Holly Cherney
ENG 362 Essay
Covert Affairs
Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent presents Adolf Verloc as a failing secret agent
attempting to redeem himself. A novel consisting of haphazard anarchy and the unintentional
murder of a young man, there is one passage that stands out as the most significant in the case of
presenting the novel’s intricate theme. It is the most jarring part of The Secret Agent, when
Chief Inspector Heat goes to the hospital after the bombing and meets with the constable,
looking at the waterproof sheets on tables:
Chief Inspector Heat, bending forward over the table in a gingerly and
horrified manner, let him run on. The hospital porter and another man turned
down the corners of the cloth, and stepped aside. The Chief Inspector’s eyes
searched the gruesome detail of that heap of mixed things, which seemed to have
been collected in shambles and rag shops.
“You used a shovel,” he remarked, observing a sprinkling of small gravel, tiny
brown bits of bark, and particles of splintered wood as fine as needles.
“Had to in one place,” said the stolid constable. “I sent a keeper to fetch a
spade. When he heard me scraping the ground with it he leaned his forehead
against a tree, and was as sick as a dog.” (Conrad 81)
First, the placement of this passage in the text takes the reader away from the present narrative.
At the time, it is unknown that the heaps of rag and bone on the waterproof sheets is Stevie;
pages later that Stevie is still alive and well, with his mother and sister, eventually becoming
closer with his brother-in-law, and then Mr. Verloc’s plan is revealed. The staging of the text by
Conrad is concealment at its finest, layering Stevie’s death and Verloc’s hideous scheme within
the regular narrative with the minor character Chief Inspector Heat. In this moment, Inspector
Heat leans over the table both gingerly and horrified, quite the mix of emotion for an officer in
such a situation. Heat is both gentle and disgusted as he looks at the mangled mess on the table
and proclaims that the constable used a shovel. Just from looking at what is left of Stevie’s
body, the inspector can tell that a shovel was used to dig the body out from the dirt after the
explosion, quite the testament to his skill as an officer. Inspector Heat, had he not become a
police officer, could have made a decent secret agent himself, as he is able to tell what kind of
tool is used just from the tiniest details: a sprinkling of small gravel, tiny brown bits of bark, and
particles of splintered wood as fine as needles.
The constable affirms his suspicion, apparently stolid, dull, emotionless. He says the
keeper who got him the spade was immediately sick when he heard the constable scraping the
ground, a violent image contrasting the way that he tells the story. As he recounts the story, all
of the constable’s actions are aggressive and brutal, a stark distinction between his calm
demeanor as he digs the pieces of Stevie’s body out of the ground and retells it later. Just before
this passage, when Inspector Heat first enters the room, the constable tells him, “He’s all there.
Every bit of him…” as though he is proud of his success. The image of the mangled remains,
coupled with the violent means of extracting them and the loss of the reliable narrator in this part
of the novel, bring about a loss of identity, a concealment of one’s true nature. Stevie’s
countenance, his entire body, has been taken from him here, unidentifiable through the remains
left behind. He literally had to be scraped from the ground to be recovered completely, and
while he is all there, he is still not. Stevie has been taken from his mother, his sister, and
deceivingly taken by Verloc under false pretenses. Though the plan did not intend for him to
lose his life, the fact that he did exacerbates his loss of self, the way a secret agent does while
working jobs undercover. Stevie, already marginalized by society and his brother-in-law,
becomes, in the bombing and as a mess of a body, a better agent than Verloc, as he is completely
concealed away from those trying to solve the crime.
As stated before, immediately after this passage the reader sees Stevie alive and
developing a closer relationship with Verloc, a sort of foreshadowing done by Conrad for an
event that has already happened. With his mother and sister, Stevie is upset that the cab driver
whips the horse and attempts to convince his family to let him walk to spare it, but Winnie urges
that Mr. Verloc would be unhappy if Stevie were to walk. Conrad says, “The idea of Mr.
Verloc’s grief and unhappiness acting as usual powerfully upon Stevie’s fundamentally docile
disposition, he abandoned all resistance, and climbed up again on the box, with a face of despair”
(Conrad 136). Not only is this one of Stevie’s most honest moments, it is one of his most
vulnerable, where the idea of Mr. Verloc’s disappointment is what dissuades him from running
after the cab so he does not have to see the horse whipped. Stevie, described as docile, passive, a
meek boy, is standing up for what he believes is right in this moment, and is shot down by
Verloc’s demeanor, even without him actually being present. While this is indicative of the great
influence people, especially Verloc, have over Stevie and his actions, this is a moment where
Stevie gets to speak and stand up for himself. Of all the characters presented in The Secret Agent
it seems that Winnie and Stevie, when given the chance, are the most genuine of them all, as they
exist next to Mr. Verloc the secret agent, as awful at his job as he is. Still, in life, and in death,
Stevie innocence and honesty is overtaken by Mr. Verloc.
Conrad’s reasoning behind Stevie’s immense reverence for Verloc comes from the
simple notion that Stevie considers him to be good. Compared to any other men in his life,
Stevie holds Mr. Verloc to a much higher position, deeming him good: “As far as Mr. Verloc
was concerned, nothing could stand in the way of Stevie’s belief. Mr. Verloc was obviously yet
mysteriously good. And the grief of a good man is august” (Conrad 150). Because Stevie
considers Verloc in such a way, he has a powerful influence over him, albeit mysterious. Simply
because he is good, Stevie knows to mind Verloc’s emotions, especially his impressive grief.
This, of course, leads to Mr. Verloc taking advantage of Stevie. He begins with taking him to the
Continent and asking Stevie to join him on walks, becoming companionable where they had
previously had a disconnect. Making matters worse, this is all encouraged by Winnie, who
assumes such a relationship will be beneficial to both of them, fully knowing the feelings Stevie
holds for her husband. She tells Mr. Verloc, “You could do anything with that boy, Adolf… He
would go through fire for you…” (Conrad 155). And so, Mr. Verloc decides he can do anything
with Stevie, and the irony, of course, is that Stevie does go through fire for him.
From then on, the novel leads to Winnie eventually finding out what her husband has
done. Inspector Heat comes to the Verloc’s shop to inquire about the bombing, assuming that
Winnie has information about it. To Winnie, Inspector Heat presents the crime as a stolen
overcoat, carrying on the theme of concealment as he attempts to goad information from her,
while he knows the truth all the while. Here, Stevie has been reduced from a mangled body to
the label inside of an overcoat, to the enormous grief of his sister as she realizes what happened.
From this point on, Winnie Verloc's character changes completely, her true demeanor erased just
as Stevie’s has been. As Verloc begs her to see the situation differently, as something other than
murder, their relationship is in ruins, like Stevie’s body lying atop the waterproof sheets in the
hospital. Verloc scrapes and scrapes at it, attempting to salvage what they once had, but it is
futile. He assumes they can return to before Winnie found out: “Mr. Verloc presumed that his
wife had understood him but he would have been glad to hear her say what she thought at the
moment. It would have been a comfort” (Conrad 203). Winnie denies him this comfort,
refusing to bend to Verloc’s whims. Instead, she takes her change in identity even further and
murders her husband as revenge. Winnie considers herself free in these moments, no longer
bound to her husband’s control. She eventually attempts to run away with Ossipon; an Anarchist
who is supposedly in love with her, he abandons her and steals the money Verloc had withdrawn
from his bank. Winnie, losing herself in the cruel murder of her brother, does not even get to
enjoy her revenge, her happy ending overtaken by yet another secret agent.
The passage on page 81 is truly significant to The Secret Agent as a whole; even the
placement of the text itself parallels the concept of a secret agent and the concealment of
characters. The image of Stevie, his remains a bloody mess on a hospital table, is indicative of
his loss of identity throughout the novel, and this is seen in his sister as well. While Verloc fails
at being a secret agent, his true success is in erasing the identity of those most important around
him. Stevie, already a victim before, during, and after the bombing, has been violently scraped
from the ground, and while his body is entirely there, Stevie himself is long gone. Both he and
his sister have been engulfed by Verloc’s presence in their lives, constantly submitting to him.
The concept of the secret agent applies to Verloc as a character, rather than his profession, and it
applies to the systematic erasure of both Stevie and Winnie, a covert affair in itself. When
Winnie learns that her husband has caused the death of her little brother, her entire character
changes, taking on a new persona, presumably, as Verloc must do and has done to keep his
identity as an agent a secret. Stevie loses his identity under Verloc’s power, so intensely under
cover of his influence that he regards him as good and ends up dying for him. The true secret
agents in Conrad’s novel are the ones who are dragged into this hidden operation.