turned about, saying:
“If I hadn’t thought of you I would have taken the bullying brute
by the throat and rammed his head into the fireplace. I’d have
been more than a match for that pink-faced, smooth-shaved – ”
Mr Verloc, neglected to finish the sentence, as if there could be
no doubt of the terminal word. For the first time in his life he
was taking that incurious woman into his confidence. The
singularity of the event, the force and importance of the personal
feelings aroused in the course of this confession, drove Stevie’s
fate clean out of Mr Verloc’s mind. The boy’s stuttering existence
of fears and indignations, together with the violence of his end,
had passed out of Mr Verloc’s mental sight for a time. For that
reason, when he looked up he was startled by the inappropriate
character of his wife’s stare. It was not a wild stare, and it was
not inattentive, but its attention was peculiar and not
satisfactory, inasmuch that it seemed concentrated upon some point
beyond Mr Verloc’s person. The impression was so strong that Mr
Verloc glanced over his shoulder. There was nothing behind him:
there was just the whitewashed wall. The excellent husband of
Winnie Verloc saw no writing on the wall. He turned to his wife
again, repeating, with some emphasis:
“I would have taken him by the throat. As true as I stand here, if
I hadn’t thought of you then I would have half choked the life out
of the brute before I let him get up. And don’t you think he would
have been anxious to call the police either. He wouldn’t have
dared. You understand why – don’t you?”
He blinked at his wife knowingly.
“No,” said Mrs Verloc in an unresonant voice, and without looking
at him at all. “What are you talking about?”
A great discouragement, the result of fatigue, came upon Mr Verloc.
He had had a very full day, and his nerves had been tried to the
utmost. After a month of maddening worry, ending in an unexpected
catastrophe, the storm-tossed spirit of Mr Verloc longed for
repose. His career as a secret agent had come to an end in a way
no one could have foreseen; only, now, perhaps he could manage to
get a night’s sleep at last. But looking at his wife, he doubted
it. She was taking it very hard – not at all like herself, he
thought. He made an effort to speak.
“You’ll have to pull yourself together, my girl,” he said
sympathetically. “What’s done can’t be undone.”
Mrs Verloc gave a slight start, though not a muscle of her white
face moved in the least. Mr Verloc, who was not looking at her,
continued ponderously.
“You go to bed now. What you want is a good cry.”
This opinion had nothing to recommend it but the general consent of
mankind. It is universally understood that, as if it were nothing
more substantial than vapour floating in the sky, every emotion of
a woman is bound to end in a shower. And it is very probable that
had Stevie died in his bed under her despairing gaze, in her
protecting arms, Mrs Verloc’s grief would have found relief in a
flood of bitter and pure tears. Mrs Verloc, in common with other
human beings, was provided with a fund of unconscious resignation
sufficient to meet the normal manifestation of human destiny.
Without “troubling her head about it,” she was aware that it “did
not stand looking into very much.” But the lamentable
circumstances of Stevie’s end, which to Mr Verloc’s mind had only
an episodic character, as part of a greater disaster, dried her
tears at their very source. It was the effect of a white-hot iron
drawn across her eyes; at the same time her heart, hardened and
chilled into a lump of ice, kept her body in an inward shudder, set
her features into a frozen contemplative immobility addressed to a
whitewashed wall with no writing on it. The exigencies of Mrs
Verloc’s temperament, which, when stripped of its philosophical
reserve, was maternal and violent, forced her to roll a series of
thoughts in her motionless head. These thoughts were rather