'Not when I've been listening.'
'It's not a matter of listening,' said the Saint. 'That man Hallin is a sort of public institution. Everyone knows about his luck. Now, I should think I've had as much luck as anyone, and I've always been much bigger news than Hallin will ever be, but nobody's ever made a song and dance about that side of my claim to immortality.'
'They've had other things to say about you'
The Saint sighed He was still frowning.
'I know,' he said. 'But I have hunches, old darling. Let me say here and now that I have absolutely nothing against Hallin. I've never heard a word against him, I haven't one reasonable suspicion about him, I haven't one single solitary fact on which I could base a suspicion. But I'll give you one very subtle joke to laugh about. Why should a man boast that he can't die?'
'He didn't make the boast.'
'Well--I wonder. . . . But he certainly earned the name, and he's never given it a chance to be forgotten. He's capitalized it arid played it up for all it's worth. So I can give you an even more subtle joke. It goes like this: 'For whosoever will save his life shall lose it. . . .''
Patricia looked at him curiously. If she had not known the Saint so well, she would have looked at him impatiently; but she knew him very well.
She said: 'Let's hear what you mean, lad. I can't follow all your riddles.''
'And I can't always give the answers,' said the Saint.
His chair tilted back as he lounged in it. He inhaled intently from his cigarette, and gazed at the ceiling through a cloud of smoke,
'A hunch,' said the Saint, 'isn't a thing that goes easily to words. Words are so brutally logical, and a hunch is the reverse of logic. And a hunch, in a way, is a riddle; but it has no answer. When you get an answer, it isn't the answer to a riddle, or the answer to a hunch; it's the end of a story. I don't know if that's quite clear.'
'It isn't,' said Patricia.
The Saint blew three smoke rings as if he had a personal grudge against them.
'My great tragedy, sweetheart,' he remarked modestly, 'is that I'm completely and devastatingly sane. And the world we live in is not sane. All the insanities of the world used to worry me crazy, without exception--once upon a time. But now, in my old age, I'm more discriminating. Half the things in that newspaper, which I'm pleased to say I've never read from end to end, are probably of-fenses against sanity. And if you come to a rag like the Daily Record, about ninety-eight percent of its printed area is devoted to offenses against sanity. And the fact has ceased to bother me. I swear to you, Pat, that I could read a Daily Record right through without groaning aloud more than twice. That's my discrimination. When I read that an obscure biologist in Minneapolis has said that men would easily live to be three hundred if they nourished themselves on an exclusive diet of green bananas and vaseline, I'm merely bored. The thing is a simple of tense against sanity. But when I'm always hearing about a Man Who Cannot Die, it annoys me. The thing is more than a simple offense against sanity. It sticks up and makes me stare at it. It's like finding one straight black line in a delirious patchwork of colours. It's more. It's like going to a menagerie and finding a man exhibited in one of the cages. Just because a Man Who Cannot Die isn't a simple insult to insanity. He's an insult to a much bigger thing. He's an insult to humanity.'
'And where does this hunch lead to?' asked Patricia, practically.
Simon shrugged.
'I wish I were sure,' he said,'
Then, suddenly, he sat upright.
'Do you know,' he said, in a kind of incomprehensible anger, 'I've a damned good mind to see if I can't break that man's record! He infuriates me. And isn't he asking for it? Isn't he just asking someone to take up the challenge and see what can be done about it?'
The girl regarded him in bewilderment.
'Do you mean you want to try to kill him?' she asked blankly.
'I don't,' said the Saint 'I mean I want to try to make him live.'
For a long time Patricia gazed at him in silence. And then, with a little shake of her head, half laughing, half perplexed, she stood up,
'You've been reading too much G.K. Chesterton,' she said. 'And you can't do anything about Hallin to-day, anyway. We're late enough as it is.'
The Saint smiled slowly, and rose to his feet.
'You're dead right, as usual, old dear,' he murmured amiably. 'I'll go and get out the car.'
And he went; but he did not forget Miles Hallin. And he never forgot his hunch about the man who could not die. For the Saint's hunches were nearly always unintelligible to anyone but himself, and always very real and intelligible to him; and all at once he had realized that in Miles Hallin he was going to find a strange story--he did not then know how strange.
Miles Hallin, as the Saint had complained, really was something very like a national institution. He was never called wealthy, but he always seemed to be able to indulge his not inexpensive hobbies without stint. It was these hobbies which had confirmed him in the reputation that Simon Templar so much disliked.
Miles Hallin was so well known that the newspapers never even troubled to mention the fact. Lesser lights in the news, Simon had discovered, were invariably accounted for. They were 'the famous cricketer' or 'the well-known novelist' or perhaps, with a more delicate conceit, 'the actor.' Simon Templar always had an uneasy feeling that these explanations were put in as a kind of covering each-way bet--in case the person referred to should become well known without anyone knowing why. But Miles Hallin was just--Miles Hallin.
Simon Templar, even in his superlatively casual acquaintance with the newspapers, had bad every opportunity to become familiar with the face of Miles Hallin, though he had never seen the man in the flesh. That square-jawed, pugnacious profile, with the white teeth and crinkled eyes and flashing smile, had figured in more photographs than the Saint cared to remember. Mr. Miles Hallin standing beside the wreckage of his Furillac at Le Mans-- Mr. Miles Hallin being taken on board a tug after his speedboat Red Lady had capsized in the Solent --Mr. Miles Hallin after his miraculous escape during the King's Cup Air Race, when his Eiton 'Dragon' caught fire at five thousand feet--Mr. Miles Hallin filming a charging buffalo in Tanganyika--Simon Templar knew them all. Miles Hallin did everything that a well-to-do sportsman could possibly include in the most versatile repertory, and all his efforts seemed to have the single aim of a spectacular suicide; but always he had escaped death by the essential hair's breadth that had given him his name. No one could say that it was Miles Hallin's fault.
Miles Hallin had survived being mauled by a tiger, and had killed an infuriated gorilla with a sheath knife. Miles Hallin had performed in bull fights before the King of Spain. Miles Hallin had gone into a tank and wrestled with a crocodile to oblige a Hollywood movie director. Miles Hallin had done everything dangerous that the most fertile imagination could conceive--and then some. So far as was known, Miles Hallin couldn't walk a tight rope; but the general impression was that if Miles Hallin could have walked a tight rope he would have walked a tight rope stretched across the crater of Vesuvius as a kind of appetizer before breakfast.
Miles Hallin bothered the Saint through the whole of that week-end.
Simon Templar, as he was always explaining, and usually explaining in such a way that his audience felt very sorry for him, had a sensitivity for anything the least bit out of the ordinary that was as tender as a gouty toe. The lightest touch, a touch that no one else would have felt, made him jump a yard. And when he boasted of his subtle discriminations, though he boasted flippantly, he spoke no less than the truth. That gift and nothing else had led him to fully half his adventures--that uncanny power of drawing a faultless line between the things that were merely eccentric and the things that were definitely wrong. And Miles Hallin struck him, in a way that he could not explain by any ordinary argument, as a thing that was definitely wrong.
Yet it so chanced, this time, that the Saint came to his story by a pure fluke--another and a wilder fluke than the one that had merely introduced him to a man whose brother had been a friend of Hallin's. But for that fluke, the Saint might to this day have been scowling at the name of Miles Hallin in the same hopeless puzzlement. And yet the Saint felt no surprise about the fluke. He had come to accept these accidents as a natural part of his life, in the same way that any other man accepts the accident of finding a newspaper on his breakfast table, with a sense (if he meditated it at all) that he was only seeing the inevitable outcome of a complicated organization of whose workings he knew nothing, but whose naturally continued existence he had never thought to question. These things were ordained.
