Summary
Winnie Verloc pauses after running out of the parlor, where she had just stabbed Mr. Verloc, and gradually becomes filled with horror at the idea – gleaned from remembered newspaper articles – that she will be hanged as a murderer. Another newspaper-derived idea appears as her only way out: to commit suicide by throwing herself from a bridge. Stumbling on her way to a bridge, the thought of running away to Europe dawns on her, but she realizes that she is utterly bereft of connections who would be able to support her.
In this moment of painful loneliness, she bumps into Comrade Ossipon and begs for his help. Assuming that she is coming to him out of grief over the death of her husband – whom he thought was the one who perished in the bomb outrage – he is surprised with his luck in gaining the confidences and seemingly the affections of an attractive woman. While she tells him, without saying explicitly that it was she who murdered Mr. Verloc, of her longing to be free and her anger towards Mr. Verloc, Ossipon does not suspect anything. She begins to call him by his nickname “Tom,” which greatly pleases him.
He promises to help her escape on Europe by taking a train to a port and then from there to take a ship to the Continent after Mrs. Verloc reveals that she has ample money from Mr. Verloc’s earlier bank withdrawal. Mrs. Verloc insists that they go back to her shop on Brett Street in order to turn off the lights. There, Ossipon is completely astounded by the sight of a murdered Mr. Verloc. He continues with Mrs. Verloc to the station, but as the train is pulling away he jumps out onto the platform to escape her. With her money in hand, he goes back to his apartment and falls asleep as the sun is coming up.
Analysis
After Mrs. Verloc comes to from her frenzied flight from the parlor room, we find her finally thinking thoughts; but, as Conrad has told us before, she does not think so much in words as in images:
The blood trickling on the floor off the handle of the knife had turned it into an extremely plain case of murder. Mrs Verloc, who always refrained from looking deep into things, was compelled to look into the very bottom of this thing. She saw there no haunting face, no reproachful shade, no vision of remorse, no sort of ideal conception. She saw there an object. That object was the gallows. Mrs Verloc was afraid of the gallows (195-6).
It seems that Conrad could have expressed the same thoughts by writing something along the lines that Mrs. Verloc feared the gallows and would do anything but have to go up to that dreadful device, because she was still so young, she still had so much to live for, etc.; instead, by the very mode of his presentation, he is presenting us with her peculiar way of thinking: certain compelling mental images drive her to heightened emotional states. This non-discursive manner of thinking identifies her at once with Stevie and in general with a conception of a working-class man or woman as extremely susceptible to the exaggerations and shocks of modern urban life. It is significant that, when she or her brother reads a newspaper or overhears some of the anarchists’ speechifying, they take the sensationalistic words very literally; specifically, they visualize what is said. Thus, just reading about the gallows plants the recurring image of the gallows in Mrs. Verloc’s mind, and any other method of escape she has read about comes unmediated to her, as though thinking a thing and seeing it, or doing it, could not be separated.
Not only does Mrs. Verloc feel compelled by various irresistible forces to kill her husband and seek her own death, but in general she feels completely isolated and bereft of all possibilities for living, a condition that is associated with the oppressive urban atmosphere of London:
It came to her suddenly. Murderers escaped. They escaped abroad. Spain or California. Mere names. The vast world created for the glory of man was only a vast blank to Mrs Verloc. She did not know which way to turn. Murderers had friends, relations, helpers—they had knowledge. She had nothing. She was the most lonely of murderers that ever struck a mortal blow. She was alone in London: and the whole town of marvels and mud, with its maze of streets and its mass of lights, was sunk in a hopeless night, rested at the bottom of a black abyss from which no unaided woman could hope to scramble out (198).
