The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
something in the wind,” he concluded, “I’ve always found he could tell me
something worth knowing.”
The Assistant Commissioner made a significant remark.
“He failed you this time.”
“Neither had I wind of anything in any other way,” retorted Chief
Inspector Heat. “I asked him nothing, so he could tell me nothing. He
isn’t one of our men. It isn’t as if he were in our pay.”
“No,” muttered the Assistant Commissioner. “He’s a spy in the pay of a
foreign government. We could never confess to him.”
“I must do my work in my own way,” declared the Chief Inspector. “When
it comes to that I would deal with the devil himself, and take the
consequences. There are things not fit for everybody to know.”
“Your idea of secrecy seems to consist in keeping the chief of your
department in the dark. That’s stretching it perhaps a little too far,
isn’t it? He lives over his shop?”
“Who—Verloc? Oh yes. He lives over his shop. The wife’s mother, I
fancy, lives with them.”
“Is the house watched?”
“Oh dear, no. It wouldn’t do. Certain people who come there are
watched. My opinion is that he knows nothing of this affair.”
“How do you account for this?” The Assistant Commissioner nodded at the
cloth rag lying before him on the table.
“I don’t account for it at all, sir. It’s simply unaccountable. It
can’t be explained by what I know.” The Chief Inspector made those
admissions with the frankness of a man whose reputation is established as
if on a rock. “At any rate not at this present moment. I think that the
man who had most to do with it will turn out to be Michaelis.”
“You do?”
“Yes, sir; because I can answer for all the others.”
“What about that other man supposed to have escaped from the park?”
“I should think he’s far away by this time,” opined the Chief Inspector.
The Assistant Commissioner looked hard at him, and rose suddenly, as
though having made up his mind to some course of action. As a matter of
fact, he had that very moment succumbed to a fascinating temptation. The
Chief Inspector heard himself dismissed with instructions to meet his
superior early next morning for further consultation upon the case. He
listened with an impenetrable face, and walked out of the room with
measured steps.
Whatever might have been the plans of the Assistant Commissioner they had
nothing to do with that desk work, which was the bane of his existence
because of its confined nature and apparent lack of reality. It could
not have had, or else the general air of alacrity that came upon the
Assistant Commissioner would have been inexplicable. As soon as he was
left alone he looked for his hat impulsively, and put it on his head.
Having done that, he sat down again to reconsider the whole matter. But
as his mind was already made up, this did not take long. And before
Chief Inspector Heat had gone very far on the way home, he also left the
building.
CHAPTER VII
The Assistant Commissioner walked along a short and narrow street like a
wet, muddy trench, then crossing a very broad thoroughfare entered a
public edifice, and sought speech with a young private secretary (unpaid)
of a great personage.
This fair, smooth-faced young man, whose symmetrically arranged hair gave
him the air of a large and neat schoolboy, met the Assistant
Commissioner’s request with a doubtful look, and spoke with bated breath.
“Would he see you? I don’t know about that. He has walked over from the
House an hour ago to talk with the permanent Under-Secretary, and now
he’s ready to walk back again. He might have sent for him; but he does
it for the sake of a little exercise, I suppose. It’s all the exercise
he can find time for while this session lasts. I don’t complain; I
rather enjoy these little strolls. He leans on my arm, and doesn’t open
his lips. But, I say, he’s very tired, and—well—not in the sweetest of
tempers just now.”
“It’s in connection with that Greenwich affair.”
“Oh! I say! He’s very bitter against you people. But I will go and
see, if you insist.”
“Do. That’s a good fellow,” said the Assistant Commissioner.
The unpaid secretary admired this pluck. Composing for himself an
innocent face, he opened a door, and went in with the assurance of a nice
and privileged child. And presently he reappeared, with a nod to the
Assistant Commissioner, who passing through the same door left open for
him, found himself with the great personage in a large room.
Vast in bulk and stature, with a long white face, which, broadened at the
base by a big double chin, appeared egg-shaped in the fringe of thin
greyish whisker, the great personage seemed an expanding man.
Unfortunate from a tailoring point of view, the cross-folds in the middle
of a buttoned black coat added to the impression, as if the fastenings of
the garment were tried to the utmost. From the head, set upward on a
thick neck, the eyes, with puffy lower lids, stared with a haughty droop
on each side of a hooked aggressive nose, nobly salient in the vast pale
circumference of the face. A shiny silk hat and a pair of worn gloves
lying ready on the end of a long table looked expanded too, enormous.
He stood on the hearthrug in big, roomy boots, and uttered no word of
greeting.
“I would like to know if this is the beginning of another dynamite
campaign,” he asked at once in a deep, very smooth voice. “Don’t go into
details. I have no time for that.”
The Assistant Commissioner’s figure before this big and rustic Presence
had the frail slenderness of a reed addressing an oak. And indeed the
unbroken record of that man’s descent surpassed in the number of
centuries the age of the oldest oak in the country.
“No. As far as one can be positive about anything I can assure you that
it is not.”
“Yes. But your idea of assurances over there,” said the great man, with
a contemptuous wave of his hand towards a window giving on the broad
thoroughfare, “seems to consist mainly in making the Secretary of State
look a fool. I have been told positively in this very room less than a
month ago that nothing of the sort was even possible.”
The Assistant Commissioner glanced in the direction of the window calmly.
“You will allow me to remark, Sir Ethelred, that so far I have had no
opportunity to give you assurances of any kind.”
The haughty droop of the eyes was focussed now upon the Assistant
Commissioner.
“True,” confessed the deep, smooth voice. “I sent for Heat. You are
still rather a novice in your new berth. And how are you getting on over
there?”
“I believe I am learning something every day.”
“Of course, of course. I hope you will get on.”
“Thank you, Sir Ethelred. I’ve learned something to-day, and even within
the last hour or so. There is much in this affair of a kind that does
not meet the eye in a usual anarchist outrage, even if one looked into it
as deep as can be. That’s why I am here.”
The great man put his arms akimbo, the backs of his big hands resting on
his hips.
“Very well. Go on. Only no details, pray. Spare me the details.”
“You shall not be troubled with them, Sir Ethelred,” the Assistant
Commissioner began, with a calm and untroubled assurance. While he was
speaking the hands on the face of the clock behind the great man’s back—a
heavy, glistening affair of massive scrolls in the same dark marble as
the mantelpiece, and with a ghostly, evanescent tick—had moved through
the space of seven minutes. He spoke with a studious fidelity to a
parenthetical manner, into which every little fact—that is, every
detail—fitted with delightful ease. Not a murmur nor even a movement
hinted at interruption. The great Personage might have been the statue
of one of his own princely ancestors stripped of a crusader’s war
harness, and put into an ill-fitting frock coat. The Assistant
Commissioner felt as though he were at liberty to talk for an hour. But
he kept his head, and at the end of the time mentioned above he broke off
with a sudden conclusion, which, reproducing the opening statement,
pleasantly surprised Sir Ethelred by its apparent swiftness and force.
“The kind of thing which meets us under the surface of this affair,
otherwise without gravity, is unusual—in this precise form at least—and
requires special treatment.”
The tone of Sir Ethelred was deepened, full of conviction.
“I should think so—involving the Ambassador of a foreign power!”
“Oh! The Ambassador!” protested the other, erect and slender, allowing
himself a mere half smile. “It would be stupid of me to advance anything
of the kind. And it is absolutely unnecessary, because if I am right in
my surmises, whether ambassador or hall porter it’s a mere detail.”
Sir Ethelred opened a wide mouth, like a cavern, into which the hooked
nose seemed anxious to peer; there came from it a subdued rolling sound,
as from a distant organ with the scornful indignation stop.
“No! These people are too impossible. What do they mean by importing
their methods of Crim-Tartary here? A Turk would have more decency.”
“You forget, Sir Ethelred, that strictly speaking we know nothing
positively—as yet.”
“No! But how would you define it? Shortly?”
“Barefaced audacity amounting to childishness of a peculiar sort.”
“We can’t put up with the innocence of nasty little children,” said the
great and expanded personage, expanding a little more, as it were. The
haughty drooping glance struck crushingly the carpet at the Assistant
Commissioner’s feet. “They’ll have to get a hard rap on the knuckles
over this affair. We must be in a position to—What is your general idea,
stated shortly? No need to go into details.”
“No, Sir Ethelred. In principle, I should lay it down that the existence
of secret agents should not be tolerated, as tending to augment the
positive dangers of the evil against which they are used. That the spy
will fabricate his information is a mere commonplace. But in the sphere
of political and revolutionary action, relying partly on violence, the
professional spy has every facility to fabricate the very facts
themselves, and will spread the double evil of emulation in one
direction, and of panic, hasty legislation, unreflecting hate, on the
other. However, this is an imperfect world—”
The deep-voiced Presence on the hearthrug, motionless, with big elbows
stuck out, said hastily:
“Be lucid, please.”
“Yes, Sir Ethelred—An imperfect world. Therefore directly the character
of this affair suggested itself to me, I thought it should be dealt with
with special secrecy, and ventured to come over here.”
“That’s right,” approved the great Personage, glancing down complacently
over his double chin. “I am glad there’s somebody over at your shop who
thinks that the Secretary of State may be trusted now and then.”
The Assistant Commissioner had an amused smile.
“I was really thinking that it might be better at this stage for Heat to
be replaced by—”
“What! Heat? An ass—eh?” exclaimed the great man, with distinct
animosity.
“Not at all. Pray, Sir Ethelred, don’t put that unjust interpretation on
my remarks.”
“Then what? Too clever by half?”
“Neither—at least not as a rule. All the grounds of my surmises I have
from him. The only thing I’ve discovered by myself is that he has been
making use of that man privately. Who could blame him? He’s an old
police hand. He told me virtually that he must have tools to work with.
It occurred to me that this tool should be surrendered to the Special
Crimes division as a whole, instead of remaining the private property of
Chief Inspector Heat. I extend my conception of our departmental duties
to the suppression of the secret agent. But Chief Inspector Heat is an