The Saint and the Happy Highwayman s-21 Read online

  Mercer recovered his voice first.

  "That's right," he said jerkily. "You two have won plenty from me other nights. Now we've got some of it back. Let's get out of here, Templar."

  They walked along Ocean Drive, past the variegated modernistic shapes of the hotels, with the rustle of the surf in their ears.

  "How much did you win on that last hand?" asked the young man.

  "About fourteen thousand dollars," said the Saint contentedly.

  Mercer said awkwardly: "That's just about what I'd lost to them before. ... I don't know how I can ever thank you for getting it back. I'd never have had the nerve to do it alone. . . . And then when Yoring turned up that straight flush--I don't know why--I had an awful moment thinking you'd made a mistake."

  The Saint put a cigarette in his mouth and struck his lighter.

  "I don't make a lot of mistakes," he said calmly. "That's where a lot of people go wrong. It makes me rather tired, sometimes. I suppose it's just professional pride, but I hate to be taken for a mug. And the funny thing is that with my reputation there are always people trying it. I suppose they think that my reactions are so easy to predict that it makes me quite a setup for any smart business." The Saint sighed, deploring the inexplicable optimism of those who should know better. "Of course I knew that a switch like that was coming --the whole idea was to make me feel so confident of the advantage I had with those glasses that I'd be an easy victim for any ordinary cardsharping. And then, of course, I wasn't supposed to be able to make any complaint because that would have meant admitting that I was cheating, too. It was a grand idea, Eddie-- at least you can say that for it."

  Mercer had taken several steps before all the implications of what the Saint had said really hit him.

  "But wait a minute," he got out. "How do you mean they knew you were wearing trick glasses ?"

  "Why else do you imagine they planted that guy on the train to pretend he was J. J. Naskill?" asked the Saint patiently. "That isn't very bright of you, Eddie. Now, I'm nearly always bright. I was so bright that I smelt a rat directly you lugged that pack of marked cards out of your beach robe--that was really carrying it a bit too far, to have them all ready to produce after you'd got me to listen in on your little act with Josephine. I must say you all played your parts beautifully, otherwise; but it's little details like that that spoil the effect. I told you at the time that you were a mug," said the Saint reprovingly. "Now why don't you paddle off and try to comfort Yoring and Kilgarry? I'm afraid they're going to be rather hurt when they hear that you didn't manage to at least make the best of a bad job and get me to hand you my winnings."

  But Mercer did not paddle off at once. He stared at the Saint for quite a long time, understanding why so many other men who had once thought themselves clever had learned to regard that cool and smiling privateer as something closely allied to the devil himself. And wondering, as they had, why the death penalty for murder had ever been invented.

  IX THE MAN WHO LIKED ANTS

  "I WONDER what would have happened if you had gone into a respectable business, Saint," Ivar Nordsten remarked one afternoon.

  Simon Templar smiled at him so innocently that for an instant his nickname might almost have seemed justified--if it had not been for the faint lazy twinkle of unsaintly mockery that stirred at the back of his blue eyes.

  "The question is too farfetched, Ivar. You might as well speculate about what would have happened if I'd been a Martian or a horse."

  They sat on the veranda of the house of Ivar Nordsten--whose name was not really Ivar Nordsten, but who was alive that day and the master of fabulous millions only because the course of one of the Saint's lawless escapades had once crossed his path at a time when death would have seemed a happy release. He of all living men should have had no wish to change the history of that twentieth-century Robin Hood, whose dark reckless face could be found photographed in half the police archives of the world, and whose gay impudence of outlawry had in its time set the underworlds of five continents buzzing like nests of infuriated wasps. But in that mood of idle fantasy which may well come with the after-lunch contentment of a warm Florida afternoon, Nordsten would have put forward almost any preposterous premise that might give him the pleasure of listening to his friend.

  "It isn't as farfetched as that," he said. "You will never admit it, but you have many respectable instincts."

  "But I have so many more disreputable ones to keep them under control," answered the Saint earnestly. "And it's always been so much more amusing to indulge the disreputable instincts. . . . No, Ivar, I mustn't let you make a paragon out of me. If I were quite cynically psychoanalyzing myself, I should probably say that the reason why I only soak the more obvious excrescences on the human race is because it makes everything okay with my respectable instincts and lets them go peacefully to sleep. Then I can turn all my disreputable impulses loose on the mechanical problem of soaking this obvious excrescence in some satisfyingly novel and juicy manner, and get all the fun of original sin out of it without any qualms of conscience."

  "But you contradict yourself. The mere fact that you speak in terms of what you call 'an obvious excrescence on the human race' proves that you have some moral standards by which you judge him, and that you have some idealistic interest in the human race itself."

  "The human race," said the Saint sombrely, "is a repulsive, dull, bloated, ill-conditioned and ill-favoured mass of dimly conscious meat, the chief justification for whose existence is that it provides a contrasting background against which my beauty and spiritual perfections can shine with a lustre only exceeded by your own."

  "You have a natural modesty which I had never suspected," Nordsten observed gravely, and they both laughed. "But," he added, "I think you will get on well with Dr Sardon."

  "Who is he?"

  "A neighbour of mine. We are dining with him tonight."

  Simon frowned.

  "I warned you that I was travelling without any dress clothes," he began, but Nordsten shook his head maliciously.

  "Dr Sardon likes dress clothes even less than you do. And you never warned me that you were coming here at all. So what could I do? I accepted his invitation a week ago, so when you arrived I could only tell Sardon what had happened. Of course he insisted that you must come with me. But I think he will interest you."

  The Saint sighed resignedly and swished the highball gently around in his glass so that the ice clinked.

  "Why should I be interested in any of your neighbours?" he protested. "I didn't come here to commit any crimes; and I'm sure all these people are as respectable as millionaires can be."

  "Dr Sardon is not a millionaire. He is a very brilliant biologist."

  "What else makes him interesting?"

  "He is very fond of ants," said Nordsten seriously, and the Saint sat up.

  Then he finished his drink deliberately and put down the glass.

  "Now I know that this climate doesn't agree with you," he said. "Let's get changed and go down to the tennis court. I'll put you in your place before we start the evening."

  Nevertheless he drove over to Dr Sardon's house that evening in a mood of open-minded curiosity. Scientists he had known before, men who went down thousands of feet into the sea to look at globigerina ooze and men who devised complicated electrical gadgets in laboratories to manufacture gold; but this was the first time that he had heard of a biologist who was fon,d of ants. Everything that was out of the ordinary was prospective material for the Saint. It must be admitted that in simplifying his own career to elementary equations by which obvious excrescences on the human race could be soaked, he did himself less than justice.

  But there was nothing about the square smooth-shaven man who was introduced to him as Dr Sardon to take away the breath of any hardened outlaw. He might perhaps have been an ordinary efficient doctor, possibly with an exclusive and sophisticated practice; more probably he could have been a successful stockbroker, or the manager of any profitable commercial
business. He shook hands with them briskly and almost mechanically, seeming to summarize the Saint in one sweeping glance through his crisp-looking rimless pince-nez.

  "No, you're not a bit late, Mr Nordsten. As a matter of fact I was working until twenty minutes ago. If you had come earlier I should have been quite embarrassed."

  He introduced his niece, a dark slender girl with a quiet and rather aloof beauty which would have been chilling if it had not been relieved by the friendly humour of her brown eyes. About her, Simon admitted, there might certainly have been things to attract the attention of a modern buccaneer.

  "Carmen has been assisting me. She has a very good degree from Columbia."

  He made no other unprompted reference to his researches, and Simon recognized him as the modern type of scientist whose carefully cultivated pose of matter-of-fact worldliness is just as fashionable an affectation as the mystical and bearded eccentricity of his predecessors used to be. Dr Sardon talked about politics, about his golf handicap and about the art of Otto Soglow. He was an entertaining and effective conversationalist but he might never have heard of such a thing as biology until towards the close of dinner Ivar Nordsten skilfully turned a discussion of gardening to the subject of insect pests.

  "Although, of course," he said, "you would not call them that."

  It was strange to see the dark glow that came into Sardon's eyes.

  "As a popular term," he said in his deep vibrant voice, "I suppose it is too well established for me to change it. But it would be much more reasonable for the insects to talk about human pests."

  He turned to Simon.

  "I expect Mr Nordsten has already warned you about the--bee in my bonnet," he said; but he used the phrase without smiling. "Do you by any chance know anything about the subject?"

  "I had a flea once," said the Saint reminiscently. "I called him Goebbels. But he left me."

  "Then you wrould be surprised to know how many of the most sensational achievements of man were surpassed by the insects hundreds of years ago without any artificial aids." The finger tips of his strong nervous hands played a tattoo against each other, "You talk about the Age of Speed and Man's Conquest of the Air; and yet the fly Cephenomia, the swiftest living creature, can outpace the fastest of your boasted aeroplanes. What is the greatest scientific marvel of the century? Probably you would say radio. But Count Arco, the German radio expert, has proved the existence of a kind of wireless telegraphy, or telepathy, between certain species of beetle, which makes nothing of a separation of miles. Lakhovsky claims to have demonstrated that this is common to several other insects. When the Redemanni termites build their twenty-five-foot conical towers topped with ten-foot chimneys they are performing much greater marvels of engineering than building an Empire State Building. To match them, in proportion to our size, we should have to put up skyscrapers four thousand feet high-- and do it without tools."

  "I knew the ants would come into it," said Nordsten sotto voce.

  Sardon turned on him with his hot piercing gaze.

  "Termites are not true ants--the term 'white ants' is a misnomer. Actually they are related to the cockroach. I merely mentioned them as one of the most remarkable of the lower insects. They have a superb social organization, and they may even be superior strategists to the true ants, but they were never destined to conquer the globe. The reason is that they cannot stand light and they cannot tolerate temperatures below twenty degrees centigrade. Therefore, their fields of expansion are for ever limited. They are one of Nature's false beginnings. They are a much older species than man, and they have evolved as far as they are likely to evolve. . . . It is not the same with the true ants."

  He leaned forward over the table, with his face white and transfigured as if in a kind of trance.

  "The true ant is the destined ruler of the earth. Can you imagine a state of society in which there was no idleness, no poverty, no unemployment, no unrest? We humans would say that it was an unattainable Utopia; and yet it was in existence among the ants when man was a hairy savage scarcely distinguishable from an ape. You may say that it is incompatible with progress-- that it could only be achieved in the same way that it is achieved by domestic cattle. But the ant has the same instincts which have made man the tyrant of creation in his time. Lasius fuliginosus keeps and milks its own domestic cattle, in the form of plant lice. Polyergus rufescens and Formica sanguined capture slaves and put them to work. Messor barbarus, the harvesting ant, collects and stores grain. The Attiini cultivate mushrooms in underground forcing houses. And all these things are done, not for private gain, but for the good of the whole community. Could man in any of his advances ever boast of that?"

  "But if ants have so many advantages," said the Saint slowly, "and they've been civilized so much longer than man, why haven't they conquered the earth before this?"

  "Because Nature cheated them. Having given them so much, she made them wait for the last essential-- pure physical bulk."

  "The brontosaurus had enough of that," said Nord-sten, "and yet man took its place."

  Sardon's thin lips curled.

  "The difference in size between man and brontosaurus was nothing compared with the difference in size between man and ant. There are limits to the superiority of brain over brawn--even to the superiority of the brain of an ant, which in proportion to its size is twice as large as the brain of a man. But the time is coming . . ."

  His voice sank almost to a whisper, and in the dim light of candles on the table the smouldering luminous-ness of his eyes seemed to leave the rest of his face in deep shadow.

  "With the ant, Nature overreached herself. The ant was ready to take his place at the head of creation before creation was ready for him--before the solar system had progressed far enough to give him the conditions in which his body, and his brain with it, his brain which in all its intrinsic qualities is so much finer than the brain of man, could grow to the brute size at which all its potentialities could be developed. Nevertheless, when the solar system is older, and the sun is red because the white heat of its fire is exhausted, and the red light which will accelerate the growth of all living cells is stronger, the ant will be waiting for his turn. Unless Nature finds a swifter instrument than Time to put right her miscalculation . . ."

  "Does it matter?" asked the Saint lightly, and Sardon's face seemed to flame at him.

  "It matters. That is only another thing which we can learn from the ant--that individual profit and ambition should count for nothing beside more enduring good. Listen. When I was a boy I loved small creatures. Among them I kept a colony of ants. In a glass box. I watched them in their busy lives, I studied them as they built their nest, I saw how they divided their labour and how they lived and died so that their common life could go on. I loved them because they were so much better than everyone else I knew. But the other boys could not understand. They thought I was soft and stupid. They were always tormenting me. One day they found my glass box where the ants lived. I fought them, but there were so many of them. They were big and cruel. They made a fire and they put my box on it, while they held me. I saw the ants running, fighting,

  struggling insanely----" The hushed voice tightened

  as he spoke until it became thin and shrill like a suppressed scream. "I saw them curling up and shrivelling, writhing, tortured. I could hear the hiss of their seething agony in the flames. I saw them going mad, twisting--sprawling--blackening--burning alive before my eyes----"

  "Uncle!"

  The quiet voice of the girl Carmen cut softly across the muted shriek in which the last words were spoken, so quietly and normally that it was only in the contrast that Simon realized that Sardon had not really raised his voice.

  The wild fire died slowly out of Sardon's eyes. For a moment his face remained set and frozen, and then, as if he had only been recalled from a fleeting lapse of attention, he seemed to come awake again with a slight start.

  "Where was I?" he said calmly. "Oh yes. I was speaking about the intel
ligence of ants. ... It is even a mistake to assume, because they make no audible sounds, that they have not just as excellent means of communication as ourselves. Whether they share the telepathic gifts of other insects is a disputed point, but it is certain that in their antennae they possess an idiom which is adequate to all ordinary needs. By close study and observation it has even been possible for us to learn some of the elementary gestures. The work of Karl Escherich . . ."

  He went into details, in the same detached incisive tone in which he had been speaking before his outburst.

  Simon Templar's fingers stroked over the cloth, found a crumb of bread and massaged it gradually into a soft round pellet. He stole a casual glance at the girl. Her aloof oval face was pale, but that might have been its natural complexion; her composure was unaltered. Sardon's outburst might never have occurred, and she might never have had to interrupt it. Only the Saint thought that he saw a shadow of fear moving far down in her eyes.

  Even after Carmen had left the table, and the room was richening with the comfortable aromas of coffee and liqueur, brandy and cigars, Sardon was still riding his hobbyhorse. It went on for nearly an hour, until at one of the rare lulls in the discussion Nordsten said: "All the same, Doctor, you are very mysterious about what this has to do with your own experiments."

  Sardon's hands rested on the table, white and motion less, the fingers spread out.

  "Because I was not ready. Even to my friends I should not like to show anything incomplete. But in the last few weeks I have disposed of my uncertainty. Tonight, if you like, I could show you a little"

  "We should be honoured."

  The flat pressure of Sardon's hands on the table increased as he pushed back his chair and stood up.

  "My workshops are at the end of the garden," he said, and blew out the four candles.

  As they rose and followed him from the room, Nordsten touched the Saint's arm and said in a low voice : "Are you sorry I dragged you out?"