last moment from some obscure motive, perhaps merely from disgust
with carriage exercise, desisted. He approached instead the
motionless partner of his labours, and stooping to seize the
bridle, lifted up the big, weary head to the height of his shoulder
with one effort of his right arm, like a feat of strength.
“Come on,” he whispered secretly.
Limping, he led the cab away. There was an air of austerity in
this departure, the scrunched gravel of the drive crying out under
the slowly turning wheels, the horse’s lean thighs moving with
ascetic deliberation away from the light into the obscurity of the
open space bordered dimly by the pointed roofs and the feebly
shining windows of the little alms-houses. The plaint of the
gravel travelled slowly all round the drive. Between the lamps of
the charitable gateway the slow cortege reappeared, lighted up for
a moment, the short, thick man limping busily, with the horse’s
head held aloft in his fist, the lank animal walking in stiff and
forlorn dignity, the dark, low box on wheels rolling behind
comically with an air of waddling. They turned to the left. There
was a pub down the street, within fifty yards of the gate.
Stevie left alone beside the private lamp-post of the Charity, his
hands thrust deep into his pockets, glared with vacant sulkiness.
At the bottom of his pockets his incapable weak hands were clinched
hard into a pair of angry fists. In the face of anything which
affected directly or indirectly his morbid dread of pain, Stevie
ended by turning vicious. A magnanimous indignation swelled his
frail chest to bursting, and caused his candid eyes to squint.
Supremely wise in knowing his own powerlessness, Stevie was not
wise enough to restrain his passions. The tenderness of his
universal charity had two phases as indissolubly joined and
connected as the reverse and obverse sides of a medal. The anguish
of immoderate compassion was succeeded by the pain of an innocent
but pitiless rage. Those two states expressing themselves
outwardly by the same signs of futile bodily agitation, his sister
Winnie soothed his excitement without ever fathoming its twofold
character. Mrs Verloc wasted no portion of this transient life in
seeking for fundamental information. This is a sort of economy
having all the appearances and some of the advantages of prudence.
Obviously it may be good for one not to know too much. And such a
view accords very well with constitutional indolence.
On that evening on which it may be said that Mrs Verloc’s mother
having parted for good from her children had also departed this
life, Winnie Verloc did not investigate her brother’s psychology.
The poor boy was excited, of course. After once more assuring the
old woman on the threshold that she would know how to guard against
the risk of Stevie losing himself for very long on his pilgrimages
of filial piety, she took her brother’s arm to walk away. Stevie
did not even mutter to himself, but with the special sense of
sisterly devotion developed in her earliest infancy, she felt that
the boy was very much excited indeed. Holding tight to his arm,
under the appearance of leaning on it, she thought of some words
suitable to the occasion.
“Now, Stevie, you must look well after me at the crossings, and get
first into the `bus, like a good brother.”
This appeal to manly protection was received by Stevie with his
usual docility. It flattered him. He raised his head and threw
out his chest.
“Don’t be nervous, Winnie. Mustn’t be nervous! `Bus all right,”
he answered in a brusque, slurring stammer partaking of the
timorousness of a child and the resolution of a man. He advanced
fearlessly with the woman on his arm, but his lower lip dropped.
Nevertheless, on the pavement of the squalid and wide thoroughfare,
whose poverty in all the amenities of life stood foolishly exposed
by a mad profusion of gas-lights, their resemblance to each other
was so pronounced as to strike the casual passers-by.
Before the doors of the public-house at the corner, where the
profusion of gas-light reached the height of positive wickedness, a
four-wheeled cab standing by the curbstone with no one on the box,