Quotation from: The Secret Agent

Written by: Joseph Conrad


Before reaching Knightsbridge, Mr Verloc took a turn to the left out of
the busy main thoroughfare, uproarious with the traffic of swaying
omnibuses and trotting vans, in the almost silent, swift flow of hansoms.
Under his hat, worn with a slight backward tilt, his hair had been
carefully brushed into respectful sleekness; for his business was with an
Embassy. And Mr Verloc, steady like a rock--a soft kind of rock--marched
now along a street which could with every propriety be described as
private. In its breadth, emptiness, and extent it had the majesty of
inorganic nature, of matter that never dies. The only reminder of
mortality was a doctor's brougham arrested in august solitude close to
the curbstone. The polished knockers of the doors gleamed as far as the
eye could reach, the clean windows shone with a dark opaque lustre. And
all was still. But a milk cart rattled noisily across the distant
perspective; a butcher boy, driving with the noble recklessness of a
charioteer at Olympic Games, dashed round the corner sitting high above a
pair of red wheels. A guilty-looking cat issuing from under the stones
ran for a while in front of Mr Verloc, then dived into another basement;
and a thick police constable, looking a stranger to every emotion, as if
he too were part of inorganic nature, surging apparently out of a lamp-
post, took not the slightest notice of Mr Verloc. With a turn to the
left Mr Verloc pursued his way along a narrow street by the side of a
yellow wall which, for some inscrutable reason, had No. 1 Chesham Square
written on it in black letters. Chesham Square was at least sixty yards
away, and Mr Verloc, cosmopolitan enough not to be deceived by London's
topographical mysteries, held on steadily, without a sign of surprise or
indignation. At last, with business-like persistency, he reached the
Square, and made diagonally for the number 10. This belonged to an
imposing carriage gate in a high, clean wall between two houses, of which
one rationally enough bore the number 9 and the other was numbered 37;
but the fact that this last belonged to Porthill Street, a street well
known in the neighbourhood, was proclaimed by an inscription placed above
the ground-floor windows by whatever highly efficient authority is
charged with the duty of keeping track of London's strayed houses. Why
powers are not asked of Parliament (a short act would do) for compelling
those edifices to return where they belong is one of the mysteries of
municipal administration. Mr Verloc did not trouble his head about it,
his mission in life being the protection of the social mechanism, not its
perfectionment or even its criticism.

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