The interval of forced inactivity must have sorely tried the patience of the Governor.  Practical theorists condemned to rust too often eat out their own hearts.  Major Shrike never referred to this period, and, indeed, laboriously snubbed any allusion to it.

He was, I have a shrewd notion, something of an officially petted reformer.  Anyhow, to his abolition of the insensate barbarism of crank and treadmill in favour of civilizing methods no opposition was offered.  Solitary confinement—­a punishment outside all nature to a gregarious race—­found no advocate in him.  “A man’s own suffering mind,” he argued, “must be, of all moral food, the most poisonous for him to feed on.  Surround a scorpion with fire and he stings himself to death, they say.  Throw a diseased soul entirely upon its own resources and moral suicide results.”

To sum up:  his nature embodied humanity without sentimentalism, firmness without obstinacy, individuality without selfishness; his activity was boundless, his devotion to his system so real as to admit no utilitarian sophistries into his scheme of personal benevolence.  Before I had been with him a week, I respected him as I had never respected man before.

* * * * *

One evening (it was during the second month of my appointment) we were sitting in his private study—­a dark, comfortable room lined with books.  It was an occasion on which a new characteristic of the man was offered to my inspection.

A prisoner of a somewhat unusual type had come in that day—­a spiritualistic medium, convicted of imposture.  To this person I casually referred.

“May I ask how you propose dealing with the new-comer?”

“On the familiar lines.”

“But, surely—­here we have a man of superior education, of imagination even?”

“No, no, no!  A hawker’s opportuneness; that describes it.  These fellows would make death itself a vulgarity.”

“You’ve no faith in their—­”

“Not a tittle.  Heaven forfend!  A sheet and a turnip are poetry to their manifestations.  It’s as crude and sour soil for us to work on as any I know.  We’ll cart it wholesale.”

“I take you—­excuse my saying so—­for a supremely sceptical man.”

“As to what?”

“The supernatural.”

There was no answer during a considerable interval.  Presently it came, with deliberate insistence:—­

“It is a principle with me to oppose bullying.  We are here for a definite purpose—­his duty plain to any man who wills to read it.  There may be disembodied spirits who seek to distress or annoy where they can no longer control.  If there are, mine, which is not yet divorced from its means to material action, declines to be influenced by any irresponsible whimsey, emanating from a place whose denizens appear to be actuated by a mere frivolous antagonism to all human order and progress.”

“But supposing you, a murderer, to be haunted by the presentment of your victim?”