At this point the trained faculties of the Chief Inspector ceased to hear the voice of the constable.He moved to one of the windows for better light.His face, averted from the room, expressed a startled, intense interest while he examined closely the triangular piece of broadcloth.By a sudden jerk he detached it, and only after stuffing it into his pocket turned round to the room, and flung the velvet collar back on the table.
`Cover up,' he directed the attendants, curtly, without another look, and, saluted by the constable, carried off his spoil hastily.
A convenient train whirled him up to town, alone and pondering deeply, in a third-class compartment.That singed piece of cloth was incredibly valuable, and he could not defend himself from astonishment at the casual manner it had come into his possession.It was as if Fate had thrust that clue into his hands.And after the manner of the average man, whose ambition is to command events, he began to mistrust such a gratuitous and accidental success - just because it seemed forced upon him.The practical value of success depends not a little on the way you look at it.But Fate looks at nothing.It has no discretion.He no longer considered it eminently desirable all round to establish publicly the identity of the man who had blown himself up that morning with such horrible completeness.But he was not certain of the view his department would take.A department is to those it employs a complex personality with ideas and even fads of its own.It depends on the loyal devotion of its servants, and the devoted loyalty of trusted servants is associated with a certain amount of affectionate contempt, which keeps it sweet, as it were.By a benevolent provision of Nature no man is a hero to his valet, or else the heroes would have to brush their own clothes.Likewise no department appears perfectly wise to the intimacy of its workers.A department does not know so much as some of its servants.Being a dispassionate organism, it can never be perfectly informed.It would not be good for its efficiency to know too much.Chief Inspector Heat got out of the train in a state of thoughtfulness entirely untainted with disloyalty, but not quite free of that jealous mistrust which so often springs on the ground of perfect devotion, whether to women or to institutions.
It was in this mental disposition, physically very empty, but still nauseated by what he had seen, that he had come upon the Professor.Under these conditions which make for irascibility in a sound, normal man, this meeting was specially unwelcome to Chief Inspector Heat.He had not been thinking of the Professor; he had not been thinking of any individual anarchist at all.The complexion of that case had somehow forced upon him the general idea of the absurdity of things human, which in the abstract is sufficiently annoying to an unphilosophical temperament, and in concrete instances becomes exasperating beyond endurance.At the beginning of his career Chief Inspector Heat had been concerned with the more energetic forms of thieving.He had gained his spurs in that sphere, and naturally enough had kept for it, after his promotion to another department, a feeling not very far removed from affection.Thieving was not a sheer absurdity.It was a form of human industry, perverse indeed, but still an industry exercised in an industrious world; it was work undertaken for the same reason as the work in potteries, in coal mines, in fields, in tool-grinding shops.It was labour, whose practical difference from the other forms of labour consisted in the nature of its risk, which did not lie in ankylosis, or lead poisoning, or fire-damp, or gritty dust, but in what may be briefly defined in its own special phraseology as `Seven years' hard'.Chief Inspector Heat was, of course, not insensible to the gravity of moral differences.But neither were the thieves he had been looking after.They submitted to the severe sanction of a morality familiar to Chief Inspector Heat with a certain resignation.They were his fellow citizens gone wrong because of imperfect education, Chief Inspector Heat believed; but allowing for that difference, he could understand the mind of a burglar, because, as a matter of fact, the mind and the instincts of a burglar are of the same kind as the mind and the instincts of a police officer.Both recognize the same conventions, and have a working knowledge of each other's methods and of the routine of their respective trades.
They understand each other, which is advantageous to both, and establishes a sort of amenity in their relations.Products of the same machine, one classed as useful and the other as noxious, they take the machine for granted in different ways, but with a seriousness essentially the same.The mind of Chief Inspector Heat was inaccessible to ideas of revolt.But his thieves were not rebels.His bodily vigour, his cool, inflexible manner, his courage, and his fairness, had secured for him much respect and some adulation in the sphere of his early successes.He had felt himself revered and admired.
And Chief Inspector Heat, arrested within six paces of the anarchist nicknamed the Professor, gave a thought of regret to the world of thieves - sane, without morbid ideals, working by routine, respectful of constituted authorities, free from all taint of hate and despair.
After paying this tribute to what is normal in the constitution of society (for the idea of thieving appeared to his instinct as normal as the idea of property), Chief Inspector Heat felt very angry with himself for having stopped, for having spoken, for having taken that way at all on the ground of it being a short cut from the station to the headquarters..And he spoke again in his big, authoritative voice, which, being moderated, had a threatening character.
`You are not wanted, I tell you,' he repeated.
