第78章

`Not to mention yourself.He leans on your arm,' suggested the Assistant Commissioner, soberly.`You would both go.'

`It would be an easy way for a young man to go down into history.Not so many British Ministers have been assassinated as to make it a minor incident.But seriously now--'

`I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you'll have to do something for it.Seriously, there's no danger whatever for both of you but from overwork.'

The sympathetic Toodles welcomed this opening for a chuckle.

`The Fisheries won't kill me.I am used to late hours,' he declared, with ingenuous levity.But, feeling an instant compunction, he began to assume an air of statesmanlike moodiness, as one draws on a glove.`His massive intellect will stand any amount of work.It's his nerves that Iam afraid of.The reactionary gang, with that abusive brute Cheeseman at their head, insult him every night.'

`If he will insist on beginning a revolution!' murmured the Assistant Commissioner.

`The time has come, and he is the only man great enough for the work,'

protested the revolutionary Toodles, flaring up under the calm, speculative gaze of the Assistant Commissioner.Somewhere in a corridor a distant bell tinkled urgently, and with devoted vigilance the young man pricked up his ears at the sound.`He's ready to go now,' he exclaimed in a whisper, snatched up his hat, and vanished from the room.

The Assistant Commissioner went out by another door in a less elastic manner.Again he crossed the wide thoroughfare, walked along a narrow street, and re-entered hastily his own departmental buildings.He kept up this accelerated pace to the door of his private room.Before he had closed it fairly his eyes sought his 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 dispatched a note to his wife, charging her to make his apologies to Michaelis's 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 movement of lights and shows thronging the roadway the crawling approach of a hansom.He gave no sign;but when the low step gliding along the kerbstone 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 ghostliness 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 action with a limited interest.The sharp pulling of his horse right round expressed his philosophy.