The Saint and Mr Teal (Once More the Saint) Read online

  But none of his intentions just then were public property. He held up to the light a glass of gin and bitters of astounding size for which he had been charged the sum of ninepence, and sighed.

  "How I shall ever be able to bring myself to pay one and six for a drink about one eighth the size of this in London again, is more than I know," he murmured contentedly, and improved the shining hour by drinking it down rapidly and calling for another.

  He strolled back with Patricia to their modest supper as it was beginning to grow dark. Their meal was just being put on the table.

  "You poach a wonderful egg, Mrs. Nance," he re­marked approvingly, and sank into his chair as the door closed behind that excellent landlady. "Pat, darling, you must wish me bon appétit, because I've got a lot to do on these vitamins."

  She had not liked to question him before, but now she gazed at him resignedly.

  "We were going away for a holiday," she reminded him.

  "I know," said the Saint. "And we still are-away to the south, where there's sunshine and good wine and tomorrow is also a day. But we came by this round­about way on a hunch, and the hunch was right. There is still a little work for us to do."

  He finished his plate without speaking again, poured himself out a cup of coffee, and lighted a cigarette. Then he said: "There's more nonsense talked about capital punish­ment than anything else, and the sentimentalists who organize petitions for the reprieve of every murderer who's ever sentenced are probably less pernicious than the more conventional humanitarians. Murder, in England anyway, is the most accidental of crimes. A human life is such a fragile thing, it's so easily snuffed out; and dozens of respectable men, without a thought of crime in their heads, have lost control of themselves for one second, and have woken up afterwards to the numbing and irrevocable realization that they have committed murder, and the penalty is death. There are deliberate murders; but there are other crimes no less deliberate and no less damning. The drug trafficker, the white slaver, the blackmailer-not one of them could ever plead that he acted in uncontrollable passion, or gave way to an instant's temptation, or did it because his wife and children were starving. All of those crimes are too deliberate-need too much capital, too much premeditation, too long to work through from beginning to end. And each of them wrecks human lives less mercifully than a sudden bullet. Why should the death penalty stop where it does? . . . That is justice as we have chosen to see it; and even now I believe that the old days were worth while."

  He sat and smoked until it was quite dark; and, being the man he was, no detail of the future weighed on his mind. He scribbled industriously on a writing pads with occasional pauses for thought; and presently Patricia came round behind him to see what he had written.

  At the top of the sheet he had roughly pinned the scrap of a report torn from the Daily Telegraph, and panelled it in characteristic slashes of blue pencil.

  "... He saw his friend in difficulties," said the coroner, "and although he could not swim himself he went to his assistance. He did what any Englishman would have done......"

  The blue pencil had scored thickly under the last sentence. And underneath it the Saint was writing:

  FLOREAT HARROVIA!

  When Adam fell, because of Eve, Upon that dreadful day, He did not own up loud and strong, And take his licking with a song, In our good English way: He had so little chivalry.

  He said "The woman tempted me,"

  And tried to hide away.

  CHORUS : But in the blaze of brighter days Britannia yet shall rule, While English Sportsmen worship God And bend their buttocks to the rod For the Honour of the School!

  When Joshua strafed Jericho (N.B.-another Jew) He did not risk his precious gore Or take a sporting chance in war As English soldiers do: He marched his bandsmen round the walls And knocked it down with bugle calls- A trick that is tabu. [chorus]

  When Roland, at the gates of Spain, Died beside Oliver, He must have found it rather hard To stand his ground and keep the guard, Being a foreigner: So we can only think he went There by some kind of accident, Or as an arbiter. [chorus]

  When Louis faced the guillotine, That calm the people saw Flinched to a sickly pallor when He knew he was an alien, A Breed without the Law; Where one of truly British phlegm, Of course, would have leapt down at them And socked them on the jaw. [chorus]

  "Is all that necessary?" asked Patricia with a smile.

  "Of course it is," said the Saint. "Because I've got an appointment with one kind of excrescence, must I forget all the others ? God in heaven, while there's still a supply of smug fools for me to tear in pieces I shall have everything to live for. . . . There are about five hundred and fifty more verses to that song, embracing everything from the massacre of Garigliano down through Christopher Columbus and Marco Polo to the last Czar of Russia, which I may write some day. I think it will end like this --"

  He wrote again, rapidly:

  But in our stately tolerance We condescend to see That heroes whose names end in -vitch Are striving to be something which We know they cannot be, But, sweating hard, they make a good Attempt to do what Britons would Achieve instinctively.

  CHORUS: So let's give praise through all our days, Again and yet again, That we do not eat sauerkraut, That some storks knew their way about, And made us Englishmen!

  "I can never finish my best songs-my gorge rises too rapidly," said the Saint; and then he looked at his watch, and stood up, stretching himself with his gay smile. " Pat, I must be going. Wish me luck."

  She kissed him quickly; and then he was gone, with the cavalier wave of his hand that she knew so well. All the old ageless Saint went with him, that fighting troubadour whom he chose to be, who could always find time to turn aside in an adventure to shape one of those wild satires that came from him with such a biting sincerity. In some way he left her happier for that touch of typical bravado.

  Her emotion was not shared by Galbraith Stride, Something had come into the life of that successful man that he felt curiously impotent to fight against, something that had stricken him with a more savage shock because it was the one thing that he had never prepared himself for. It had the inexorable march of a machine. It left him unable to think clearly, with a sense of physical helplessness as if he had been worn down overnight by a fierce fever, struggling with the foreknowledge of defeat against a kind of paralysis of panic. And that thing was the name of the Saint.

  He was a silent man at dinner that night. He knew that Abdul Osman had crushed and beaten him with an ease that seemed fantastically ridiculous, and the knowledge hypnotized him into a sort of horrible night­mare. And yet at the same time he knew that he might still have been fighting, calling on all the resources of guile and duplicity that had brought him to the power that was being stripped from him, if it had not been for the words that had stunned his ears early that afternoon. He was that strange psychological freak, a criminal possessed of an imagination that amounted almost to mania; and when Osman had told him that the Saint was still at large an overstrained bulwark on the borders of his reason seemed to have crashed in­wards. He was still fighting for all he could hope to save from the disaster, but it was a dumb stubborn fight without vitality.

  He sent for Laura Berwick at nine o'clock. Her slender young body looked particularly beautiful in the black evening gown she was wearing; in some way its cool sweetness was framed in that sombre setting with an effect that was pulse-quickeningly radiant from the contrast. To do him justice, Galbraith Stride felt a momentary twinge of remorse as he saw her.

  "My dear, I want you to take a note over to Mr. Osman. It's rather important, and I'd feel relieved if you delivered it yourself."

  He had been drinking, but the whisky that reeked on his breath had thickened his voice without making him drunk. It served the purpose of nipping that twinge of remorse in the bud, before he had time to forget his own danger.

  "Couldn't one of the crew go?" she asked, in some surprise.

  "I'm afraid there are reason
s why they can't," he said. "They-er-hum-I may be able to explain later. A matter of business. It's vitally important --"

  "But what about Mr. Almido?"

  "Mr. Almido," said Stride, "is a fool. Between ourselves, I don't trust him. Some funny things been happening to my accounts lately. No, my dear, you must do this for me. I'd go myself, only I-I'm not feeling very well. You can take the motorboat."

  He was staring at her with the fixed and glassy eyes of semi-intoxication-she could see that-but there was something besides alcohol in his stare that fright­ened her. His excuses for requiring her to go over in person seemed absurd; and yet it seemed equally absurd to imagine that there could be anything serious behind them. She was fond of him, in a purely conventional way-chiefly because he was the only relative she had had since she was six years old. She knew nothing of his business; but in his remotely fussy way he had been kind to her.

  "All right-I'll go for you. When do you want it done?"

  "At once." He pressed a sealed envelope into her hand, and she felt that his own hand was hot and sticky. "Run along right away, will you?"

  "Right-ho," she said; and wondered, as she went to the door, why her own words rang in her ears without a trace of the artificial cheerfulness that she had tried to put into them.

  She left him sitting at the table, squinting after her with the same glazed stare; and went up on deck to find Toby Halidom.

  "Daddy wants me to go over to the Luxor and deliver a note," she said, and he was naturally perplexed.

  "Why shouldn't one of the crew go-or that Dago secretary with the Marcel wave?"

  "I don't know, Toby." Out under the stars, the vague impressions she had received in the saloon seemed even more absurd. "He was rather funny about it, but he seemed to want it particularly badly, so I said I'd go."

  "Probably suffering from an attack of liver," haz­arded Toby heartily. "All the same, he ought to know better than to ask you to pay calls on a reptile like that at this hour of the night. I'd better come with you, old thing-I don't like you to go and see that ugly nigger alone"

  It was not Toby Halidom's fault that he had been brought up to that inscrutable system of English thought in which all coloured men are niggers unless they happen also to be county cricketers; but on this occasion at least his apprehensions were destined to be fully justified. They had both met Abdul Osman once before during their stay, and Laura knew that her fiance had shared her instinctive revulsion. She felt relieved that he had spontaneously offered to go with her.

  "I'd be glad if you would come, Toby."

  Galbraith Stride heard the motorboat chugging away from the side, and listened to it till the sound died away. Then he went over and pressed a bell in the panelling. It was answered by the saturnine Mr. Almido.

  "We shall be leaving at ten," he said; and his secre­tary was pardonably surprised.

  "Why, sir, I thought --"

  "Never mind what you thought," said Stride thickly. "Tell the captain."

  Almido retired; and Stride got up and began to pace the saloon. The die was cast. He had abdicated to Abdul Osman. He had saved his liberty-perhaps he could even save himself from the Saint. The reaction was starting to take hold of him like a powerful drug, spurring him with a febrile exhilaration and scouring an unnatural brightness into the glaze of his eyes. He had no compunction about what he had done. Laura Berwick was not his own flesh and blood-that would have been his only excuse, if he had bothered to make any. The thought of her fate had ceased to trouble him. It counted for nothing beside his own safety. For a brief space he even regretted the feebleness of his surrender-wondered if a card like Laura could not have been played to far better effect. . . .

  It was only another twist in the imponderable thread that had begun to weave itself when the boom of the Claudette's dinghy had swung over against Laura Ber­wick's head that morning; but the twist was a short one. For Fate, masking behind the name which Galbraith Stride feared more than any other name in the world, had taken a full hand in the game that night.

  There were two doors into the saloon. One of them opened into a microscopic vestibule, from which a broad companion gave access to the deck and an alley­way led out to other cabins and the crew's quarters forward; the other opened into Stride's own stateroom. In his restless pacing of the saloon, Stride had his back turned to the second door when he heard a sharp swish and thud behind him. He jerked round, raw-nerved and startled; and then he saw what had caused the sound, and his heart missed a beat.

  Standing straight out from the polished woodwork of the door was a long thin-bladed knife with a hilt of exquisitely carved ivory, still quivering from the force of the impact that had driven it home.

  His lungs seemed to freeze achingly against the walls of his chest, and a parching dryness came into his throat that filled him with a presentiment that if he released the scream which was struggling for outlet just below his wishbone it could only have materialized as a thin, croaking whisper. The hand that dragged the automatic from his pocket was shaking so much that he almost dropped it. The sudden appearance of that quivering knife was uncanny, supernatural. The opposite door had been closed all the time, for he had been pacing towards it when the thing happened; the ports and sky­light also were fastened. From the angle at which it had driven into the door it should have flashed past his face, barely missing him as he walked; but he had not seen it.

  If he had been in any state in which he could think coherently, he might have hit on the explanation in a few moments; but he was not in that state. It never occurred to him that the door behind him might have been opened, the knife driven home, and the door rapidly and silently closed again, with just that very object of misleading his attention which it had achieved.

  Which was indubitably very foolish of Mr. Galbraith Stride.

  Filled with the foreboding that a second attack would almost instantly follow the first unsuccessful one, trembling in the grip of a cold funk that turned his belly to water, he backed slowly and shakily towards the door where the knife had struck, facing in the direction from which he believed the danger threatened. Curiously enough, his only idea was that Abdul Osman had de­cided to take no chances on his regretting his bargain, and had sent one of his men stealthily to eliminate that possibility. If he had thought of anything else, it is possible that the scream which he ached to utter would not have been suppressed.

  Back . . . back . . . three paces, four paces. . . . And then suddenly he saw the bulkheads on each side of him, and realized with an eerie thrill of horror that he was actually passing through them-that the door which should have come up against his back had been opened noiselessly behind him, and he was stepping backwards over the threshold.

  He opened his mouth to cry out, turning his head as he did so; but the cry rattled voicelessly in his throat. A brown shirt-sleeved arm whipped round his neck from behind and strangled him in the crook of its elbow, while fingers like bars of steel fastened on his wrist just behind the gun. His head was dragged back so that he looked up into the inverted vision of twin blue eyes that were as clear and cold as frozen ultramarines; and then the intruder's mouth spoke against his ear.

  "Come and pay calls with me, Galbraith," he heard; and then he fainted.

  CHAPTER VII

  ABDUL OSMAN had also been drinking, but with him it had been almost a festive rite. He had put on a dinner suit, with a red tarboosh; and his broad soft stomach, swelling out under the sloping expanse of a snowy shirt front, gave him the appearance of a flabby pyramid walking about on legs, as if a bloated frog had been dressed up in European clothes. His wide sallow face was freshly shaved and had a slightly greasy look around the chin. Although he wore Western clothes, cut by the best tailors in London, the saloon of his yacht, in which he was walking about, was decorated entirely in the Oriental style, which was the only one in which he felt truly comfortable. The rugs on the floor were Bokhara and Shiraz, virtually priceless; the tables ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl; the couches
low, covered with dark silk brocades, heavily strewn with cushions. Even the prosaic portholes were framed with embroidered hangings and barred with iron grilles so that they should not clash with the atmosphere, and the dim concealed lights left corners full of shadows. Osman, in his dinner jacket and white starched shirt front, fitted into those surroundings with a paradoxical effect, like an ardent nudist clinging to his straw hat and pince-nez; but he was incapable of perceiving the incongruity.

  He was preening himself before a mirror, a half emptied glass in one hand, the other smoothing an imperceptible crease out of his bow tie, a thin oval cigarette smouldering between his lips, when he heard the approaching sputter of a motor launch. He listened in immobile expectancy and heard the engine cut off and the sound of voices. Then the Arab seaman, Ali, knocked on the door and opened it, and Laura Berwick stood in the entrance.

  Abdul Osman saw her in the mirror, from which he had not moved; and for a second or two he did not stir. His veins raced with the sudden concrete knowledge of triumph. Cold-blooded ? The corners of his mouth lifted fractionally, wrinkling up his eyes. At their very first meeting, the formal touch of her hand had filled him with a hunger like raging furnaces: now, seeing her gloriously modelled face and shoulders standing out brilliantly pale in the dark doorway, his heart pounded molten flame through his body.

  He turned slowly, spreading out one arm in a grandi­ose gesture.

  "So you have come-my beautiful white rose!"

  Laura Berwick smiled hesitantly. The room was full of the peculiarly dry choky scent of sandalwood. Every­thing in her recoiled in disgust from its ornately exotic gloom. It seemed unhealthy, suffocating, heavy with an aura of horribly secret indulgence, like the slack puffy body of the man who was feeding his eyes on her. She was glad that Toby had come with her-his clear-cut Spartan cleanness was like an antiseptic.