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    The Secret Agent
    The Secret Agent
    The Secret Agent
    Ebook339 pages6 hours

    The Secret Agent

    By Joseph Conrad

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    In a rough-and-ready shop in Soho in Victorian London, Mr. Verloc lives a humble existence sustaining himself, his wife, her infirm mother, and her disabled brother, Stevie. But all is not as it seems with Mr. Verloc, a secret agent in the employ of a foreign government.

    When a plot to bomb Greenwich Observatory falls apart, Verloc’s identity is exposed, and those closest to him must bear the burden of his failures. Harkening back to the writings of Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad’s early masterpiece effectively explores themes of subversion, politics, and crime.

    HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMay 5, 2015
    ISBN9781443447652
    Author

    Joseph Conrad

    Polish-born Joseph Conrad is regarded as a highly influential author, and his works are seen as a precursor to modernist literature. His often tragic insight into the human condition in novels such as Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent is unrivalled by his contemporaries.

    Read more from Joseph Conrad

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    Reviews for The Secret Agent

    3.5/5

    35 ratings46 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Spy thriller that clearly heavily influenced le Carre. I really enjoyed the slow burn into incandescence.
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed this book much more than I expected--I had actually never heard of it before finding it on Serial Reader and the 1001 books list.Winnie has spent her life devoted to her mentally disabled brother. She forgoes a true love in order to marry Mr Verloc, who is kind to Stevie and happy to have he (and then her mother) live with them.Winnie is happy enough. She works the store, cares for Stevie, and is satisfied. But then her mother chooses to move into an indigent's home through her late husband's connections--she is worried for Stevie, and feels this move while she is alive is best. But then Winnie learns how her husband truly supports them--it's not the store, he is a secret agent. She has always put up with/enjoyed the gatherings of his revolutionary friends. But now his client is asking too much.
    • 3/5
      Bijwijlen hilarisch verhaal van een groepje anarchisten die in Londen een spraakmakende aanslag willen plegen op het Greenwich Observatorium. Moeilijk boek, niet zozeer om de gewone modernistische aanpak, wel om de verregaande introspectie (zeer traag). Nadruk op het kijken van Verloc naar Stevie, waarbij het maar heel traag tot hem doordringt welk nut de jongen voor hem kan hebben; Winnie kijkt heel anders
    • 4/5
      To me, this is one of the darkest novels I have read in a long time. It is a tale of a simple man used by the "government" with disastrous results. The simplest are affected the most adversely. Clearly, the author held some significantly negative perceptions of the hierarchies within government, and their manipulations of the little people!
    • 3/5
      The Secret Agent is another Conrad mystery, great for descriptions of locale and depth of characters, but slow and weak with plot.Once again, there was no character whose fate readers might connect to or care about.
    • 4/5
      There may have been a time, long before this book was written, when its darkly comic vision of politics, revolutionaries, and law enforcement didn't apply. But I doubt there has been a time since. No one understood the dark intersection of politics, money, power, and love quite like Joseph Conrad. Since the moment that the man on the street gained enough power to have an opinion, politics (being all local) has wormed its way into every corner of our lives, and Conrad does a wonderful job of examining those motives. Unlike Sinclair or Rand, however, Conrad's style is not distant or didactic. In fact, the lens can often be so close as to slow the pacing. A very timely book, ahead of its time.
    • 3/5
      Bijwijlen hilarisch verhaal van een groepje anarchisten die in Londen een spraakmakende aanslag willen plegen op het Greenwich Observatorium. Moeilijk boek, niet zozeer om de gewone modernistische aanpak, wel om de verregaande introspectie (zeer traag). Nadruk op het kijken van Verloc naar Stevie, waarbij het maar heel traag tot hem doordringt welk nut de jongen voor hem kan hebben; Winnie kijkt heel anders
    • 3/5
      Far better than expected, some of the interior monologue was just fantastic. Extra points because terrorism, counter-espionage and the manipulation of public opinion thereon is so damn timely.
    • 2/5
      This was kind of interesting in one way that I didn't at all expect, and mostly uninteresting in the aspects that I expected to like. It is famous as a prototype of the political thriller genre, and certainly a lot of the familiar themes are there, but the narrative structure is completely different. To the extent that it fits into any genre, this book plays out more like a murder mystery, and even in that context the plot unfolds in a strange way. One major event happens about a quarter of the way through the book, and everything after that revolves around the characters (and the reader) trying to figure out what exactly that major event was. The novelty of Conrad's approach, or at least the divergence from my expectations, lent the book some interest to me; however, it wasn't enough to make this an especially compelling experience overall.

      What Conrad has to say about political extremism may have been good for the time, but I feel like our current geopolitical climate has led to some more nuanced explorations. At least, we've now had more time to think about terrorism. This book seems to hinge around the thesis that ideologies are little more than high-minded justifications for baser psychological impulses like greed and sexual inadequacy. I think there is quite a bit of truth to that, but it really isn't exciting or complex enough of an insight to successfully anchor an entire novel.
    • 3/5
      I wish I had read this in the early years after 9/11. While the characters in Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent" are not superficially the same as the characters that would figure into the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and the subsequent events, the themes are eerily similar.

      As a piece of literature, though the book is an almost surreal set of disjointed pieces. Each chapter is a different view, through a different set of eyes, and only by looking at them all in turn does the mystery unfold. Methodically, Conrad unfolds each participants thoughts in slow motion, and while he demonstrates a command of the English language that is enviable, as well as a vocabulary that would be substantial for a native speaker and even more so for a sailor whose native tongue was Polish, the slow pace demands a serious reader's attention and patience. You get a full picture in the reading, but you look at every details that unfolds.

      And yet, plodding as the pace is, there are surprises. After pages of slow, deliberate character development, a sudden jolt of action with shift the plot, especially as the personal consequences of the underlying act of terror begins to turn the characters in on each other. In this regard, one sees echoes of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" or even Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" in the inescapable maelstrom that drags down all who are touched by violent men and violent actions.

      Is it heavy, then? Undeniably. Worth the effort? Without question, it is an interesting and fascinating read, and Conrad's prescience, decades before the onset of the terrorism's "golden age," is itself an argument for reading "The Secret Agent."

      Just don't pick it up expecting James Bond. He's not here.
    • 4/5
      I think Conrad was like Carver (you never thought you'd see that comparison, did you?): he should have stuck with the short form, which in Conrad's case was the novella. I don't think you could call anything Conrad wrote "short". This was a great story stretched out over much too many pages.
    • 4/5
      An enticing read filled with grotesque and somewhat comical figures. Conrad definitely understood politics and this is a well-written, bitingly satiric look at both sides of a major issue during his day. You need to understand, or at least quickly skim, the historical context if you are not going to become lost while reading. Anarchy was quite a confusing movement which was being embraced by many in the working class. Conrad definitely feels no pity for anarchists, but he doesn't spare the government or police from the bite of his pen, either. I really enjoyed the philosophical bits in which he deconstructed the very ideas of anarchy and criminality. One can see why the book would have been highly controversial at the time. An unsettling feature of the book is that contemporary readers can see how manufactured terrorist events and governmental squabbling have not changed much in the past century. Certain newspaper headlines might seem familiar to readers who keep up with current events. I do have a few issues with the novel from a disability studies perspective, namely that Stevie is an archetypal character sent into this fictional world to teach all of the able people a lesson, but hey... I did find myself laughing quite a few times throughout; how can you not find Ossipon and the rest of the gang hilarious? Certainly worth the read.
    • 3/5
      A solid book, and a good choice for people who want to read something by Conrad besides Heart of Darkness- not that the works have much in common.

      Conrad paints the world of secret agents as one joined because of financial interests, not ardent belief or nationalism or some other soft motivation. It's a bit cynical, but variety of perspectives is the spice of life. Governments here treat their agents as salaried employees expected to produce results, while the agents see the governments that pay them as witless bureaucrats who should stay silent and just keep forking over the money.

      The most interesting part of this book is the structure. You can piece together what has happened rather early in the book, and through the point of view of a detective character this suspicion is confirmed. The tension is created by waiting for the character who will take the news the worst to learn of it. Tension is ratcheted up by hinting at just how bad that character is going to take the news. Then there's a payoff that doesn't disappoint, even if it could have been arrived at faster without doing any harm to the narrative.

      The final section has some beautiful writing, with vivid descriptions of London. I was irritated that some threads, particularly that of the detective character, were left dangling. If The Secret Agent had been tighter and all the stories tied up this would have been a four star book, as it stands it's somewhere above three stars but not all the way there.
    • 1/5
      Like listening to Charlie Brown's teacher. While this is one of the classics, it did not grab me in a couple hours of dedicated listening, so I put it aside. This is the third try, so I give up.
    • 3/5
      A pretty cool Conrad story, and refreshing in that it's not about some guy on a boat.
    • 3/5
      Not bad - not memorable. Considered by some as Conrad's best. If you want his best, read Nostromo.
    • 4/5
      I read Heart of Darkness back in my school days, but I am pretty sure this is the first Conrad novel I have read. I guess I am a bit disappointed. Conrad built up such a nice configuration, but doesn't then put it to full use. What might Vladimir have done to cover up his own tracks? What if Verloc had turned aside more quickly and then had to figure out how to proceed. The thing is too much of an open and shut morality tale. What makes these things so much more sordid is their lasting character, the cover-ups of the cover-ups. What could Kafka have done with this material. OK, Kafka would go to the other extreme! This is more like a novella. Things just don't developed fully. It is like a snapshot of a world, more than a movie. Still, it is a rich snapshot, and surely in its time and place it opened up a window onto a very unusual world, not often seen in literature. Nowadays, though, it's too common. Still, Conrad is a master. The book is worth reading.
    • 4/5
      It took a while until I could immerse myself in the story. I liked the quiet style for a strong content. First, the reader is introduced to the secret agent as a bore. Despite the fact that he does not spray out of power, his thoughts and actions are very awake. He has the talent to take the people for himself and things to turn so that he comes out fine. But he has the bill not made with his wife, who does not trust him. Likewise, the members of his association to turn away from him and one of them tried to gain profit for himself.I liked the profound story.
    • 2/5
      Disappointing. About anarchist terrorists in London around the end of the 19th century, but one hears little concrete of either anarchism or terrorism, only about the not too interesting characters. One of the characters is supposed to have been an inspiration for the "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski.
    • 5/5
      A few years ago I began a personal tradition of starting each year's reading with a reread of a Joseph Conrad novel. This year it was The Secret Agent, a book I did a massive amount of research about during my grad school days. The book, set in London in late 19/early 20th century, tells the story of Adolph Verloc, who is too indolent to work and so makes his living in the employ of an Eastern European embassy, spying on London's anarchists. When Verloc's employer puts pressure on him to create an anarchist outrage so that a too tolerant English society will decide to crack down on the anarchists in their midst, Verloc's troubles begin. We also follow at times the anarchists themselves and the police. But this is really only the framework for a broader portrayal of the ways in which Conrad saw the growing industrialization and impersonality of society as a destroyer of hope, incentive and emotion and as a promoter of alienation and despair. At the center of these themes are Verloc's home life, and especially the ways in which his wife has married him as a form of personal compromise, away from happiness but for security for herself, her indigent mother and her mentally challenged brother. But Conrad's themes are equally evident in his descriptions of the city itself, its filth, slime and darkness. Also, very unusual for its time was Conrad's bending of time, showing us important episodes out of chronological order in ways that make us feel that time itself is standing still.Conrad had nothing but contempt for anarchists, and to a lesser degree for politics as a whole. He saw anarchists as parasites, people looking to tear down, but not to contribute to the daily business of getting along and getting on with life. Conrad, after all, came of age on merchant ships, a world where each man depended for his life on the other fellow doing his job all the time, and where even the most menial task could be crucial. But that level of contempt is the book's flaw, as Conrad let his antipathy run away with him, here. Consequently, the anarchists come off as mere caricatures, and the narrative loses power when they take center stage. As always, though, I am in love with Conrad's turn of a phrase and with his powers of observation.
    • 5/5
      Despite its name, this is not a James Bond type story. First of all, it is set in 1880s London and involves a small group of mostly ineffectual anarchists. Secondly, the primary characteristic of the main "secret agent" is laziness! Conrad gives us wonderful portraits of these disaffected men, each of whom is disgruntled for different reasons, as well as the rest of the Verloc family.

      As I was reading this, I kept having the sensation of deja vu. I knew that I had never read this before, but certain aspects were extremely familiar to me and in one important part I knew in advance what was coming. Finally I realized that Alfred Hitchcock had based one of his early movies - Sabotage - on this book! I am a big fan of Hitchcock (and have seen Sabotage more than once), but although his movie is quite exciting (even more thrills than the book), it doesn't capture Conrad's characters and has a completely different (and more conventional) ending. The book features complex characters and motivations which are perhaps slower and less exciting but will stay with me longer.
    • 4/5
      A very interesting read. Conrad's style meanders around the plot beautifully, following one character to another, and around until it finally reaches the point. In a story about anarchists, the flow of the book works very well. In the hands of a lesser writer, I would complain that the book was too long for such a simple tale, but Conrad handles the leangth quite well, and I have no such complaint.
    • 3/5
      “Curiosity being one of the forms of self-revelation, a systematically incurious person remains always partly mysterious. The Secret Agent was first printed in 1907 and is based on actual events, the attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory in 1894. Mr. Verloc, who runs a pornographic shop, is summoned to a foriegn Embassy in London. There he is revealed to be a secret agent. There is a new man at the Embassy and he believes that Mr Verloc is no longer being productive as a spy. The new man, Mr Vladimir, sees himself as a man of action and suggests that Mr. Verloc should set off a bomb in some scientific place to prove his worth and to try and shake Britain's perceived liberal attitude.Mr. Verloc is married to a beautiful, younger woman and lives with her, her mother and her simple minded brother Stevie whom is cared for devotedly by his sister Mrs Verloc. He holds meetings at his shop with fellow anarchists.When a man blows up in Greenwich Park Mr. Verloc is believed to be the victim but it is actually his brother-in-law who has died. The police also are immediately suspicious of Mr. Verloc, and a Chief Inspector Heat visits the shop and informs the unaware Mrs Verloc that her brother has died. She is naturally devastated and blames her husband as well with shocking results.In many respects this is a very simple plot about an attack on a British building concocted by a foreign power and packed with characters that are allegorical in nature, the wily foreigner Mr Vladimir, the meddling policeman Chief Inspector Heat and his ambitious boss, a haughty politician in Sir Ethelred, yet it is one full of powerful emotions. Love, pride and duplicity to name but a few. However, perhaps the most important emotion is conceit or maybe self-worth. Mr Vladimir believes himself a man of action but is obviously rocked when his part in the bomb plot is exposed, Heat believes he knows and can prove who the offender is without bothering to look at the evidence but this idea of inflated self-worth is particularly evident in Mr Verloc. He seems comfortable in his comfy married life but his world is rocked when his value as an informer is questioned and when his part in the bombing is revealed he believes that he is important enough to cause major embarrassment to the respective authorities yet his is but a minor role in a bigger game. This point is nicely illustrated as two of his fellow anarchists are seen walking down the crowded street alone, "one endeavouring to secure himself in the conviction that 'He was a force' with the power to regenerate the world, the other with his self-conception in ruins".So saying all that why did I not give it a higher rating. To be perfectly honest I felt that the author rather over-indulged in the minutia of minor details which stopped rather than enhanced the flow of the story for my taste. That said it is still a worthy read.
    • 3/5
      At the turn of the 20th century, Adolf Verloc is a London shopkeeper. He has a wife (Winnie), a mother-in-law, and a brother-in-law (Stevie) with some sort of mental disability. Verloc is also a secret agent for a foreign government. He isn't called on to do much – just pass on the occasional bit of information and make contact with new arrivals who come as customers to his shop. This changes when he is called to the Embassy and ordered to execute a bombing attack on Greenwich. The bombing goes wrong, and everything falls apart for Verloc.The plot sounds like it should be an exciting book. It isn't. Most of the book is filled with the thoughts of various characters – Verloc, his fellow anarchists, various police officials, Verloc's wife and her family. Their thoughts are occasionally interrupted by the comments or actions of other characters. This book was surprisingly difficult to follow in audio, even with a talented reader that I would otherwise enjoy listening to. I don't think I would like it any better in print. Hitchcock made a film version of the book, and I think I might like it better.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this book. The modernity of it surprised me. Conrad had a good grasp of human nature. His rich prose brings late 19th century London to life, and the intrigues of the life of a secret agent are as well drawn as anything written by John Le Carré almost 100 years later.
    • 5/5
      Like Heart of Darkness, Secret Agent:

      - Is deeply cynical
      - And heavily allegorical
      - And ends with a bang (although this book also begins with one).

      I guessed a big part of the plot pretty quickly, so I guess that's a negative...although I'm not sure it was supposed to be hard to guess.

      It's about a cheerful, indolent secret agent who's pressed by his superiors to do something big to prove his worth. Complications ensue. And there's a guy who goes around strapped with enough explosives to blow everyone around him to smithereens, and a little rubber bulb in his pocket to trigger it, so no one has the balls to arrest him. I love that guy.
    • 4/5
      Mr. Verloc is a Russian secret agent keeping a shop in London where he lives with his wife, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother. Mr. Verloc has become comfortable and lazy in his role, but the Russian ambassador insists on action. Verloc puts together a bomb plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory and implicate the anarchists, but things go disastrously wrong. This novel is said to be the precursor of the espionage thriller. While it was very subdued compared to the modern thriller, I found it to be pretty engrossing. It was interesting to see the motivations the characters had for their actions and the how the unforeseen affects of the bombing played out in so many lives.
    • 3/5
      It seemed very well written ... but very hard to follow. I read two or three books at one time and I think it would be best to read this one cover to cover alone. I really had a hard time getting through it.
    • 4/5
      This is a random read from the "1001 books you should read before you die"-list, so I knew nothing about this book other than its title. I started reading, and from the start I really didn't like it. In fact, I actively disliked it. I found the first half of the book to be a muddled and messy blend of politics, social commentary, satire and attempts at humour. As standalone elements all of these would probably have held up, but the way in which they were blended together made the story confusing, really hard to read, and disagreeable to me. Considering how little was actually happening, it was baffling how hard it was to keep up with it.Then everything changed.The mood of the book changed drastically. The relatively lighthearted, almost superficial, story turned dark. It became intense, emotional and gripping. One passage in particular, which takes up most of the second half of the book, had me completely gripped. The situation isn't particularly dramatic, but the way in which it is recounted is extremely immersive. After reading it I felt like I'd been holding my breath for a few hours. A lot of time is spent describing a very sort passage of time, yet not a word is wasted. One of the characters is in an extremely fragile emotional state, and as they get closer and closer to the edge, I found myself dreading what would happen when they fell off it. But I had to know. I had to continue reading. Way past when I should have gone to sleep.Concluding anything about this book is very difficult. Perhaps the start of the book was necessary for the rest of it to be so good. Maybe the contrast in mood and tone is what made the book have such an impact on me. I'm not sure whether I'd recommend it or not. I really, really didn't enjoy the first part of the book, and I'm finding it hard to describe how much I enjoyed the last part. Take from that what you will.
    • 4/5
      The story starts as a comedy and ends in tragedy. Its a story of Mr.Verloc, a married man with a small bookstand. He is also a secret agent employed by a foreign govrnment and works with the revolutionaries and anarchists in the country. One day he is summoned by the new ambassador to the foreign embassy and is ridiculed upon his appearance and given a task to create dread in the common populance by blowing up the Greenwich park. He consults his anarchist friends and goes ahead with a plan that ends up hurting his innocent family.A beautifully narrated story. Conrad has a style of mixing comedy and serious events in the story.

    Book preview

    The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad

    SecretAgent_cover.jpg

    The Secret Agent

    Joseph Conrad

    HarperPerennialClassicsLogo.jpg

    CONTENTS

    Cover

    Title Page

    Dedication

    Author’s Note

    Chapter I

    Chapter II

    Chapter III

    Chapter IV

    Chapter V

    Chapter VI

    Chapter VII

    Chapter VIII

    Chapter IX

    Chapter X

    Chapter XI

    Chapter XII

    Chapter XIII

    About the Author

    About the Series

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    Dedication

    To H. G. Wells

    The chronicler of Mr. Lewisham’s love

    the biographer of Kipps and the

    historian of the ages to come

    this simple tale of the XIX century

    Is affectionately offered

    Author’s Note

    The origin of The Secret Agent: subject, treatment, artistic purpose, and every other motive that may induce an author to take up his pen, can, I believe, be traced to a period of mental and emotional reaction.

    The actual facts are that I began this book impulsively and wrote it continuously. When in due course it was bound and delivered to the public gaze I found myself reproved for having produced it at all. Some of the admonitions were severe, others had a sorrowful note. I have not got them textually before me but I remember perfectly the general argument, which was very simple; and also my surprise at its nature. All this sounds a very old story now! And yet it is not such a long time ago. I must conclude that I had still preserved much of my pristine innocence in the year 1907. It seems to me now that even an artless person might have foreseen that some criticisms would be based on the ground of sordid surroundings and the moral squalor of the tale.

    That of course is a serious objection. It was not universal. In fact it seems ungracious to remember so little reproof amongst so much intelligent and sympathetic appreciation; and I trust that the readers of this Preface will not hasten to put it down to wounded vanity or a natural disposition to ingratitude. I suggest that a charitable heart could very well ascribe my choice to natural modesty. Yet it isn’t exactly modesty that makes me select reproof for the illustration of my case. No, it isn’t exactly modesty. I am not at all certain that I am modest; but those who have read so far through my work will credit me with enough decency, tact, savoir-faire, what you will, to prevent me from making a song for my own glory out of the words of other people, No! The true motive of my selection lies in quite a different trait. I have always had a propensity to justify my action. Not to defend. To justify. Not to insist that I was right but simply to explain that there was no perverse intention, no secret scorn for the natural sensibilities of mankind at the bottom of my impulses.

    That kind of weakness is dangerous only so far that it exposes one to the risk of becoming a bore; for the world generally is not interested in the motives of any overt act but in its consequences. Man may smile and smile but he is not an investigating animal. He loves the obvious. He shrinks from explanations. Yet I will go on with mine. It’s obvious that I need not have written that book. I was under no necessity to deal with that subject; using the word subject both in the sense of the tale itself and in the larger one of a special manifestation in the life of mankind. This I fully admit. But the thought of elaborating mere ugliness in order to shock, or even simply to surprise my readers by a change of front, has never entered my head. In making this statement I expect to be believed, not only on the evidence of my general character but also for the reason, which anybody can see, that the whole treatment of the tale, its inspiring indignation and underlying pity and contempt, prove my detachment from the squalor and sordidness which lie simply in the outward circumstances of the setting.

    The inception of The Secret Agent followed immediately on a two years’ period of intense absorption in the task of writing that remote novel, Nostromo, with its far-off Latin-American atmosphere; and the profoundly personal Mirror of the Sea. The first an intense creative effort on what I suppose will always remain my largest canvas, the second an unreserved attempt to unveil for a moment the profounder intimacies of the sea and the formative influences of nearly half my lifetime. It was a period, too, in which my sense of the truth of things was attended by a very intense imaginative and emotional readiness which, all genuine and faithful to facts as it was, yet made me feel (the task once done) as if I were left behind, aimless amongst mere husks of sensations and lost in a world of other, of inferior, values.

    I don’t know whether I really felt that I wanted a change, change in my imagination, in my vision, and in my mental attitude. I rather think that a change in the fundamental mood had already stolen over me unawares. I don’t remember anything definite happening. With The Mirror of the Sea finished in the full consciousness that I had dealt honestly with myself and my readers in every line of that book, I gave myself up to a not unhappy pause. Then, while I was yet standing still, as it were, and certainly not thinking of going out of my way to look for anything ugly, the subject of The Secret Agent—I mean the tale—came to me in the shape of a few words uttered by a friend in a casual conversation about anarchists or rather anarchist activities; how brought about I don’t remember now.

    I remember, however, remarking on the criminal futility of the whole thing, doctrine, action, mentality; and on the contemptible aspect of the half-crazy pose as of a brazen cheat exploiting the poignant miseries and passionate credulities of a mankind always so tragically eager for self-destruction. That was what made for me its philosophical pretences so unpardonable. Presently, passing to particular instances, we recalled the already old story of the attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory; a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought. For perverse unreason has its own logical processes. But that outrage could not be laid hold of mentally in any sort of way, so that one remained faced by the fact of a man blown to bits for nothing even most remotely resembling an idea, anarchistic or other. As to the outer wall of the Observatory it did not show as much as the faintest crack.

    I pointed all this out to my friend who remained silent for a while and then remarked in his characteristically casual and omniscient manner: Oh, that fellow was half an idiot. His sister committed suicide afterwards. These were absolutely the only words that passed between us; for extreme surprise at this unexpected piece of information kept me dumb for a moment and he began at once to talk of something else. It never occurred to me later to ask how he arrived at his knowledge. I am sure that if he had seen once in his life the back of an anarchist that must have been the whole extent of his connection with the underworld. He was, however, a man who liked to talk with all sorts of people, and he may have gathered those illuminating facts at second or third hand, from a crossing-sweeper, from a retired police officer, from some vague man in his club, or even perhaps from a Minister of State met at some public or private reception.

    Of the illuminating quality there could be no doubt whatever. One felt like walking out of a forest on to a plain—there was not much to see but one had plenty of light. No, there was not much to see and, frankly, for a considerable time I didn’t even attempt to perceive anything. It was only the illuminating impression that remained. It remained satisfactory but in a passive way. Then, about a week later, I came upon a book which as far as I know had never attained any prominence, the rather summary recollections of an Assistant Commissioner of Police, an obviously able man with a strong religious strain in his character who was appointed to his post at the time of the dynamite outrages in London, away back in the eighties. The book was fairly interesting, very discreet of course; and I have by now forgotten the bulk of its contents. It contained no revelations, it ran over the surface agreeably, and that was all. I won’t even try to explain why I should have been arrested by a little passage of about seven lines, in which the author (I believe his name was Anderson) reproduced a short dialogue held in the Lobby of the House of Commons after some unexpected anarchist outrage, with the Home Secretary. I think it was Sir William Harcourt then. He was very much irritated and the official was very apologetic. The phrase, amongst the three which passed between them, that struck me most was Sir W. Harcourt’s angry sally: All that’s very well. But your idea of secrecy over there seems to consist of keeping the Home Secretary in the dark. Characteristic enough of Sir W. Harcourt’s temper but not much in itself. There must have been, however, some sort of atmosphere in the whole incident because all of a sudden I felt myself stimulated. And then ensued in my mind what a student of chemistry would best understand from the analogy of the addition of the tiniest little drop of the right kind, precipitating the process of crystallization in a test tube containing some colourless solution.

    It was at first for me a mental change, disturbing a quieted-down imagination, in which strange forms, sharp in outline but imperfectly apprehended, appeared and claimed attention as crystals will do by their bizarre and unexpected shapes. One fell to musing before the phenomenon—even of the past: of South America, a continent of crude sunshine and brutal revolutions, of the sea, the vast expanse of salt waters, the mirror of heaven’s frowns and smiles, the reflector of the world’s light. Then the vision of an enormous town presented itself, of a monstrous town more populous than some continents and in its man-made might as if indifferent to heaven’s frowns and smiles; a cruel devourer of the world’s light. There was room enough there to place any story, depth enough for any passion, variety enough there for any setting, darkness enough to bury five millions of lives.

    Irresistibly the town became the background for the ensuing period of deep and tentative meditations. Endless vistas opened before me in various directions. It would take years to find the right way! It seemed to take years! . . . Slowly the dawning conviction of Mrs. Verloc’s maternal passion grew up to a flame between me and that background, tingeing it with its secret ardour and receiving from it in exchange some of its own sombre colouring. At last the story of Winnie Verloc stood out complete from the days of her childhood to the end, unproportioned as yet, with everything still on the first plane as it were; but ready now to be dealt with. It was a matter of about three days.

    This book is that story, reduced to manageable proportions, its whole course suggested and centred round the absurd cruelty of the Greenwich Park explosion. I had there a task I will not say arduous but of the most absorbing difficulty. But it had to be done. It was a necessity. The figures grouped about Mrs. Verloc and related directly or indirectly to her tragic suspicion that life doesn’t stand much looking into, are the outcome of that very necessity. Personally I have never had any doubt of the reality of Mrs. Verloc’s story; but it had to be disengaged from its obscurity in that immense town, it had to be made credible, I don’t mean so much as to her soul but as to her surroundings, not so much as to her psychology but as to her humanity. For the surroundings hints were not lacking. I had to fight hard to keep at arm’s length the memories of my solitary and nocturnal walks all over London in my early days, lest they should rush in and overwhelm each page of the story as these emerged one after another from a mood as serious in feeling and thought as any in which I ever wrote a line. In that respect I really think that The Secret Agent is a perfectly genuine piece of work. Even the purely artistic purpose, that of applying an ironic method to a subject of that kind, was formulated with deliberation and in the earnest belief that ironic treatment alone would enable me to say all I felt I would have to say in scorn as well as in pity. It is one of the minor satisfactions of my writing life that having taken that resolve I did manage, it seems to me, to carry it right through to the end. As to the personages whom the absolute necessity of the case—Mrs. Verloc’s case—brings out in front of the London background, from them, too, I obtained those little satisfactions which really count for so much against the mass of oppressive doubts that haunt so persistently every attempt at creative work. For instance, of Mr. Vladimir himself (who was fair game for a caricatural presentation) I was gratified to hear that an experienced man of the world had said that Conrad must have been in touch with that sphere or else has an excellent intuition of things, because Mr. Vladimir was not only possible in detail but quite right in essentials. Then a visitor from America informed me that all sorts of revolutionary refugees in New York would have it that the book was written by somebody who knew a lot about them. This seemed to me a very high compliment, considering that, as a matter of hard fact, I had seen even less of their kind than the omniscient friend who gave me the first suggestion for the novel. I have no doubt, however, that there had been moments during the writing of the book when I was an extreme revolutionist, I won’t say more convinced than they but certainly cherishing a more concentrated purpose than any of them had ever done in the whole course of his life. I don’t say this to boast. I was simply attending to my business. In the matter of all my books I have always attended to my business. I have attended to it with complete self-surrender. And this statement, too, is not a boast. I could not have done otherwise. It would have bored me too much to make-believe.

    The suggestions for certain personages of the tale, both law-abiding and lawless, came from various sources which, perhaps, here and there, some reader may have recognized. They are not very recondite. But I am not concerned here to legitimize any of those people, and even as to my general view of the moral reactions as between the criminal and the police all I will venture to say is that it seems to me to be at least arguable.

    The twelve years that have elapsed since the publication of the book have not changed my attitude. I do not regret having written It. Lately, circumstances, which have nothing to do with the general tenor of this Preface, have compelled me to strip this tale of the literary robe of indignant scorn it has cost me so much to fit on it decently, years ago. I have been forced, so to speak, to look upon its bare bones. I confess that it makes a grisly skeleton. But still I will submit that telling Winnie Verloc’s story to its anarchistic end of utter desolation, madness, and despair, and telling it as I have told it here, I have not intended to commit a gratuitous outrage on the feelings of mankind.

    J.C.

    1920

    Chapter I

    Mr. Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-in-law. It could be done, because there was very little business at any time, and practically none at all before the evening. Mr. Verloc cared but little about his ostensible business. And, moreover, his wife was in charge of his brother-in-law.

    The shop was small, and so was the house. It was one of those grimy brick houses which existed in large quantities before the era of reconstruction dawned upon London. The shop was a square box of a place, with the front glazed in small panes. In the daytime the door remained closed; in the evening it stood discreetly but suspiciously ajar.

    The window contained photographs of more or less undressed dancing girls; nondescript packages in wrappers like patent medicines; closed yellow paper envelopes, very flimsy, and marked two-and-six in heavy black figures; a few numbers of ancient French comic publications hung across a string as if to dry; a dingy blue china bowl, a casket of black wood, bottles of marking ink, and rubber stamps; a few books, with titles hinting at impropriety; a few apparently old copies of obscure newspapers, badly printed, with titles like The Torch, The Gong—rousing titles. And the two gas jets inside the panes were always turned low, either for economy’s sake or for the sake of the customers.

    These customers were either very young men, who hung about the window for a time before slipping in suddenly; or men of a more mature age, but looking generally as if they were not in funds. Some of that last kind had the collars of their overcoats turned right up to their moustaches, and traces of mud on the bottom of their nether garments, which had the appearance of being much worn and not very valuable. And the legs inside them did not, as a general rule, seem of much account either. With their hands plunged deep in the side pockets of their coats, they dodged in sideways, one shoulder first, as if afraid to start the bell going.

    The bell, hung on the door by means of a curved ribbon of steel, was difficult to circumvent. It was hopelessly cracked; but of an evening, at the slightest provocation, it clattered behind the customer with impudent virulence.

    It clattered; and at that signal, through the dusty glass door behind the painted deal counter, Mr. Verloc would issue hastily from the parlour at the back. His eyes were naturally heavy; he had an air of having wallowed, fully dressed, all day on an unmade bed. Another man would have felt such an appearance a distinct disadvantage. In a commercial transaction of the retail order much depends on the seller’s engaging and amiable aspect. But Mr. Verloc knew his business, and remained undisturbed by any sort of aesthetic doubt about his appearance. With a firm, steady-eyed impudence, which seemed to hold back the threat of some abominable menace, he would proceed to sell over the counter some object looking obviously and scandalously not worth the money which passed in the transaction: a small cardboard box with apparently nothing inside, for instance, or one of those carefully closed yellow flimsy envelopes, or a soiled volume in paper covers with a promising title. Now and then it happened that one of the faded, yellow dancing girls would get sold to an amateur, as though she had been alive and young.

    Sometimes it was Mrs. Verloc who would appear at the call of the cracked bell. Winnie Verloc was a young woman with a full bust, in a tight bodice, and with broad hips. Her hair was very tidy. Steady-eyed like her husband, she preserved an air of unfathomable indifference behind the rampart of the counter. Then the customer of comparatively tender years would get suddenly disconcerted at having to deal with a woman, and with rage in his heart would proffer a request for a bottle of marking ink, retail value sixpence (price in Verloc’s shop one-and-sixpence), which, once outside, he would drop stealthily into the gutter.

    The evening visitors—the men with collars turned up and soft hats rammed down—nodded familiarly to Mrs. Verloc, and with a muttered greeting, lifted up the flap at the end of the counter in order to pass into the back parlour, which gave access to a passage and to a steep flight of stairs. The door of the shop was the only means of entrance to the house in which Mr. Verloc carried on his business of a seller of shady wares, exercised his vocation of a protector of society, and cultivated his domestic virtues. These last were pronounced. He was thoroughly domesticated. Neither his spiritual, nor his mental, nor his physical needs were of the kind to take him much abroad. He found at home the ease of his body and the peace of his conscience, together with Mrs. Verloc’s wifely attentions and Mrs. Verloc’s mother’s deferential regard.

    Winnie’s mother was a stout, wheezy woman, with a large brown face. She wore a black wig under a white cap. Her swollen legs rendered her inactive. She considered herself to be of French descent, which might have been true; and after a good many years of married life with a licensed victualler of the more common sort, she provided for the years of widowhood by letting furnished apartments for gentlemen near Vauxhall Bridge Road in a square once of some splendour and still included in the district of Belgravia. This topographical fact was of some advantage in advertising her rooms; but the patrons of the worthy widow were not exactly of the fashionable kind. Such as they were, her daughter Winnie helped to look after them. Traces of the French descent which the widow boasted of were apparent in Winnie too. They were apparent in the extremely neat and artistic arrangement of her glossy dark hair. Winnie had also other charms: her youth; her full, rounded form; her clear complexion; the provocation of her unfathomable reserve, which never went so far as to prevent conversation, carried on on the lodgers’ part with animation, and on hers with an equable amiability. It must be that Mr. Verloc was susceptible to these fascinations. Mr. Verloc was an intermittent patron. He came and went without any very apparent reason. He generally arrived in London (like the influenza) from the Continent, only he arrived unheralded by the Press; and his visitations set in with great severity. He breakfasted in bed, and remained wallowing there with an air of quiet enjoyment till noon every day—and sometimes even to a later hour. But when he went out he seemed to experience a great difficulty in finding his way back to his temporary home in the Belgravian square. He left it late, and returned to it early—as early as three or four in the morning; and on waking up at ten addressed Winnie, bringing in the breakfast tray, with jocular, exhausted civility, in the hoarse, failing tones of a man who had been talking vehemently for many hours together. His prominent, heavy-lidded eyes rolled sideways amorously and languidly, the bedclothes were pulled up to his chin, and his dark smooth moustache covered his thick lips capable of much honeyed banter.

    In Winnie’s mother’s opinion Mr. Verloc was a very nice gentleman. From her life’s experience gathered in various business houses the good woman had taken into her retirement an ideal of gentlemanliness as exhibited by the patrons of private-saloon bars. Mr. Verloc approached that ideal; he attained it, in fact.

    Of course, we’ll take over your furniture, mother, Winnie had remarked.

    The lodging-house was to be given up. It seems it would not answer to carry it on. It would have been too much trouble for Mr. Verloc. It would not have been convenient for his other business. What his business was he did not say; but after his engagement to Winnie he took the trouble to get up before noon, and descending the basement stairs, make himself pleasant to Winnie’s mother in the breakfast-room downstairs where she had her motionless being. He stroked the cat, poked the fire, had his lunch served to him there. He left its slightly stuffy cosiness with evident reluctance, but, all the same, remained out till the night was far advanced. He never offered to take Winnie to theatres, as such a nice gentleman ought to have done. His evenings were occupied. His work was in a way political, he told Winnie once. She would have, he warned her, to be very nice to his political friends. And with her straight, unfathomable glance she answered that she would be so, of course.

    How much more he told her as to his occupation it was impossible for Winnie’s mother to discover. The married couple took her over with the furniture. The mean aspect of the shop surprised her. The change from the Belgravian square to the narrow street in Soho affected her legs adversely. They became of an enormous size. On the other hand, she experienced a complete relief from material cares. Her son-in-law’s heavy good nature inspired her with a sense of absolute safety. Her daughter’s future was obviously assured, and even as to her son Stevie she need have no anxiety. She had not been able to conceal from herself that he was a terrible encumbrance, that poor Stevie. But in view of Winnie’s fondness for her delicate brother, and of Mr. Verloc’s kind and generous disposition, she felt that the poor boy was pretty safe in this rough world. And in her heart of hearts she was not perhaps displeased that the Verlocs had no children. As that circumstance seemed perfectly indifferent to Mr. Verloc, and as Winnie found an object of quasi-maternal affection in her brother, perhaps this was just as well for poor Stevie.

    For he was difficult to dispose of, that boy. He was delicate and, in a frail way, good-looking too, except for the vacant droop of his lower lip. Under our excellent system of compulsory education he had learned to read and write, notwithstanding the unfavourable aspect of the lower lip. But as errand-boy he did not turn out a great success. He forgot his messages; he was easily diverted from the straight path of duty by the attractions of stray cats and dogs, which he followed down narrow alleys into unsavoury courts; by the comedies of the streets, which he contemplated open-mouthed, to the detriment of his employer’s interests; or by the dramas of fallen horses, whose pathos and violence induced him sometimes to shriek pierceingly in a crowd, which disliked to be disturbed by sounds of distress in its quiet enjoyment of the national spectacle. When led away by a grave and protecting policeman, it would often become apparent that poor Stevie had forgotten his address—at least for a time. A brusque question caused him to stutter to the point of suffocation. When startled by anything perplexing he used to squint horribly. However, he never had any fits (which was encouraging); and before the natural outbursts of impatience on the part of his father he could always, in his childhood’s days, run for protection behind the short skirts of his sister Winnie. On the other hand, he might have been suspected of hiding a fund of reckless naughtiness. When he had reached the age of fourteen a friend of his late father, an agent for a foreign preserved milk firm, having given him an opening as office-boy, he was discovered

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