Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (314 page)

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.

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 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.