The Secret Agent

by Joseph Conrad

which seemed to hold back the threat of some abominable menace,

He generally arrived in London (like the influenza)

Mr Verloc was going westward through a town without shadows in an atmosphere of powdered old gold.

the whole social order favourable to their hygienic idleness had to be protected against the shallow enviousness of unhygienic labour.

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.

His big, prominent eyes were not well adapted to winking. They were rather of the sort that closes solemnly in slumber with majestic effect.

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.

For all I know, the expression of these last may be perfectly diabolic. I shouldn’t be surprised.

In its breadth, emptiness, and extent it had the majesty of inorganic nature, of matter that never dies.

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.

his mission in life being the protection of the social mechanism, not its perfectionment or even its criticism.

The useful, hard-working, if obscure member of the Embassy had an air of being impressed by some newly-born thought.

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,”

charabia

sacrosanct

Every newspaper has ready-made phrases to explain such manifestations away.

You anarchists should make it clear that you are perfectly determined to make a clean sweep of the whole social creation.

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.

Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it either by threats, persuasion, or bribes.

Moreover, I am a civilised man.

he seemed to hold delicately between his thumb and forefinger the subtlety of his suggestion.

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.

All idealisation makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity—it is to destroy it.

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.

At best they can only interpret the mind of the prophet, and can have no objective value.

An extraordinary expression of underhand malevolence survived in his extinguished eyes.

Cold reason, he boasted, was the basis of his optimism.

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.

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?

The famous terrorist had never in his life raised personally as much as his little finger against the social edifice.

He saw Capitalism doomed in its cradle, born with the poison of the principle of competition in its system.

For history is made with tools, not with ideas; and everything is changed by economic conditions—art, philosophy, love, virtue—truth itself!

This is the statement of a law, not an empty prophecy.”

The only thing that matters to us is the emotional state of the masses. Without emotion there is no action.”

And Mr Verloc, temperamentally identical with his associates, drew fine distinctions in his mind on the strength of insignificant differences.

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 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.

He dreaded the demon of sleeplessness, which he felt had marked him for its own.