The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad [52]
“It’s in connection with that Greenwich affair.”
“Oh! I say! He’s very bitter against you people. But I will go and see, if you insist.”
“Do. That’s a good fellow,” said the Assistant Commissioner.
The unpaid secretary admired this pluck. Composing for himself an innocent face, he opened a door, and went in with the assurance of a nice and privileged child. And presently he reappeared, with a nod to the Assistant Commissioner, who passing through the same door left open for him, found himself with the great personage in a large room.
Vast in bulk and stature, with a long white face, which, broadened at the base by a big double chin, appeared egg-shaped in the fringe of thin greyish whisker, the great personage seemed an expanding man. Unfortunate from a tailoring point of view, the cross-folds in the middle of a buttoned black coat added to the impression, as if the fastenings of the garment were tried to the utmost. From the head, set upward on a thick neck, the eyes, with puffy lower lids, stared with a haughty droop on each side of a hooked aggressive nose, nobly salient in the vast pale circumference of the face. A shiny silk hat and a pair of worn gloves lying ready on the end of a long table looked expanded too, enormous.
He stood on the hearthrug in big, roomy boots, and uttered no word of greeting.
“I would like to know if this is the beginning of another dynamite campaign,” he asked at once in a deep, very smooth voice. “Don’t go into details. I have no time for that.”
The Assistant Commissioner’s figure before this big and rustic Presence had the frail slenderness of a reed addressing an oak. And indeed the unbroken record of that man’s descent surpassed in the number of centuries the age of the oldest oak in the country.
“No. As far as one can be positive about anything I can assure you that it is not.”
“Yes. But your idea of assurances over there,” said the great man, with a contemptuous wave of his hand towards a window giving on the broad thoroughfare, “seems to consist mainly in making the Secretary of State look a fool. I have been told positively in this very room less than a month ago that nothing of the sort was even possible.”
The Assistant Commissioner glanced in the direction of the window calmly.
“You will allow me to remark, Sir Ethelred, that so far I have had no opportunity to give you assurances of any kind.”
The haughty droop of the eyes was focussed now upon the Assistant Commissioner.
“True,” confessed the deep, smooth voice. “I sent for Heat. You are still rather a novice in your new berth. And how are you getting on over there?”
“I believe I am learning something every day.”
“Of course, of course. I hope you will get on.”
“Thank you, Sir Ethelred. I’ve learned something to-day, and even within the last hour or so. There is much in this affair of a kind that does not meet the eye in a usual anarchist outrage, even if one looked into it as deep as can be. That’s why I am here.”
The great man put his arms akimbo, the backs of his big hands resting on his hips.
“Very well. Go on. Only no details, pray. Spare me the details.”
“You shall not be troubled with them, Sir Ethelred,” the Assistant Commissioner began, with a calm and untroubled assurance. While he was speaking the hands on the face of the clock behind the great man’s back—a heavy, glistening affair of massive scrolls in the same dark marble as the mantelpiece, and with a ghostly, evanescent tick—had moved through the space of seven minutes. He spoke with a studious fidelity to a parenthetical manner, into which every little fact—that is, every detail—fitted with delightful ease. Not a murmur nor even a movement hinted at interruption. The great Personage might have been the statue of one of his own princely ancestors stripped of a crusader