The Secret Agent, Verloc´s Journey

Donde Verloc se dirige a una cita a través de la ciudad de Londres, conocemos algo sobre su forma de vestir y pensar. Del original inglés The Secret Agent, de Joseph Conrad.

También buscamos sobre el carruaje victoria, en el que aparecen otros términados relacionados como brougham y phaetom

 

Such was the house, the household, and the business Mr Verloc left behind him on his way westward at the hour of half-past ten in the morning.  It was unusually early for him; his whole person exhaled the charm of almost dewy freshness; he wore his blue cloth overcoat unbuttoned; his boots were shiny; his cheeks, freshly shaven, had a sort of shine; and even his heavy-lidded eyes, refreshed by a night of peaceful sleep, sent out glances of comparative alertness.  Through the park railings these glances beheld men and women riding in the Row, couples cantering past harmoniously, others advancing sedately at a walk, loitering groups of three or four, solitary horsemen looking unsociable, and solitary women followed at a long distance by a man with an ornament to his hat and a leather belt over his tight-fitting coat.  Carriages went moving by, mostly two-horse broughams, with here and there a victoria with the skin of some wild beast inside and a woman’s face and hat emerging above the folded hood.  And a peculiarly London sun—against which nothing could be said except that it looked bloodshot—glorified all this by its stare.  It hung at a moderate elevation above Hyde Park Corner with an air of punctual and benign vigilance.  The very pavement under Mr Verloc’s feet had an old-gold tinge in that diffused light, in which neither wall, nor tree, nor beast, nor man cast a shadow.  Mr Verloc was going westward through a town without shadows in an atmosphere of powdered old gold.  There were red, coppery gleams on the roofs of houses, on the corners of walls, on the panels of carriages, on the very coats of the horses, and on the broad back of Mr Verloc’s overcoat, where they produced a dull effect of rustiness.  But Mr Verloc was not in the least conscious of having got rusty. He surveyed through the park railings the evidences of the town’s opulence and luxury with an approving eye.  All these people had to be protected.  Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury.  They had to be protected; and their horses, carriages, houses, servants had to be protected; and the source of their wealth had to be protected in the heart of the city and the heart of the country; the whole social order favourable to their hygienic idleness had to be protected against the shallow enviousness of unhygienic labour.  It had to—and Mr Verloc would have rubbed his hands with satisfaction had he not been constitutionally averse from every superfluous exertion.  His idleness was not hygienic, but it suited him very well.  He was in a manner devoted to it with a sort of inert fanaticism, or perhaps rather with a fanatical inertness.  Born of industrious parents for a life of toil, he had embraced indolence from an impulse as profound as inexplicable and as imperious as the impulse which directs a man’s preference for one particular woman in a given thousand.  He was too lazy even for a mere demagogue, for a workman orator, for a leader of labour.  It was too much trouble.  He required a more perfect form of ease; or it might have been that he was the victim of a philosophical unbelief in the effectiveness of every human effort.  Such a form of indolence requires, implies, a certain amount of intelligence.  Mr Verloc was not devoid of intelligence—and at the notion of a menaced social order he would perhaps have winked to himself if there had not been an effort to make in that sign of scepticism.  His big, prominent eyes were not well adapted to winking.  They were rather of the sort that closes solemnly in slumber with majestic effect.

Espionaje, pintura de 1880

Undemonstrative and strong in a fat-pig style, Mr Verloc, without either rubbing his hands with satisfaction or winking sceptically at his thoughts, proceeded on his way.  He trod the pavement heavily with his shiny boots, and his general get-up was that of a well-to-do mechanic in business for himself.  He might have been anything from a picture-frame maker to a lock-smith; an employer of labour in a small way.  But there was also about him an indescribable air which no mechanic could have acquired in the practice of his handicraft however dishonestly exercised: the air common to men who live on the vices, the follies, or the baser fears of mankind; the air of moral nihilism common to keepers of gambling hells and disorderly houses; to private detectives and inquiry agents; to drink sellers and, I should say, to the sellers of invigorating electric belts and to the inventors of patent medicines.  But of that last I am not sure, not having carried my investigations so far into the depths.  For all I know, the expression of these last may be perfectly diabolic.  I shouldn’t be surprised.  What I want to affirm is that Mr Verloc’s expression was by no means diabolic.

Before reaching Knightsbridge, Mr Verloc took a turn to the left out of the busy main street, hysterical with the traffic of moving omnibuses and going 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 neatness; 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 majestic 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. (the Secret Agent)

 

Ideas principales

Verloc left his house. Some people were passing through the streets and parks. There were carriages, broughams and victorias. He noticed the wealth of the city and knew it had to be protected. He walked heavily and seemed a mechanic.  He was going to an embassy so he was neat in his dresses. He saw the polished knockers on the doors. A policeman barely noticed him.

 

Para saber

El victoria es una carruaje elegante de origen francés, posiblemente basado en el phaeton de George IV. Un victoria puede ser visualizado como esencialmente un phaeton o brougham con la suma de un asiento para el conductor, pero sin cerrar y en consecuencia abierto a la intemperie.

En Inglaterra el nombre victoria no fue empleado antes de 1870, cuando se importó uno. Fue muy popular entre las familias adineradas

 

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