apparently stirred a limb for an hour and a half. He got up
heavily, and came to his dinner in his overcoat and with his hat
on, without uttering a word. His silence in itself had nothing
startlingly unusual in this household, hidden in the shades of the
sordid street seldom touched by the sun, behind the dim shop with
its wares of disreputable rubbish. Only that day Mr Verloc’s
taciturnity was so obviously thoughtful that the two women were
impressed by it. They sat silent themselves, keeping a watchful
eye on poor Stevie, lest he should break out into one of his fits
of loquacity. He faced Mr Verloc across the table, and remained
very good and quiet, staring vacantly. The endeavour to keep him
from making himself objectionable in any way to the master of the
house put no inconsiderable anxiety into these two women’s lives.
“That boy,” as they alluded to him softly between themselves, had
been a source of that sort of anxiety almost from the very day of
his birth. The late licensed victualler’s humiliation at having
such a very peculiar boy for a son manifested itself by a
propensity to brutal treatment; for he was a person of fine
sensibilities, and his sufferings as a man and a father were
perfectly genuine. Afterwards Stevie had to be kept from making
himself a nuisance to the single gentlemen lodgers, who are
themselves a queer lot, and are easily aggrieved. And there was
always the anxiety of his mere existence to face. Visions of a
workhouse infirmary for her child had haunted the old woman in the
basement breakfast-room of the decayed Belgravian house. “If you
had not found such a good husband, my dear,” she used to say to her
daughter, “I don’t know what would have become of that poor boy.”
Mr Verloc extended as much recognition to Stevie as a man not
particularly fond of animals may give to his wife’s beloved cat;
and this recognition, benevolent and perfunctory, was essentially
of the same quality. Both women admitted to themselves that not
much more could be reasonably expected. It was enough to earn for
Mr Verloc the old woman’s reverential gratitude. In the early
days, made sceptical by the trials of friendless life, she used
sometimes to ask anxiously: “You don’t think, my dear, that Mr
Verloc is getting tired of seeing Stevie about?” To this Winnie
replied habitually by a slight toss of her head. Once, however,
she retorted, with a rather grim pertness: “He’ll have to get tired
of me first.” A long silence ensued. The mother, with her feet
propped up on a stool, seemed to be trying to get to the bottom of
that answer, whose feminine profundity had struck her all of a
heap. She had never really understood why Winnie had married Mr
Verloc. It was very sensible of her, and evidently had turned out
for the best, but her girl might have naturally hoped to find
somebody of a more suitable age. There had been a steady young
fellow, only son of a butcher in the next street, helping his
father in business, with whom Winnie had been walking out with
obvious gusto. He was dependent on his father, it is true; but the
business was good, and his prospects excellent. He took her girl
to the theatre on several evenings. Then just as she began to
dread to hear of their engagement (for what could she have done
with that big house alone, with Stevie on her hands), that romance
came to an abrupt end, and Winnie went about looking very dull.
But Mr Verloc, turning up providentially to occupy the first-floor
front bedroom, there had been no more question of the young
butcher. It was clearly providential.
CHAPTER III
” . . . All idealisation makes life poorer. To beautify it is to
take away its character of complexity – it is to destroy it. Leave
that to the moralists, my boy. 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.
History is dominated and determined by the tool and the production