upon her for a good many days. It was, as a matter of fact,
affecting her nerves. Recumbent and motionless, she said placidly:
“You’ll catch cold walking about in your socks like this.”
This speech, becoming the solicitude of the wife and the prudence
of the woman, took Mr Verloc unawares. He had left his boots
downstairs, but he had forgotten to put on his slippers, and he had
been turning about the bedroom on noiseless pads like a bear in a
cage. At the sound of his wife’s voice he stopped and stared at
her with a somnambulistic, expressionless gaze so long that Mrs
Verloc moved her limbs slightly under the bed-clothes. But she did
not move her black head sunk in the white pillow one hand under her
cheek and the big, dark, unwinking eyes.
Under her husband’s expressionless stare, and remembering her
mother’s empty room across the landing, she felt an acute pang of
loneliness. She had never been parted from her mother before.
They had stood by each other. She felt that they had, and she said
to herself that now mother was gone – gone for good. Mrs Verloc
had no illusions. Stevie remained, however. And she said:
“Mother’s done what she wanted to do. There’s no sense in it that
I can see. I’m sure she couldn’t have thought you had enough of
her. It’s perfectly wicked, leaving us like that.”
Mr Verloc was not a well-read person; his range of allusive phrases
was limited, but there was a peculiar aptness in circumstances
which made him think of rats leaving a doomed ship. He very nearly
said so. He had grown suspicious and embittered. Could it be that
the old woman had such an excellent nose? But the unreasonableness
of such a suspicion was patent, and Mr Verloc held his tongue. Not
altogether, however. He muttered heavily:
“Perhaps it’s just as well.”
He began to undress. Mrs Verloc kept very still, perfectly still,
with her eyes fixed in a dreamy, quiet stare. And her heart for
the fraction of a second seemed to stand still too. That night she
was “not quite herself,” as the saying is, and it was borne upon
her with some force that a simple sentence may hold several diverse
meanings – mostly disagreeable. How was it just as well? And why?
But she did not allow herself to fall into the idleness of barren
speculation. She was rather confirmed in her belief that things
did not stand being looked into. Practical and subtle in her way,
she brought Stevie to the front without loss of time, because in
her the singleness of purpose had the unerring nature and the force
of an instinct.
“What I am going to do to cheer up that boy for the first few days
I’m sure I don’t know. He’ll be worrying himself from morning till
night before he gets used to mother being away. And he’s such a
good boy. I couldn’t do without him.”
Mr Verloc went on divesting himself of his clothing with the
unnoticing inward concentration of a man undressing in the solitude
of a vast and hopeless desert. For thus inhospitably did this fair
earth, our common inheritance, present itself to the mental vision
of Mr Verloc. All was so still without and within that the lonely
ticking of the clock on the landing stole into the room as if for
the sake of company.
Mr Verloc, getting into bed on his own side, remained prone and
mute behind Mrs Verloc’s back. His thick arms rested abandoned on
the outside of the counterpane like dropped weapons, like discarded
tools. At that moment he was within a hair’s breadth of making a
clean breast of it all to his wife. The moment seemed propitious.
Looking out of the corners of his eyes, he saw her ample shoulders
draped in white, the back of her head, with the hair done for the
night in three plaits tied up with black tapes at the ends. And he
forbore. Mr Verloc loved his wife as a wife should be loved – that
is, maritally, with the regard one has for one’s chief possession.
This head arranged for the night, those ample shoulders, had an