employed on. Why, you must have discredited yourself completely in
your own world by your marriage. Couldn’t you have managed
without? This is your virtuous attachment – eh? What with one
sort of attachment and another you are doing away with your
usefulness.”
Mr Verloc, puffing out his cheeks, let the air escape violently,
and that was all. He had armed himself with patience. It was not
to be tried much longer. The First Secretary became suddenly very
curt, detached, final.
“You may go now,” he said. “A dynamite outrage must be provoked.
I give you a month. The sittings of the Conference are suspended.
Before it reassembles again something must have happened here, or
your connection with us ceases.”
He changed the note once more with an unprincipled versatility.
“Think over my philosophy, Mr – Mr – Verloc,” he said, with a sort
of chaffing condescension, waving his hand towards the door. “Go
for the first meridian. You don’t know the middle classes as well
as I do. Their sensibilities are jaded. The first meridian.
Nothing better, and nothing easier, I should think.”
He had got up, and with his thin sensitive lips twitching
humorously, watched in the glass over the mantelpiece Mr Verloc
backing out of the room heavily, hat and stick in hand. The door
closed.
The footman in trousers, appearing suddenly in the corridor, let Mr
Verloc another way out and through a small door in the corner of
the courtyard. The porter standing at the gate ignored his exit
completely; and 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. He walked straight
behind the counter, and sat down on a wooden chair that stood
there. No one appeared to disturb his solitude. Stevie, put into
a green baize apron, was now sweeping and dusting upstairs, intent
and conscientious, as though he were playing at it; and Mrs Verloc,
warned in the kitchen by the clatter of the cracked bell, had
merely come to the glazed door of the parlour, and putting the
curtain aside a little, had peered into the dim shop. Seeing her
husband sitting there shadowy and bulky, with his hat tilted far
back on his head, she had at once returned to her stove. An hour
or more later she took the green baize apron off her brother
Stevie, and instructed him to wash his hands and face in the
peremptory tone she had used in that connection for fifteen years
or so – ever since she had, in fact, ceased to attend to the boy’s
hands and face herself. She spared presently a glance away from
her dishing-up for the inspection of that face and those hands
which Stevie, approaching the kitchen table, offered for her
approval with an air of self-assurance hiding a perpetual residue
of anxiety. Formerly the anger of the father was the supremely
effective sanction of these rites, but Mr Verloc’s placidity in
domestic life would have made all mention of anger incredible even
to poor Stevie’s nervousness. The theory was that Mr Verloc would
have been inexpressibly pained and shocked by any deficiency of
cleanliness at meal times. Winnie after the death of her father
found considerable consolation in the feeling that she need no
longer tremble for poor Stevie. She could not bear to see the boy
hurt. It maddened her. As a little girl she had often faced with
blazing eyes the irascible licensed victualler in defence of her
brother. Nothing now in Mrs Verloc’s appearance could lead one to
suppose that she was capable of a passionate demonstration.
She finished her dishing-up. The table was laid in the parlour.
Going to the foot of the stairs, she screamed out “Mother!” Then
opening the glazed door leading to the shop, she said quietly
“Adolf!” Mr Verloc had not changed his position; he had not