Chapter: Mr Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of
his brother-in-law.  It could be done, because there was very little
business at any time, and practically none at all before the evening.  Mr
Verloc cared but little about his ostensible business.  And, moreover,
his wife was in charge of his brother-in-law.

The shop was small, and so was the house.  It was one of those grimy
brick houses which existed in large quantities before the era of
reconstruction dawned upon London.  The shop was a square box of a place,
with the front glazed in small panes.  In the daytime the door remained
closed; in the evening it stood discreetly but suspiciously ajar.

The window contained photographs of more or less undressed dancing girls;
nondescript packages in wrappers like patent medicines; closed yellow
paper envelopes, very flimsy, and marked two-and-six in heavy black
figures; a few numbers of ancient French comic publications hung across a
string as if to dry; a dingy blue china bowl, a casket of black wood,
bottles of marking ink, and rubber stamps; a few books, with titles
hinting at impropriety; a few apparently old copies of obscure
newspapers, badly printed, with titles like _The Torch_, _The
Gong_--rousing titles.  And the two gas jets inside the panes were always
turned low, either for economy's sake or for the sake of the customers.

These customers were either very young men, who hung about the window for
a time before slipping in suddenly; or men of a more mature age, but
looking generally as if they were not in funds.  Some of that last kind
had the collars of their overcoats turned right up to their moustaches,
and traces of mud on the bottom of their nether garments, which had the
appearance of being much worn and not very valuable.  And the legs inside
them did not, as a general rule, seem of much account either.  With their
hands plunged deep in the side pockets of their coats, they dodged in
sideways, one shoulder first, as if afraid to start the bell going.

The bell, hung on the door by means of a curved ribbon of steel, was
difficult to circumvent.  It was hopelessly cracked; but of an evening,
at the slightest provocation, it clattered behind the customer with
impudent virulence.

It clattered; and at that signal, through the dusty glass door behind the
painted deal counter, Mr Verloc would issue hastily from the parlour at
the back.  His eyes were naturally heavy; he had an air of having
wallowed, fully dressed, all day on an unmade bed.  Another man would
have felt such an appearance a distinct disadvantage.  In a commercial
transaction of the retail order much depends on the seller's engaging and
amiable aspect.  But Mr Verloc knew his business, and remained
undisturbed by any sort of aesthetic doubt about his appearance.  With a
firm, steady-eyed impudence, which seemed to hold back the threat of some
abominable menace, he would proceed to sell over the counter some object
looking obviously and scandalously not worth the money which passed in
the transaction: a small cardboard box with apparently nothing inside,
for instance, or one of those carefully closed yellow flimsy envelopes,
or a soiled volume in paper covers with a promising title.  Now and then
it happened that one of the faded, yellow dancing girls would get sold to
an amateur, as though she had been alive and young.

Sometimes it was Mrs Verloc who would appear at the call of the cracked
bell.  Winnie Verloc was a young woman with a full bust, in a tight
bodice, and with broad hips.  Her hair was very tidy.  Steady-eyed like
her husband, she preserved an air of unfathomable indifference behind the
rampart of the counter.  Then the customer of comparatively tender years
would get suddenly disconcerted at having to deal with a woman, and with
rage in his heart would proffer a request for a bottle of marking ink,
retail value sixpence (price in Verloc's shop one-and-sixpence), which,
once outside, he would drop stealthily into the gutter.

The evening visitors--the men with collars turned up and soft hats rammed
down--nodded familiarly to Mrs Verloc, and with a muttered greeting,
lifted up the flap at the end of the counter in order to pass into the
back parlour, which gave access to a passage and to a steep flight of
stairs.  The door of the shop was the only means of entrance to the house
in which Mr Verloc carried on his business of a seller of shady wares,
exercised his vocation of a protector of society, and cultivated his
domestic virtues.  These last were pronounced.  He was thoroughly
domesticated.  Neither his spiritual, nor his mental, nor his physical
needs were of the kind to take him much abroad.  He found at home the
ease of his body and the peace of his conscience, together with Mrs
Verloc's wifely attentions and Mrs Verloc's mother's deferential regard.

Winnie's mother was a stout, wheezy woman, with a large brown face.  She
wore a black wig under a white cap.  Her swollen legs rendered her
inactive.  She considered herself to be of French descent, which might
have been true; and after a good many years of married life with a
licensed victualler of the more common sort, she provided for the years
of widowhood by letting furnished apartments for gentlemen near Vauxhall
Bridge Road in a square once of some splendour and still included in the
district of Belgravia.  This topographical fact was of some advantage in
advertising her rooms; but the patrons of the worthy widow were not
exactly of the fashionable kind.  Such as they were, her daughter Winnie
helped to look after them.  Traces of the French descent which the widow
boasted of were apparent in Winnie too.  They were apparent in the
extremely neat and artistic arrangement of her glossy dark hair.  Winnie
had also other charms: her youth; her full, rounded form; her clear
complexion; the provocation of her unfathomable reserve, which never went
so far as to prevent conversation, carried on on the lodgers' part with
animation, and on hers with an equable amiability.  It must be that Mr
Verloc was susceptible to these fascinations.  Mr Verloc was an
intermittent patron.  He came and went without any very apparent reason.
He generally arrived in London (like the influenza) from the Continent,
only he arrived unheralded by the Press; and his visitations set in with
great severity.  He breakfasted in bed, and remained wallowing there with
an air of quiet enjoyment till noon every day--and sometimes even to a
later hour.  But when he went out he seemed to experience a great
difficulty in finding his way back to his temporary home in the
Belgravian square.  He left it late, and returned to it early--as early
as three or four in the morning; and on waking up at ten addressed
Winnie, bringing in the breakfast tray, with jocular, exhausted civility,
in the hoarse, failing tones of a man who had been talking vehemently for
many hours together.  His prominent, heavy-lidded eyes rolled sideways
amorously and languidly, the bedclothes were pulled up to his chin, and
his dark smooth moustache covered his thick lips capable of much honeyed
banter.

In Winnie's mother's opinion Mr Verloc was a very nice gentleman.  From
her life's experience gathered in various "business houses" the good
woman had taken into her retirement an ideal of gentlemanliness as
exhibited by the patrons of private-saloon bars.  Mr Verloc approached
that ideal; he attained it, in fact.

"Of course, we'll take over your furniture, mother," Winnie had remarked.

The lodging-house was to be given up.  It seems it would not answer to
carry it on.  It would have been too much trouble for Mr Verloc.  It
would not have been convenient for his other business.  What his business
was he did not say; but after his engagement to Winnie he took the
trouble to get up before noon, and descending the basement stairs, make
himself pleasant to Winnie's mother in the breakfast-room downstairs
where she had her motionless being.  He stroked the cat, poked the fire,
had his lunch served to him there.  He left its slightly stuffy cosiness
with evident reluctance, but, all the same, remained out till the night
was far advanced.  He never offered to take Winnie to theatres, as such a
nice gentleman ought to have done.  His evenings were occupied.  His work
was in a way political, he told Winnie once.  She would have, he warned
her, to be very nice to his political friends.

And with her straight, unfathomable glance she answered that she would be
so, of course.

How much more he told her as to his occupation it was impossible for
Winnie's mother to discover.  The married couple took her over with the
furniture.  The mean aspect of the shop surprised her.  The change from
the Belgravian square to the narrow street in Soho affected her legs
adversely.  They became of an enormous size.  On the other hand, she
experienced a complete relief from material cares.  Her son-in-law's
heavy good nature inspired her with a sense of absolute safety.  Her
daughter's future was obviously assured, and even as to her son Stevie
she need have no anxiety.  She had not been able to conceal from herself
that he was a terrible encumbrance, that poor Stevie.  But in view of
Winnie's fondness for her delicate brother, and of Mr Verloc's kind and
generous disposition, she felt that the poor boy was pretty safe in this
rough world.  And in her heart of hearts she was not perhaps displeased
that the Verlocs had no children.  As that circumstance seemed perfectly
indifferent to Mr Verloc, and as Winnie found an object of quasi-maternal
affection in her brother, perhaps this was just as well for poor Stevie.

For he was difficult to dispose of, that boy.  He was delicate and, in a
frail way, good-looking too, except for the vacant droop of his lower
lip.  Under our excellent system of compulsory education he had learned
to read and write, notwithstanding the unfavourable aspect of the lower
lip.  But as errand-boy he did not turn out a great success.  He forgot
his messages; he was easily diverted from the straight path of duty by
the attractions of stray cats and dogs, which he followed down narrow
alleys into unsavoury courts; by the comedies of the streets, which he
contemplated open-mouthed, to the detriment of his employer's interests;
or by the dramas of fallen horses, whose pathos and violence induced him
sometimes to shriek pierceingly in a crowd, which disliked to be
disturbed by sounds of distress in its quiet enjoyment of the national
spectacle.  When led away by a grave and protecting policeman, it would
often become apparent that poor Stevie had forgotten his address--at
least for a time.  A brusque question caused him to stutter to the point
of suffocation.  When startled by anything perplexing he used to squint
horribly.  However, he never had any fits (which was encouraging); and
before the natural outbursts of impatience on the part of his father he
could always, in his childhood's days, run for protection behind the
short skirts of his sister Winnie.  On the other hand, he might have been
suspected of hiding a fund of reckless naughtiness.  When he had reached
the age of fourteen a friend of his late father, an agent for a foreign
preserved milk firm, having given him an opening as office-boy, he was
discovered one foggy afternoon, in his chief's absence, busy letting off
fireworks on the staircase.  He touched off in quick succession a set of
fierce rockets, angry catherine wheels, loudly exploding squibs--and the
matter might have turned out very serious.  An awful panic spread through
the whole building.  Wild-eyed, choking clerks stampeded through the
passages full of smoke, silk hats and elderly business men could be seen
rolling independently down the stairs.  Stevie did not seem to derive any
personal gratification from what he had done.  His motives for this
stroke of originality were difficult to discover.  It was only later on
that Winnie obtained from him a misty and confused confession.  It seems
that two other office-boys in the building had worked upon his feelings
by tales of injustice and oppression till they had wrought his compassion
to the pitch of that frenzy.  But his father's friend, of course,
dismissed him summarily as likely to ruin his business.  After that
altruistic exploit Stevie was put to help wash the dishes in the basement
kitchen, and to black the boots of the gentlemen patronising the
Belgravian mansion.  There was obviously no future in such work.  The
gentlemen tipped him a shilling now and then.  Mr Verloc showed himself
the most generous of lodgers.  But altogether all that did not amount to
much either in the way of gain or prospects; so that when Winnie
announced her engagement to Mr Verloc her mother could not help
wondering, with a sigh and a glance towards the scullery, what would
become of poor Stephen now.

It appeared that Mr Verloc was ready to take him over together with his
wife's mother and with the furniture, which was the whole visible fortune
of the family.  Mr Verloc gathered everything as it came to his broad,
good-natured breast.  The furniture was disposed to the best advantage
all over the house, but Mrs Verloc's mother was confined to two back
rooms on the first floor.  The luckless Stevie slept in one of them.  By
this time a growth of thin fluffy hair had come to blur, like a golden
mist, the sharp line of his small lower jaw.  He helped his sister with
blind love and docility in her household duties.  Mr Verloc thought that
some occupation would be good for him.  His spare time he occupied by
drawing circles with compass and pencil on a piece of paper.  He applied
himself to that pastime with great industry, with his elbows spread out
and bowed low over the kitchen table.  Through the open door of the
parlour at the back of the shop Winnie, his sister, glanced at him from
time to time with maternal vigilance.

 Meet Mr. Verloc, who's leaving his brother-in-law in charge of his London shop as he steps out for a little walk. The brother-in-law doesn't sound all that capable of running the place, but truth is that Verloc doesn't really care all that much about his "ostensible" business. The shop is attached to his house, which is a grimy brick building in London. The windows of the shop contain pictures of naked dancing girls, as well as "packages in wrappers like patent medicines; closed yellow paper envelopes" . In other words, these are packages that are really discrete, and you might already be realizing that Mr. Verloc runs some sort of pornography shop. Nice first impression on the reader, right? Imagine what people would've thought in 1907. The book describes the characters that frequent Verloc's shop, and doesn't paint a flattering picture of them. They tend to be either anxious young men or older gents with muddy clothes and their collars turned up to hide their faces. A bell at the door usually brings Mr. Verloc from out of the house and into the shop. He isn't the warmest of clerks; but hey, it's the pornography business, and customers aren't likely to care one way or the other. Sometimes, it is actually Mrs. Verloc who answers the bell. She is described as an attractive woman "with a full bust, in a tight bodice, and with broad hips" . Sometimes she makes younger customers uncomfortable , and they leave after buying only a ridiculously overpriced bottle of ink. You also learn that there are "evening visitors," who come into the shop and don't buy anything, but instead "lif up the flap at the end of the counter in order to pass into the back parlour" . The reader isn't quite sure who these dudes are, or why they've going into the Verloc's home, but Winnie doesn't seem to mind. Winnie's mother is an old woman who can barely move because of her swollen legs. She's had a long life, and at one point ran a boarding house in another part of London. She's been a widow for a while now, and she's happy that Winnie married Mr. Verloc, who seems like a nice man who can take care of them all. Winnie's mother remembers how Mr. Verloc used to come to her boarding house every now and then, always arriving from somewhere outside England. When he used to come, he would eat his breakfast in bed and "remain wallowing there" until noon every day . He would leave in the early afternoon and come back in the early morning, maybe three or four a.m., sounding like he'd been talking all night. The old woman doesn't really like the new neighborhood, but she is happy that her daughter is secure, along with Stevie. So why, we might already wonder, is she so worried about Stevie? Well it turns out that Winnie's brother has what people today would call a mental disability. Stevie has tried to hold jobs in the past, but he seems unable to keep them because he gets too easily distracted. On one occasion, he actually set off fireworks in the stairwell of an office building and caused a huge commotion. Winnie only found out afterwards that "two other office-boys in the building had worked upon his feelings by tales of injustice and oppression till they had wrought his compassion to the pitch of that frenzy" . In other words, two smarter young men tricked Stevie into lighting off the fireworks out of protest for the terrible treatment they'd received. At this point, Conrad shows you that Stevie can be easily manipulated. Stevie doesn't seem to cause Mr. Verloc much hassle. For the most part, he stays in his room at the rear of the Verloc house and spends his days drawing circles with a pencil and mathematical compass. While he does this, Winnie "glance at him from time to time with maternal vigilance" , which suggests that she's very protective of him.

