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    The Secret Agent
    The Secret Agent
    The Secret Agent
    Ebook363 pages5 hours

    The Secret Agent

    By Joseph Conrad and E.L. Doctorow

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    Inspired by an attempt in 1894 to blow up London’s Greenwich Observatory, The Secret Agent is the unsurpassed original of the long tradition of espionage thrillers that explore the confused motives at the heart of terrorism. Published in 1907, Joseph Conrad’s novel was remarkably prescient, anticipating the political contours of the next century, as well as the classic spy novels of such later writers as Graham Greene and John Le Carré.

    Conrad’s double agent, Verloc, is a Russian spy tasked with infiltrating an anarchist group in London. His mission to discredit the ineffectual radicals and their cause goes awry, and involves his unsuspecting wife and her vulnerable younger brother in disastrous ways. In its use of powerful psychological insight to intensify narrative suspense, The Secret Agent broke new literary ground. Conrad was the first novelist to discover the strange, in-between territory of the political exile, and his genius was such that we still have no truer map of that region’s moral terrain than his story of a terrorist plot and its tragic consequences for both the guilty and the innocent.

    Introduction by Paul Theroux

    (Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Publishing Group
    Release dateApr 3, 2007
    ISBN9781101126899
    Author

    Joseph Conrad

    Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) und Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939) gehören zu den bedeutendsten Erzählern der modernen Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts. In seinen vielschichtigen, auch vieldeutigen Romanen und Erzählungen knüpfte Conrad oft an die Erfahrungen seiner Seemannsjahre an. Die Romane von Ford Madox Ford haben an Wertschätzung in den letzten Jahrzehnten ständig zugenommen und gelten heute ebenfalls als Klassiker; er arbeitete viel und eng mit Joseph Conrad zusammen, mit dem er mehrere Bücher verfasste.

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      The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad

      Introduction

      The amazing Joseph Conrad, a Pole whose genius found its metier in the English language, published The Secret Agent in 1908. His previous career as a merchant sailor having endowed him with a geographical reach-the Congo in Heart of Darkness (1899), the East Indies in Lord Jim (1900), South America in Nostromo (1904)-it was only a matter of time before he would turn his laser eye on his adopted homeland. The man who at age twenty taught himself English and in less than a quarter century produced a body of work that put him in the pantheon of great English novelists, would choose for a setting the same city that a more circumspect writer would have thought was owned by Charles Dickens.

      Dickens’ London is the city of the industrial revolution—it may be dirty, sooty, class-ridden, rife with injustice, and populated by bumbling lawyers, street thieves, orphans deprived of their patrimony, and bizarre characters given to inane homilies, but it is not the heart of darkness of Conrad’s London. We have moved forward in time some fifty years: the London of The Secret Agent is hermetic, choked in raw fog or drowned in cold rain. The Thames is a sinister marvel of still shadows and flowing gleams mingling ... in a black silence. The sun, insofar as it manages to appear, may be bloodshot and the city at night slumbers monstrously on a carpet of mud under a veil of raw mist. Just a few people are its significant population. And though they range from the low to the highborn, their lives are brought into relief by a single violent episode-a terrorist bombing—that, not to disturb the closeted drama of the piece, occurs offstage.

      In Dickens there is a possibility of redemption, a capacity for forgiveness, a discerning eye for innocence. Conrad by contrast forgives no one, redeems no one, nor will he portray innocence of the kind to bring tears to our eyes. Those characters he does not view with contempt may suffer only his ironic amusement, or be condescended to with pity, but no one escapes his accounting. Conrad writes looking down. It is his achievement to provide us no character with whom we wish to identify, yet to keep us intensely engaged.

      What has put the novelist in this frame of mind? Recalling his earlier Heart of Darkness, we might be justified in attributing to him the despairingly bleak view of humankind of a prophet. In that work, nameless, spiritually bereft Congolese slaves and murderous European colonialists seem to exhaust the range of human possibility. But something more specific is at work in this London noir. What it is can be surmised from the quartet of anarchists Conrad puts on display early in the story: Michaelis, an overweight philosophic dreamer, Jundt, a bitter wizened misanthrope, and Ossipon, an example of the revolutionary as opportunist, are met in the back parlor of the . indolent Verloc, a presumed member of this local anarchist cell, but in fact the secret agent of the title, a man whose income derives not from the shabby part-porno, part-stationer’s shop he owns, but from his work as a mole and would-be agent provocateur on behalf of a foreign government. Conrad derives from the situation of these hapless marginal men a reason to abhor utopian thinking. The futility and death immanent in revolutionary activism is his presiding theme. He will show us that any noble social ideal is necessarily configured to the weak minds of its adherents.

      But why anarchism? Today it exists mostly in books as a political philosophy. Anarchism would replace the nation-state, and the hieratic economic structures, capitalist or communist, that it legitimizes, with the loose association of libertarian-socialist communities that it conceives of bringing true freedom and individual self-realization to mankind. But in Conrad’s time anarchism was an international political force that took the form of militant trade unionism. In Italy, Spain, France, the United States, and in Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, anarchist parties had adherents in the tens if not hundreds of thousands. Strikes, rallies, demands for an eight-hour working day, mass marches, factory occupations, and, inevitably, acts of violence were front-page stories all over the world. Ferocious repression of such anarchist tactics as the general strike engendered violence in turn. It was a hybridized movement and there were those anarchists who instigated bombings and assassinations intended to raise public awareness and rally support. Inevitably the newspaper cartoon of the black-bearded alien tossing a bomb that was drawn like an apple with a stem became the reductive image of the movement.

      When Conrad set about writing The Secret Agent in 1907, anarchists were the designated terrorists of his day.

      But what of this quartet meeting in the shabby parlor behind the shop of the secret agent Verloc? They are anything but menacing. When they meet it is only to argue with one another as to how best to bring their revolutionary vision into being. Shall it come inevitably from the pacific, literate publicizing of its reasonableness on one hand, or through acts of violence against capitalist symbols of power, on the other? In any case they will end up doing nothing. Their internal dissension renders these anarchists hapless, however dangerous they are portrayed in the press.

      Conrad accurately satirizes the ineffective anarchist underworld in Britain; it was a sputtering, bumbling movement compared to what was happening on the Continent. The plot of The Secret Agent unfolds, ironically, as Verloc goes on to report to Mr. Vladimir, the suave and contemptuous foreign embassy official—French, Russian, Hungarian?—who runs him. Apparently the indolent Verloc has not been getting results. If the anarchists he spies upon are too weak to do anything, Verloc will have to do it for them. Something must be done to awaken England to the anarchist menace. Verloc is ordered to compromise his vacillating comrades and fulfill his role as agent provocateur by committing an outrage—specifically he is to blow up the Greenwich Observatory.

      It is an historical fact that there had been an attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory more than a dozen years before Conrad undertook his novel. The bomber, an anarchist, had only succeeded in blowing himself up. In an Author’s Note for the collected works edition of his novel, Conrad tells how the incident eventually aroused his imaginative instincts when he heard from someone that the bomber’s sister committed suicide shortly after the bombing. From such forgotten newspaper stories and casual conversations are novels born. Conrad’s friend, Henry James, in his essay The Art of Fiction, speaks of novels emerging from a writer’s immense sensibility ... that takes to itself the faintest hints of life ... and converts the very pulses of the air into revelations.

      Verloc is married to a younger woman, Winnie, who minds the shop for him when he is away; she has married him to ensure a home for her younger retarded brother, Stevie, and her old mother, the onetime keeper of a boardinghouse, where, indeed, Verloc had been a lodger and had come to know the three of them. And so in the small rooms behind the shop does this improvised family live in a state of passionless dependence until a bomb explodes at the Greenwich Observatory and does no damage except to the bomber.

      Here we must acknowledge the construction of the book: Verloc will now disappear for several chapters. He disappears either because he has destroyed himself, or because he is alive and the author must absent him from the narrative if the truth of what happened is to be withheld, as it must in all works that participate suspensefully in the genre of the detective novel. For of course this one does, even as its substance is political intrigue. At the Observatory the police have found only the unidentifiable fragments of a body—a heap of rags, says Conrad, scorched and bloodstained, half concealing what might have been an accumulation of raw material for a cannibal feast. And in a series of real-time scenes with no elisions, we follow the investigation of this event as it works like a fuse for another kind of bomb, a revelation that will wreak devastation in the lives of several of the characters.

      Remarkably, in a work dealing with espionage and terrorist violence, its realms are private. Most of the action occurs indoors, and when outdoors in alleys or dark narrow streets. The story develops through the conversational exchanges of the characters. These exchanges succeed one another as a narrative skein of event and reaction rolling itself out—Verloc and the embassy official Mr. Vladimir, the Chief Inspector of Police with the Professor, a malign little nihilist who lives only to devise the perfect detonator, the Assistant Commissioner of Police with the great lady, a patroness of the anarchist Michaelis and a practitioner of fin de siècle radical chic, and so on. In nineteenth-century novels of espionage and political intrigue—Stendhal, Dumas—the geography is generously given and lots of time passes. People move about, there are vistas, horizons. Not so here. The Secret Agent foretells the twentieth-century genre, as exemplified by Graham Greene and John Le Carré, in which the players are not romantics but woeful interior men not quite up to the demands of their professions. But what has never been achieved since, in the genre of political thriller, is the intensity with which Conrad attends to his characters. He may treat them with disdain or grisly amusement but his authorial love for them is unbounded. He loves them for the opportunity they give him for extended moral analysis. Never more clearly than in this novel can the novel be seen as an aesthetic system of opinions. The story moves forward through the characters’ thoughts and feelings; there is total invasion of their privacy, and with the exception of the afflicted boy Stevie, they are a company that would not want that much shown of themselves—certainly not their ruling self-interest. Nor would they want to learn of themselves their capacity for self-deception.

      We read The Secret Agent in the illusion that the time it takes us to read is equivalent to the passage of time in the story. We feel this despite the major disruption of chronology. With some variation, if not eccentricity, Conrad is observing the classical unities of time and place and—by means of the consistent attitudinal voice—theme.

      It may not be unfair to say that Conrad’s conservatism was bred in him when, as a child, he went into exile with his politically active Polish parents (the family name was Korzeniowski) only to have them die by the time he was eleven. Some of his biographers have made much of this fact. Such stunning bereavement had come of his parents’ radicalism—his father having been a Polish nationalist in prominent opposition to the Tsarist occupation of his country—and it is not hard to imagine that Conrad was educated to a despair of political activism by the bitterness of his childhood losses. Of course such psychologizing of an author’s childhood does not account for the self-sufficiency of his art. The Secret Agent proves out on its own—it is an aesthetically realized work, a devised universe of words that tells us all we need to know in order to understand it and it requires of us no knowledge of the author’s life to justify its given nature. Nevertheless this work, which deals most directly with the dissident political life of the sort to which his father was given, happens to be the most constrictive of Conrad’s novels. It is as if only by sealing off his characters in their dark hermetic city, and giving them their being in the formal genre of a deductive mystery, could he resist polemic and find a secure aesthetic accommodation for his own passionately held political beliefs. For as the poet W. H. Auden once said: A writer’s politics are more of a danger to him than his cupidity.

      But if Conrad rejected the parental Korzeniowskis’ activism, he did not abjure the social position that gave it leave: the family had been of the Polish upper class, they were landed gentry, and what the orphaned boy came away with was a recollection of the regal presumption he was born to.

      We find a trace of this presumption in Conrad’s most often quoted remark about the writer’s task from his introduction to his Nigger of the Narcissus:

      My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand—and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.

      That tail at the end, that glimpse of truth for which we have forgotten to ask puts us down there with Verloc and his self-deluding companions. Certainly no American writer from the last century or this would get away with such grandiose sentiments, all capped by some regal disdain for the common reader. We can forgive Conrad because he delivered great work, and in a time when perhaps writers had more right to claim their importance to the culture of mankind than now when they are hardly heard through the static of electronic life, and the stroboscopic dazzlement of film. Conrad wrote when, in the words of the critic Alfred Kazin, writing was everything. He had the hard life of the writer’s writer with very little money to show for it. And writing for no matter how many years, and with whatever brilliance, in a language to which you were not born, could you not have heard antiphonally, as if whispered by ghosts, the language you were born to and from which you derived your aristocratic sense of yourself?

      But we can take these observations back to the book itself and remark with appreciation how Conrad has applied his finely textured Jamesian prose to distinctly non-Jamesian characters. He will say of Verloc, for example, that

      Mr Verloc extended as much recognition to Stevie as a man not particularly fond of animals may give to his wife’s beloved cat; and this recognition, benevolent and perfunctory, was essentially of the same quality.

      A peculiarity of the book is that some characters have names but others are referred to only by their title or their station in life—not only the great lady but the Assistant Commissioner, or the malign bomb maker whom we know only as the Professor. Presumably there are ironic distinctions to be made in Conrad’s overview of the society of the book. Or perhaps it is the author sounding his voice in whatever way he conceivably can. For however presumptive his invasion of his characters’ minds, he does maintain his distance somewhat above them.

      Withal we are heartened to notice the workmanlike strategies to which Conrad sometimes resorts. When Verloc is brought back into the narrative, it is to a time before the failed bombing of the Observatory. Here we find Winnie Verloc’s old mother, concerned that Verloc may grow to resent his economic responsibility for Winnie’s extended family, sacrificially deciding to move herself to an almshouse to lighten Verloc’s burden and ensure that the poor, weak-minded Stevie will always have a home. There is a long, memorable cab ride in the middle of the night as Winnie and Stevie take their mother across London to her new home for indigents. And Conrad being Conrad, he does not stint in this scene: the cabbie, the cabbie’s horse, and the entire London night get their full due in one of the most brilliant chapters of the book. He will use nobody carelessly as a functional presence with no more character than the job he or she holds. Every person will be given their justice—they are each at the center of their universe, as with the barely articulate disgruntled cabbie with his broken-down hackney carriage and wretched knacker of a horse taking Winnie Verloc’s mother to her rest home.

      The pertinent strategy is this: why in the middle of this novel of political intrigue does Winnie Verloc’s mother decide to leave the family home and take up residence across London? The answer, of course, is that she has to be gotten out of the way for the climactic scenes of the novel. For finally it is this family of the secret agent and his wife and her retarded younger brother to whom Conrad gives most of his attention. The family home, the precinct of intimate family life, is where history will crash through the door and demolish everything in its path.

      But in deciding he had to remove the old mother from any diluting influence she might have on the horrifying final scenes, Conrad discovered, with what must have been nothing short of exuberance, how he loved describing that journey across the London night, with poor Stevie concerned that the cabbie was whipping his broken-down horse, and the cabbie, to whom Conrad had given a prosthetic arm and an oversized head, becoming a frightening presence to the old woman, and the horse itself made as specific a horse as decrepitude could ensure.

      And so we reclaim Conrad from his august throne as a writer of classics to make him a working writer for the here and now: What is strategically necessary—the tactical removal of a minor character—becomes first a brilliant improvisation—Conrad’s aesthetic conscience allowing him to let nothing go by without milking its meaning to the fullest—and then, perhaps unanticipated even by him—the iconic image of this woeful society of sad, doomed people that will endure long after we have read the last page.

      -E. L. Doctorow

      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 licenced 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 lodger’s 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 piercingly 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 one foggy afternoon, in his chiefs absence, busy letting off fireworks on the staircase. He touched off in quick succession a set of fierce rockets, angry catherine wheels, loudly exploding squibs—and the matter might have turned out very serious. An awful panic spread through the whole building. Wild-eyed, choking clerks stampeded through the passages full of smoke; silk hats and elderly business men could be seen rolling independently down the stairs. Stevie did not seem to derive any personal gratification from what he had done. His motives for this stroke of originality were difficult to discover. It was only later on that Winnie obtained from him a misty and confused confession. It seems

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