seated or standing in the light of six tall windows.
Michaelis had been the object of a revulsion of popular sentiment,
the same sentiment which years ago had applauded the ferocity of
the life sentence passed upon him for complicity in a rather mad
attempt to rescue some prisoners from a police van. The plan of
the conspirators had been to shoot down the horses and overpower
the escort. Unfortunately, one of the police constables got shot
too. He left a wife and three small children, and the death of
that man aroused through the length and breadth of a realm for
whose defence, welfare, and glory men die every day as matter of
duty, an outburst of furious indignation, of a raging implacable
pity for the victim. Three ring-leaders got hanged. Michaelis,
young and slim, locksmith by trade, and great frequenter of evening
schools, did not even know that anybody had been killed, his part
with a few others being to force open the door at the back of the
special conveyance. When arrested he had a bunch of skeleton keys
in one pocket a heavy chisel in another, and a short crowbar in his
hand: neither more nor less than a burglar. But no burglar would
have received such a heavy sentence. The death of the constable
had made him miserable at heart, but the failure of the plot also.
He did not conceal either of these sentiments from his empanelled
countrymen, and that sort of compunction appeared shockingly
imperfect to the crammed court. The judge on passing sentence
commented feelingly upon the depravity and callousness of the young
prisoner.
That made the groundless fame of his condemnation; the fame of his
release was made for him on no better grounds by people who wished
to exploit the sentimental aspect of his imprisonment either for
purposes of their own or for no intelligible purpose. He let them
do so in the innocence of his heart and the simplicity of his mind.
Nothing that happened to him individually had any importance. He
was like those saintly men whose personality is lost in the
contemplation of their faith. His ideas were not in the nature of
convictions. They were inaccessible to reasoning. They formed in
all their contradictions and obscurities an invincible and
humanitarian creed, which he confessed rather than preached, with
an obstinate gentleness, a smile of pacific assurance on his lips,
and his candid blue eyes cast down because the sight of faces
troubled his inspiration developed in solitude. In that
characteristic attitude, pathetic in his grotesque and incurable
obesity which he had to drag like a galley slave’s bullet to the
end of his days, the Assistant Commissioner of Police beheld the
ticket-of-leave apostle filling a privileged arm-chair within the
screen. He sat there by the head of the old lady’s couch, mild-
voiced and quiet, with no more self-consciousness than a very small
child, and with something of a child’s charm – the appealing charm
of trustfulness. Confident of the future, whose secret ways had
been revealed to him within the four walls of a well-known
penitentiary, he had no reason to look with suspicion upon anybody.
If he could not give the great and curious lady a very definite
idea as to what the world was coming to, he had managed without
effort to impress her by his unembittered faith, by the sterling
quality of his optimism.
A certain simplicity of thought is common to serene souls at both
ends of the social scale. The great lady was simple in her own
way. His views and beliefs had nothing in them to shock or startle
her, since she judged them from the standpoint of her lofty
position. Indeed, her sympathies were easily accessible to a man
of that sort. She was not an exploiting capitalist herself; she
was, as it were, above the play of economic conditions. And she
had a great capacity of pity for the more obvious forms of common
human miseries, precisely because she was such a complete stranger
to them that she had to translate her conception into terms of
mental suffering before she could grasp the notion of their
cruelty. The Assistant Commissioner remembered very well the