Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (319 page)

“He would, would he?” muttered the proud head of Sir Ethelred from its lofty elevation.

“I am afraid so — with an indignation and disgust of which you or I can have no idea.  He’s an excellent servant.  We must not put an undue strain on his loyalty.  That’s always a mistake.  Besides, I want a free hand — a freer hand than it would be perhaps advisable to give Chief Inspector Heat.  I haven’t the slightest wish to spare this man Verloc.  He will, I imagine, be extremely startled to find his connection with this affair, whatever it may be, brought home to him so quickly.  Frightening him will not be very difficult.  But our true objective lies behind him somewhere.  I want your authority to give him such assurances of personal safety as I may think proper.”

“Certainly,” said the Personage on the hearthrug.  “Find out as much as you can; find it out in your own way.”

“I must set about it without loss of time, this very evening,” said the Assistant Commissioner.

Sir Ethelred shifted one hand under his coat tails, and tilting back his head, looked at him steadily.

“We’ll have a late sitting to-night,” he said.  “Come to the House with your discoveries if we are not gone home.  I’ll warn Toodles to look out for you.  He’ll take you into my room.”

The numerous family and the wide connections of the youthful-looking Private Secretary cherished for him the hope of an austere and exalted destiny.  Meantime the social sphere he adorned in his hours of idleness chose to pet him under the above nickname.  And Sir Ethelred, hearing it on the lips of his wife and girls every day (mostly at breakfast-time), had conferred upon it the dignity of unsmiling adoption.

The Assistant Commissioner was surprised and gratified extremely.

“I shall certainly bring my discoveries to the House on the chance of you having the time to — ”

“I won’t have the time,” interrupted the great Personage.  “But I will see you.  I haven’t the time now — And you are going yourself?”

“Yes, Sir Ethelred.  I think it the best way.”

The Personage had tilted his head so far back that, in order to keep the Assistant Commissioner under his observation, he had to nearly close his eyes.

“H’m.  Ha!  And how do you propose — Will you assume a disguise?”

“Hardly a disguise!  I’ll change my clothes, of course.”

“Of course,” repeated the great man, with a sort of absent-minded loftiness.  He turned his big head slowly, and over his shoulder gave a haughty oblique stare to the ponderous marble timepiece with the sly, feeble tick.  The gilt hands had taken the opportunity to steal through no less than five and twenty minutes behind his back.

The Assistant Commissioner, who could not see them, grew a little nervous in the interval.  But the great man presented to him a calm and undismayed face.

“Very well,” he said, and paused, as if in deliberate contempt of the official clock.  “But what first put you in motion in this direction?”

“I have been always of opinion,” began the Assistant Commissioner.

“Ah.  Yes!  Opinion.  That’s of course.  But the immediate motive?”

“What shall I say, Sir Ethelred?  A new man’s antagonism to old methods.  A desire to know something at first hand.  Some impatience.  It’s my old work, but the harness is different.  It has been chafing me a little in one or two tender places.”

“I hope you’ll get on over there,” said the great man kindly, extending his hand, soft to the touch, but broad and powerful like the hand of a glorified farmer.  The Assistant Commissioner shook it, and withdrew.

In the outer room Toodles, who had been waiting perched on the edge of a table, advanced to meet him, subduing his natural buoyancy.

“Well?  Satisfactory?” he asked, with airy importance.

“Perfectly.  You’ve earned my undying gratitude,” answered the Assistant Commissioner, whose long face looked wooden in contrast with the peculiar character of the other’s gravity, which seemed perpetually ready to break into ripples and chuckles.

“That’s all right.  But seriously, you can’t imagine how irritated he is by the attacks on his Bill for the Nationalisation of Fisheries.  They call it the beginning of social revolution.  Of course, it is a revolutionary measure.  But these fellows have no decency.  The personal attacks — ”

“I read the papers,” remarked the Assistant Commissioner.

“Odious?  Eh?  And you have no notion what a mass of work he has got to get through every day.  He does it all himself.  Seems unable to trust anyone with these Fisheries.”

“And yet he’s given a whole half hour to the consideration of my very small sprat,” interjected the Assistant Commissioner.

“Small!  Is it?  I’m glad to hear that.  But it’s a pity you didn’t keep away, then.  This fight takes it out of him frightfully.  The man’s getting exhausted.  I feel it by the way he leans on my arm as we walk over.  And, I say, is he safe in the streets?  Mullins has been marching his men up here this afternoon.  There’s a constable stuck by every lamp-post, and every second person we meet between this and Palace Yard is an obvious ‘tec.’  It will get on his nerves presently.  I say, these foreign scoundrels aren’t likely to throw something at him — are they?  It would be a national calamity.  The country can’t spare him.”

“Not to mention yourself.  He leans on your arm,” suggested the Assistant Commissioner soberly.  “You would both go.”

“It would be an easy way for a young man to go down into history?  Not so many British Ministers have been assassinated as to make it a minor incident.  But seriously now — ”

“I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you’ll have to do something for it.  Seriously, there’s no danger whatever for both of you but from overwork.”

The sympathetic Toodles welcomed this opening for a chuckle.

“The Fisheries won’t kill me.  I am used to late hours,” he declared, with ingenuous levity.  But, feeling an instant compunction, he began to assume an air of statesman-like moodiness, as one draws on a glove.  “His massive intellect will stand any amount of work.  It’s his nerves that I am afraid of.  The reactionary gang, with that abusive brute Cheeseman at their head, insult him every night.”

“If he will insist on beginning a revolution!” murmured the Assistant Commissioner.

“The time has come, and he is the only man great enough for the work,” protested the revolutionary Toodles, flaring up under the calm, speculative gaze of the Assistant Commissioner.  Somewhere in a corridor a distant bell tinkled urgently, and with devoted vigilance the young man pricked up his ears at the sound.  “He’s ready to go now,” he exclaimed in a whisper, snatched up his hat, and vanished from the room.

The Assistant Commissioner went out by another door in a less elastic manner.  Again he crossed the wide thoroughfare, walked along a narrow street, and re-entered hastily his own departmental buildings.  He kept up this accelerated pace to the door of his private room.  Before he had closed it fairly his eyes sought his desk.  He stood still for a moment, then walked up, looked all round on the floor, sat down in his chair, rang a bell, and waited.

“Chief Inspector Heat gone yet?”

“Yes, sir.  Went away half-an-hour ago.”

He nodded.  “That will do.”  And sitting still, with his hat pushed off his forehead, he thought that it was just like Heat’s confounded cheek to carry off quietly the only piece of material evidence.  But he thought this without animosity.  Old and valued servants will take liberties.  The piece of overcoat with the address sewn on was certainly not a thing to leave about.  Dismissing from his mind this manifestation of Chief Inspector Heat’s mistrust, he wrote and despatched a note to his wife, charging her to make his apologies to Michaelis’ great lady, with whom they were engaged to dine that evening.

The short jacket and the low, round hat he assumed in a sort of curtained alcove containing a washstand, a row of wooden pegs and a shelf, brought out wonderfully the length of his grave, brown face.  He stepped back into the full light of the room, looking like the vision of a cool, reflective Don Quixote, with the sunken eyes of a dark enthusiast and a very deliberate manner.  He left the scene of his daily labours quickly like an unobtrusive shadow.  His descent into the street was like the descent into a slimy aquarium from which the water had been run off.  A murky, gloomy dampness enveloped him.  The walls of the houses were wet, the mud of the roadway glistened with an effect of phosphorescence, and when he emerged into the Strand out of a narrow street by the side of Charing Cross Station the genius of the locality assimilated him.  He might have been but one more of the queer foreign fish that can be seen of an evening about there flitting round the dark corners.

He came to a stand on the very edge of the pavement, and waited.  His exercised eyes had made out in the confused movements of lights and shadows thronging the roadway the crawling approach of a hansom.  He gave no sign; but when the low step gliding along the curbstone came to his feet he dodged in skilfully in front of the big turning wheel, and spoke up through the little trap door almost before the man gazing supinely ahead from his perch was aware of having been boarded by a fare.

It was not a long drive.  It ended by signal abruptly, nowhere in particular, between two lamp-posts before a large drapery establishment — a long range of shops already lapped up in sheets of corrugated iron for the night.  Tendering a coin through the trap door the fare slipped out and away, leaving an effect of uncanny, eccentric ghastliness upon the driver’s mind.  But the size of the coin was satisfactory to his touch, and his education not being literary, he remained untroubled by the fear of finding it presently turned to a dead leaf in his pocket.  Raised above the world of fares by the nature of his calling, he contemplated their actions with a limited interest.  The sharp pulling of his horse right round expressed his philosophy.

Meantime the Assistant Commissioner was already giving his order to a waiter in a little Italian restaurant round the corner — one of those traps for the hungry, long and narrow, baited with a perspective of mirrors and white napery; without air, but with an atmosphere of their own — an atmosphere of fraudulent cookery mocking an abject mankind in the most pressing of its miserable necessities.  In this immoral atmosphere the Assistant Commissioner, reflecting upon his enterprise, seemed to lose some more of his identity.  He had a sense of loneliness, of evil freedom.  It was rather pleasant.  When, after paying for his short meal, he stood up and waited for his change, he saw himself in the sheet of glass, and was struck by his foreign appearance.  He contemplated his own image with a melancholy and inquisitive gaze, then by sudden inspiration raised the collar of his jacket.  This arrangement appeared to him commendable, and he completed it by giving an upward twist to the ends of his black moustache.  He was satisfied by the subtle modification of his personal aspect caused by these small changes.  “That’ll do very well,” he thought.  “I’ll get a little wet, a little splashed — ”

He became aware of the waiter at his elbow and of a small pile of silver coins on the edge of the table before him.  The waiter kept one eye on it, while his other eye followed the long back of a tall, not very young girl, who passed up to a distant table looking perfectly sightless and altogether unapproachable.  She seemed to be a habitual customer.

On going out the Assistant Commissioner made to himself the observation that the patrons of the place had lost in the frequentation of fraudulent cookery all their national and private characteristics.  And this was strange, since the Italian restaurant is such a peculiarly British institution.  But these people were as denationalised as the dishes set before them with every circumstance of unstamped respectability.  Neither was their personality stamped in any way, professionally, socially or racially.  They seemed created for the Italian restaurant, unless the Italian restaurant had been perchance created for them.  But that last hypothesis was unthinkable, since one could not place them anywhere outside those special establishments.  One never met these enigmatical persons elsewhere.  It was impossible to form a precise idea what occupations they followed by day and where they went to bed at night.  And he himself had become unplaced.  It would have been impossible for anybody to guess his occupation.  As to going to bed, there was a doubt even in his own mind.  Not indeed in regard to his domicile itself, but very much so in respect of the time when he would be able to return there.  A pleasurable feeling of independence possessed him when he heard the glass doors swing to behind his back with a sort of imperfect baffled thud.  He advanced at once into an immensity of greasy slime and damp plaster interspersed with lamps, and enveloped, oppressed, penetrated, choked, and suffocated by the blackness of a wet London night, which is composed of soot and drops of water.

Brett Street was not very far away.  It branched off, narrow, from the side of an open triangular space surrounded by dark and mysterious houses, temples of petty commerce emptied of traders for the night.  Only a fruiterer’s stall at the corner made a violent blaze of light and colour.  Beyond all was black, and the few people passing in that direction vanished at one stride beyond the glowing heaps of oranges and lemons.  No footsteps echoed.  They would never be heard of again.  The adventurous head of the Special Crimes Department watched these disappearances from a distance with an interested eye.  He felt light-hearted, as though he had been ambushed all alone in a jungle many thousands of miles away from departmental desks and official inkstands.  This joyousness and dispersion of thought before a task of some importance seems to prove that this world of ours is not such a very serious affair after all.  For the Assistant Commissioner was not constitutionally inclined to levity.

The policeman on the beat projected his sombre and moving form against the luminous glory of oranges and lemons, and entered Brett Street without haste.  The Assistant Commissioner, as though he were a member of the criminal classes, lingered out of sight, awaiting his return.  But this constable seemed to be lost for ever to the force.  He never returned: must have gone out at the other end of Brett Street.