The Saint and Mr. Teal: Formerly Called "Once More the Saint" Read Free Page A

The Saint’s face wore the register of a rapt student of theology absorbing wisdom from an archbishop.
    And yet Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal felt his mouth drying up in spite of the soothing stimulus of spearmint. He had the numbing sensation of fatuity of a man who has embarked on a funny story in the hope of salvaging an extempore after-dinner speech that has been falling progressively flatter with every sentence, and who realizes in the middle of it that it is not going to get a laugh. His own ears began to wince painfully at the awful dampness of the platitudes that were drooling inexplicably out of his own mouth. His voice sounded like the bleat of a lost sheep crying in the wilderness. He wished he had sent someone else to Newhaven.
    “Let me know the worst,” said the Saint. “What are you leading up to? Is the government proposing to offer me a pension and a seat in the House of Lords if I’ll retire?”
    “It isn’t. It’s offering you ten years’ free board and lodging at Parkhurst if you don’t. I shouldn’t want you to make any mistake about it. If you think you’re —”
    Simon waved his hand.
    “If you’re not careful you’ll be repeating yourself, Claud,” he murmured. “Let me make the point for you. So long as I carry on like a little gentleman and go to Sunday school every week, your lordships will leave me alone. But if I should get back any of my naughty old ideas-if anyone sort of died suddenly while I was around, or some half-witted policeman lost sight of a packet of illicit diamonds and wanted to blame it on me-then it’ll be the ambition of every dick in England to lead me straight to the Old Bailey. The long-suffering police of this great country are on their mettle. Britain has awoken. The Great Empire on which the sun never sets —”
    “That’s enough of that,” yapped the detective.
    He had not intended to yap. He should have spoken in a trenchant and paralyzing baritone, a voice ringing with power and determination. Something went wrong with his larynx at the crucial moment.
    He glared savagely at the Saint.
    “I’d like to know your views,” he said.
    Simon Templar stood up. There were seventy-four steel inches of him, a long, lazy uncoiling of easy strength and fighting vitality tapering down from wide, square shoulders. The keen, tanned face of a cavalier smiled down at Teal.
    “Do you really want them, Claud?”
    “That’s what I’m here for.”
    “Then if you want the news straight from the stable, I think that speech of yours would be a knockout at the Mothers’ Union.” The Saint spread out his arms. “I can just see those kindly, wrinkled faces lighting up with the radiant dawn of a new hope-the tired souls wakening again to beauty —”
    “Is that all you’ve got to say?”
    “Very nearly, Claud. You see, your proposition doesn’t tempt me. Even if it had included the pension and the peerage, I don’t think I should have succumbed. It would make life so dull. I can’t expect you to see my point, but there it is.”
    Teal also got to his feet, under the raking twinkle of those very clear blue eyes. There was something in their mockery which he had never understood, which perhaps he would never understand. And against that something which he could not understand, his jaw tightened up in grim belligerence.
    “Very well,” he said. “You’ll be sorry.”
    “I doubt it,” said the Saint.
    On the way back to London, Teal thought of many more brilliant speeches which he could have made, but he had not made any of them. He returned to Scotland Yard in a mood of undiluted acid, which the sarcastic comments of the assistant commissioner did nothing to mellow.
    “To tell you the truth, sir, I never expected anything else,” Teal said seriously. “The Saint’s outside our province, and he always has been. I never imagined anyone could make me believe in the sort of story-book Raffles who goes in for crime for the fun of the thing, but in this