The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
and crossing his thin legs, leaned sideways on his elbow, with one hand
shading his eyes. His listening attitude had a sort of angular and
sorrowful grace. Gleams as of highly burnished silver played on the
sides of his ebony black head when he inclined it slowly at the end.
Chief Inspector Heat waited with the appearance of turning over in his
mind all he had just said, but, as a matter of fact, considering the
advisability of saying something more. The Assistant Commissioner cut
his hesitation short.
“You believe there were two men?” he asked, without uncovering his eyes.
The Chief Inspector thought it more than probable. In his opinion, the
two men had parted from each other within a hundred yards from the
Observatory walls. He explained also how the other man could have got
out of the park speedily without being observed. The fog, though not
very dense, was in his favour. He seemed to have escorted the other to
the spot, and then to have left him there to do the job single-handed.
Taking the time those two were seen coming out of Maze Hill Station by
the old woman, and the time when the explosion was heard, the Chief
Inspector thought that the other man might have been actually at the
Greenwich Park Station, ready to catch the next train up, at the moment
his comrade was destroying himself so thoroughly.
“Very thoroughly—eh?” murmured the Assistant Commissioner from under the
shadow of his hand.
The Chief Inspector in a few vigorous words described the aspect of the
remains. “The coroner’s jury will have a treat,” he added grimly.
The Assistant Commissioner uncovered his eyes.
“We shall have nothing to tell them,” he remarked languidly.
He looked up, and for a time watched the markedly non-committal attitude
of his Chief Inspector. His nature was one that is not easily accessible
to illusions. He knew that a department is at the mercy of its
subordinate officers, who have their own conceptions of loyalty. His
career had begun in a tropical colony. He had liked his work there. It
was police work. He had been very successful in tracking and breaking up
certain nefarious secret societies amongst the natives. Then he took his
long leave, and got married rather impulsively. It was a good match from
a worldly point of view, but his wife formed an unfavourable opinion of
the colonial climate on hearsay evidence. On the other hand, she had
influential connections. It was an excellent match. But he did not like
the work he had to do now. He felt himself dependent on too many
subordinates and too many masters. The near presence of that strange
emotional phenomenon called public opinion weighed upon his spirits, and
alarmed him by its irrational nature. No doubt that from ignorance he
exaggerated to himself its power for good and evil—especially for evil;
and the rough east winds of the English spring (which agreed with his
wife) augmented his general mistrust of men’s motives and of the
efficiency of their organisation. The futility of office work especially
appalled him on those days so trying to his sensitive liver.
He got up, unfolding himself to his full height, and with a heaviness of
step remarkable in so slender a man, moved across the room to the window.
The panes streamed with rain, and the short street he looked down into
lay wet and empty, as if swept clear suddenly by a great flood. It was a
very trying day, choked in raw fog to begin with, and now drowned in cold
rain. The flickering, blurred flames of gas-lamps seemed to be
dissolving in a watery atmosphere. And the lofty pretensions of a
mankind oppressed by the miserable indignities of the weather appeared as
a colossal and hopeless vanity deserving of scorn, wonder, and
compassion.
“Horrible, horrible!” thought the Assistant Commissioner to himself, with
his face near the window-pane. “We have been having this sort of thing
now for ten days; no, a fortnight—a fortnight.” He ceased to think
completely for a time. That utter stillness of his brain lasted about
three seconds. Then he said perfunctorily: “You have set inquiries on
foot for tracing that other man up and down the line?”
He had no doubt that everything needful had been done. Chief Inspector
Heat knew, of course, thoroughly the business of man-hunting. And these
were the routine steps, too, that would be taken as a matter of course by
the merest beginner. A few inquiries amongst the ticket collectors and
the porters of the two small railway stations would give additional
details as to the appearance of the two men; the inspection of the
collected tickets would show at once where they came from that morning.
It was elementary, and could not have been neglected. Accordingly the
Chief Inspector answered that all this had been done directly the old
woman had come forward with her deposition. And he mentioned the name of
a station. “That’s where they came from, sir,” he went on. “The porter
who took the tickets at Maze Hill remembers two chaps answering to the
description passing the barrier. They seemed to him two respectable
working men of a superior sort—sign painters or house decorators. The
big man got out of a third-class compartment backward, with a bright tin
can in his hand. On the platform he gave it to carry to the fair young
fellow who followed him. All this agrees exactly with what the old woman
told the police sergeant in Greenwich.”
The Assistant Commissioner, still with his face turned to the window,
expressed his doubt as to these two men having had anything to do with
the outrage. All this theory rested upon the utterances of an old
charwoman who had been nearly knocked down by a man in a hurry. Not a
very substantial authority indeed, unless on the ground of sudden
inspiration, which was hardly tenable.
“Frankly now, could she have been really inspired?” he queried, with
grave irony, keeping his back to the room, as if entranced by the
contemplation of the town’s colossal forms half lost in the night. He
did not even look round when he heard the mutter of the word
“Providential” from the principal subordinate of his department, whose
name, printed sometimes in the papers, was familiar to the great public
as that of one of its zealous and hard-working protectors. Chief
Inspector Heat raised his voice a little.
“Strips and bits of bright tin were quite visible to me,” he said.
“That’s a pretty good corroboration.”
“And these men came from that little country station,” the Assistant
Commissioner mused aloud, wondering. He was told that such was the name
on two tickets out of three given up out of that train at Maze Hill. The
third person who got out was a hawker from Gravesend well known to the
porters. The Chief Inspector imparted that information in a tone of
finality with some ill humour, as loyal servants will do in the
consciousness of their fidelity and with the sense of the value of their
loyal exertions. And still the Assistant Commissioner did not turn away
from the darkness outside, as vast as a sea.
“Two foreign anarchists coming from that place,” he said, apparently to
the window-pane. “It’s rather unaccountable.”’
“Yes, sir. But it would be still more unaccountable if that Michaelis
weren’t staying in a cottage in the neighbourhood.”
At the sound of that name, falling unexpectedly into this annoying
affair, the Assistant Commissioner dismissed brusquely the vague
remembrance of his daily whist party at his club. It was the most
comforting habit of his life, in a mainly successful display of his skill
without the assistance of any subordinate. He entered his club to play
from five to seven, before going home to dinner, forgetting for those two
hours whatever was distasteful in his life, as though the game were a
beneficent drug for allaying the pangs of moral discontent. His partners
were the gloomily humorous editor of a celebrated magazine; a silent,
elderly barrister with malicious little eyes; and a highly martial,
simple-minded old Colonel with nervous brown hands. They were his club
acquaintances merely. He never met them elsewhere except at the
card-table. But they all seemed to approach the game in the spirit of
co-sufferers, as if it were indeed a drug against the secret ills of
existence; and every day as the sun declined over the countless roofs of
the town, a mellow, pleasurable impatience, resembling the impulse of a
sure and profound friendship, lightened his professional labours. And
now this pleasurable sensation went out of him with something resembling
a physical shock, and was replaced by a special kind of interest in his
work of social protection—an improper sort of interest, which may be
defined best as a sudden and alert mistrust of the weapon in his hand.
CHAPTER VI
The lady patroness of Michaelis, the ticket-of-leave apostle of
humanitarian hopes, was one of the most influential and distinguished
connections of the Assistant Commissioner’s wife, whom she called Annie,
and treated still rather as a not very wise and utterly inexperienced
young girl. But she had consented to accept him on a friendly footing,
which was by no means the case with all of his wife’s influential
connections. Married young and splendidly at some remote epoch of the
past, she had had for a time a close view of great affairs and even of
some great men. She herself was a great lady. Old now in the number of
her years, she had that sort of exceptional temperament which defies time
with scornful disregard, as if it were a rather vulgar convention
submitted to by the mass of inferior mankind. Many other conventions
easier to set aside, alas! failed to obtain her recognition, also on
temperamental grounds—either because they bored her, or else because they
stood in the way of her scorns and sympathies. Admiration was a
sentiment unknown to her (it was one of the secret griefs of her most
noble husband against her)—first, as always more or less tainted with
mediocrity, and next as being in a way an admission of inferiority. And
both were frankly inconceivable to her nature. To be fearlessly
outspoken in her opinions came easily to her, since she judged solely
from the standpoint of her social position. She was equally untrammelled
in her actions; and as her tactfulness proceeded from genuine humanity,
her bodily vigour remained remarkable and her superiority was serene and
cordial, three generations had admired her infinitely, and the last she
was likely to see had pronounced her a wonderful woman. Meantime
intelligent, with a sort of lofty simplicity, and curious at heart, but
not like many women merely of social gossip, she amused her age by
attracting within her ken through the power of her great, almost
historical, social prestige everything that rose above the dead level of
mankind, lawfully or unlawfully, by position, wit, audacity, fortune or
misfortune. Royal Highnesses, artists, men of science, young statesmen,
and charlatans of all ages and conditions, who, unsubstantial and light,
bobbing up like corks, show best the direction of the surface currents,
had been welcomed in that house, listened to, penetrated, understood,
appraised, for her own edification. In her own words, she liked to watch
what the world was coming to. And as she had a practical mind her
judgment of men and things, though based on special prejudices, was
seldom totally wrong, and almost never wrong-headed. Her drawing-room
was probably the only place in the wide world where an Assistant
Commissioner of Police could meet a convict liberated on a
ticket-of-leave on other than professional and official ground. Who had
brought Michaelis there one afternoon the Assistant Commissioner did not
remember very well. He had a notion it must have been a certain Member