behind a horseman, but knows also how to tread close on the heels of people not sufficiently well off to keep horses—like Mr Verloc, for instance.
“He may’ve been half-witted, but you must have been crazy. What drove you off your head like this?” Mr Verloc, thinking of Mr Vladimir, did not hesitate in the choice of words. “A Hyperborean swine,” he hissed forcibly. “A what you might call a—a gentleman.”
Penetrating through a portal by no means lofty into the precincts of the House which is the House, par excellence in the minds of many millions of men, he was met at last by the volatile and revolutionary Toodles.
Toodles was revolutionary only in politics; his social beliefs and personal feelings he wished to preserve unchanged through all the years allotted to him on this earth which, upon the whole, he believed to be a nice place to live on.
You know no doubt that most criminals at some time or other feel an irresistible need of confessing—of making a clean breast of it to somebody—to anybody. And they do it often to the police. In that Verloc whom Heat wished so much to screen I’ve found a man in that particular psychological state.
He had been driven out of his mind almost by an extraordinary performance, which for you or me it would be difficult to take as seriously meant, but which produced a great impression obviously on him.”
It sounds an extravagant way of putting it, Sir Ethelred, but his state of dismay suggested to me an impulsive man who, after committing suicide with the notion that it would end all his troubles, had discovered that it did nothing of the kind.”
From a certain point of view we are here in the presence of a domestic drama.”
Descended from generations victimised by the instruments of an arbitrary power, he was racially, nationally, and individually afraid of the police. It was an inherited weakness, altogether independent of his judgment, of his reason, of his experience. He was born to it. But that sentiment, which resembled the irrational horror some people have of cats, did not stand in the way of his immense contempt for the English police.
Stevie dead was a much greater nuisance than ever he had been when alive.
That his wife should hit upon the precaution of sewing the boy’s address inside his overcoat was the last thing Mr Verloc would have thought of. One can’t think of everything.
Only he did not understand either the nature or the whole extent of that sentiment. And in this he was excusable, since it was impossible for him to understand it without ceasing to be himself.
Curiosity being one of the forms of self-revelation, a systematically incurious person remains always partly mysterious.
The excellent husband of Winnie Verloc saw no writing on the wall.
It is universally understood that, as if it were nothing more substantial than vapour floating in the sky, every emotion of a woman is bound to end in a shower.
In these terms did Mr Verloc declare his thirst for revenge. It was a very appropriate revenge. It was in harmony with the promptings of Mr Verloc’s genius. It had also the advantage of being within the range of his powers and of adjusting itself easily to the practice of his life, which had consisted precisely in betraying the secret and unlawful proceedings of his fellow-men.
By their extreme disaccord with her mental condition these words produced on her a slightly suffocating effect.
She had her freedom. Her contract with existence, as represented by that man standing over there, was at an end. She was a free woman.
Mrs Verloc was a free woman. She had thrown open the window of the bedroom either with the intention of screaming Murder! Help! or of throwing herself out. For she did not exactly know what use to make of her freedom.
This woman, capable of a bargain the mere suspicion of which would have been infinitely shocking to Mr Verloc’s idea of love, remained irresolute, as if scrupulously aware of something wanting on her part for the formal closing of the transaction.
Mrs Verloc closed her eyes desperately, throwing upon that vision the night of her eyelids, where after a rainlike fall of mangled limbs the decapitated head of Stevie lingered suspended alone, and fading out slowly like the last star of a pyrotechnic display. Mrs Verloc opened her eyes.
Mrs Verloc, who thought in images, was not troubled now by visions, because she did not think at all. And she did not move. She was a woman enjoying her complete irresponsibility and endless leisure, almost in the manner of a corpse.
