On the sofa Mr Verloc wriggled his shoulders into perfect comfort, and
from the fulness of his heart emitted a wish which was certainly as pious
as anything likely to come from such a source.
"I wish to goodness," he growled huskily, "I had never seen Greenwich
Park or anything belonging to it."
The veiled sound filled the small room with its moderate volume, well
adapted to the modest nature of the wish. The waves of air of the proper
length, propagated in accordance with correct mathematical formulas,
flowed around all the inanimate things in the room, lapped against Mrs
Verloc's head as if it had been a head of stone. And incredible as it
may appear, the eyes of Mrs Verloc seemed to grow still larger. The
audible wish of Mr Verloc's overflowing heart flowed into an empty place
in his wife's memory. Greenwich Park. A park! That's where the boy was
killed. A park--smashed branches, torn leaves, gravel, bits of brotherly
flesh and bone, all spouting up together in the manner of a firework. She
remembered now what she had heard, and she remembered it pictorially.
They had to gather him up with the shovel. Trembling all over with
irrepressible shudders, she saw before her the very implement with its
ghastly load scraped up from the ground. Mrs Verloc closed her eyes
desperately, throwing upon that vision the night of her eyelids, where
after a rainlike fall of mangled limbs the decapitated head of Stevie
lingered suspended alone, and fading out slowly like the last star of a
pyrotechnic display. Mrs Verloc opened her eyes.
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