第67章

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 armchair 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 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's 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 incapable of hurting a fly intentionally.