The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
of Parliament of illustrious parentage and unconventional sympathies,
which were the standing joke of the comic papers. The notabilities and
even the simple notorieties of the day brought each other freely to that
temple of an old woman’s not ignoble curiosity. You never could guess
whom you were likely to come upon being received in semi-privacy within
the faded blue silk and gilt frame screen, making a cosy nook for a couch
and a few arm-chairs in the great drawing-room, with its hum of voices
and the groups of people seated or standing in the light of six tall
windows.
Michaelis had been the object of a revulsion of popular sentiment, the
same sentiment which years ago had applauded the ferocity of the life
sentence passed upon him for complicity in a rather mad attempt to rescue
some prisoners from a police van. The plan of the conspirators had been
to shoot down the horses and overpower the escort. Unfortunately, one of
the police constables got shot too. He left a wife and three small
children, and the death of that man aroused through the length and
breadth of a realm for whose defence, welfare, and glory men die every
day as matter of duty, an outburst of furious indignation, of a raging
implacable pity for the victim. Three ring-leaders got hanged.
Michaelis, young and slim, locksmith by trade, and great frequenter of
evening schools, did not even know that anybody had been killed, his part
with a few others being to force open the door at the back of the special
conveyance. When arrested he had a bunch of skeleton keys in one pocket,
a heavy chisel in another, and a short crowbar in his hand: neither more
nor less than a burglar. But no burglar would have received such a heavy
sentence. The death of the constable had made him miserable at heart,
but the failure of the plot also. He did not conceal either of these
sentiments from his empanelled countrymen, and that sort of compunction
appeared shockingly imperfect to the crammed court. The judge on passing
sentence commented feelingly upon the depravity and callousness of the
young prisoner.
That made the groundless fame of his condemnation; the fame of his
release was made for him on no better grounds by people who wished to
exploit the sentimental aspect of his imprisonment either for purposes of
their own or for no intelligible purpose. He let them do so in the
innocence of his heart and the simplicity of his mind. Nothing that
happened to him individually had any importance. He was like those
saintly men whose personality is lost in the contemplation of their
faith. His ideas were not in the nature of convictions. They were
inaccessible to reasoning. They formed in all their contradictions and
obscurities an invincible and humanitarian creed, which he confessed
rather than preached, with an obstinate gentleness, a smile of pacific
assurance on his lips, and his candid blue eyes cast down because the
sight of faces troubled his inspiration developed in solitude. In that
characteristic attitude, pathetic in his grotesque and incurable obesity
which he had to drag like a galley slave’s bullet to the end of his days,
the Assistant Commissioner of Police beheld the ticket-of-leave apostle
filling a privileged arm-chair within the screen. He sat there by the
head of the old lady’s couch, mild-voiced and quiet, with no more
self-consciousness than a very small child, and with something of a
child’s charm—the appealing charm of trustfulness. Confident of the
future, whose secret ways had been revealed to him within the four walls
of a well-known penitentiary, he had no reason to look with suspicion
upon anybody. If he could not give the great and curious lady a very
definite idea as to what the world was coming to, he had managed without
effort to impress her by his unembittered faith, by the sterling quality
of his optimism.
A certain simplicity of thought is common to serene souls at both ends of
the social scale. The great lady was simple in her own way. His views
and beliefs had nothing in them to shock or startle her, since she judged
them from the standpoint of her lofty position. Indeed, her sympathies
were easily accessible to a man of that sort. She was not an exploiting
capitalist herself; she was, as it were, above the play of economic
conditions. And she had a great capacity of pity for the more obvious
forms of common human miseries, precisely because she was such a complete
stranger to them that she had to translate her conception into terms of
mental suffering before she could grasp the notion of their cruelty. The
Assistant Commissioner remembered very well the conversation between
these two. He had listened in silence. It was something as exciting in
a way, and even touching in its foredoomed futility, as the efforts at
moral intercourse between the inhabitants of remote planets. But this
grotesque incarnation of humanitarian passion appealed somehow, to one’s
imagination. At last Michaelis rose, and taking the great lady’s
extended hand, shook it, retained it for a moment in his great cushioned
palm with unembarrassed friendliness, and turned upon the semi-private
nook of the drawing-room his back, vast and square, and as if distended
under the short tweed jacket. Glancing about in serene benevolence, he
waddled along to the distant door between the knots of other visitors.
The murmur of conversations paused on his passage. He smiled innocently
at a tall, brilliant girl, whose eyes met his accidentally, and went out
unconscious of the glances following him across the room. Michaelis’
first appearance in the world was a success—a success of esteem unmarred
by a single murmur of derision. The interrupted conversations were
resumed in their proper tone, grave or light. Only a well-set-up,
long-limbed, active-looking man of forty talking with two ladies near a
window remarked aloud, with an unexpected depth of feeling: “Eighteen
stone, I should say, and not five foot six. Poor fellow! It’s
terrible—terrible.”
The lady of the house, gazing absently at the Assistant Commissioner,
left alone with her on the private side of the screen, seemed to be
rearranging her mental impressions behind her thoughtful immobility of a
handsome old face. Men with grey moustaches and full, healthy, vaguely
smiling countenances approached, circling round the screen; two mature
women with a matronly air of gracious resolution; a clean-shaved
individual with sunken cheeks, and dangling a gold-mounted eyeglass on a
broad black ribbon with an old-world, dandified effect. A silence
deferential, but full of reserves, reigned for a moment, and then the
great lady exclaimed, not with resentment, but with a sort of protesting
indignation:
“And that officially is supposed to be a revolutionist! What nonsense.”
She looked hard at the Assistant Commissioner, who murmured
apologetically:
“Not a dangerous one perhaps.”
“Not dangerous—I should think not indeed. He is a mere believer. It’s
the temperament of a saint,” declared the great lady in a firm tone.
“And they kept him shut up for twenty years. One shudders at the
stupidity of it. And now they have let him out everybody belonging to
him is gone away somewhere or dead. His parents are dead; the girl he
was to marry has died while he was in prison; he has lost the skill
necessary for his manual occupation. He told me all this himself with
the sweetest patience; but then, he said, he had had plenty of time to
think out things for himself. A pretty compensation! If that’s the
stuff revolutionists are made of some of us may well go on their knees to
them,” she continued in a slightly bantering voice, while the banal
society smiles hardened on the worldly faces turned towards her with
conventional deference. “The poor creature is obviously no longer in a
position to take care of himself. Somebody will have to look after him a
little.”
“He should be recommended to follow a treatment of some sort,” the
soldierly voice of the active-looking man was heard advising earnestly
from a distance. He was in the pink of condition for his age, and even
the texture of his long frock coat had a character of elastic soundness,
as if it were a living tissue. “The man is virtually a cripple,” he
added with unmistakable feeling.
Other voices, as if glad of the opening, murmured hasty compassion.
“Quite startling,” “Monstrous,” “Most painful to see.” The lank man,
with the eyeglass on a broad ribbon, pronounced mincingly the word
“Grotesque,” whose justness was appreciated by those standing near him.
They smiled at each other.
The Assistant Commissioner had expressed no opinion either then or later,
his position making it impossible for him to ventilate any independent
view of a ticket-of-leave convict. But, in truth, he shared the view of
his wife’s friend and patron that Michaelis was a humanitarian
sentimentalist, a little mad, but upon the whole incapable of hurting a
fly intentionally. So when that name cropped up suddenly in this vexing
bomb affair he realised all the danger of it for the ticket-of-leave
apostle, and his mind reverted at once to the old lady’s well-established
infatuation. Her arbitrary kindness would not brook patiently any
interference with Michaelis’ freedom. It was a deep, calm, convinced
infatuation. She had not only felt him to be inoffensive, but she had
said so, which last by a confusion of her absolutist mind became a sort
of incontrovertible demonstration. It was as if the monstrosity of the
man, with his candid infant’s eyes and a fat angelic smile, had
fascinated her. She had come to believe almost his theory of the future,
since it was not repugnant to her prejudices. She disliked the new
element of plutocracy in the social compound, and industrialism as a
method of human development appeared to her singularly repulsive in its
mechanical and unfeeling character. The humanitarian hopes of the mild
Michaelis tended not towards utter destruction, but merely towards the
complete economic ruin of the system. And she did not really see where
was the moral harm of it. It would do away with all the multitude of the
“parvenus,” whom she disliked and mistrusted, not because they had
arrived anywhere (she denied that), but because of their profound
unintelligence of the world, which was the primary cause of the crudity
of their perceptions and the aridity of their hearts. With the
annihilation of all capital they would vanish too; but universal ruin
(providing it was universal, as it was revealed to Michaelis) would leave
the social values untouched. The disappearance of the last piece of
money could not affect people of position. She could not conceive how it
could affect her position, for instance. She had developed these
discoveries to the Assistant Commissioner with all the serene
fearlessness of an old woman who had escaped the blight of indifference.
He had made for himself the rule to receive everything of that sort in a
silence which he took care from policy and inclination not to make
offensive. He had an affection for the aged disciple of Michaelis, a
complex sentiment depending a little on her prestige, on her personality,
but most of all on the instinct of flattered gratitude. He felt himself
really liked in her house. She was kindness personified. And she was
practically wise too, after the manner of experienced women. She made
his married life much easier than it would have been without her
generously full recognition of his rights as Annie’s husband. Her
influence upon his wife, a woman devoured by all sorts of small
selfishnesses, small envies, small jealousies, was excellent.
Unfortunately, both her kindness and her wisdom were of unreasonable