The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

imagined than expressed. Mrs Verloc was a woman of singularly few

words, either for public or private use. With the rage and dismay

of a betrayed woman, she reviewed the tenor of her life in visions

concerned mostly with Stevie’s difficult existence from its

earliest days. It was a life of single purpose and of a noble

unity of inspiration, like those rare lives that have left their

mark on the thoughts and feelings of mankind. But the visions of

Mrs Verloc lacked nobility and magnificence. She saw herself

putting the boy to bed by the light of a single candle on the

deserted top floor of a “business house,” dark under the roof and

scintillating exceedingly with lights and cut glass at the level of

the street like a fairy palace. That meretricious splendour was

the only one to be met in Mrs Verloc’s visions. She remembered

brushing the boy’s hair and tying his pinafores – herself in a

pinafore still; the consolations administered to a small and badly

scared creature by another creature nearly as small but not quite

so badly scared; she had the vision of the blows intercepted (often

with her own head), of a door held desperately shut against a man’s

rage (not for very long); of a poker flung once (not very far),

which stilled that particular storm into the dumb and awful silence

which follows a thunder-clap. And all these scenes of violence

came and went accompanied by the unrefined noise of deep

vociferations proceeding from a man wounded in his paternal pride,

declaring himself obviously accursed since one of his kids was a

“slobbering idjut and the other a wicked she-devil.” It was of her

that this had been said many years ago.

Mrs Verloc heard the words again in a ghostly fashion, and then the

dreary shadow of the Belgravian mansion descended upon her

shoulders. It was a crushing memory, an exhausting vision of

countless breakfast trays carried up and down innumerable stairs,

of endless haggling over pence, of the endless drudgery of

sweeping, dusting, cleaning, from basement to attics; while the

impotent mother, staggering on swollen legs, cooked in a grimy

kitchen, and poor Stevie, the unconscious presiding genius of all

their toil, blacked the gentlemen’s boots in the scullery. But

this vision had a breath of a hot London summer in it, and for a

central figure a young man wearing his Sunday best, with a straw

hat on his dark head and a wooden pipe in his mouth. Affectionate

and jolly, he was a fascinating companion for a voyage down the

sparkling stream of life; only his boat was very small. There was

room in it for a girl-partner at the oar, but no accommodation for

passengers. He was allowed to drift away from the threshold of the

Belgravian mansion while Winnie averted her tearful eyes. He was

not a lodger. The lodger was Mr Verloc, indolent, and keeping late

hours, sleepily jocular of a morning from under his bed-clothes,

but with gleams of infatuation in his heavy lidded eyes, and always

with some money in his pockets. There was no sparkle of any kind

on the lazy stream of his life. It flowed through secret places.

But his barque seemed a roomy craft, and his taciturn magnanimity

accepted as a matter of course the presence of passengers.

Mrs Verloc pursued the visions of seven years’ security for Stevie,

loyally paid for on her part; of security growing into confidence,

into a domestic feeling, stagnant and deep like a placid pool,

whose guarded surface hardly shuddered on the occasional passage of

Comrade Ossipon, the robust anarchist with shamelessly inviting

eyes, whose glance had a corrupt clearness sufficient to enlighten

any woman not absolutely imbecile.

A few seconds only had elapsed since the last word had been uttered

aloud in the kitchen, and Mrs Verloc was staring already at the

vision of an episode not more than a fortnight old. With eyes

whose pupils were extremely dilated she stared at the vision of her

husband and poor Stevie walking up Brett Street side by side away

from the shop. It was the last scene of an existence created by

Mrs Verloc’s genius; an existence foreign to all grace and charm,

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