第 五 章 · Chapter V

. Chapter V

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.