Summary
The Assistant Commissioner drives to Westminster Palace to meet with Sir Ethelred and deliver a report on the Greenwich Bomb Outrage. He runs into Sir Ethelred’s private secretary Toodles again and makes light conversation with him before going in to meet with the august personage. Drawing upon what Chief Inspector Heat discovered, the Assistant Commissioner reports that they have found Mr. Verloc and Stevie to be culprits, though he is also quick to exculpate Michaelis. He tells Sir Ethelred further that he has left Mr. Verloc alone, knowing that the man has nowhere to disappear to, and that Mr. Verloc is married.
He goes home to change and then makes an appearance at an ongoing soirée hosted by the lady patroness of Michaelis. He assures her that Michaelis is out of suspicion. While there, he runs into Mr. Vladimir and then has a private word with the embassy man outside; he tells him menacingly that he wants to use Mr. Verloc’s case as a way to clear out foreign agents from England. The two go their separate ways into the night.
Analysis
The soirée at the patroness' that the Assistant Commissioner attends turns out to be one of the peculiar occasions and locations where opposite ends of society – government officials and anarchists, continental Europeans and Englishmen – come together for conversation. If Conrad had already impressed upon us the irony of policemen getting along with criminals in his description of Inspector Heat’s respect for thieves, he makes it all the more concrete by showing the supposed antagonists moving about languidly in the same space. Of course, such a paradoxical gathering is only possible under the power of an equally self-contradictory force: Michaelis’ patroness, who, as a member of the old aristocracy, disdains the masses and the bourgeoisie alike, and so ends up becoming friends with everyone by the logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
We also witness in this chapter a meeting of the Assistant Commissioner and Mr. Vladimir, where the latter is unexpectedly humbled: “Descended from generations victimised by the instruments of an arbitrary power, he was racially, nationally, and individually afraid of the police. It was an inherited weakness, altogether independent of his judgment, of his reason, of his experience. He was born to it. But that sentiment, which resembled the irrational horror some people have of cats, did not stand in the way of his immense contempt for the English police” (164). This passage serves as an allusion to the history of Russian revolutionism that subtly links the British environment of Conrad’s novels to the passionate anarchist violence and brutally repressive police state to the East.
