air of a large animal in a cage.
Curiosity being one of the forms of self-revelation, – a
systematically incurious person remains always partly mysterious.
Every time he passed near the door Mr Verloc glanced at his wife
uneasily. It was not that he was afraid of her. Mr Verloc
imagined himself loved by that woman. But she had not accustomed
him to make confidences. And the confidence he had to make was of
a profound psychological order. How with his want of practice
could he tell her what he himself felt but vaguely: that there are
conspiracies of fatal destiny, that a notion grows in a mind
sometimes till it acquires an outward existence, an independent
power of its own, and even a suggestive voice? He could not inform
her that a man may be haunted by a fat, witty, clean-shaved face
till the wildest expedient to get rid of it appears a child of
wisdom.
On this mental reference to a First Secretary of a great Embassy,
Mr Verloc stopped in the doorway, and looking down into the kitchen
with an angry face and clenched fists, addressed his wife.
“You don’t know what a brute I had to deal with.”
He started off to make another perambulation of the table; then
when he had come to the door again he stopped, glaring in from the
height of two steps.
“A silly, jeering, dangerous brute, with no more sense than –
After all these years! A man like me! And I have been playing my
head at that game. You didn’t know. Quite right, too. What was
the good of telling you that I stood the risk of having a knife
stuck into me any time these seven years we’ve been married? I am
not a chap to worry a woman that’s fond of me. You had no business
to know.” Mr Verloc took another turn round the parlour, fuming.
“A venomous beast,” he began again from the doorway. “Drive me out
into a ditch to starve for a joke. I could see he thought it was a
damned good joke. A man like me! Look here! Some of the highest
in the world got to thank me for walking on their two legs to this
day. That’s the man you’ve got married to, my girl!”
He perceived that his wife had sat up. Mrs Verloc’s arms remained
lying stretched on the table. Mr Verloc watched at her back as if
he could read there the effect of his words.
“There isn’t a murdering plot for the last eleven years that I
hadn’t my finger in at the risk of my life. There’s scores of
these revolutionists I’ve sent off, with their bombs in their
blamed pockets, to get themselves caught on the frontier. The old
Baron knew what I was worth to his country. And here suddenly a
swine comes along – an ignorant, overbearing swine.”
Mr Verloc, stepping slowly down two steps, entered the kitchen,
took a tumbler off the dresser, and holding it in his hand,
approached the sink, without looking at his wife. “It wasn’t the
old Baron who would have had the wicked folly of getting me to call
on him at eleven in the morning. There are two or three in this
town that, if they had seen me going in, would have made no bones
about knocking me on the head sooner or later. It was a silly,
murderous trick to expose for nothing a man – like me.”
Mr Verloc, turning on the tap above the sink, poured three glasses
of water, one after another, down his throat to quench the fires of
his indignation. Mr Vladimir’s conduct was like a hot brand which
set his internal economy in a blaze. He could not get over the
disloyalty of it. This man, who would not work at the usual hard
tasks which society sets to its humbler members, had exercised his
secret industry with an indefatigable devotion. There was in Mr
Verloc a fund of loyalty. He had been loyal to his employers, to
the cause of social stability, – and to his affections too – as
became apparent when, after standing the tumbler in the sink, he