The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
unexpected solutions of continuity, sudden holes in space and time. A
given anarchist may be watched inch by inch and minute by minute, but a
moment always comes when somehow all sight and touch of him are lost for
a few hours, during which something (generally an explosion) more or less
deplorable does happen. But the high official, carried away by his sense
of the fitness of things, had smiled, and now the recollection of that
smile was very annoying to Chief Inspector Heat, principal expert in
anarchist procedure.
This was not the only circumstance whose recollection depressed the usual
serenity of the eminent specialist. There was another dating back only
to that very morning. The thought that when called urgently to his
Assistant Commissioner’s private room he had been unable to conceal his
astonishment was distinctly vexing. His instinct of a successful man had
taught him long ago that, as a general rule, a reputation is built on
manner as much as on achievement. And he felt that his manner when
confronted with the telegram had not been impressive. He had opened his
eyes widely, and had exclaimed “Impossible!” exposing himself thereby to
the unanswerable retort of a finger-tip laid forcibly on the telegram
which the Assistant Commissioner, after reading it aloud, had flung on
the desk. To be crushed, as it were, under the tip of a forefinger was
an unpleasant experience. Very damaging, too! Furthermore, Chief
Inspector Heat was conscious of not having mended matters by allowing
himself to express a conviction.
“One thing I can tell you at once: none of our lot had anything to do
with this.”
He was strong in his integrity of a good detective, but he saw now that
an impenetrably attentive reserve towards this incident would have served
his reputation better. On the other hand, he admitted to himself that it
was difficult to preserve one’s reputation if rank outsiders were going
to take a hand in the business. Outsiders are the bane of the police as
of other professions. The tone of the Assistant Commissioner’s remarks
had been sour enough to set one’s teeth on edge.
And since breakfast Chief Inspector Heat had not managed to get anything
to eat.
Starting immediately to begin his investigation on the spot, he had
swallowed a good deal of raw, unwholesome fog in the park. Then he had
walked over to the hospital; and when the investigation in Greenwich was
concluded at last he had lost his inclination for food. Not accustomed,
as the doctors are, to examine closely the mangled remains of human
beings, he had been shocked by the sight disclosed to his view when a
waterproof sheet had been lifted off a table in a certain apartment of
the hospital.
Another waterproof sheet was spread over that table in the manner of a
table-cloth, with the corners turned up over a sort of mound—a heap of
rags, scorched and bloodstained, half concealing what might have been an
accumulation of raw material for a cannibal feast. It required
considerable firmness of mind not to recoil before that sight. Chief
Inspector Heat, an efficient officer of his department, stood his ground,
but for a whole minute he did not advance. A local constable in uniform
cast a sidelong glance, and said, with stolid simplicity:
“He’s all there. Every bit of him. It was a job.”
He had been the first man on the spot after the explosion. He mentioned
the fact again. He had seen something like a heavy flash of lightning in
the fog. At that time he was standing at the door of the King William
Street Lodge talking to the keeper. The concussion made him tingle all
over. He ran between the trees towards the Observatory. “As fast as my
legs would carry me,” he repeated twice.
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.”
The Chief Inspector, stooping guardedly over the table, fought down the
unpleasant sensation in his throat. The shattering violence of
destruction which had made of that body a heap of nameless fragments
affected his feelings with a sense of ruthless cruelty, though his reason
told him the effect must have been as swift as a flash of lightning. The
man, whoever he was, had died instantaneously; and yet it seemed
impossible to believe that a human body could have reached that state of
disintegration without passing through the pangs of inconceivable agony.
No physiologist, and still less of a metaphysician, Chief Inspector Heat
rose by the force of sympathy, which is a form of fear, above the vulgar
conception of time. Instantaneous! He remembered all he had ever read
in popular publications of long and terrifying dreams dreamed in the
instant of waking; of the whole past life lived with frightful intensity
by a drowning man as his doomed head bobs up, streaming, for the last
time. The inexplicable mysteries of conscious existence beset Chief
Inspector Heat till he evolved a horrible notion that ages of atrocious
pain and mental torture could be contained between two successive winks
of an eye. And meantime the Chief Inspector went on, peering at the
table with a calm face and the slightly anxious attention of an indigent
customer bending over what may be called the by-products of a butcher’s
shop with a view to an inexpensive Sunday dinner. All the time his
trained faculties of an excellent investigator, who scorns no chance of
information, followed the self-satisfied, disjointed loquacity of the
constable.
“A fair-haired fellow,” the last observed in a placid tone, and paused.
“The old woman who spoke to the sergeant noticed a fair-haired fellow
coming out of Maze Hill Station.” He paused. “And he was a fair-haired
fellow. She noticed two men coming out of the station after the uptrain
had gone on,” he continued slowly. “She couldn’t tell if they were
together. She took no particular notice of the big one, but the other
was a fair, slight chap, carrying a tin varnish can in one hand.” The
constable ceased.
“Know the woman?” muttered the Chief Inspector, with his eyes fixed on
the table, and a vague notion in his mind of an inquest to be held
presently upon a person likely to remain for ever unknown.
“Yes. She’s housekeeper to a retired publican, and attends the chapel in
Park Place sometimes,” the constable uttered weightily, and paused, with
another oblique glance at the table.
Then suddenly: “Well, here he is—all of him I could see. Fair.
Slight—slight enough. Look at that foot there. I picked up the legs
first, one after another. He was that scattered you didn’t know where to
begin.”
The constable paused; the least flicker of an innocent self-laudatory
smile invested his round face with an infantile expression.
“Stumbled,” he announced positively. “I stumbled once myself, and
pitched on my head too, while running up. Them roots do stick out all
about the place. Stumbled against the root of a tree and fell, and that
thing he was carrying must have gone off right under his chest, I
expect.”
The echo of the words “Person unknown” repeating itself in his inner
consciousness bothered the Chief Inspector considerably. He would have
liked to trace this affair back to its mysterious origin for his own
information. He was professionally curious. Before the public he would
have liked to vindicate the efficiency of his department by establishing
the identity of that man. He was a loyal servant. That, however,
appeared impossible. The first term of the problem was unreadable—lacked
all suggestion but that of atrocious cruelty.
Overcoming his physical repugnance, Chief Inspector Heat stretched out
his hand without conviction for the salving of his conscience, and took
up the least soiled of the rags. It was a narrow strip of velvet with a
larger triangular piece of dark blue cloth hanging from it. He held it
up to his eyes; and the police constable spoke.
“Velvet collar. Funny the old woman should have noticed the velvet
collar. Dark blue overcoat with a velvet collar, she has told us. He
was the chap she saw, and no mistake. And here he is all complete,
velvet collar and all. I don’t think I missed a single piece as big as a
postage stamp.”
At this point the trained faculties of the Chief Inspector ceased to hear
the voice of the constable. He moved to one of the windows for better
light. His face, averted from the room, expressed a startled intense
interest while he examined closely the triangular piece of broad-cloth.
By a sudden jerk he detached it, and _only_ after stuffing it into his
pocket turned round to the room, and flung the velvet collar back on the
table—
“Cover up,” he directed the attendants curtly, without another look, and,
saluted by the constable, carried off his spoil hastily.
A convenient train whirled him up to town, alone and pondering deeply, in
a third-class compartment. That singed piece of cloth was incredibly
valuable, and he could not defend himself from astonishment at the casual
manner it had come into his possession. It was as if Fate had thrust
that clue into his hands. And after the manner of the average man, whose
ambition is to command events, he began to mistrust such a gratuitous and
accidental success—just because it seemed forced upon him. The practical
value of success depends not a little on the way you look at it. But
Fate looks at nothing. It has no discretion. He no longer considered it
eminently desirable all round to establish publicly the identity of the
man who had blown himself up that morning with such horrible
completeness. But he was not certain of the view his department would
take. A department is to those it employs a complex personality with
ideas and even fads of its own. It depends on the loyal devotion of its
servants, and the devoted loyalty of trusted servants is associated with
a certain amount of affectionate contempt, which keeps it sweet, as it
were. By a benevolent provision of Nature no man is a hero to his valet,
or else the heroes would have to brush their own clothes. Likewise no
department appears perfectly wise to the intimacy of its workers. A
department does not know so much as some of its servants. Being a
dispassionate organism, it can never be perfectly informed. It would not
be good for its efficiency to know too much. Chief Inspector Heat got
out of the train in a state of thoughtfulness entirely untainted with
disloyalty, but not quite free of that jealous mistrust which so often
springs on the ground of perfect devotion, whether to women or to
institutions.
It was in this mental disposition, physically very empty, but still
nauseated by what he had seen, that he had come upon the Professor.
Under these conditions which make for irascibility in a sound, normal
man, this meeting was specially unwelcome to Chief Inspector Heat. He
had not been thinking of the Professor; he had not been thinking of any
individual anarchist at all. The complexion of that case had somehow
forced upon him the general idea of the absurdity of things human, which
in the abstract is sufficiently annoying to an unphilosophical
temperament, and in concrete instances becomes exasperating beyond