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 organization.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 manhunting.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, ******-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.
