The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

The evening visitors – the men with collars turned up and soft hats

rammed down – nodded familiarly to Mrs Verloc, and with a muttered

greeting, lifted up the flap at the end of the counter in order to

pass into the back parlour, which gave access to a passage and to a

steep flight of stairs. The door of the shop was the only means of

entrance to the house in which Mr Verloc carried on his business of

a seller of shady wares, exercised his vocation of a protector of

society, and cultivated his domestic virtues. These last were

pronounced. He was thoroughly domesticated. Neither his

spiritual, nor his mental, nor his physical needs were of the kind

to take him much abroad. He found at home the ease of his body and

the peace of his conscience, together with Mrs Verloc’s wifely

attentions and Mrs Verloc’s mother’s deferential regard.

Winnie’s mother was a stout, wheezy woman, with a large brown face.

She wore a black wig under a white cap. Her swollen legs rendered

her inactive. She considered herself to be of French descent,

which might have been true; and after a good many years of married

life with a licensed victualler of the more common sort, she

provided for the years of widowhood by letting furnished apartments

for gentlemen near Vauxhall Bridge Road in a square once of some

splendour and still included in the district of Belgravia. This

topographical fact was of some advantage in advertising her rooms;

but the patrons of the worthy widow were not exactly of the

fashionable kind. Such as they were, her daughter Winnie helped to

look after them. Traces of the French descent which the widow

boasted of were apparent in Winnie too. They were apparent in the

extremely neat and artistic arrangement of her glossy dark hair.

Winnie had also other charms: her youth; her full, rounded form;

her clear complexion; the provocation of her unfathomable reserve,

which never went so far as to prevent conversation, carried on on

the lodgers’ part with animation, and on hers with an equable

amiability. It must be that Mr Verloc was susceptible to these

fascinations. Mr Verloc was an intermittent patron. He came and

went without any very apparent reason. He generally arrived in

London (like the influenza) from the Continent, only he arrived

unheralded by the Press; and his visitations set in with great

severity. He breakfasted in bed, and remained wallowing there with

an air of quiet enjoyment till noon every day – and sometimes even

to a later hour. But when he went out he seemed to experience a

great difficulty in finding his way back to his temporary home in

the Belgravian square. He left it late, and returned to it early –

as early as three or four in the morning; and on waking up at ten

addressed Winnie, bringing in the breakfast tray, with jocular,

exhausted civility, in the hoarse, failing tones of a man who had

been talking vehemently for many hours together. His prominent,

heavy-lidded eyes rolled sideways amorously and languidly, the

bedclothes were pulled up to his chin, and his dark smooth

moustache covered his thick lips capable of much honeyed banter.

In Winnie’s mother’s opinion Mr Verloc was a very nice gentleman.

From her life’s experience gathered in various “business houses”

the good woman had taken into her retirement an ideal of

gentlemanliness as exhibited by the patrons of private-saloon bars.

Mr Verloc approached that ideal; he attained it, in fact.

“Of course, we’ll take over your furniture, mother,” Winnie had

remarked.

The lodging-house was to be given up. It seems it would not answer

to carry it on. It would have been too much trouble for Mr Verloc.

It would not have been convenient for his other business. What his

business was he did not say; but after his engagement to Winnie he

took the trouble to get up before noon, and descending the basement

stairs, make himself pleasant to Winnie’s mother in the breakfast-

room downstairs where she had her motionless being. He stroked the

cat, poked the fire, had his lunch served to him there. He left

its slightly stuffy cosiness with evident reluctance, but, all the

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