CHAPTER VI
The lady patroness of Michaelis, the ticket-of-leave apostle of
humanitarian hopes, was one of the most influential and distinguished
connections of the Assistant Commissioner's wife, whom she called Annie,
and treated still rather as a not very wise and utterly inexperienced
young girl. But she had consented to accept him on a friendly footing,
which was by no means the case with all of his wife's influential
connections. Married young and splendidly at some remote epoch of the
past, she had had for a time a close view of great affairs and even of
some great men. She herself was a great lady. Old now in the number of
her years, she had that sort of exceptional temperament which defies time
with scornful disregard, as if it were a rather vulgar convention
submitted to by the mass of inferior mankind. Many other conventions
easier to set aside, alas! failed to obtain her recognition, also on
temperamental grounds--either because they bored her, or else because
they stood in the way of her scorns and sympathies. Admiration was a
sentiment unknown to her (it was one of the secret griefs of her most
noble husband against her)--first, as always more or less tainted with
mediocrity, and next as being in a way an admission of inferiority. And
both were frankly inconceivable to her nature. To be fearlessly
outspoken in her opinions came easily to her, since she judged solely
from the standpoint of her social position. She was equally untrammelled
in her actions; and as her tactfulness proceeded from genuine humanity,
her bodily vigour remained remarkable and her superiority was serene and
cordial, three generations had admired her infinitely, and the last she
was likely to see had pronounced her a wonderful woman. Meantime
intelligent, with a sort of lofty simplicity, and curious at heart, but
not like many women merely of social gossip, she amused her age by
attracting within her ken through the power of her great, almost
historical, social prestige everything that rose above the dead level of
mankind, lawfully or unlawfully, by position, wit, audacity, fortune or
misfortune. Royal Highnesses, artists, men of science, young statesmen,
and charlatans of all ages and conditions, who, unsubstantial and light,
bobbing up like corks, show best the direction of the surface currents,
had been welcomed in that house, listened to, penetrated, understood,
appraised, for her own edification. In her own words, she liked to watch
what the world was coming to. And as she had a practical mind her
judgment of men and things, though based on special prejudices, was
seldom totally wrong, and almost never wrong-headed. Her drawing-room
was probably the only place in the wide world where an Assistant
Commissioner of Police could meet a convict liberated on a
ticket-of-leave on other than professional and official ground. Who had
brought Michaelis there one afternoon the Assistant Commissioner did not
remember very well. He had a notion it must have been a certain Member
of Parliament of illustrious parentage and unconventional sympathies,
which were the standing joke of the comic papers. The notabilities and
even the simple notorieties of the day brought each other freely to that
temple of an old woman's not ignoble curiosity. You never could guess
whom you were likely to come upon being received in semi-privacy within
the faded blue silk and gilt frame screen, making a cosy nook for a couch
and a few arm-chairs in the great drawing-room, with its hum of voices
and the groups of people seated or standing in the light of six tall
windows.
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