第89章

Mr Verloc, returning from the Continent at the end of ten days, brought back a mind evidently unrefreshed by the wonders of foreign travel and a countenance unlighted by the joys of homecoming.He entered in the clatter of the shop-bell with an air of sombre and vexed exhaustion.His bag in hand, his head lowered, he strode straight behind the counter, and let himself fall into the chair, as though he had tramped all the way from Dover.It was early morning.Stevie, dusting various objects displayed in the front windows, turned to gape at him with reverence and awe.

`Here!' said Mr Verloc, giving a slight kick to the gladstone bag on the floor; and Stevie flung himself upon it, seized it, bore it off with triumphant devotion.He was so prompt that Mr Verloc was distinctly surprised.

Already at the clatter of the shop-bell Mrs Neale, blackleading the parlour grate, had looked through the door, and rising from her knees had gone, aproned, and grimy with everlasting toil, to tell Mrs Verloc in the kitchen that `there was the master come back'.

Winnie came no farther than the inner shop door.`You'll want some breakfast,'

she said from a distance.Mr Verloc moved his hands slightly, as if overcome by an impossible suggestion.But once enticed into the parlour he did not reject the food set before him.He ate as if in a public place, his hat pushed off his forehead, the skirts of his heavy overcoat hanging in a triangle on each side of the chair.And across the length of the table covered with brown oilcloth Winnie, his wife, talked evenly at him the wifely talk, as artfully adapted, no doubt, to the circumstances of this return as the talk of Penelope to the return of the wandering Odysseus.

Mrs Verloc, however, had done no weaving during her husband's absence.

But she had had all the upstairs rooms cleaned thoroughly, had sold some wares, had seen Mr Michaelis several times.He had told her the last time that he was going away to live in a cottage in the country, somewhere on the London, Chatham, and Dover line.Karl Yundt had come, too, once led under the arm by that `wicked old house-keeper of his'.He was a `disgusting old man'.Of Comrade Ossipon, whom she had received curtly, entrenched behind the counter with a stony face and a far-away gaze, she said nothing, her mental reference to the robust anarchist being marked by a short pause, with the faintest possible blush.And bringing in her brother Stevie as soon as she could into the current of domestic events, she mentioned that the boy had moped a good deal.

`It's all along of mother leaving us like this.'

Mr Verloc neither said `Damn!' nor yet `Stevie be hanged!' And Mrs Verloc, not let into the secret of his thoughts, failed to appreciate the generosity of this restraint.

`It isn't that he doesn't work as well as ever,' she continued.`He's been making himself very useful.You'd think he couldn't do enough for us.'

Mr Verloc directed a casual and somnolent glance at Stevie, who sat on his right, delicate, pale-faced, his rosy mouth open vacantly.It was not a critical glance.It had no intention.And if Mr Verloc thought for a moment that his wife's brother looked uncommonly useless, it was only a dull and fleeting thought, devoid of that force and durability which enables sometimes a thought to move the world.Leaning back, Mr Verloc uncovered his head.Before his extended arm could put down the hat Stevie pounced upon it, and bore it off reverently into the kitchen.And again Mr Verloc was surprised.

`You could do anything with that boy, Adolf,' Mrs Verloc said, with her best air of inflexible calmness.`He would go through fire for you.

He--'

She paused attentive, her ear turned towards the door of the kitchen.

There Mrs Neale was scrubbing the floor.At Stevie's appearance she groaned lamentably, having observed that he could be induced easily to bestow for the benefit of her infant children the shilling his sister Winnie presented him with from time to time.On all fours amongst the puddles, wet and begrimed, like a sort of amphibious and domestic animal living in ashbins and dirty water, she uttered the usual exordium; `It's all very well for you, kept doing nothing, like a gentleman.' And she followed it with the everlasting plaint of the poor, pathetically mendacious, miserably authenticated by the horrible breath of cheap rum and soap-suds.She scrubbed hard, snuffling all the time, and talking volubly.And she was sincere.

And on each side of her thin red nose her bleared, misty eyes swam in tears, because she felt really the want of some sort of stimulant in the morning.

In the parlour Mrs Verloc observed, with knowledge:

`There's Mrs Neale at it again with her harrowing tales about her little children.They can't be all so little as she makes them out.Some of them must be big enough by now to try to do something for themselves.It only makes Stevie angry.'

These words were confirmed by a thud as of a fist striking the kitchen table.In the normal evolution of his sympathy Stevie had become angry on discovering that he had no shilling in his pocket.In his inability to relieve at once Mrs Neale's `little 'uns' privations, he felt that somebody should be made to suffer for it.Mrs Verloc rose and went into the kitchen to `stop that nonsense'.And she did it firmly but gently.She was well aware that directly Mrs Neale received her money she went round the corner to drink ardent spirits in a mean and musty public-house - the unavoidable station on the via dolorosa of her life.Mrs Verloc's comment upon this practice had an unexpected profundity, as coming from a person disinclined to look under the surface of things.`Of course, what is she to do to keep up? If I were like Mrs Neale I expect I wouldn't act any different.'

In the afternoon of the same day, as Mr Verloc, coming with a start out of the last of a long series of dozes before the parlour fire, declared his intention of going out for a walk, Winnie said from the shop:

`I wish you would take that boy out with you, Adolf.'