第24章

WINNIE VERLOC, the widow of Mr Verloc, the sister of the late faithful Stevie (blown to fragments in a state of innocence and in the conviction of being engaged in a humanitarian enterprise), did not run beyond the door of the parlour.She had indeed run away so far from a mere trickle of blood, but that was a movement of instinctive repulsion.And there she had paused, with staring eyes and lowered head.As though she had run through long years in her flight across the small parlour, Mrs Verloc by the door was quite a different person from the woman who had been leaning over the sofa, a little swimmy in her head, but otherwise free to enjoy the profound calm of idleness and irresponsibility...Mrs Verloc was no longer giddy.

Her head was steady.On the other hand, she was no longer calm.She was afraid.

If she avoided looking in the direction of her reposing husband it was not because she was afraid of him.Mr Verloc was not frightful to behold.

He looked comfortable.Moreover, he was dead.Mrs Verloc entertained no vain `delusions on the subject' of the dead.Nothing brings them back, neither love nor hate.They can do nothing to you.They are as nothing.

Her mental state was tinged by a sort of austere contempt for that man who had let himself be killed so easily.He had been the master of a house, the husband of a woman, and the murderer of her Stevie.And now he was of no account in every respect.He was of less practical account than the clothing on his body, than his overcoat, than his boots - than that hat lying on the floor.He was nothing.He was not worth looking at.He was even no longer the murderer of poor Stevie.The only murderer that would be found in the room when people came to look for Mr Verloc would be -herself!

Her hands shook so that she failed twice in the task of refastening her veil.Mrs Verloc was no longer a person of leisure and irresponsibility.

She was afraid.The stabbing of Mr Verloc had been only a blow.It had relieved the pent-up agony of shrieks strangled in her throat, of tears dried up in her hot eyes, of the maddening and indignant rage at the atrocious part played by that man, who was less than nothing now, in robbing her of the boy.It had been an obscurely prompted blow.The blood trickling on the floor off the handle of the knife had turned it into an extremely plain case of murder.Mrs Verloc, who always refrained from looking deep into things, was compelled to look into the very bottom of this thing.

She saw there no haunting face, no reproachful shade, no vision of remorse, no sort of ideal conception.She saw there an object.That object was the gallows.Mrs Verloc was afraid of the gallows.

She was terrified of them ideally.Having never set eyes on the last argument of men's justice except in illustrative woodcuts to a certain type of tales, she first saw them erect against a black and stormy background, festooned with chains and human bones, circled about by birds that peck at dead men's eyes.This was frightful enough, but Mrs Verloc, though not a well-informed woman, had a sufficient knowledge of the institutions of her country to know that gallows are no longer erected romantically on the banks of dismal rivers or on wind-swept headlands, but in the yards of jails.There within four high walls, as if into a pit, at dawn of day, the murderer was brought out to be executed, with a horrible quietness and, as the reports in the newspapers always said, `in the presence of the authorities'.With her eyes staring on the floor, her nostrils quivering with anguish and shame, she imagined herself all alone amongst a lot of strange gentlemen in silk hats who were calmly proceeding about the business of hanging her by the neck.That - never! Never! And how was it done? The impossibility of imagining the details of such quiet execution added something maddening to her abstract terror.The newspapers never gave any details except one, but that one with some affection was always there at the end of a meagre report.Mrs Verloc remembered its nature.It came with a cruel burning pain into her head, as if the words `The drop given was fourteen feet' had been scratched on her brain with a hot needle.`The drop given was fourteen feet.'

These words affected her physically, too.Her throat became convulsed in waves to resist strangulation; and the apprehension of the jerk was so vivid that she seized her head in both hands as if to save it from being torn off her shoulders.`The drop given was fourteen feet.' No! that must never be.She could not stand that.The thought of it even was not bearable.

She could not stand thinking of it.Therefore Mrs Verloc formed the resolution to go at once and throw herself into the river off one of the bridges.

This time she managed to refasten her veil.With her face as if masked, all black from head to foot except for some flowers in her hat, she looked up mechanically at the clock.She thought it must have stopped.She could not believe that only two minutes had passed since she had looked at it last.Of course not.It had been stopped all the time.As a matter of fact, only three minutes had elapsed from the moment she had drawn the first deep, easy breath after the blow, to this moment when Mrs Verloc formed the resolution to drown herself in the Thames.But Mrs Verloc could not believe that.She seemed to have heard or read that clocks and watches always stopped at the moment of murder for the undoing of the murderer.

She did not care.`To the bridge - and over I go.'...But her movements were slow.