Section 12

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not affect people of position. She could not conceive how it could affect her position, for instance. She had developed these discoveries to the Assistant Commissioner with all the serene fearlessness of an old woman who had escaped the blight of indifference. He had made for himself the rule to receive everything of that sort in a silence which he took care from policy and inclination not to make offensive. He had an affection for the aged disciple of Michaelis, a complex sentiment depending a little on her prestige, on her personality, but most of all on the instinct of flattered gratitude. He felt himself really liked in her house. She was kindness personified. And she was practi- cally wise too, after the manner of experienced women. She made his married life much easier than it would have been without her generously full recognition of his rights as Annie's husband. Her influence upon his wife, a woman devoured by all sorts of small selfish- nesses, small envies, small jealousies, was excellent. Unfortunately, both her kindness and her wisdom were of unreasonable com- plexion, distinctly feminine, and difficult to deal with. She remained a perfect woman all along her full tale of years, and not as some of them do become a sort of slippery, pestilential old
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man in petticoats. And it was as of a woman that he thought of her the specially choice incarnation of the feminine, wherein is recruited the tender, ingenuous, and fierce bodyguard for all sorts of men who talk under the influ- ence of an emotion, true or fradulent ; for preachers, seers, prophets, or reformers.
Appreciating the distinguished and good friend of his wife, and himself, in that way, the Assistant Commissioner became alarmed at the convict Michaelis' possible fate. Once arrested on suspicion of being in some way, however remote, a party to this outrage, the man could hardly escape being sent back to finish his sentence at least. And that would kill him ; he would never come out alive. The Assistant Commissioner made a re- flection extremely unbecoming his official position without being really creditable to his humanity.
" If the fellow is laid hold of again," he thought, " she will never forgive me."
The frankness of such a secretly outspoken thought could not go without some derisive self-criticism. No man engaged in a work he does not like can preserve many saving illusions about himself. The distaste, the absence of glamour, extend from the occupation to the
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personality. It is only when our appointed activities seem by a lucky accident to obey the particular earnestness of our temperament that we can taste the comfort of complete self-deception. The Assistant Commissioner did not like his work at home. The police work he had been engaged on in a distant part of the globe had the saving character of an irregular sort of warfare or at least the risk and excitement of open-air sport. His real abili- ties, which were mainly of an administrative order, were combined with an ad\ e iturous dis- position. Chained to a desk in the thick of four millions of men, he considered himself the victim of an ironic fate the same, no doubt, which had brought about his marriage with a woman exceptionally sensitive in the matter of colonial climate, besides other limitations testifying to the delicacy of her nature and her tastes. Though he judged his alarm sardonically he did not dismiss the improper thought from his mind. The instinct of self-preservation was strong within him. On the contrary, he repeated it mentally with profane emphasis and a fuller precision : " Damn it ! If that infernal Heat has his way the fellow'll die in prison smothered in his fat, and she'll never forgive me."
His black, narrow figure, with the white band
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of the collar under the silvery gleams on the close- cropped hair at the back of the head, remained motionless. The silence had lasted such a long time that Chief Inspector Heat ventured to clear his throat. This noise produced its effect. The zealous and intelligent officer was asked by his superior, whose back remained turned to him immovably :
"You connect Michaelis with this affair ? "
Chief Inspector Heat was very positive, but cautious.
"Well, sir," he said, " we have enough to go upon. A * man like that has no business to be at large, anyhow."
"You will want some conclusive evidence/* came the observation in a murmur.
Chief Inspector Heat raised his eyebrows at the black, narrow back, which remained obstin- ately presented to his intelligence and his zeal.
" There will be no difficulty in getting up sufficient evidence against Aim," he said, with virtuous complacency. " You may trust me for that, sir/' he added, quite unnecessarily, out of the fulness of his heart ; for it seemed to him an excellent thing to have that man in hand to be thrown down to the public should it think fit to roar with any special indignation in this case. It was impossible to say yet whether it
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would roar or not. That in the last instance de- pended, of course, on the newspaper press. But in any case, Chief Inspector Heat, purveyor of prisons by trade, and a man of legal instincts, did logically believe that incarceration was the proper fate for every declared enemy of the law, In the strength of that conviction he committed a fault of tact. He allowed himself a little conceited laugh, and repeated :
" Trust me for that, sir."
This was too much for the forced calmness under which the Assistant Commissioner had for upwards of eighteen months concealed his irri- tation with the system and the subordinates of his office. A square peg forced into a round hole, he had felt like a daily outrage that long established smooth roundness into which a man of less sharply angular shape would have fitted himself, with voluptuous acquiescence, after a shrug or two. What he resented most was just the necessity of taking so much on trust. At the little laugh of Chief Inspector Heat's he spun swiftly on his heels, as if whirled away from the window-pane by an electric shock. He caught on the latter's face not only the complacency proper to the occasion lurking under the moustache, but the vestiges of ex- perimental watchfulness in the round eyes, L
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which had been, no doubt, fastened on his back, and now met his glance for a second before the intent character of their stare had the time to change to a merely startled appearance.
The Assistant Commissioner of Police had really some qualifications for his post Sud- denly his suspicion was awakened. It is but fair to say that his suspicions of the police methods (unless the police happened to be a semi-military body organised by himself) was not difficult to arouse. If it ever slumbered from sheer weariness, it was but lightly ; and his appreciation of Chief Inspector Heat's zeal and ability, moderate in itself, excluded all notion of moral confidence. " He's up to some- thing," he exclaimed mentally, and at once be- came angry. Crossing over to his desk with headlong strides, he sat down violently. " Here I am stuck in a litter of paper/' he reflected, with unreasonable resentment, "supposed to hold all the threads in my hands, and yet I can but hold what is put in my hand, and nothing else. And they can fasten the other ends of the threads where they please/'
He raised his head, and turned towards his subordinate a long, meagre face with the accen- tuated features of an energetic Don Quixote.
44 Now what is it you've got up your sleeve ? "
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The other stared He stared without wink- ing in a perfect immobility of his round eyes, as he was used to stare at the various members of the criminal class when, after being duly cautioned, they made their statements in the tones of injured innocence, or false simplicity, or sullen resignation. But behind that profes- sional and stony fixity there was some surprise too, for in such a tone, combining nicely the note of contempt and impatience, Chief Inspector Heat, the right-hand man of the department, was not used to be addressed. He began in a procrastinating manner, like a man taken un- awares by a new and unexpected experience.
"What I've got against that man Michaelis you mean, sir ? "
The Assistant Commissioner watched the bullet head ; the points of that Norse rover's moustache, falling below the line of the heavy jaw ; the whole full and pale physiognomy, whose determined character was marred by too much flesh ; at the cunning wrinkles radiating from the outer corners of the eyes and in that purposeful contemplation of the valuable and trusted officer he drew a conviction so sudden that it moved him like an inspiration.
" I have reason to think that when you came into this room/' he said in measured tones, "it
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was not Michaelis who was in yoar mind ; not principally perhaps not at all."
"You have reason to think, sir ?" muttered Chief Inspector Heat, with every appearance of astonishment, which up to a certain point was genuine enough. He had discovered in this affair a delicate and perplexing side, forcing upon the discoverer a certain amount of insin- cerity that sort of insincerity which, under the names of skill, prudence, discretion, turns up at one point or another in most human affairs. He felt at the moment like a tight-rope artist might feel if suddenly, in the middle of the per- formance, the manager of the Music Hall were to rush out of the proper managerial seclusion and begin to shake the rope. Indignation, the sense of moral insecurity engendered by such a treacherous proceeding joined to the im- mediate apprehension of a broken neck, would, in the colloquial phrase, put him in a state. And there would be also some scandalised con- cern for his art too, since a man must identify himself with something more tangible than his own personality, and establish his pride some- where, either in his social position, or in the quality of the work he is obliged to do, or simply in the superiority of the idleness he may be fortunate enough to enjoy.
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" Yes/* said the Assistant Commissioner ; " I have. I do not mean to say that you have not thought of Michaelis at all. But you are giving the fact you've mentioned a prominence which strikes me as not quite candid, Inspector Heat. If that is really the track of discovery, why haven't you followed it up at once, either per- sonally or by sending one of your men to that village ? "
" Do you think, sir, I have failed in my duty there?" the Chief Inspector asked, in a tone which he sought to make simply reflective. Forced unexpectedly to concentrate his faculties upon the task of preserving his balance, he had seized upon that point, and exposed himself to a rebuke ; for, the Assistant Commissioner frown- ing slightly, observed that this was a very improper remark to make.
" But since you've made it," he continued coldly, " I'll tell you that this is not my mean- ing."
He paused, with a straight glance of his sunken eyes which was a full equivalent of the unspoken termination "and you know it." The head of the so-called Special Crimes Department debarred by his position from going out of doors personally in quest of secrets locked up in guilty breasts, had a
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propensity to exercise his considerable gifts for the detection of incriminating truth upon his own subordinates. That peculiar instinct could hardly be called a weakness. It was natural. He was a born detective. It had unconsciously governed his choice of a career, and if it ever failed him in life it was perhaps in the one exceptional circumstance of his marriage which was also natural. It fed, since it could not roam abroad, upon the human material which was brought to it in its official seclusion. We can never cease to be ourselves.
His elbow on the desk, his thin legs crossed, and nursing his cheek in the palm of his meagre hand, the Assistant Commissioner in charge of the Special Crimes branch was getting hold of the case with growing interest. His Chief Inspector, if not an absolutely worthy foeman of his penetration, was at anyrate the most worthy of all within his reach. A mistrust of established reputations was strictly in character with the Assistant Commissioner's ability as detector. His memory evoked a certain old fat and wealthy native chief in the distant colony whom it was a tradition for the succes- sive Colonial Governors to trust and make much of as a firm friend and supporter of the order
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and legality established by white men ; where- as, when examined sceptically, he was found out to be principally his own good friend, and nobody else's. Not precisely a traitor, but still a man of many dangerous reservations in his fidelity, caused by a due regard for his own advantage, comfort, and safety. A fellow of some innocence in his naive duplicity, but none the less dangerous. He took some finding out. He was physically a big man, too, and (allowing for the difference of colour, of course) Chief Inspector Heat's appearance recalled him to the memory of his superior. It was not the eyes nor yet the lips exactly. It was bizarre. But does not Alfred Wallace relate in his famous book on the Malay Archipelago how, amongst the Aru Islanders, he discovered in an old and naked savage with a sooty skin a peculiar re- semblance to a dear friend at home ?
For the first time since he took up his ap- pointment the Assistant Commissioner felt as if he were going to do some real work for his salary. And that was a pleasurable sensation. 44 I'll turn him inside out like an old glove," thought the Assistant Commissioner, with his eyes resting pensively upon Chief Inspector Heat.
" No, that was not my thought/' he began
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again. " There is no doubt about you knowing your business no doubt at all ; and that's
precisely why I " He stopped short, and
changing his tone: "What could you bring up against Michaelis of a definite nature ? I mean apart from the fact that the two men under sus- picion you're certain there were two of them came last from a railway station within three miles of the village where Michaelis is living now."
" This by itself is enough for us to go upon, sir, with that sort of man," said the Chief In- spector, with returning composure. The slight approving movement of the Assistant Com- missioner's head went far to pacify the resentful astonishment of the renowned officer. For Chief Inspector Heat was a kind man, an excellent husband, a devoted father ; and the public and departmental confidence he enjoyed acting favourably upon an amiable nature, dis- posed him to feel friendly towards the successive Assistant Commissioners he had seen pass through that very room. There had been three in his time. The first one, a soldierly, abrupt, red-faced person, with white eyebrows and an explosive temper, could be managed with a silken thread. He left on reaching the age limit. The second, a perfect gentleman,
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knowing his own and everybody else's place to a nicety, on resigning to take up a higher ap- pointment out of England got decorated for (really) Inspector Heat's services. To work with him had been a pride and a pleasure. The third, a bit of a dark horse from the first, was at the end of eighteen months something of a dark horse still to the department. Upon the whole Chief Inspector Heat believed him to be in the main harmless odd-looking, but harmless, He was speaking now, and the Chief Inspector listened with outward deference (which means nothing, being a matter of duty) and inwardly with benevolent toleration.
" Michaelis reported himself before leaving London for the country?"
"Yes, sir. He did."
" And what may he be doing there ? " continued the Assistant Commissioner, who was perfectly informed on that point. Fitted with painful tightness into an old wooden arm-chair, before a worm-eaten oak table in an upstairs room of a four-roomed cottage with a roof of moss-grown tiles, Michaelis was writing night and day in a shaky, slanting hand that " Autobiography of a Prisoner " which was to be like a book of Revelation in the history of mankind. The conditions of confined space, seclusion, and soli-
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tude in a small four-roomed cottage were favour- able to his inspiration. It was like being in prison, except that one was never disturbed for the "odious purpose of taking exercise according to the tyrannical regulations of his old home in the penitentiary. He could not tell whether the sun still shone on the earth or not. The per- spiration of the literary labour dropped from his brow. A delightful enthusiasm urged him on. It was the liberation of his inner life, the letting out of his soul into the wide world. And the zeal of his guileless vanity (first awakened by the offer of five 'hundred pounds from a publisher) seemed something predestined and holy.
"It would be, of course, most desirable to be informed exactly," insisted the Assistant Com- missioner uncandidly.