The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

Verloc would have rubbed his hands with satisfaction had he not

been constitutionally averse from every superfluous exertion. His

idleness was not hygienic, but it suited him very well. He was in

a manner devoted to it with a sort of inert fanaticism, or perhaps

rather with a fanatical inertness. Born of industrious parents for

a life of toil, he had embraced indolence from an impulse as

profound as inexplicable and as imperious as the impulse which

directs a man’s preference for one particular woman in a given

thousand. He was too lazy even for a mere demagogue, for a workman

orator, for a leader of labour. It was too much trouble. He

required a more perfect form of ease; or it might have been that he

was the victim of a philosophical unbelief in the effectiveness of

every human effort. Such a form of indolence requires, implies, a

certain amount of intelligence. Mr Verloc was not devoid of

intelligence – and at the notion of a menaced social order he would

perhaps have winked to himself if there had not been an effort to

make in that sign of scepticism. His big, prominent eyes were not

well adapted to winking. They were rather of the sort that closes

solemnly in slumber with majestic effect.

Undemonstrative and burly in a fat-pig style, Mr Verloc, without

either rubbing his hands with satisfaction or winking sceptically

at his thoughts, proceeded on his way. He trod the pavement

heavily with his shiny boots, and his general get-up was that of a

well-to-do mechanic in business for himself. He might have been

anything from a picture-frame maker to a lock-smith; an employer of

labour in a small way. But there was also about him an

indescribable air which no mechanic could have acquired in the

practice of his handicraft however dishonestly exercised: the air

common to men who live on the vices, the follies, or the baser

fears of mankind; the air of moral nihilism common to keepers of

gambling hells and disorderly houses; to private detectives and

inquiry agents; to drink sellers and, I should say, to the sellers

of invigorating electric belts and to the inventors of patent

medicines. But of that last I am not sure, not having carried my

investigations so far into the depths. For all I know, the

expression of these last may be perfectly diabolic. I shouldn’t be

surprised. What I want to affirm is that Mr Verloc’s expression

was by no means diabolic.

Before reaching Knightsbridge, Mr Verloc took a turn to the left

out of the busy main thoroughfare, uproarious with the traffic of

swaying omnibuses and trotting vans, in the almost silent, swift

flow of hansoms. Under his hat, worn with a slight backward tilt,

his hair had been carefully brushed into respectful sleekness; for

his business was with an Embassy. And Mr Verloc, steady like a

rock – a soft kind of rock – marched now along a street which could

with every propriety be described as private. In its breadth,

emptiness, and extent it had the majesty of inorganic nature, of

matter that never dies. The only reminder of mortality was a

doctor’s brougham arrested in august solitude close to the

curbstone. The polished knockers of the doors gleamed as far as

the eye could reach, the clean windows shone with a dark opaque

lustre. And all was still. But a milk cart rattled noisily across

the distant perspective; a butcher boy, driving with the noble

recklessness of a charioteer at Olympic Games, dashed round the

corner sitting high above a pair of red wheels. A guilty-looking

cat issuing from under the stones ran for a while in front of Mr

Verloc, then dived into another basement; and a thick police

constable, looking a stranger to every emotion, as if he too were

part of inorganic nature, surging apparently out of a lamp-post,

took not the slightest notice of Mr Verloc. With a turn to the

left Mr Verloc pursued his way along a narrow street by the side of

a yellow wall which, for some inscrutable reason, had No. 1 Chesham

Square written on it in black letters. Chesham Square was at least

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