Chapter: Having infused by persistent importunities some sort of heat into the
chilly interest of several licensed victuallers (the acquaintances once
upon a time of her late unlucky husband), Mrs Verloc's mother had at last
secured her admission to certain almshouses founded by a wealthy
innkeeper for the destitute widows of the trade.

This end, conceived in the astuteness of her uneasy heart, the old woman
had pursued with secrecy and determination.  That was the time when her
daughter Winnie could not help passing a remark to Mr Verloc that "mother
has been spending half-crowns and five shillings almost every day this
last week in cab fares."  But the remark was not made grudgingly.  Winnie
respected her mother's infirmities.  She was only a little surprised at
this sudden mania for locomotion.  Mr Verloc, who was sufficiently
magnificent in his way, had grunted the remark impatiently aside as
interfering with his meditations.  These were frequent, deep, and
prolonged; they bore upon a matter more important than five shillings.
Distinctly more important, and beyond all comparison more difficult to
consider in all its aspects with philosophical serenity.

Her object attained in astute secrecy, the heroic old woman had made a
clean breast of it to Mrs Verloc.  Her soul was triumphant and her heart
tremulous.  Inwardly she quaked, because she dreaded and admired the
calm, self-contained character of her daughter Winnie, whose displeasure
was made redoubtable by a diversity of dreadful silences.  But she did
not allow her inward apprehensions to rob her of the advantage of
venerable placidity conferred upon her outward person by her triple chin,
the floating ampleness of her ancient form, and the impotent condition of
her legs.

The shock of the information was so unexpected that Mrs Verloc, against
her usual practice when addressed, interrupted the domestic occupation
she was engaged upon.  It was the dusting of the furniture in the parlour
behind the shop.  She turned her head towards her mother.

"Whatever did you want to do that for?" she exclaimed, in scandalised
astonishment.

The shock must have been severe to make her depart from that distant and
uninquiring acceptance of facts which was her force and her safeguard in
life.

"Weren't you made comfortable enough here?"

She had lapsed into these inquiries, but next moment she saved the
consistency of her conduct by resuming her dusting, while the old woman
sat scared and dumb under her dingy white cap and lustreless dark wig.

Winnie finished the chair, and ran the duster along the mahogany at the
back of the horse-hair sofa on which Mr Verloc loved to take his ease in
hat and overcoat.  She was intent on her work, but presently she
permitted herself another question.

"How in the world did you manage it, mother?"

As not affecting the inwardness of things, which it was Mrs Verloc's
principle to ignore, this curiosity was excusable.  It bore merely on the
methods.  The old woman welcomed it eagerly as bringing forward something
that could be talked about with much sincerity.

She favoured her daughter by an exhaustive answer, full of names and
enriched by side comments upon the ravages of time as observed in the
alteration of human countenances.  The names were principally the names
of licensed victuallers--"poor daddy's friends, my dear."  She enlarged
with special appreciation on the kindness and condescension of a large
brewer, a Baronet and an M. P., the Chairman of the Governors of the
Charity.  She expressed herself thus warmly because she had been allowed
to interview by appointment his Private Secretary--"a very polite
gentleman, all in black, with a gentle, sad voice, but so very, very thin
and quiet.  He was like a shadow, my dear."

Winnie, prolonging her dusting operations till the tale was told to the
end, walked out of the parlour into the kitchen (down two steps) in her
usual manner, without the slightest comment.

Shedding a few tears in sign of rejoicing at her daughter's mansuetude in
this terrible affair, Mrs Verloc's mother gave play to her astuteness in
the direction of her furniture, because it was her own; and sometimes she
wished it hadn't been.  Heroism is all very well, but there are
circumstances when the disposal of a few tables and chairs, brass
bedsteads, and so on, may be big with remote and disastrous consequences.
She required a few pieces herself, the Foundation which, after many
importunities, had gathered her to its charitable breast, giving nothing
but bare planks and cheaply papered bricks to the objects of its
solicitude.  The delicacy guiding her choice to the least valuable and
most dilapidated articles passed unacknowledged, because Winnie's
philosophy consisted in not taking notice of the inside of facts; she
assumed that mother took what suited her best.  As to Mr Verloc, his
intense meditation, like a sort of Chinese wall, isolated him completely
from the phenomena of this world of vain effort and illusory appearances.

Her selection made, the disposal of the rest became a perplexing question
in a particular way.  She was leaving it in Brett Street, of course.  But
she had two children.  Winnie was provided for by her sensible union with
that excellent husband, Mr Verloc.  Stevie was destitute--and a little
peculiar.  His position had to be considered before the claims of legal
justice and even the promptings of partiality.  The possession of the
furniture would not be in any sense a provision.  He ought to have
it--the poor boy.  But to give it to him would be like tampering with his
position of complete dependence.  It was a sort of claim which she feared
to weaken.  Moreover, the susceptibilities of Mr Verloc would perhaps not
brook being beholden to his brother-in-law for the chairs he sat on.  In
a long experience of gentlemen lodgers, Mrs Verloc's mother had acquired
a dismal but resigned notion of the fantastic side of human nature.  What
if Mr Verloc suddenly took it into his head to tell Stevie to take his
blessed sticks somewhere out of that?  A division, on the other hand,
however carefully made, might give some cause of offence to Winnie.  No,
Stevie must remain destitute and dependent.  And at the moment of leaving
Brett Street she had said to her daughter: "No use waiting till I am
dead, is there?  Everything I leave here is altogether your own now, my
dear."

Winnie, with her hat on, silent behind her mother's back, went on
arranging the collar of the old woman's cloak.  She got her hand-bag, an
umbrella, with an impassive face.  The time had come for the expenditure
of the sum of three-and-sixpence on what might well be supposed the last
cab drive of Mrs Verloc's mother's life.  They went out at the shop door.

The conveyance awaiting them would have illustrated the proverb that
"truth can be more cruel than caricature," if such a proverb existed.
Crawling behind an infirm horse, a metropolitan hackney carriage drew up
on wobbly wheels and with a maimed driver on the box.  This last
peculiarity caused some embarrassment.  Catching sight of a hooked iron
contrivance protruding from the left sleeve of the man's coat, Mrs
Verloc's mother lost suddenly the heroic courage of these days.  She
really couldn't trust herself.  "What do you think, Winnie?"  She hung
back.  The passionate expostulations of the big-faced cabman seemed to be
squeezed out of a blocked throat.  Leaning over from his box, he
whispered with mysterious indignation.  What was the matter now?  Was it
possible to treat a man so?  His enormous and unwashed countenance flamed
red in the muddy stretch of the street.  Was it likely they would have
given him a licence, he inquired desperately, if--

The police constable of the locality quieted him by a friendly glance;
then addressing himself to the two women without marked consideration,
said:

"He's been driving a cab for twenty years.  I never knew him to have an
accident."

"Accident!" shouted the driver in a scornful whisper.

The policeman's testimony settled it.  The modest assemblage of seven
people, mostly under age, dispersed.  Winnie followed her mother into the
cab.  Stevie climbed on the box.  His vacant mouth and distressed eyes
depicted the state of his mind in regard to the transactions which were
taking place.  In the narrow streets the progress of the journey was made
sensible to those within by the near fronts of the houses gliding past
slowly and shakily, with a great rattle and jingling of glass, as if
about to collapse behind the cab; and the infirm horse, with the harness
hung over his sharp backbone flapping very loose about his thighs,
appeared to be dancing mincingly on his toes with infinite patience.
Later on, in the wider space of Whitehall, all visual evidences of motion
became imperceptible.  The rattle and jingle of glass went on
indefinitely in front of the long Treasury building--and time itself
seemed to stand still.

At last Winnie observed: "This isn't a very good horse."

Her eyes gleamed in the shadow of the cab straight ahead, immovable.  On
the box, Stevie shut his vacant mouth first, in order to ejaculate
earnestly: "Don't."

The driver, holding high the reins twisted around the hook, took no
notice.  Perhaps he had not heard.  Stevie's breast heaved.

"Don't whip."

The man turned slowly his bloated and sodden face of many colours
bristling with white hairs.  His little red eyes glistened with moisture.
His big lips had a violet tint.  They remained closed.  With the dirty
back of his whip-hand he rubbed the stubble sprouting on his enormous
chin.

"You mustn't," stammered out Stevie violently.  "It hurts."

"Mustn't whip," queried the other in a thoughtful whisper, and
immediately whipped.  He did this, not because his soul was cruel and his
heart evil, but because he had to earn his fare.  And for a time the
walls of St Stephen's, with its towers and pinnacles, contemplated in
immobility and silence a cab that jingled.  It rolled too, however.  But
on the bridge there was a commotion.  Stevie suddenly proceeded to get
down from the box.  There were shouts on the pavement, people ran
forward, the driver pulled up, whispering curses of indignation and
astonishment.  Winnie lowered the window, and put her head out, white as
a ghost.  In the depths of the cab, her mother was exclaiming, in tones
of anguish: "Is that boy hurt?  Is that boy hurt?"

Stevie was not hurt, he had not even fallen, but excitement as usual had
robbed him of the power of connected speech.  He could do no more than
stammer at the window.  "Too heavy.  Too heavy."  Winnie put out her hand
on to his shoulder.

"Stevie!  Get up on the box directly, and don't try to get down again."

"No.  No.  Walk.  Must walk."

In trying to state the nature of that necessity he stammered himself into
utter incoherence.  No physical impossibility stood in the way of his
whim.  Stevie could have managed easily to keep pace with the infirm,
dancing horse without getting out of breath.  But his sister withheld her
consent decisively.  "The idea!  Whoever heard of such a thing!  Run
after a cab!"  Her mother, frightened and helpless in the depths of the
conveyance, entreated: "Oh, don't let him, Winnie.  He'll get lost.
Don't let him."

"Certainly not.  What next!  Mr Verloc will be sorry to hear of this
nonsense, Stevie,--I can tell you.  He won't be happy at all."

The idea of Mr Verloc's grief and unhappiness acting as usual powerfully
upon Stevie's fundamentally docile disposition, he abandoned all
resistance, and climbed up again on the box, with a face of despair.

The cabby turned at him his enormous and inflamed countenance
truculently.  "Don't you go for trying this silly game again, young
fellow."

After delivering himself thus in a stern whisper, strained almost to
extinction, he drove on, ruminating solemnly.  To his mind the incident
remained somewhat obscure.  But his intellect, though it had lost its
pristine vivacity in the benumbing years of sedentary exposure to the
weather, lacked not independence or sanity.  Gravely he dismissed the
hypothesis of Stevie being a drunken young nipper.

Inside the cab the spell of silence, in which the two women had endured
shoulder to shoulder the jolting, rattling, and jingling of the journey,
had been broken by Stevie's outbreak.  Winnie raised her voice.

"You've done what you wanted, mother.  You'll have only yourself to thank
for it if you aren't happy afterwards.  And I don't think you'll be.
That I don't.  Weren't you comfortable enough in the house?  Whatever
people'll think of us--you throwing yourself like this on a Charity?"

"My dear," screamed the old woman earnestly above the noise, "you've been
the best of daughters to me.  As to Mr Verloc--there--"

Words failing her on the subject of Mr Verloc's excellence, she turned
her old tearful eyes to the roof of the cab.  Then she averted her head
on the pretence of looking out of the window, as if to judge of their
progress.  It was insignificant, and went on close to the curbstone.
Night, the early dirty night, the sinister, noisy, hopeless and rowdy
night of South London, had overtaken her on her last cab drive.  In the
gas-light of the low-fronted shops her big cheeks glowed with an orange
hue under a black and mauve bonnet.

Mrs Verloc's mother's complexion had become yellow by the effect of age
and from a natural predisposition to biliousness, favoured by the trials
of a difficult and worried existence, first as wife, then as widow.  It
was a complexion, that under the influence of a blush would take on an
orange tint.  And this woman, modest indeed but hardened in the fires of
adversity, of an age, moreover, when blushes are not expected, had
positively blushed before her daughter.  In the privacy of a
four-wheeler, on her way to a charity cottage (one of a row) which by the
exiguity of its dimensions and the simplicity of its accommodation, might
well have been devised in kindness as a place of training for the still
more straitened circumstances of the grave, she was forced to hide from
her own child a blush of remorse and shame.

Whatever people will think?  She knew very well what they did think, the
people Winnie had in her mind--the old friends of her husband, and others
too, whose interest she had solicited with such flattering success.  She
had not known before what a good beggar she could be.  But she guessed
very well what inference was drawn from her application.  On account of
that shrinking delicacy, which exists side by side with aggressive
brutality in masculine nature, the inquiries into her circumstances had
not been pushed very far.  She had checked them by a visible compression
of the lips and some display of an emotion determined to be eloquently
silent.  And the men would become suddenly incurious, after the manner of
their kind.  She congratulated herself more than once on having nothing
to do with women, who being naturally more callous and avid of details,
would have been anxious to be exactly informed by what sort of unkind
conduct her daughter and son-in-law had driven her to that sad extremity.
It was only before the Secretary of the great brewer M. P. and Chairman
of the Charity, who, acting for his principal, felt bound to be
conscientiously inquisitive as to the real circumstances of the
applicant, that she had burst into tears outright and aloud, as a
cornered woman will weep.  The thin and polite gentleman, after
contemplating her with an air of being "struck all of a heap," abandoned
his position under the cover of soothing remarks.  She must not distress
herself.  The deed of the Charity did not absolutely specify "childless
widows."  In fact, it did not by any means disqualify her.  But the
discretion of the Committee must be an informed discretion.  One could
understand very well her unwillingness to be a burden, etc. etc.
Thereupon, to his profound disappointment, Mrs Verloc's mother wept some
more with an augmented vehemence.

The tears of that large female in a dark, dusty wig, and ancient silk
dress festooned with dingy white cotton lace, were the tears of genuine
distress.  She had wept because she was heroic and unscrupulous and full
of love for both her children.  Girls frequently get sacrificed to the
welfare of the boys.  In this case she was sacrificing Winnie.  By the
suppression of truth she was slandering her.  Of course, Winnie was
independent, and need not care for the opinion of people that she would
never see and who would never see her; whereas poor Stevie had nothing in
the world he could call his own except his mother's heroism and
unscrupulousness.

The first sense of security following on Winnie's marriage wore off in
time (for nothing lasts), and Mrs Verloc's mother, in the seclusion of
the back bedroom, had recalled the teaching of that experience which the
world impresses upon a widowed woman.  But she had recalled it without
vain bitterness; her store of resignation amounted almost to dignity.
She reflected stoically that everything decays, wears out, in this world;
that the way of kindness should be made easy to the well disposed; that
her daughter Winnie was a most devoted sister, and a very self-confident
wife indeed.  As regards Winnie's sisterly devotion, her stoicism
flinched.  She excepted that sentiment from the rule of decay affecting
all things human and some things divine.  She could not help it; not to
do so would have frightened her too much.  But in considering the
conditions of her daughter's married state, she rejected firmly all
flattering illusions.  She took the cold and reasonable view that the
less strain put on Mr Verloc's kindness the longer its effects were
likely to last.  That excellent man loved his wife, of course, but he
would, no doubt, prefer to keep as few of her relations as was consistent
with the proper display of that sentiment.  It would be better if its
whole effect were concentrated on poor Stevie.  And the heroic old woman
resolved on going away from her children as an act of devotion and as a
move of deep policy.

The "virtue" of this policy consisted in this (Mrs Verloc's mother was
subtle in her way), that Stevie's moral claim would be strengthened.  The
poor boy--a good, useful boy, if a little peculiar--had not a sufficient
standing.  He had been taken over with his mother, somewhat in the same
way as the furniture of the Belgravian mansion had been taken over, as if
on the ground of belonging to her exclusively.  What will happen, she
asked herself (for Mrs Verloc's mother was in a measure imaginative),
when I die?  And when she asked herself that question it was with dread.
It was also terrible to think that she would not then have the means of
knowing what happened to the poor boy.  But by making him over to his
sister, by going thus away, she gave him the advantage of a directly
dependent position.  This was the more subtle sanction of Mrs Verloc's
mother's heroism and unscrupulousness.  Her act of abandonment was really
an arrangement for settling her son permanently in life.  Other people
made material sacrifices for such an object, she in that way.  It was the
only way.  Moreover, she would be able to see how it worked.  Ill or well
she would avoid the horrible incertitude on the death-bed.  But it was
hard, hard, cruelly hard.

The cab rattled, jingled, jolted; in fact, the last was quite
extraordinary.  By its disproportionate violence and magnitude it
obliterated every sensation of onward movement; and the effect was of
being shaken in a stationary apparatus like a mediaeval device for the
punishment of crime, or some very newfangled invention for the cure of a
sluggish liver.  It was extremely distressing; and the raising of Mrs
Verloc's mother's voice sounded like a wail of pain.

"I know, my dear, you'll come to see me as often as you can spare the
time.  Won't you?"

"Of course," answered Winnie shortly, staring straight before her.

And the cab jolted in front of a steamy, greasy shop in a blaze of gas
and in the smell of fried fish.

The old woman raised a wail again.

"And, my dear, I must see that poor boy every Sunday.  He won't mind
spending the day with his old mother--"

Winnie screamed out stolidly:

"Mind!  I should think not.  That poor boy will miss you something cruel.
I wish you had thought a little of that, mother."

Not think of it!  The heroic woman swallowed a playful and inconvenient
object like a billiard ball, which had tried to jump out of her throat.
Winnie sat mute for a while, pouting at the front of the cab, then
snapped out, which was an unusual tone with her:

"I expect I'll have a job with him at first, he'll be that restless--"

"Whatever you do, don't let him worry your husband, my dear."

Thus they discussed on familiar lines the bearings of a new situation.
And the cab jolted.  Mrs Verloc's mother expressed some misgivings.
Could Stevie be trusted to come all that way alone?  Winnie maintained
that he was much less "absent-minded" now.  They agreed as to that.  It
could not be denied.  Much less--hardly at all.  They shouted at each
other in the jingle with comparative cheerfulness.  But suddenly the
maternal anxiety broke out afresh.  There were two omnibuses to take, and
a short walk between.  It was too difficult!  The old woman gave way to
grief and consternation.

Winnie stared forward.

"Don't you upset yourself like this, mother.  You must see him, of
course."

"No, my dear.  I'll try not to."

She mopped her streaming eyes.

"But you can't spare the time to come with him, and if he should forget
himself and lose his way and somebody spoke to him sharply, his name and
address may slip his memory, and he'll remain lost for days and days--"

The vision of a workhouse infirmary for poor Stevie--if only during
inquiries--wrung her heart.  For she was a proud woman.  Winnie's stare
had grown hard, intent, inventive.

"I can't bring him to you myself every week," she cried.  "But don't you
worry, mother.  I'll see to it that he don't get lost for long."

They felt a peculiar bump; a vision of brick pillars lingered before the
rattling windows of the cab; a sudden cessation of atrocious jolting and
uproarious jingling dazed the two women.  What had happened?  They sat
motionless and scared in the profound stillness, till the door came open,
and a rough, strained whispering was heard:

"Here you are!"

A range of gabled little houses, each with one dim yellow window, on the
ground floor, surrounded the dark open space of a grass plot planted with
shrubs and railed off from the patchwork of lights and shadows in the
wide road, resounding with the dull rumble of traffic.  Before the door
of one of these tiny houses--one without a light in the little downstairs
window--the cab had come to a standstill.  Mrs Verloc's mother got out
first, backwards, with a key in her hand.  Winnie lingered on the
flagstone path to pay the cabman.  Stevie, after helping to carry inside
a lot of small parcels, came out and stood under the light of a gas-lamp
belonging to the Charity.  The cabman looked at the pieces of silver,
which, appearing very minute in his big, grimy palm, symbolised the
insignificant results which reward the ambitious courage and toil of a
mankind whose day is short on this earth of evil.

He had been paid decently--four one-shilling pieces--and he contemplated
them in perfect stillness, as if they had been the surprising terms of a
melancholy problem.  The slow transfer of that treasure to an inner
pocket demanded much laborious groping in the depths of decayed clothing.
His form was squat and without flexibility.  Stevie, slender, his
shoulders a little up, and his hands thrust deep in the side pockets of
his warm overcoat, stood at the edge of the path, pouting.

The cabman, pausing in his deliberate movements, seemed struck by some
misty recollection.

"Oh!  'Ere you are, young fellow," he whispered.  "You'll know him
again--won't you?"

Stevie was staring at the horse, whose hind quarters appeared unduly
elevated by the effect of emaciation.  The little stiff tail seemed to
have been fitted in for a heartless joke; and at the other end the thin,
flat neck, like a plank covered with old horse-hide, drooped to the
ground under the weight of an enormous bony head.  The ears hung at
different angles, negligently; and the macabre figure of that mute
dweller on the earth steamed straight up from ribs and backbone in the
muggy stillness of the air.

The cabman struck lightly Stevie's breast with the iron hook protruding
from a ragged, greasy sleeve.

"Look 'ere, young feller.  'Ow'd _you_ like to sit behind this 'oss up to
two o'clock in the morning p'raps?"

Stevie looked vacantly into the fierce little eyes with red-edged lids.

"He ain't lame," pursued the other, whispering with energy.  "He ain't
got no sore places on 'im.  'Ere he is.  'Ow would _you_ like--"

His strained, extinct voice invested his utterance with a character of
vehement secrecy.  Stevie's vacant gaze was changing slowly into dread.

"You may well look!  Till three and four o'clock in the morning.  Cold
and 'ungry.  Looking for fares.  Drunks."

His jovial purple cheeks bristled with white hairs; and like Virgil's
Silenus, who, his face smeared with the juice of berries, discoursed of
Olympian Gods to the innocent shepherds of Sicily, he talked to Stevie of
domestic matters and the affairs of men whose sufferings are great and
immortality by no means assured.

"I am a night cabby, I am," he whispered, with a sort of boastful
exasperation.  "I've got to take out what they will blooming well give me
at the yard.  I've got my missus and four kids at 'ome."

The monstrous nature of that declaration of paternity seemed to strike
the world dumb.  A silence reigned during which the flanks of the old
horse, the steed of apocalyptic misery, smoked upwards in the light of
the charitable gas-lamp.

The cabman grunted, then added in his mysterious whisper:

"This ain't an easy world."  Stevie's face had been twitching for some
time, and at last his feelings burst out in their usual concise form.

"Bad!  Bad!"

His gaze remained fixed on the ribs of the horse, self-conscious and
sombre, as though he were afraid to look about him at the badness of the
world.  And his slenderness, his rosy lips and pale, clear complexion,
gave him the aspect of a delicate boy, notwithstanding the fluffy growth
of golden hair on his cheeks.  He pouted in a scared way like a child.
The cabman, short and broad, eyed him with his fierce little eyes that
seemed to smart in a clear and corroding liquid.

"'Ard on 'osses, but dam' sight 'arder on poor chaps like me," he wheezed
just audibly.

"Poor!  Poor!" stammered out Stevie, pushing his hands deeper into his
pockets with convulsive sympathy.  He could say nothing; for the
tenderness to all pain and all misery, the desire to make the horse happy
and the cabman happy, had reached the point of a bizarre longing to take
them to bed with him.  And that, he knew, was impossible.  For Stevie was
not mad.  It was, as it were, a symbolic longing; and at the same time it
was very distinct, because springing from experience, the mother of
wisdom.  Thus when as a child he cowered in a dark corner scared,
wretched, sore, and miserable with the black, black misery of the soul,
his sister Winnie used to come along, and carry him off to bed with her,
as into a heaven of consoling peace.  Stevie, though apt to forget mere
facts, such as his name and address for instance, had a faithful memory
of sensations.  To be taken into a bed of compassion was the supreme
remedy, with the only one disadvantage of being difficult of application
on a large scale.  And looking at the cabman, Stevie perceived this
clearly, because he was reasonable.

The cabman went on with his leisurely preparations as if Stevie had not
existed.  He made as if to hoist himself on the box, but at the 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, seemed cast out
into the gutter on account of irremediable decay.  Mrs Verloc recognised
the conveyance.  Its aspect was so profoundly lamentable, with such a
perfection of grotesque misery and weirdness of macabre detail, as if it
were the Cab of Death itself, that Mrs Verloc, with that ready compassion
of a woman for a horse (when she is not sitting behind him), exclaimed
vaguely:

"Poor brute!"

Hanging back suddenly, Stevie inflicted an arresting jerk upon his
sister.

"Poor!  Poor!" he ejaculated appreciatively.  "Cabman poor too.  He told
me himself."

The contemplation of the infirm and lonely steed overcame him.  Jostled,
but obstinate, he would remain there, trying to express the view newly
opened to his sympathies of the human and equine misery in close
association.  But it was very difficult.  "Poor brute, poor people!" was
all he could repeat.  It did not seem forcible enough, and he came to a
stop with an angry splutter: "Shame!"  Stevie was no master of phrases,
and perhaps for that very reason his thoughts lacked clearness and
precision.  But he felt with greater completeness and some profundity.
That little word contained all his sense of indignation and horror at one
sort of wretchedness having to feed upon the anguish of the other--at the
poor cabman beating the poor horse in the name, as it were, of his poor
kids at home.  And Stevie knew what it was to be beaten.  He knew it from
experience.  It was a bad world.  Bad!  Bad!

Mrs Verloc, his only sister, guardian, and protector, could not pretend
to such depths of insight.  Moreover, she had not experienced the magic
of the cabman's eloquence.  She was in the dark as to the inwardness of
the word "Shame."  And she said placidly:

"Come along, Stevie.  You can't help that."

The docile Stevie went along; but now he went along without pride,
shamblingly, and muttering half words, and even words that would have
been whole if they had not been made up of halves that did not belong to
each other.  It was as though he had been trying to fit all the words he
could remember to his sentiments in order to get some sort of
corresponding idea.  And, as a matter of fact, he got it at last.  He
hung back to utter it at once.

"Bad world for poor people."

Directly he had expressed that thought he became aware that it was
familiar to him already in all its consequences.  This circumstance
strengthened his conviction immensely, but also augmented his
indignation.  Somebody, he felt, ought to be punished for it--punished
with great severity.  Being no sceptic, but a moral creature, he was in a
manner at the mercy of his righteous passions.

"Beastly!" he added concisely.

It was clear to Mrs Verloc that he was greatly excited.

"Nobody can help that," she said.  "Do come along.  Is that the way
you're taking care of me?"

Stevie mended his pace obediently.  He prided himself on being a good
brother.  His morality, which was very complete, demanded that from him.
Yet he was pained at the information imparted by his sister Winnie who
was good.  Nobody could help that!  He came along gloomily, but presently
he brightened up.  Like the rest of mankind, perplexed by the mystery of
the universe, he had his moments of consoling trust in the organised
powers of the earth.

"Police," he suggested confidently.

"The police aren't for that," observed Mrs Verloc cursorily, hurrying on
her way.

Stevie's face lengthened considerably.  He was thinking.  The more
intense his thinking, the slacker was the droop of his lower jaw.

And it was with an aspect of hopeless vacancy that he gave up his
intellectual enterprise.

"Not for that?" he mumbled, resigned but surprised.  "Not for that?"  He
had formed for himself an ideal conception of the metropolitan police as
a sort of benevolent institution for the suppression of evil.  The notion
of benevolence especially was very closely associated with his sense of
the power of the men in blue.  He had liked all police constables
tenderly, with a guileless trustfulness.  And he was pained.  He was
irritated, too, by a suspicion of duplicity in the members of the force.
For Stevie was frank and as open as the day himself.  What did they mean
by pretending then?  Unlike his sister, who put her trust in face values,
he wished to go to the bottom of the matter.  He carried on his inquiry
by means of an angry challenge.

"What for are they then, Winn?  What are they for?  Tell me."

Winnie disliked controversy.  But fearing most a fit of black depression
consequent on Stevie missing his mother very much at first, she did not
altogether decline the discussion.  Guiltless of all irony, she answered
yet in a form which was not perhaps unnatural in the wife of Mr Verloc,
Delegate of the Central Red Committee, personal friend of certain
anarchists, and a votary of social revolution.

"Don't you know what the police are for, Stevie?  They are there so that
them as have nothing shouldn't take anything away from them who have."

She avoided using the verb "to steal," because it always made her brother
uncomfortable.  For Stevie was delicately honest.  Certain simple
principles had been instilled into him so anxiously (on account of his
"queerness") that the mere names of certain transgressions filled him
with horror.  He had been always easily impressed by speeches.  He was
impressed and startled now, and his intelligence was very alert.

"What?" he asked at once anxiously.  "Not even if they were hungry?
Mustn't they?"

The two had paused in their walk.

"Not if they were ever so," said Mrs Verloc, with the equanimity of a
person untroubled by the problem of the distribution of wealth, and
exploring the perspective of the roadway for an omnibus of the right
colour.  "Certainly not.  But what's the use of talking about all that?
You aren't ever hungry."

She cast a swift glance at the boy, like a young man, by her side.  She
saw him amiable, attractive, affectionate, and only a little, a very
little, peculiar.  And she could not see him otherwise, for he was
connected with what there was of the salt of passion in her tasteless
life--the passion of indignation, of courage, of pity, and even of
self-sacrifice.  She did not add: "And you aren't likely ever to be as
long as I live."  But she might very well have done so, since she had
taken effectual steps to that end.  Mr Verloc was a very good husband.
It was her honest impression that nobody could help liking the boy.  She
cried out suddenly:

"Quick, Stevie.  Stop that green 'bus."

And Stevie, tremulous and important with his sister Winnie on his arm,
flung up the other high above his head at the approaching 'bus, with
complete success.

An hour afterwards Mr Verloc raised his eyes from a newspaper he was
reading, or at any rate looking at, behind the counter, and in the
expiring clatter of the door-bell beheld Winnie, his wife, enter and
cross the shop on her way upstairs, followed by Stevie, his
brother-in-law.  The sight of his wife was agreeable to Mr Verloc.  It
was his idiosyncrasy.  The figure of his brother-in-law remained
imperceptible to him because of the morose thoughtfulness that lately had
fallen like a veil between Mr Verloc and the appearances of the world of
senses.  He looked after his wife fixedly, without a word, as though she
had been a phantom.  His voice for home use was husky and placid, but now
it was heard not at all.  It was not heard at supper, to which he was
called by his wife in the usual brief manner: "Adolf."  He sat down to
consume it without conviction, wearing his hat pushed far back on his
head.  It was not devotion to an outdoor life, but the frequentation of
foreign cafes which was responsible for that habit, investing with a
character of unceremonious impermanency Mr Verloc's steady fidelity to
his own fireside.  Twice at the clatter of the cracked bell he arose
without a word, disappeared into the shop, and came back silently.
During these absences Mrs Verloc, becoming acutely aware of the vacant
place at her right hand, missed her mother very much, and stared stonily;
while Stevie, from the same reason, kept on shuffling his feet, as though
the floor under the table were uncomfortably hot.  When Mr Verloc
returned to sit in his place, like the very embodiment of silence, the
character of Mrs Verloc's stare underwent a subtle change, and Stevie
ceased to fidget with his feet, because of his great and awed regard for
his sister's husband.  He directed at him glances of respectful
compassion.  Mr Verloc was sorry.  His sister Winnie had impressed upon
him (in the omnibus) that Mr Verloc would be found at home in a state of
sorrow, and must not be worried.  His father's anger, the irritability of
gentlemen lodgers, and Mr Verloc's predisposition to immoderate grief,
had been the main sanctions of Stevie's self-restraint.  Of these
sentiments, all easily provoked, but not always easy to understand, the
last had the greatest moral efficiency--because Mr Verloc was _good_.
His mother and his sister had established that ethical fact on an
unshakable foundation.  They had established, erected, consecrated it
behind Mr Verloc's back, for reasons that had nothing to do with abstract
morality.  And Mr Verloc was not aware of it.  It is but bare justice to
him to say that he had no notion of appearing good to Stevie.  Yet so it
was.  He was even the only man so qualified in Stevie's knowledge,
because the gentlemen lodgers had been too transient and too remote to
have anything very distinct about them but perhaps their boots; and as
regards the disciplinary measures of his father, the desolation of his
mother and sister shrank from setting up a theory of goodness before the
victim.  It would have been too cruel.  And it was even possible that
Stevie would not have believed them.  As far as Mr Verloc was concerned,
nothing could stand in the way of Stevie's belief.  Mr Verloc was
obviously yet mysteriously _good_.  And the grief of a good man is
august.

Stevie gave glances of reverential compassion to his brother-in-law.  Mr
Verloc was sorry.  The brother of Winnie had never before felt himself in
such close communion with the mystery of that man's goodness.  It was an
understandable sorrow.  And Stevie himself was sorry.  He was very sorry.
The same sort of sorrow.  And his attention being drawn to this
unpleasant state, Stevie shuffled his feet.  His feelings were habitually
manifested by the agitation of his limbs.

"Keep your feet quiet, dear," said Mrs Verloc, with authority and
tenderness; then turning towards her husband in an indifferent voice, the
masterly achievement of instinctive tact: "Are you going out to-night?"
she asked.

The mere suggestion seemed repugnant to Mr Verloc.  He shook his head
moodily, and then sat still with downcast eyes, looking at the piece of
cheese on his plate for a whole minute.  At the end of that time he got
up, and went out--went right out in the clatter of the shop-door bell.
He acted thus inconsistently, not from any desire to make himself
unpleasant, but because of an unconquerable restlessness.  It was no
earthly good going out.  He could not find anywhere in London what he
wanted.  But he went out.  He led a cortege of dismal thoughts along dark
streets, through lighted streets, in and out of two flash bars, as if in
a half-hearted attempt to make a night of it, and finally back again to
his menaced home, where he sat down fatigued behind the counter, and they
crowded urgently round him, like a pack of hungry black hounds.  After
locking up the house and putting out the gas he took them upstairs with
him--a dreadful escort for a man going to bed.  His wife had preceded him
some time before, and with her ample form defined vaguely under the
counterpane, her head on the pillow, and a hand under the cheek offered
to his distraction the view of early drowsiness arguing the possession of
an equable soul.  Her big eyes stared wide open, inert and dark against
the snowy whiteness of the linen.  She did not move.

She had an equable soul.  She felt profoundly that things do not stand
much looking into.  She made her force and her wisdom of that instinct.
But the taciturnity of Mr Verloc had been lying heavily upon her for a
good many days.  It was, as a matter of fact, affecting her nerves.
Recumbent and motionless, she said placidly:

"You'll catch cold walking about in your socks like this."

This speech, becoming the solicitude of the wife and the prudence of the
woman, took Mr Verloc unawares.  He had left his boots downstairs, but he
had forgotten to put on his slippers, and he had been turning about the
bedroom on noiseless pads like a bear in a cage.  At the sound of his
wife's voice he stopped and stared at her with a somnambulistic,
expressionless gaze so long that Mrs Verloc moved her limbs slightly
under the bed-clothes.  But she did not move her black head sunk in the
white pillow one hand under her cheek and the big, dark, unwinking eyes.

Under her husband's expressionless stare, and remembering her mother's
empty room across the landing, she felt an acute pang of loneliness.  She
had never been parted from her mother before.  They had stood by each
other.  She felt that they had, and she said to herself that now mother
was gone--gone for good.  Mrs Verloc had no illusions.  Stevie remained,
however.  And she said:

"Mother's done what she wanted to do.  There's no sense in it that I can
see.  I'm sure she couldn't have thought you had enough of her.  It's
perfectly wicked, leaving us like that."

Mr Verloc was not a well-read person; his range of allusive phrases was
limited, but there was a peculiar aptness in circumstances which made him
think of rats leaving a doomed ship.  He very nearly said so.  He had
grown suspicious and embittered.  Could it be that the old woman had such
an excellent nose?  But the unreasonableness of such a suspicion was
patent, and Mr Verloc held his tongue.  Not altogether, however.  He
muttered heavily:

"Perhaps it's just as well."

He began to undress.  Mrs Verloc kept very still, perfectly still, with
her eyes fixed in a dreamy, quiet stare.  And her heart for the fraction
of a second seemed to stand still too.  That night she was "not quite
herself," as the saying is, and it was borne upon her with some force
that a simple sentence may hold several diverse meanings--mostly
disagreeable.  How was it just as well?  And why?  But she did not allow
herself to fall into the idleness of barren speculation.  She was rather
confirmed in her belief that things did not stand being looked into.
Practical and subtle in her way, she brought Stevie to the front without
loss of time, because in her the singleness of purpose had the unerring
nature and the force of an instinct.

"What I am going to do to cheer up that boy for the first few days I'm
sure I don't know.  He'll be worrying himself from morning till night
before he gets used to mother being away.  And he's such a good boy.  I
couldn't do without him."

Mr Verloc went on divesting himself of his clothing with the unnoticing
inward concentration of a man undressing in the solitude of a vast and
hopeless desert.  For thus inhospitably did this fair earth, our common
inheritance, present itself to the mental vision of Mr Verloc.  All was
so still without and within that the lonely ticking of the clock on the
landing stole into the room as if for the sake of company.

Mr Verloc, getting into bed on his own side, remained prone and mute
behind Mrs Verloc's back.  His thick arms rested abandoned on the outside
of the counterpane like dropped weapons, like discarded tools.  At that
moment he was within a hair's breadth of making a clean breast of it all
to his wife.  The moment seemed propitious.  Looking out of the corners
of his eyes, he saw her ample shoulders draped in white, the back of her
head, with the hair done for the night in three plaits tied up with black
tapes at the ends.  And he forbore.  Mr Verloc loved his wife as a wife
should be loved--that is, maritally, with the regard one has for one's
chief possession.  This head arranged for the night, those ample
shoulders, had an 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."

 We learn that Winnie's mother has a found a place for herself in a charity almshouse, which is basically a version of an old folks' home during Conrad's time. The news shocks Winnie, who asks her mother if she wasn't comfortable living with the Verlocs. After this, Winnie falls into a disappointed silence. That leaves the issue of who owns the mother's furniture. The mother has only been given an apartment with nothing in it, so she'll need to take a few items with her. She makes sure to take only the crummiest pieces, though. The mother then has to decide what to do with the furniture she leaves behind. She could give it to Stevie, but doesn't want it to seem as though Stevie has some sort of leverage on Mr. Verloc. No, its important to rely on Verloc's charity, and so Winnie's mother decides that "Stevie must remain destitute and dependent" . They call for a ride to take the mother and all her stuff to the almshouse, and are confronted with a really junky old carriage. As if we didn't realize how bad this carriage is, Conrad makes sure to give the driver a metal hook where his hand's suppose to be. The horse pulling the carriage is no prize either, looking pretty sick and run-down. This wobbly carriage makes the mother nervous, and she asks Winnie what she thinks. After a brief moment, they're convinced to get up on the cab and start jolting on their way. Stevie comes with them and climbs onto the box to sit beside the carriage driver. As they travel, Stevie gets upset and tells the man not to whip his horse. The man keeps whipping anyway, and this makes Stevie jump off the carriage. He runs around to the window and shouts "Too heavy. Too heavy" to Winnie and his mother. The women order him to get back on the cab, but he wants to walk, thinking it'll make things easier on the horse. Winnie thinks this is ridiculous, and threatens Stevie by saying that Mr. Verloc will be very displeased if he doesn't get back onto the carriage, so Stevie does it. The narrator talks about how Winnie's mother is basically sacrificing herself for Stevie's protection. It's possible that the mother has detected the stress that's been piling up on Verloc, and she wants to relieve the pressure on him by taking herself out of the equation. So the old woman painfully leaves her children "as an act of devotion and as a move of deep policy" . Returning to the present, the narrator describes how the mother asks Winnie to come visit her every Sunday. Winnie says she'll try, but won't always be able to come when Stevie visits. The mother gets upset at this and worries that Stevie will lose his way. Winnie answers her, "I'll see to it that he don't get lost for long" . Did someone say foreshadowing? At this moment, the carriage grinds to a halt and they arrive at the almshouse. After they've taken out all the parcels and loaded the stuff into the house, Stevie stands under a streetlamp, and the carriage driver pokes him with his hook and starts chatting him up about how terrible his life is. He tells Stevie about how he has to drive his horse around all day and night, just to make enough money to keep his wife and four children from starving to death. This gets Stevie very upset, and he starts shouting "Bad! Bad!" Stevie tries to think of some way to make sense of the world's badness, to somehow make it all better, but he can't string his thoughts together. Convinced that Stevie now pities him, the driver climbs back up on the cab and drives away for a little while, then stops at a pub down the street, probably to drink away some of the money he supposedly needs to feed his family. Stevie is left alone with his agitated thoughts. Winnie comes over to soothe him. Unlike Stevie, who always tries to get to the heart of things, Winnie "waste no portion of this transient life in seeking for fundamental information" . Winnie settles Stevie down by asking him to take care for her. This makes Stevie straighten up and puff out his chest like a man, happy to take on the role of a brotherly protector. They walk past the pub where the carriage is pulled up. Winnie makes a remark about the poor, sick horse. But Stevie is quick to tell her that the driver has a hard life, too. He is overcome again by thinking about the pain of the world, but Winnie says he can't help any of it. Suddenly, Stevie suggests that the police can banish evil from the world, but Winnie says that the police can't help either, because their job is to protect the people who have stuff from the people who don't have stuff. Stevie is overcome by how terrible the world is. Winnie tells him again not to worry about it, since he's never hungry himself. When they get back home, Verloc is there glancing at a newspaper. He barely even notices them because he's so distracted by his thoughts. When Verloc disappears into the shop, Winnie suddenly starts to miss her mother. Winnie asks Mr. Verloc if he'll be going out that night. He hates the idea of going out, but then goes out anyway, searching for some sort of comfort that London can't give him. When he comes back, he stands by his bed in his socks for a while. Winnie says she doesn't understand why her mother has left, but Verloc answers, "Perhaps it's just as well" . Winnie wonders what Verloc means by this, but doesn't ask any questions because she believes that "things not stand being looked into" . She intentionally turns a blind eye to this vague statement by Verloc. The narrator mentions that at this moment, Verloc almost tells his wife about his entire predicament. "Mr Verloc loved his wife as a wife should be loved--that is, martially, with the regard one has for one's chief possession" . When he gets into bed next to her, he tells Winnie that he plans to leave England for "the Continent" the next day.

