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