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_ The Professor had turned into a street to the left, and walked
along, with his head carried rigidly erect, in a crowd whose every
individual almost overtopped his stunted stature. It was vain to
pretend to himself that he was not disappointed. But that was mere
feeling; the stoicism of his thought could not be disturbed by this
or any other failure. Next time, or the time after next, a telling
stroke would be delivered-something really startling - a blow fit
to open the first crack in the imposing front of the great edifice
of legal conceptions sheltering the atrocious injustice of society.
Of humble origin, and with an appearance really so mean as to stand
in the way of his considerable natural abilities, his imagination
had been fired early by the tales of men rising from the depths of
poverty to positions of authority and affluence. The extreme,
almost ascetic purity of his thought, combined with an astounding
ignorance of worldly conditions, had set before him a goal of power
and prestige to be attained without the medium of arts, graces,
tact, wealth - by sheer weight of merit alone. On that view he
considered himself entitled to undisputed success. His father, a
delicate dark enthusiast with a sloping forehead, had been an
itinerant and rousing preacher of some obscure but rigid Christian
sect - a man supremely confident in the privileges of his
righteousness. In the son, individualist by temperament, once the
science of colleges had replaced thoroughly the faith of
conventicles, this moral attitude translated itself into a frenzied
puritanism of ambition. He nursed it as something secularly holy.
To see it thwarted opened his eyes to the true nature of the world,
whose morality was artificial, corrupt, and blasphemous. The way
of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal
impulses disguised into creeds. The Professor's indignation found
in itself a final cause that absolved him from the sin of turning
to destruction as the agent of his ambition. To destroy public
faith in legality was the imperfect formula of his pedantic
fanaticism; but the subconscious conviction that the framework of
an established social order cannot be effectually shattered except
by some form of collective or individual violence was precise and
correct. He was a moral agent - that was settled in his mind. By
exercising his agency with ruthless defiance he procured for
himself the appearances of power and personal prestige. That was
undeniable to his vengeful bitterness. It pacified its unrest; and
in their own way the most ardent of revolutionaries are perhaps
doing no more but seeking for peace in common with the rest of
mankind - the peace of soothed vanity, of satisfied appetites, or
perhaps of appeased conscience.
Lost in the crowd, miserable and undersized, he meditated
confidently on his power, keeping his hand in the left pocket of
his trousers, grasping lightly the india-rubber ball, the supreme
guarantee of his sinister freedom; but after a while he became
disagreeably affected by the sight of the roadway thronged with
vehicles and of the pavement crowded with men and women. He was in
a long, straight street, peopled by a mere fraction of an immense
multitude; but all round him, on and on, even to the limits of the
horizon hidden by the enormous piles of bricks, he felt the mass of
mankind mighty in its numbers. They swarmed numerous like locusts,
industrious like ants, thoughtless like a natural force, pushing on
blind and orderly and absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic,
to terror too perhaps.
That was the form of doubt he feared most. Impervious to fear!
Often while walking abroad, when he happened also to come out of
himself, he had such moments of dreadful and sane mistrust of
mankind. What if nothing could move them? Such moments come to
all men whose ambition aims at a direct grasp upon humanity - to
artists, politicians, thinkers, reformers, or saints. A despicable
emotional state this, against which solitude fortifies a superior
character; and with severe exultation the Professor thought of the
refuge of his room, with its padlocked cupboard, lost in a
wilderness of poor houses, the hermitage of the perfect anarchist.
In order to reach sooner the point where he could take his omnibus,
he turned brusquely out of the populous street into a narrow and
dusky alley paved with flagstones. On one side the low brick
houses had in their dusty windows the sightless, moribund look of
incurable decay - empty shells awaiting demolition. From the other
side life had not departed wholly as yet. Facing the only gas-lamp
yawned the cavern of a second-hand furniture dealer, where, deep in
the gloom of a sort of narrow avenue winding through a bizarre
forest of wardrobes, with an undergrowth tangle of table legs, a
tall pier-glass glimmered like a pool of water in a wood. An
unhappy, homeless couch, accompanied by two unrelated chairs, stood
in the open. The only human being making use of the alley besides
the Professor, coming stalwart and erect from the opposite
direction, checked his swinging pace suddenly.
"Hallo!" he said, and stood a little on one side watchfully.
The Professor had already stopped, with a ready half turn which
brought his shoulders very near the other wall. His right hand
fell lightly on the back of the outcast couch, the left remained
purposefully plunged deep in the trousers pocket, and the roundness
of the heavy rimmed spectacles imparted an owlish character to his
moody, unperturbed face.
It was like a meeting in a side corridor of a mansion full of life.
The stalwart man was buttoned up in a dark overcoat, and carried an
umbrella. His hat, tilted back, uncovered a good deal of forehead,
which appeared very white in the dusk. In the dark patches of the
orbits the eyeballs glimmered piercingly. Long, drooping
moustaches, the colour of ripe corn, framed with their points the
square block of his shaved chin.
"I am not looking for you," he said curtly.
The Professor did not stir an inch. The blended noises of the
enormous town sank down to an inarticulate low murmur. Chief
Inspector Heat of the Special Crimes Department changed his tone.
"Not in a hurry to get home?" he asked, with mocking simplicity.
The unwholesome-looking little moral agent of destruction exulted
silently in the possession of personal prestige, keeping in check
this man armed with the defensive mandate of a menaced society.
More fortunate than Caligula, who wished that the Roman Senate had
only one head for the better satisfaction of his cruel lust, he
beheld in that one man all the forces he had set at defiance: the
force of law, property, oppression, and injustice. He beheld all
his enemies, and fearlessly confronted them all in a supreme
satisfaction of his vanity. They stood perplexed before him as if
before a dreadful portent. He gloated inwardly over the chance of
this meeting affirming his superiority over all the multitude of
mankind.
It was in reality a chance meeting. Chief Inspector Heat had had a
disagreeably busy day since his department received the first
telegram from Greenwich a little before eleven in the morning.
First of all, the fact of the outrage being attempted less than a
week after he had assured a high official that no outbreak of
anarchist activity was to be apprehended was sufficiently annoying.
If he ever thought himself safe in making a statement, it was then.
He had made that statement with infinite satisfaction to himself,
because it was clear that the high official desired greatly to hear
that very thing. He had affirmed that nothing of the sort could
even be thought of without the department being aware of it within
twenty-four hours; and he had spoken thus in his consciousness of
being the great expert of his department. He had gone even so far
as to utter words which true wisdom would have kept back. But
Chief Inspector Heat was not very wise - at least not truly so.
True wisdom, which is not certain of anything in this world of
contradictions, would have prevented him from attaining his present
position. It would have alarmed his superiors, and done away with
his chances of promotion. His promotion had been very rapid.
"There isn't one of them, sir, that we couldn't lay our hands on at
any time of night and day. We know what each of them is doing hour
by hour," he had declared. And the high official had deigned to
smile. This was so obviously the right thing to say for an officer
of Chief Inspector Heat's reputation that it was perfectly
delightful. The high official believed the declaration, which
chimed in with his idea of the fitness of things. His wisdom was
of an official kind, or else he might have reflected upon a matter
not of theory but of experience that in the close-woven stuff of
relations between conspirator and police there occur 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 endurance. At the beginning
of his career Chief Inspector Heat had been concerned with the more
energetic forms of thieving. He had gained his spurs in that
sphere, and naturally enough had kept for it, after his promotion
to another department, a feeling not very far removed from
affection. Thieving was not a sheer absurdity. It was a form of
human industry, perverse indeed, but still an industry exercised in
an industrious world; it was work undertaken for the same reason as
the work in potteries, in coal mines, in fields, in tool-grinding
shops. It was labour, whose practical difference from the other
forms of labour consisted in the nature of its risk, which did not
lie in ankylosis, or lead poisoning, or fire-damp, or gritty dust,
but in what may be briefly defined in its own special phraseology
as "Seven years hard." Chief Inspector Heat was, of course, not
insensible to the gravity of moral differences. But neither were
the thieves he had been looking after. They submitted to the
severe sanctions of a morality familiar to Chief Inspector Heat
with a certain resignation.
They were his fellow-citizens gone wrong because of imperfect
education, Chief Inspector Heat believed; but allowing for that
difference, he could understand the mind of a burglar, because, as
a matter of fact, the mind and the instincts of a burglar are of
the same kind as the mind and the instincts of a police officer.
Both recognise the same conventions, and have a working knowledge
of each other's methods and of the routine of their respective
trades. They understand each other, which is advantageous to both,
and establishes a sort of amenity in their relations. Products of
the same machine, one classed as useful and the other as noxious,
they take the machine for granted in different ways, but with a
seriousness essentially the same. The mind of Chief Inspector Heat
was inaccessible to ideas of revolt. But his thieves were not
rebels. His bodily vigour, his cool inflexible manner, his courage
and his fairness, had secured for him much respect and some
adulation in the sphere of his early successes. He had felt
himself revered and admired. And Chief Inspector Heat, arrested
within six paces of the anarchist nick-named the Professor, gave a
thought of regret to the world of thieves - sane, without morbid
ideals, working by routine, respectful of constituted authorities,
free from all taint of hate and despair.
After paying this tribute to what is normal in the constitution of
society (for the idea of thieving appeared to his instinct as
normal as the idea of property), Chief Inspector Heat felt very
angry with himself for having stopped, for having spoken, for
having taken that way at all on the ground of it being a short cut
from the station to the headquarters. And he spoke again in his
big authoritative voice, which, being moderated, had a threatening
character.
"You are not wanted, I tell you," he repeated.
The anarchist did not stir. An inward laugh of derision uncovered
not only his teeth but his gums as well, shook him all over,
without the slightest sound. Chief Inspector Heat was led to add,
against his better judgment:
"Not yet. When I want you I will know where to find you."
Those were perfectly proper words, within the tradition and
suitable to his character of a police officer addressing one of his
special flock. But the reception they got departed from tradition
and propriety. It was outrageous. The stunted, weakly figure
before him spoke at last.
"I've no doubt the papers would give you an obituary notice then.
You know best what that would be worth to you. I should think you
can imagine easily the sort of stuff that would be printed. But
you may be exposed to the unpleasantness of being buried together
with me, though I suppose your friends would make an effort to sort
us out as much as possible."
With all his healthy contempt for the spirit dictating such
speeches, the atrocious allusiveness of the words had its effect on
Chief Inspector Heat. He had too much insight, and too much exact
information as well, to dismiss them as rot. The dusk of this
narrow lane took on a sinister tint from the dark, frail little
figure, its back to the wall, and speaking with a weak, self-
confident voice. To the vigorous, tenacious vitality of the Chief
Inspector, the physical wretchedness of that being, so obviously
not fit to live, was ominous; for it seemed to him that if he had
the misfortune to be such a miserable object he would not have
cared how soon he died. Life had such a strong hold upon him that
a fresh wave of nausea broke out in slight perspiration upon his
brow. The murmur of town life, the subdued rumble of wheels in the
two invisible streets to the right and left, came through the curve
of the sordid lane to his ears with a precious familiarity and an
appealing sweetness. He was human. But Chief Inspector Heat was
also a man, and he could not let such words pass.
"All this is good to frighten children with," he said. "I'll have
you yet."
It was very well said, without scorn, with an almost austere
quietness.
"Doubtless," was the answer; "but there's no time like the present,
believe me. For a man of real convictions this is a fine
opportunity of self-sacrifice. You may not find another so
favourable, so humane. There isn't even a cat near us, and these
condemned old houses would make a good heap of bricks where you
stand. You'll never get me at so little cost to life and property,
which you are paid to protect."
"You don't know who you're speaking to," said Chief Inspector Heat
firmly. "If I were to lay my hands on you now I would be no better
than yourself."
"Ah! The game!'
"You may be sure our side will win in the end. It may yet be
necessary to make people believe that some of you ought to be shot
at sight like mad dogs. Then that will be the game. But I'll be
damned if I know what yours is. I don't believe you know
yourselves. You'll never get anything by it."
"Meantime it's you who get something from it - so far. And you get
it easily, too. I won't speak of your salary, but haven't you made
your name simply by not understanding what we are after?"
"What are you after, then?" asked Chief Inspector Heat, with
scornful haste, like a man in a hurry who perceives he is wasting
his time.
The perfect anarchist answered by a smile which did not part his
thin colourless lips; and the celebrated Chief Inspector felt a
sense of superiority which induced him to raise a warning finger.
"Give it up - whatever it is," he said in an admonishing tone, but
not so kindly as if he were condescending to give good advice to a
cracksman of repute. "Give it up. You'll find we are too many for
you."
The fixed smile on the Professor's lips wavered, as if the mocking
spirit within had lost its assurance. Chief Inspector Heat went
on:
"Don't you believe me eh? Well, you've only got to look about you.
We are. And anyway, you're not doing it well. You're always
making a mess of it. Why, if the thieves didn't know their work
better they would starve."
The hint of an invincible multitude behind that man's back roused a
sombre indignation in the breast of the Professor. He smiled no
longer his enigmatic and mocking smile. The resisting power of
numbers, the unattackable stolidity of a great multitude, was the
haunting fear of his sinister loneliness. His lips trembled for
some time before he managed to say in a strangled voice:
"I am doing my work better than you're doing yours."
"That'll do now," interrupted Chief Inspector Heat hurriedly; and
the Professor laughed right out this time. While still laughing he
moved on; but he did not laugh long. It was a sad-faced, miserable
little man who emerged from the narrow passage into the bustle of
the broad thoroughfare. He walked with the nerveless gait of a
tramp going on, still going on, indifferent to rain or sun in a
sinister detachment from the aspects of sky and earth. Chief
Inspector Heat, on the other hand, after watching him for a while,
stepped out with the purposeful briskness of a man disregarding
indeed the inclemencies of the weather, but conscious of having an
authorised mission on this earth and the moral support of his kind.
All the inhabitants of the immense town, the population of the
whole country, and even the teeming millions struggling upon the
planet, were with him - down to the very thieves and mendicants.
Yes, the thieves themselves were sure to be with him in his present
work. The consciousness of universal support in his general
activity heartened him to grapple with the particular problem.
The problem immediately before the Chief Inspector was that of
managing the Assistant Commissioner of his department, his
immediate superior. This is the perennial problem of trusty and
loyal servants; anarchism gave it its particular complexion, but
nothing more. Truth to say, Chief Inspector Heat thought but
little of anarchism. He did not attach undue importance to it, and
could never bring himself to consider it seriously. It had more
the character of disorderly conduct; disorderly without the human
excuse of drunkenness, which at any rate implies good feeling and
an amiable leaning towards festivity. As criminals, anarchists
were distinctly no class - no class at all. And recalling the
Professor, Chief Inspector Heat, without checking his swinging
pace, muttered through his teeth:
"Lunatic."
Catching thieves was another matter altogether. It had that
quality of seriousness belonging to every form of open sport where
the best man wins under perfectly comprehensible rules. There were
no rules for dealing with anarchists. And that was distasteful to
the Chief Inspector. It was all foolishness, but that foolishness
excited the public mind, affected persons in high places, and
touched upon international relations. A hard, merciless contempt
settled rigidly on the Chief Inspector's face as he walked on. His
mind ran over all the anarchists of his flock. Not one of them had
half the spunk of this or that burglar he had known. Not half -
not one-tenth.
At headquarters the Chief Inspector was admitted at once to the
Assistant Commissioner's private room. He found him, pen in hand,
bent over a great table bestrewn with papers, as if worshipping an
enormous double inkstand of bronze and crystal. Speaking tubes
resembling snakes were tied by the heads to the back of the
Assistant Commissioner's wooden arm-chair, and their gaping mouths
seemed ready to bite his elbows. And in this attitude he raised
only his eyes, whose lids were darker than his face and very much
creased. The reports had come in: every anarchist had been exactly
accounted for.
After saying this he lowered his eyes, signed rapidly two single
sheets of paper, and only then laid down his pen, and sat well
back, directing an inquiring gaze at his renowned subordinate. The
Chief Inspector stood it well, deferential but inscrutable.
"I daresay you were right," said the Assistant Commissioner, "in
telling me at first that the London anarchists had nothing to do
with this. I quite appreciate the excellent watch kept on them by
your men. On the other hand, this, for the public, does not amount
to more than a confession of ignorance."
The Assistant Commissioner's delivery was leisurely, as it were
cautious. His thought seemed to rest poised on a word before
passing to another, as though words had been the stepping-stones
for his intellect picking its way across the waters of error.
"Unless you have brought something useful from Greenwich," he
added.
The Chief Inspector began at once the account of his investigation
in a clear matter-of-fact manner. His superior turning his chair a
little, 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. _
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