conversation between these two. He had listened in silence. It
was something as exciting in a way, and even touching in its
foredoomed futility, as the efforts at moral intercourse between
the inhabitants of remote planets. But this grotesque incarnation
of humanitarian passion appealed somehow, to one’s imagination. At
last Michaelis rose, and taking the great lady’s extended hand,
shook it, retained it for a moment in his great cushioned palm with
unembarrassed friendliness, and turned upon the semi-private nook
of the drawing-room his back, vast and square, and as if distended
under the short tweed jacket. Glancing about in serene
benevolence, he waddled along to the distant door between the knots
of other visitors. The murmur of conversations paused on his
passage. He smiled innocently at a tall, brilliant girl, whose
eyes met his accidentally, and went out unconscious of the glances
following him across the room. Michaelis’ first appearance in the
world was a success – a success of esteem unmarred by a single
murmur of derision. The interrupted conversations were resumed in
their proper tone, grave or light. Only a well-set-up, long-
limbed, active-looking man of forty talking with two ladies near a
window remarked aloud, with an unexpected depth of feeling:
“Eighteen stone, I should say, and not five foot six. Poor fellow!
It’s terrible – terrible.”
The lady of the house, gazing absently at the Assistant
Commissioner, left alone with her on the private side of the
screen, seemed to be rearranging her mental impressions behind her
thoughtful immobility of a handsome old face. Men with grey
moustaches and full, healthy, vaguely smiling countenances
approached, circling round the screen; two mature women with a
matronly air of gracious resolution; a clean-shaved individual with
sunken cheeks, and dangling a gold-mounted eyeglass on a broad
black ribbon with an old-world, dandified effect. A silence
deferential, but full of reserves, reigned for a moment, and then
the great lady exclaimed, not with resentment, but with a sort of
protesting indignation:
“And that officially is supposed to be a revolutionist! What
nonsense.” She looked hard at the Assistant Commissioner, who
murmured apologetically:
“Not a dangerous one perhaps.”
“Not dangerous – I should think not indeed. He is a mere believer.
It’s the temperament of a saint,” declared the great lady in a firm
tone. “And they kept him shut up for twenty years. One shudders
at the stupidity of it. And now they have let him out everybody
belonging to him is gone away somewhere or dead. His parents are
dead; the girl he was to marry has died while he was in prison; he
has lost the skill necessary for his manual occupation. He told me
all this himself with the sweetest patience; but then, he said, he
had had plenty of time to think out things for himself. A pretty
compensation! If that’s the stuff revolutionists are made of some
of us may well go on their knees to them,” she continued in a
slightly bantering voice, while the banal society smiles hardened
on the worldly faces turned towards her with conventional
deference. “The poor creature is obviously no longer in a position
to take care of himself. Somebody will have to look after him a
little.”
“He should be recommended to follow a treatment of some sort,” the
soldierly voice of the active-looking man was heard advising
earnestly from a distance. He was in the pink of condition for his
age, and even the texture of his long frock coat had a character of
elastic soundness, as if it were a living tissue. “The man is
virtually a cripple,” he added with unmistakable feeling.
Other voices, as if glad of the opening, murmured hasty compassion.
“Quite startling,” “Monstrous,” “Most painful to see.” The lank
man, with the eyeglass on a broad ribbon, pronounced mincingly the
word “Grotesque,” whose justness was appreciated by those standing
near him. They smiled at each other.
The Assistant Commissioner had expressed no opinion either then or
later, his position making it impossible for him to ventilate any
independent view of a ticket-of-leave convict. But, in truth, he
shared the view of his wife’s friend and patron that Michaelis was
a humanitarian sentimentalist, a little mad, but upon the whole