Knight Templar, or The Avenging Saint s-4 Page 20

  "I believe I owe you my life, Mr. Templar," he said steadily; but the Saint's nod was curt.

  "You're welcome."

  "I'm not used to these things," Lessing said; "and I find I'm not fitted for them. I suppose you can't help despising me. I can only say that I agree with you. And I should like to apologize."

  For a long moment the Saint looked at him, but Lessing met the clear blue gaze without flinching. And then Simon gripped the millionaire's arm.

  "The others are waiting for us," he said. "I'll talk to you as we go."

  They passed out of the door; and the Saint, glancing back, saw a man huddled in one corner of the hall, very still. By the lodge gates, a little while before, he had seen another man, just as still. And, later, he told Roger Conway that those two men were dead. "You want to be careful how you bash folks with the blunt end of a gat," said the Saint. "It's so dreadfully easy to stave in their skulls." But he never told Roger what he said to Sir Isaac Lessing in the small hours of that morning as they walked across the landing field under the stars.

  2

  "AND SO WE LEAVE YOU," said the Saint.

  He had been busy for a short time performing some obscure operation with the rope that Sonia Delmar had brought; but now he came round the aëroplane into the light of the lantern, buckling the strap of his helmet. Lessing waited a little way apart; but Simon called him, and he came up and joined the group.

  "We'll meet you in London," said the Saint. "As soon as we're off you'd better take Sonia down to the station and wait there for the first train. I don't think you'll have any trouble; but if you do it shouldn't be difficult to deal with it. There's nothing you can be held for. But for God's sake don't say anything about Angel Face or this house—I'd as soon trust that village cop to look after Angel Face as I'd leave my favourite white mouse under the charge of a hungry cat. When you get to town I expect you'll want some sleep, but you'll find us in Upper Berkeley Mews this evening. Sonia knows the place."

  Lessing nodded.

  "Good luck," he said, and held out his hand.

  Simon crushed it in a clasp of steel.

  He moved away, held up his handkerchief for a moment to check the wind, and went to clear the chocks from under the wheels. Then he climbed into the front cockpit and plugged his telephones into the rubber connection. His voice boomed through the speaking tube.

  "All set, Roger?"

  "All set."

  The Saint looked back.

  He saw Roger catch the girl's hand to his lips; and then she tore herself away. And with that last glimpse of her, the Saint settled his goggles over his eyes and pushed the stick forward; and the tumult of the engine rose to a howl as he threw open the throttle and they began to jolt forward over the grass.

  Not quite so damned easy, taking off on a dark night, with the Lord knew what at the end of the run. . . . But he kept the tail up grimly until he had got his full flying speed, and then eased the stick back as quickly as he dared. . . . The bump­ing lessened, ceased altogether; they rushed smoothly through the air. . . . Looking over the side, he saw a black feather of tree-top slip by six feet below, and grinned his relief. Turning steeply to the west, he saw a tiny speck of light in the darkness beyond his wing tip. The lantern. . . . And then the machine came level again, and went racing through the night in a gentle climb.

  The stinging swiftness of the upper air was new life to him. A little while ago he had been weary to death, though no one had known: but now he felt shoutingly fit for the adventure of his life. It might have been because of the fresh hope he had found when there had seemed to be no hope. . . . For he had his chance; and, if human daring and skill and sinew counted for anything, he would not fail. And so the work would be done, and life would go on, and there would be other things to see and new songs to sing. Battle, murder, and sudden death, he had had them all—full measure, pressed down, running over. And her had loved them for their own sake. . . . And his follies he had had, temp­tations, nonsense, fool's paradise and fool's hell; and those also had gone over. And now a vow had been fulfilled, and much good done, and a great task was near its end; but there must be other things.

  "For the song and the sword and the pipes of Pan

  Are birthrights sold to a usurer;

  But I am the last lone highwayman,

  And lam the last adventurer."

  Not even all that he had done was a destiny; there must always be other things. So long as the earth turned for the marching seasons, and the stars hung in the sky, for so long there would be other things. There was neither climax nor anti­climax: a full life had no place for such trivial theatricalities. A full life was made up of all that life had to offer; it was complete, taking every­thing without fear and giving everything without favour; and wherever it ended it would always be whole. So it would go on. To fight and kill one day, to rescue the next; to be rich one day, and to be a beggar the next; to sin one day, and to do something heroic the next—so might a man's sins be forgiven. And there was so much that he had not done. He hadn't walked in the gardens of Monte Carlo, immaculate in evening dress, and he hadn't tramped from one end of Europe to the other in the oldest clothes he could find. He hadn't been a beachcomber on a South Sea island, or built a house with his own hands, or read the lessons in a church, or been to Timbuktu, or been married, or cheated at cards, or learned to talk Chinese, or shot a sitting rabbit, or driven a Ford, or. . . Hell! Was there ever an end? And everything that a man could do must enrich him in some way, and for everything that he did not do his life must be for ever poorer. . . .

  So, as the aëroplane fled westwards across the sky, and the sky behind it began to pale with the promise of dawn, the Saint found a strange peace of heart; and he laughed. . . .

  His course was set unerringly. In the old days there had been hardly an inch of England over which he had not flown; and he had no need of maps. As the silver in the sky spread wanly up the heavens, the country beneath him was slowly lighted for his eyes; and he began to school Roger in a difficult task.

  "You have handled the controls before, haven't you, old dear?" he remarked coolly; and an unenthusiastic reply came back to him.

  "Only for a little while."

  "Then you've got about half an hour to learn to handle them as if you'd been born in the air!"

  Roger Conway said things—naughty and irrel­evant things, which do not belong here. And the Saint smiled.

  "Come on," he said. "Let's see you do a gentle turn."

  After a pause, the machine heeled over drunkenly. . . .

  "Verminous," said the Saint scathingly. "You're too rough on that rudder. Try to imagine that you're not riding a bicycle. And don't use the stick as if you were stirring porridge. . . . Now we'll do one together." They did. "And now one to the left. . . ."

  For ten minutes the instruction went on.

  "I guess you ought to be fairly safe on that," said the Saint at the end of that time. "Keep the turns gentle, and you won't hurt yourself. I'm sorry I haven't time to tell you all about spins, so if you get into one I'm afraid you'll just have to die. Now we'll take the glide."

  Then Roger was saying, unhappily: "What's the idea of all this, Saint?"

  "Sorry," said the Saint, "but I'm afraid you'll be in sole charge before long. I'm going to be busy."

  He explained why; and Roger's gasp of horror came clearly through the telephones.

  "But how the hell am I going to get down, Saint?"

  "Crash in the Thames," answered Simon succinctly. "Glide down to a nice quiet spot, just as you've been taught, undo your safety belt, flatten out gently when you're near the water, and pray. It's not our aëroplane, anyway."

  "It's my life," said Roger gloomily.

  "You won't hurt yourself, sonny boy. Now, wake up and try your hand at this contour chasing. ..."

  And the nose of the machine went down, with a sudden scream of wires. The ground, luminous now with the cold pallor of the sky before sunrise, heaved up deliriously to
meet them. Roger's head sang with a rush of blood, and he seemed to have left his stomach about a thousand feet behind. ... Then the stick stroked back between his legs, his stomach flopped nauseatingly down towards his seat, and he felt slightly sick. . . .

  "Is it always as bad as that?" he inquired faintly.

  "Not if you don't come down so fast," said the Saint cheerfully. "That was just to save time. . . . Now, you simply must get used to this low flying. It's only a matter of keeping your head and going light on the controls." The aëroplane shot between two trees, with approximately six inches to spare beyond either wing, and a flock of sheep stampeded under their wheels. "You're flying her, Roger! Let's skim this next hedge. . . . No, you're too high. I said skim, not skyrocket." The stick went forward a trifle. "That's better. . . . Now miss this fence by about two feet. . . . No, that was nearer ten feet. Try to do better at the next, but don't go to the other extreme and take the undercarriage off. . . . That's more like it! You were only about four feet up that time. If you can get that distance fixed in your eye, you'll be absolutely all right. Now do the same thing again. . . . Good! Now up a bit for these trees. Try to miss them by the same distance—it'll be good practice for you. ..."

  And Roger tried. He tried as he had never before tried anything in his life, for he knew how much depended on him. And the Saint urged him on, speaking all the time in the same tone of quiet encouragement, grimly trying to crowd a month's instruction into a few minutes. And somehow he achieved results. Roger was getting the idea; he was getting that most essential thing, the feel of the machine; and he had started off with the greatest of all blessings—a cool head and an instinctive judgment. It was much later when he found a patch of gray hair on each of his temples. . . .

  And so, for the rest of that flight, they worked on together, with the Saint glancing from time to time at his watch, yet never varying the patient steadiness of his voice.

  And then the time came when the Saint said that the instruction must be over, hit or miss; and he took over the controls again. They soared up in a swift climb; and, as the fields fell away beneath them, a shaft of light from the shy rim of the sun caught them like a fantastic spotlight, and the aeroplane was turned to a hurtling jewel of silver and gold in the translucent gulf of the sky.

  3

  "DOWN THERE, on your right!" cried the Saint; and Roger looked over where the Saint's arm pointed.

  He saw the fields laid out underneath them like a huge unrolled map. The trees and little houses were like the toys that children play with, building their villages on a nursery floor. And over that grotesque vision of a puny world seen as an idle god might see it, a criss-cross of roads and lanes sprawled like a sparse muddle of strings, and a railway line was like a knife-cut across the icing of a cake, and down the railway line puffed the tiniest of toy trains.

  The aëroplane swung over in a steep bank, and the map seemed to slide up the sky until it stood like a wall at their wing tip; and the Saint spoke again.

  "Hermann's about twenty miles away, but that doesn't give us much time at seventy miles an hour. So you've got to get it over quickly, Roger. If you can do your stuff as you were doing it just now, there's simply nothing can go wrong. Don't get excited, and just be a wee bit careful not to stall when my weight comes off. I'm not quite sure what the effect will be."

  "And suppose—suppose you don't bring it off?"

  They were flying to meet the toy train now.

  "If I miss, Roger, the only thing I can ask you to do is to try to land farther up the line. You'll crash, of course, but if you turn your petrol off first you may live to tell the tale. But whether you try it or not is up to you."

  "I'll try it, Saint, if I have to."

  "Good scout."

  They had passed over the train; and then again they turned steeply, and went in pursuit.

  And the Saint's calm voice came to Roger's ears with a hint of reckless laughter somewhere in its calm.

  "You've got her, old Roger. I'm just going to get out. So long, old dear, and the best of luck."

  "Good luck, Simon."

  And Roger Conway took over the controls.

  And then he saw the thing that he will never forget. He saw the Saint climb out of the cockpit in front of him, and saw him stagger on the wing as the wind caught him and all but tore him from his precarious hold. And then the Saint had hold of a strut with one hand, and the rope that he had fixed with the other, and he was backing towards the leading edge of the wing. Roger saw him smile, the old incomparable Saintly smile. . . . And then the Saint was on his knees; then his legs had disap­peared from view; then there was only his head and shoulders and two hands. . . . one hand .... And the Saint was gone.

  Roger put the stick gently forward.

  He looked back over the side as he did so, in a kind of sick terror that he would see a foolish spread-eagle shape dwindling down into the unrolled map four thousand feet below; but he saw nothing. And then he had eyes only for the train.

  Hit or miss. ...

  And Simon Templar also watched the train.

  He dangled at the end of his rope, like a spider on a thread, ten feet below the silver and gold fuselage. One foot rested in a loop that he had knotted for himself before they started; his hands were locked upon the rope itself. And the train was coming nearer.

  The wind lashed him with invisible whips, bil­lowing his coat, fighting him with savage flailing fingers. It was an effort to breathe; to hold on at all was a battle. And he was supposed to be resting there. He had deliberately taught Roger to fly low, much lower than was necessary, because that extreme was far safer than the possibility of being trailed along twenty feet above the carriage roofs. When the time came he would slip down the rope, hang by his arms, and lei go as soon as he had the chance.

  And that time was not far distant. Roger was diving rather steeply, with his engine full on. . . . But the train was also moving. ... At two hundred feet the Saint guessed that they were overtaking the train at about twenty miles an hour. He ought to have told Roger about that. . . . But then Roger must have seen the mistake also, for he throttled the engine down a trifle, and they lost speed. And they were drifting lower. . . .

  With a brief prayer, the Saint twitched his foot out of the stirrup and went down the rope hand over hand.

  "Glory!" thought the Saint. "If the fool stalls—if he tries to cut his speed down by bringing the stick back. . ."

  But they weren't stalling. They were keeping their height for a moment; then they dipped straightly, gaining on the train at about fifteen miles an hour. . . no, ten. . . . And the hindmost carriage slipped under the Saint's feet—a dozen feet under them.

  There were only three coaches on the train.

  But they were dropping quickly now—Roger was contour-chasing like an ace! He wasn't dead centre, though. . . .A shade to one side. . . . "Just a touch of left rudder!" cried the Saint helplessly; for one of his feet had scraped the outside edge of a carriage roof, and they were still going lower. . . . And then, somehow, it hap­pened just as if Roger could have heard him: the Saint was clear over the roof of the leading coach, and his knees and arms were bent to keep his feet off it. . . .

  And he let go.

  The train seemed to tear away from under him; his left hand crashed into a projection, and went numb; and the roof became red-hot and scorched his legs. He felt himself slithering towards the side, and flung out his sound right hand blindly. ... He caught something like a handle. . . held on. . . and the slipping stopped with a jar that sent a twinge of agony stabbing through his shoulder.

  He lay there gasping, dumbly bewildered that he should still be alive.

  For a full minute. . . .

  And then the meaning of it filtered into his understanding; and he laughed softly, absurdly, a laughter queerly close to tears.

  For the work was done.

  Slowly, in a breathless wonder, he turned his head. The aëroplane was turning, coming back towards him, alongside the
train, low down. And a face looked out, helmeted, with its big round goggles masking all expression and giving it the appearance of some macabre gargoyle; but all that could be seen of the face was as white as the morning sky.

  Simon waved his injured hand; and, as the aëroplane swept by in a droning thunder of noise, the snowy flutter of a handkerchief broke out against its silver and gold. And so the aëroplane passed, rising slowly as it went towards the north, with the sunrise striking it like a banner unfurled.

  And five minutes later, in a strange and mon­strous contrast to the flamboyant plumage of the great metal bird that was swinging smoothly round into the dawn, a strained and tatterdemalion figure came reeling over the tender of the swaying locomotive; and the two men in the cab, who had been watching him from the beginning, were there to catch him as he fell into their arms.

  "You come outa that airyplane?" blurted one of them dazedly; and Simon Templar nodded.

  He put up a filthy hand and smeared the blood out of his eyes.

  "I came to tell you to stop the train," he said. "There are two bombs on the line."

  4

  THE SAINT RESTED where they had laid him down. He had never known what it was to be so utterly weary. All his strength seemed to have ebbed out of him, now that it had served for the supreme effort. He felt that he had not slept for a thousand years. . . .

  All around him there was noise. He heard the hoarse roar of escaping steam, the whine of brakes, the fading clatter of movement, the jolt and hiss of the stop. In the sudden silence he heard the far, steady drone of the aëroplane filling the sky. Then there were voices, running feet, ques­tions and answers mingling in an indecipherable murmur. Someone shook him by the shoulder, but at that moment he felt too tired to rouse, and the man moved away.

  And then, presently, he was shaken again, more insistently. A cool wet cloth wiped his face, and he heard a startled exclamation. The aëroplane seemed to have gone, though he had not heard its humming die away: he must have passed out altogether for a few seconds. Then a glass was pressed to his lips; he gulped, and spluttered as the neat spirit rawed his throat. And he opened his eyes.