unseemly shrieks and other misplaced sincerities of conduct. And
after the striking of the blow, this respectability was continued
in immobility and silence.
Nothing moved in the parlour till Mrs Verloc raised her head slowly
and looked at the clock with inquiring mistrust. She had become
aware of a ticking sound in the room. It grew upon her ear, while
she remembered clearly that the clock on the wall was silent, had
no audible tick. What did it mean by beginning to tick so loudly
all of a sudden? Its face indicated ten minutes to nine. Mrs
Verloc cared nothing for time, and the ticking went on. She
concluded it could not be the clock, and her sullen gaze moved
along the walls, wavered, and became vague, while she strained her
hearing to locate the sound. Tic, tic, tic.
After listening for some time Mrs Verloc lowered her gaze
deliberately on her husband’s body. It’s attitude of repose was so
home-like and familiar that she could do so without feeling
embarrassed by any pronounced novelty in the phenomena of her home
life. Mr Verloc was taking his habitual ease. He looked
comfortable.
By the position of the body the face of Mr Verloc was not visible
to Mrs Verloc, his widow. Her fine, sleepy eyes, travelling
downward on the track of the sound, became contemplative on meeting
a flat object of bone which protruded a little beyond the edge of
the sofa. It was the handle of the domestic carving knife with
nothing strange about it but its position at right angles to Mr
Verloc’s waistcoat and the fact that something dripped from it.
Dark drops fell on the floorcloth one after another, with a sound
of ticking growing fast and furious like the pulse of an insane
clock. At its highest speed this ticking changed into a continuous
sound of trickling. Mrs Verloc watched that transformation with
shadows of anxiety coming and going on her face. It was a trickle,
dark, swift, thin. . . . Blood!
At this unforeseen circumstance Mrs Verloc abandoned her pose of
idleness and irresponsibility.
With a sudden snatch at her skirts and a faint shriek she ran to
the door, as if the trickle had been the first sign of a destroying
flood. Finding the table in her way she gave it a push with both
hands as though it had been alive, with such force that it went for
some distance on its four legs, making a loud, scraping racket,
whilst the big dish with the joint crashed heavily on the floor.
Then all became still. Mrs Verloc on reaching the door had
stopped. A round hat disclosed in the middle of the floor by the
moving of the table rocked slightly on its crown in the wind of her
flight.
CHAPTER XII
Winnie Verloc, the widow of Mr Verloc, the sister of the late
faithful Stevie (blown to fragments in a state of innocence and in
the conviction of being engaged in a humanitarian enterprise), did
not run beyond the door of the parlour. She had indeed run away so
far from a mere trickle of blood, but that was a movement of
instinctive repulsion. And there she had paused, with staring eyes
and lowered head. As though she had run through long years in her
flight across the small parlour, Mrs Verloc by the door was quite a
different person from the woman who had been leaning over the sofa,
a little swimmy in her head, but otherwise free to enjoy the
profound calm of idleness and irresponsibility. Mrs Verloc was no
longer giddy. Her head was steady. On the other hand, she was no
longer calm. She was afraid.
If she avoided looking in the direction of her reposing husband it
was not because she was afraid of him. Mr Verloc was not frightful
to behold. He looked comfortable. Moreover, he was dead. Mrs
Verloc entertained no vain delusions on the subject of the dead.
Nothing brings them back, neither love nor hate. They can do
nothing to you. They are as nothing. Her mental state was tinged
by a sort of austere contempt for that man who had let himself be