The Saint Closes the Case Read Free Page B

an opinion on world
affairs.
    “If you live for another six
months,” he said, “I shall ex pect to see you in
uniform. Or will you conscientiously ob ject?”
    Simon tapped a cigarette deliberately on his
thumbnail.
    “You mean that?”
    “I’m desperately serious. We’re nearer to
these things than the rest of the public, and we see them coming first. In
an other few months the rest of England will see it coming. A lot of funny
things have been happening lately.”
    Simon waited, suddenly keyed up to interest;
and Barney Malone sucked thoughtfully at his pipe, and presently
went on:
    “In the last month, three foreigners
have been arrested, tried, and imprisoned for offences against the Official
Secrets Act. In other words, espionage. During the same period, four
Englishmen have been similarly dealt with in different parts of Europe. The
foreign governments concerned have dis owned the men we’ve
pinched; but since a government always disowns its spies as
soon as they get into trouble, on principle, no one ever believes
it. Similarly, we have disclaimed the four Englishmen, and,
naturally, nobody believes us, either—and yet I happen to know
that it’s true. If you appreciate really subtle jokes, you might think that one
over, and laugh next time I see you.”
    The Saint went home in a thoughtful mood.
    He had a genius that was all his own—an
imaginative gen ius that would take a number of ordinary facts, all of
which seemed to be totally unconnected, and none of which, to the eye of
anyone but himself, would have seemed very remark able, and read them
into a sign-post pointing to a mystery. Adventure came to him
not so much because he sought it as because he brazenly expected it. He
believed that life was full of adventure, and he went forward in the full
blaze and surge of that belief. It has been said of a man very much like
Simon Templar that he was “a man born with the sound of trumpets in his
ears”; that saying might almost equally well have been said of the
Saint, for he also, like Michael Paladin, had heard the sound of the
trumpet, and had moved ever afterwards in the echoes of the
sound of the trumpet, in such a mighty clamour of romance that at least one of
his friends had been moved to call him the last hero, in
desperately earnest jest.
    “From battle, murder, and sudden death,
Good Lord, deliver us!’ ” he quoted once. “How can any live man ask
for that? Why, they’re meat and drink—they’re the things that make life
worth living! Into battle, murder, and sudden death, Good Lord,
deliver me up to the neck! That’s what I say… .”
    Thus spoke the Saint, that man of superb
recklessness and strange heroisms and impossible ideals; and went on to
show, as few others of his age have shown, that a man inspired can swashbuckle
as well with cloak and stick as any cavalier of history with cloak and
sword, that there can be as much chiv alry in the setting of a modern laugh
as there can ever have been in the setting of a medieval lance, that
a true valour and venture finds its way to fulfilment, not so much through
the kind of world into which it happens to be born, as through the heart
with which it lives.
    But even he could never have guessed into what
a strange story this genius and this faith of his were to bring
him.
    On what he had chanced to read, and what
Barney Malone had told him, the Saint built in his mind a tower of
possibili ties whose magnitude, when it was completed, awed even
himself. And then, because he had the priceless gift of taking the products of
his vivid imagination at their practical worth, he filed the fancy away
in his mind as an interesting curiosity, and thought no more
about it.
    Too much sanity is sometimes dangerous.
    Simon Templar was self-conscious about his
imagination. It was the one kind of self-consciousness he had, and certainly
he kept it a secret which no one would have suspected. Those who knew
him said that he was reckless to the point of vain