第9章

`I'll see the Attorney-General tonight, and will send for you tomorrow morning.Is there anything more you'd wish to tell me now?'

The Assistant Commissioner had stood up also, slender and flexible.

`I think not, Sir Ethelred, unless I were to enter into details which--'

`No.No details, please.'

The great shadowy form seemed to shrink away as if in physical dread of details; then came forward, expanded, enormous, and weighty, offering a large hand.`And you say that this man has got a wife?'

`Yes, Sir Ethelred,' said the Assistant Commissioner, pressing deferentially the extended hand.`A genuine wife and a genuinely, respectably, marital relation.He told me that after his interview at the Embassy he would have thrown everything up, would have tried to sell his shop, and leave the country, only he felt certain that his wife would not even hear of going abroad.Nothing could be more characteristic of the respectable bond than that,' went on, with a touch of grimness, the Assistant Commissioner, whose own wife, too, had refused to hear of going abroad.`Yes, a genuine wife.

And the victim was a genuine brother-in-law.From a certain point of view we are here in the presence of a domestic drama.'

The Assistant Commissioner laughed a little; but the great man's thoughts seemed to have wandered far away, perhaps to the questions of his country's domestic policy, the battleground of his crusading valour against the paynim Cheeseman.The Assistant Commissioner withdrew quietly, unnoticed, as if already forgotten.

He had his own crusading instincts.This affair, which, in one way or another, disgusted Chief Inspector Heat, seemed to him a providentially given starting-point for a crusade.He had it much at heart to begin.He walked slowly home, meditating that enterprise on the way, and thinking over Mr Verloc's psychology in a composite mood of repugnance and satisfaction.

He walked all the way home.Finding the drawing-room dark, he went upstairs, and spent some time between the bedroom and the dressing-room, changing his clothes, going to and fro with the air of a thoughtful somnambulist.

But he shook it off before going out again to join his wife at the house of the great lady patroness of Michaelis.

He knew he would be welcomed there.On entering the smaller of the two drawing-rooms he saw his wife in a small group near the piano.A youngish composer in pass of becoming famous was discoursing from a music stool to two thick men whose backs looked old, and three slender women whose backs looked young.Behind the screen the great lady had only two persons with her: a man and a woman, who sat side by side on armchairs at the foot of her couch.She extended her hand to the Assistant Commissioner.

`I never hoped to see you here tonight.Annie told me--'

`Yes.I had no idea myself that my work would be over so soon.'

The Assistant Commissioner added in a low tone: `I am glad to tell you that Michaelis is altogether clear of this--The patroness of the ex-convict received this assurance indignantly.

`Why? Were your people stupid enough to connect him with--'

`Not stupid,' interrupted the Assistant Commissioner, contradicting deferentially.`Clever enough - quite clever enough for that.'

A silence fell.The man at the foot of the couch had stopped speaking to the lady, and looked on with a faint smile.

`I don't know whether you ever met before,' said the great lady.

Mr Vladimir and the Assistant Commissioner, introduced, acknowledged each other's existence with punctilious and guarded courtesy.

`He's been frightening me,' declared suddenly the lady who sat by the side of Mr Vladimir, with an inclination of the head towards that gentleman.

The Assistant Commissioner knew the lady.

`You do not look frightened,' he pronounced, after surveying her conscientiously with his tired and equable gaze.He was thinking meantime to himself that in this house one met everybody sooner or later.Mr Vladimir's rosy countenance was wreathed in smiles, because he was witty, but his eyes remained serious, like the eyes of convinced man.

`Well, he tried to at least,' amended the lady.

`Force of habit perhaps,' said the Assistant Commissioner, moved by an irresistible inspiration.

`He has been threatening society with all sorts of horrors,' continued the lady, whose enunciation was caressing and slow, `apropos of this explosion in Greenwich Park.It appears we all ought to quake in our shoes at what's coming if those people are not suppressed all over the world.I had no idea this was such a grave affair.'

Mr Vladimir, affecting not to listen, leaned towards the couch, talking amiably in subdued tones, but he heard the Assistant Commissioner say:

`I've no doubt that Mr Vladimir has a very precise notion of the true importance of this affair.'

Mr Vladimir asked himself what that confounded and intrusive policeman was driving at.Descended from generations victimized by the instruments of an arbitrary power, he was racially, nationally, and individually afraid of the police.It was an inherited weakness, altogether independent of his judgement, of his reason, of his experience.He was born to it.But that sentiment, which resembled the irrational horror some people have of cats, did not stand in the way of his immense contempt for the English police.He finished the sentence addressed to the great lady, and turned slightly in his chair.

`You mean that we have a great experience of these people.Yes; indeed, we suffer greatly from their activity, while you' - Mr Vladimir hesitated for a moment, in smiling perplexity - `While you suffer their presence gladly in your midst,' he finished, displaying a dimple in each clean-shaven cheek.Then he added more gravely: `I may even say - because you do.'