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