"Michaelis reported himself before leaving London for the country?"
"Yes, sir. He did."
"And what may he be doing there?" continued the Assistant Commissioner,
who was perfectly informed on that point. Fitted with painful tightness
into an old wooden arm-chair, before a worm-eaten oak table in an
upstairs room of a four-roomed cottage with a roof of moss-grown tiles,
Michaelis was writing night and day in a shaky, slanting hand that
"Autobiography of a Prisoner" which was to be like a book of Revelation
in the history of mankind. The conditions of confined space, seclusion,
and solitude in a small four-roomed cottage were favourable to his
inspiration. It was like being in prison, except that one was never
disturbed for the odious purpose of taking exercise according to the
tyrannical regulations of his old home in the penitentiary. He could not
tell whether the sun still shone on the earth or not. The perspiration
of the literary labour dropped from his brow. A delightful enthusiasm
urged him on. It was the liberation of his inner life, the letting out
of his soul into the wide world. And the zeal of his guileless vanity
(first awakened by the offer of five hundred pounds from a publisher)
seemed something predestined and holy.
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