The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
complexion, distinctly feminine, and difficult to deal with. She
remained a perfect woman all along her full tale of years, and not as
some of them do become—a sort of slippery, pestilential old man in
petticoats. And it was as of a woman that he thought of her—the
specially choice incarnation of the feminine, wherein is recruited the
tender, ingenuous, and fierce bodyguard for all sorts of men who talk
under the influence of an emotion, true or fraudulent; for preachers,
seers, prophets, or reformers.
Appreciating the distinguished and good friend of his wife, and himself,
in that way, the Assistant Commissioner became alarmed at the convict
Michaelis’ possible fate. Once arrested on suspicion of being in some
way, however remote, a party to this outrage, the man could hardly escape
being sent back to finish his sentence at least. And that would kill
him; he would never come out alive. The Assistant Commissioner made a
reflection extremely unbecoming his official position without being
really creditable to his humanity.
“If the fellow is laid hold of again,” he thought, “she will never
forgive me.”
The frankness of such a secretly outspoken thought could not go without
some derisive self-criticism. No man engaged in a work he does not like
can preserve many saving illusions about himself. The distaste, the
absence of glamour, extend from the occupation to the personality. It is
only when our appointed activities seem by a lucky accident to obey the
particular earnestness of our temperament that we can taste the comfort
of complete self-deception. The Assistant Commissioner did not like his
work at home. The police work he had been engaged on in a distant part
of the globe had the saving character of an irregular sort of warfare or
at least the risk and excitement of open-air sport. His real abilities,
which were mainly of an administrative order, were combined with an
adventurous disposition. Chained to a desk in the thick of four millions
of men, he considered himself the victim of an ironic fate—the same, no
doubt, which had brought about his marriage with a woman exceptionally
sensitive in the matter of colonial climate, besides other limitations
testifying to the delicacy of her nature—and her tastes. Though he
judged his alarm sardonically he did not dismiss the improper thought
from his mind. The instinct of self-preservation was strong within him.
On the contrary, he repeated it mentally with profane emphasis and a
fuller precision: “Damn it! If that infernal Heat has his way the
fellow’ll die in prison smothered in his fat, and she’ll never forgive
me.”
His black, narrow figure, with the white band of the collar under the
silvery gleams on the close-cropped hair at the back of the head,
remained motionless. The silence had lasted such a long time that Chief
Inspector Heat ventured to clear his throat. This noise produced its
effect. The zealous and intelligent officer was asked by his superior,
whose back remained turned to him immovably:
“You connect Michaelis with this affair?”
Chief Inspector Heat was very positive, but cautious.
“Well, sir,” he said, “we have enough to go upon. A man like that has no
business to be at large, anyhow.”
“You will want some conclusive evidence,” came the observation in a
murmur.
Chief Inspector Heat raised his eyebrows at the black, narrow back, which
remained obstinately presented to his intelligence and his zeal.
“There will be no difficulty in getting up sufficient evidence against
_him_,” he said, with virtuous complacency. “You may trust me for that,
sir,” he added, quite unnecessarily, out of the fulness of his heart; for
it seemed to him an excellent thing to have that man in hand to be thrown
down to the public should it think fit to roar with any special
indignation in this case. It was impossible to say yet whether it would
roar or not. That in the last instance depended, of course, on the
newspaper press. But in any case, Chief Inspector Heat, purveyor of
prisons by trade, and a man of legal instincts, did logically believe
that incarceration was the proper fate for every declared enemy of the
law. In the strength of that conviction he committed a fault of tact.
He allowed himself a little conceited laugh, and repeated:
“Trust me for that, sir.”
This was too much for the forced calmness under which the Assistant
Commissioner had for upwards of eighteen months concealed his irritation
with the system and the subordinates of his office. A square peg forced
into a round hole, he had felt like a daily outrage that long established
smooth roundness into which a man of less sharply angular shape would
have fitted himself, with voluptuous acquiescence, after a shrug or two.
What he resented most was just the necessity of taking so much on trust.
At the little laugh of Chief Inspector Heat’s he spun swiftly on his
heels, as if whirled away from the window-pane by an electric shock. He
caught on the latter’s face not only the complacency proper to the
occasion lurking under the moustache, but the vestiges of experimental
watchfulness in the round eyes, which had been, no doubt, fastened on his
back, and now met his glance for a second before the intent character of
their stare had the time to change to a merely startled appearance.
The Assistant Commissioner of Police had really some qualifications for
his post. Suddenly his suspicion was awakened. It is but fair to say
that his suspicions of the police methods (unless the police happened to
be a semi-military body organised by himself) was not difficult to
arouse. If it ever slumbered from sheer weariness, it was but lightly;
and his appreciation of Chief Inspector Heat’s zeal and ability, moderate
in itself, excluded all notion of moral confidence. “He’s up to
something,” he exclaimed mentally, and at once became angry. Crossing
over to his desk with headlong strides, he sat down violently. “Here I
am stuck in a litter of paper,” he reflected, with unreasonable
resentment, “supposed to hold all the threads in my hands, and yet I can
but hold what is put in my hand, and nothing else. And they can fasten
the other ends of the threads where they please.”
He raised his head, and turned towards his subordinate a long, meagre
face with the accentuated features of an energetic Don Quixote.
“Now what is it you’ve got up your sleeve?”
The other stared. He stared without winking in a perfect immobility of
his round eyes, as he was used to stare at the various members of the
criminal class when, after being duly cautioned, they made their
statements in the tones of injured innocence, or false simplicity, or
sullen resignation. But behind that professional and stony fixity there
was some surprise too, for in such a tone, combining nicely the note of
contempt and impatience, Chief Inspector Heat, the right-hand man of the
department, was not used to be addressed. He began in a procrastinating
manner, like a man taken unawares by a new and unexpected experience.
“What I’ve got against that man Michaelis you mean, sir?”
The Assistant Commissioner watched the bullet head; the points of that
Norse rover’s moustache, falling below the line of the heavy jaw; the
whole full and pale physiognomy, whose determined character was marred by
too much flesh; at the cunning wrinkles radiating from the outer corners
of the eyes—and in that purposeful contemplation of the valuable and
trusted officer he drew a conviction so sudden that it moved him like an
inspiration.
“I have reason to think that when you came into this room,” he said in
measured tones, “it was not Michaelis who was in your mind; not
principally—perhaps not at all.”
“You have reason to think, sir?” muttered Chief Inspector Heat, with
every appearance of astonishment, which up to a certain point was genuine
enough. He had discovered in this affair a delicate and perplexing side,
forcing upon the discoverer a certain amount of insincerity—that sort of
insincerity which, under the names of skill, prudence, discretion, turns
up at one point or another in most human affairs. He felt at the moment
like a tight-rope artist might feel if suddenly, in the middle of the
performance, the manager of the Music Hall were to rush out of the proper
managerial seclusion and begin to shake the rope. Indignation, the sense
of moral insecurity engendered by such a treacherous proceeding joined to
the immediate apprehension of a broken neck, would, in the colloquial
phrase, put him in a state. And there would be also some scandalised
concern for his art too, since a man must identify himself with something
more tangible than his own personality, and establish his pride
somewhere, either in his social position, or in the quality of the work
he is obliged to do, or simply in the superiority of the idleness he may
be fortunate enough to enjoy.
“Yes,” said the Assistant Commissioner; “I have. I do not mean to say
that you have not thought of Michaelis at all. But you are giving the
fact you’ve mentioned a prominence which strikes me as not quite candid,
Inspector Heat. If that is really the track of discovery, why haven’t
you followed it up at once, either personally or by sending one of your
men to that village?”
“Do you think, sir, I have failed in my duty there?” the Chief Inspector
asked, in a tone which he sought to make simply reflective. Forced
unexpectedly to concentrate his faculties upon the task of preserving his
balance, he had seized upon that point, and exposed himself to a rebuke;
for, the Assistant Commissioner frowning slightly, observed that this was
a very improper remark to make.
“But since you’ve made it,” he continued coldly, “I’ll tell you that this
is not my meaning.”
He paused, with a straight glance of his sunken eyes which was a full
equivalent of the unspoken termination “and you know it.” The head of
the so-called Special Crimes Department debarred by his position from
going out of doors personally in quest of secrets locked up in guilty
breasts, had a propensity to exercise his considerable gifts for the
detection of incriminating truth upon his own subordinates. That
peculiar instinct could hardly be called a weakness. It was natural. He
was a born detective. It had unconsciously governed his choice of a
career, and if it ever failed him in life it was perhaps in the one
exceptional circumstance of his marriage—which was also natural. It fed,
since it could not roam abroad, upon the human material which was brought
to it in its official seclusion. We can never cease to be ourselves.
His elbow on the desk, his thin legs crossed, and nursing his cheek in
the palm of his meagre hand, the Assistant Commissioner in charge of the
Special Crimes branch was getting hold of the case with growing interest.
His Chief Inspector, if not an absolutely worthy foeman of his
penetration, was at any rate the most worthy of all within his reach. A
mistrust of established reputations was strictly in character with the
Assistant Commissioner’s ability as detector. His memory evoked a
certain old fat and wealthy native chief in the distant colony whom it
was a tradition for the successive Colonial Governors to trust and make
much of as a firm friend and supporter of the order and legality
established by white men; whereas, when examined sceptically, he was
found out to be principally his own good friend, and nobody else’s. Not
precisely a traitor, but still a man of many dangerous reservations in
his fidelity, caused by a due regard for his own advantage, comfort, and
safety. A fellow of some innocence in his naive duplicity, but none the
less dangerous. He took some finding out. He was physically a big man,
too, and (allowing for the difference of colour, of course) Chief