he’s left alone.”
Mr Verloc made no comment.
“I wish he had never been to school,” Mrs Verloc began again
brusquely. “He’s always taking away those newspapers from the
window to read. He gets a red face poring over them. We don’t get
rid of a dozen numbers in a month. They only take up room in the
front window. And Mr Ossipon brings every week a pile of these F.
P. tracts to sell at a halfpenny each. I wouldn’t give a halfpenny
for the whole lot. It’s silly reading – that’s what it is.
There’s no sale for it. The other day Stevie got hold of one, and
there was a story in it of a German soldier officer tearing half-
off the ear of a recruit, and nothing was done to him for it. The
brute! I couldn’t do anything with Stevie that afternoon. The
story was enough, too, to make one’s blood boil. But what’s the
use of printing things like that? We aren’t German slaves here,
thank God. It’s not our business – is it?”
Mr Verloc made no reply.
“I had to take the carving knife from the boy,” Mrs Verloc
continued, a little sleepily now. “He was shouting and stamping
and sobbing. He can’t stand the notion of any cruelty. He would
have stuck that officer like a pig if he had seen him then. It’s
true, too! Some people don’t deserve much mercy.” Mrs Verloc’s
voice ceased, and the expression of her motionless eyes became more
and more contemplative and veiled during the long pause.
“Comfortable, dear?” she asked in a faint, far-away voice. “Shall
I put out the light now?”
The dreary conviction that there was no sleep for him held Mr
Verloc mute and hopelessly inert in his fear of darkness. He made
a great effort.
“Yes. Put it out,” he said at last in a hollow tone.
CHAPTER IV
Most of the thirty or so little tables covered by red cloths with a
white design stood ranged at right angles to the deep brown
wainscoting of the underground hall. Bronze chandeliers with many
globes depended from the low, slightly vaulted ceiling, and the
fresco paintings ran flat and dull all round the walls without
windows, representing scenes of the chase and of outdoor revelry in
mediaeval costumes. Varlets in green jerkins brandished hunting
knives and raised on high tankards of foaming beer.
“Unless I am very much mistaken, you are the man who would know the
inside of this confounded affair,” said the robust Ossipon, leaning
over, his elbows far out on the table and his feet tucked back
completely under his chair. His eyes stared with wild eagerness.
An upright semi-grand piano near the door, flanked by two palms in
pots, executed suddenly all by itself a valse tune with aggressive
virtuosity. The din it raised was deafening. When it ceased, as
abruptly as it had started, the be-spectacled, dingy little man who
faced Ossipon behind a heavy glass mug full of beer emitted calmly
what had the sound of a general proposition.
“In principle what one of us may or may not know as to any given
fact can’t be a matter for inquiry to the others.”
“Certainly not,” Comrade Ossipon agreed in a quiet undertone. “In
principle.”
With his big florid face held between his hands he continued to
stare hard, while the dingy little man in spectacles coolly took a
drink of beer and stood the glass mug back on the table. His flat,
large ears departed widely from the sides of his skull, which
looked frail enough for Ossipon to crush between thumb and
forefinger; the dome of the forehead seemed to rest on the rim of
the spectacles; the flat cheeks, of a greasy, unhealthy complexion,
were merely smudged by the miserable poverty of a thin dark
whisker. The lamentable inferiority of the whole physique was made
ludicrous by the supremely self-confident bearing of the
individual. His speech was curt, and he had a particularly
impressive manner of keeping silent.
Ossipon spoke again from between his hands in a mutter.
“Have you been out much to-day?”
“No. I stayed in bed all the morning,” answered the other. “Why?”