aspect of familiar sacredness – the sacredness of domestic peace.
She moved not, massive and shapeless like a recumbent statue in the
rough; he remembered her wide-open eyes looking into the empty
room. She was mysterious, with the mysteriousness of living
beings. The far-famed secret agent [delta] of the late Baron
Stott-Wartenheim’s alarmist despatches was not the man to break
into such mysteries. He was easily intimidated. And he was also
indolent, with the indolence which is so often the secret of good
nature. He forbore touching that mystery out of love, timidity,
and indolence. There would be always time enough. For several
minutes he bore his sufferings silently in the drowsy silence of
the room. And then he disturbed it by a resolute declaration.
“I am going on the Continent to-morrow.”
His wife might have fallen asleep already. He could not tell. As
a matter of fact, Mrs Verloc had heard him. Her eyes remained very
wide open, and she lay very still, confirmed in her instinctive
conviction that things don’t bear looking into very much. And yet
it was nothing very unusual for Mr Verloc to take such a trip. He
renewed his stock from Paris and Brussels. Often he went over to
make his purchases personally. A little select connection of
amateurs was forming around the shop in Brett Street, a secret
connection eminently proper for any business undertaken by Mr
Verloc, who, by a mystic accord of temperament and necessity, had
been set apart to be a secret agent all his life.
He waited for a while, then added: “I’ll be away a week or perhaps
a fortnight. Get Mrs Neale to come for the day.”
Mrs Neale was the charwoman of Brett Street. Victim of her
marriage with a debauched joiner, she was oppressed by the needs of
many infant children. Red-armed, and aproned in coarse sacking up
to the arm-pits, she exhaled the anguish of the poor in a breath of
soap-suds and rum, in the uproar of scrubbing, in the clatter of
tin pails.
Mrs Verloc, full of deep purpose, spoke in the tone of the
shallowest indifference.
“There is no need to have the woman here all day. I shall do very
well with Stevie.”
She let the lonely clock on the landing count off fifteen ticks
into the abyss of eternity, and asked:
“Shall I put the light out?”
Mr Verloc snapped at his wife huskily.
“Put it out.”
CHAPTER IX
Mr Verloc returning from the Continent at the end of ten days,
brought back a mind evidently unrefreshed by the wonders of foreign
travel and a countenance unlighted by the joys of home-coming. He
entered in the clatter of the shop bell with an air of sombre and
vexed exhaustion. His bag in hand, his head lowered, he strode
straight behind the counter, and let himself fall into the chair,
as though he had tramped all the way from Dover. It was early
morning. Stevie, dusting various objects displayed in the front
windows, turned to gape at him with reverence and awe.
“Here!” said Mr Verloc, giving a slight kick to the gladstone bag
on the floor; and Stevie flung himself upon it, seized it, bore it
off with triumphant devotion. He was so prompt that Mr Verloc was
distinctly surprised.
Already at the clatter of the shop bell Mrs Neale, blackleading the
parlour grate, had looked through the door, and rising from her
knees had gone, aproned, and grimy with everlasting toll, to tell
Mrs Verloc in the kitchen that “there was the master come back.”
Winnie came no farther than the inner shop door.
“You’ll want some breakfast,” she said from a distance.
Mr Verloc moved his hands slightly, as if overcome by an impossible
suggestion. But once enticed into the parlour he did not reject
the food set before him. He ate as if in a public place, his hat
pushed off his forehead, the skirts of his heavy overcoat hanging
in a triangle on each side of the chair. And across the length of
the table covered with brown oil-cloth Winnie, his wife, talked
evenly at him the wifely talk, as artfully adapted, no doubt, to
the circumstances of this return as the talk of Penelope to the