when Mr. Teal had departed the Saint sat down and smoked three cigarettes with entirely unnecessary violence.
Patricia Holm, coming in just after the third of these cigarettes had been hurled through the open window, read his mood at once.
'What is it this time?' she asked.
Simon broke a match into small pieces as if it had done him a grievous injury.
'Teal, Nigel Perry, Miles Hallin,' he answered, comprehensively. 'Also, an old joke about death,'
It was some time before she secured a coherent explanation. The incidents of the night before she had already heard; but he had stated them without adornment, and his manner had encouraged the postponement of questions. Now he told her, in the same blunt manner, about Teal's visit; but she had to wait until after lunch, when the coffee cups were in front of them and the Saint was gently circulating a minute quantity of Napoleon brandy around the bowl of an enormous glass, before she could get him to expound his grievance.
'When I first spoke about Miles Hallin--you remember?--you thought I was raving. I don't want to lay on any of the 'I told you so' stuff; but now you know what you do know, I want you to try and appreciate my point. I know you'll say what anyone else would say--that the whole thing simply boils down to the most unholy fluke. I'm saying it doesn't. The point is that I'm going back far beyond that share business--even beyond poor old Teddy. I'm going back to Nigel's brother, and that little story of the great open spaces that I've heard so much about. I tell you, this just confirms what I thought about that.'
'You didn't say you thought anything about it,' Patricia remarked.
'I wasn't asking to be called a fool,' said the Saint. 'I knew that as things stood I had rather less chance of convincing any sane person than I'd have of climbing the Matterhorn with my hands tied behind me and an elephant in each pocket. But you ought to see the joke now. What would you say was the most eccentric thing about a man who could not die?'
Patricia smiled at him patiently.
'I shouldn't know what to say,' she answered truthfully.
'Why,' said the Saint, with a kind of vast impatience, 'what else should be the most eccentric thing about him but the fact that he can die, and always could? Don't you understand that whatever jokes people make about death, they never make that kind of joke? There are impossibilities that are freakish and funny,-and impossibilities that are freakish and unfunny; pigs with wings belong to the first kind, but men who cannot die belong to the second kind. Now, what could induce a man to pursue that second kind of joke with such a terrible eagerness?'
The girl shrugged.
'It's beyond me, Simon.'
'The answer,' said the Saint, 'is that he knew it wasn't true. Because he'd once looked death in the face-- slow and deliberate death, not the kind that comes with a rush. And he found he was afraid of it.'
'Then that story about Nigel's brother--'
'Perhaps we shall never know the truth of it. But I'm as certain as I've ever been about anything that the story we're told isn't the truth. I'm certain that that was the time when Miles Hallin discovered, not that he could not die, but that he couldn't bear to die. And he saved his life at the expense of his partner.'
'But he's risked his life so often since--'
'I wonder how much of that is the unvarnished truth--how much he engineered, and how much he adorned his stories so as to give the impression he wanted to give? , . . Because I think Miles Hallin is a man in terror. Once, he yielded to his fear; and after that his fear became the keynote of his life, which a fear will become if you yield to it. And he found another fear--the fear of being found out. He was afraid of his own legend. He had to bolster it up, he had to pile miracle upon miracle--only to make one miracle seem possible. He had to risk losing his life in order to save it.'
'But why should he have killed Teddy?-'
The Saint took another cigarette. He gazed across the restaurant with eyes that saw other things.
'One fear breeds another,' he said. 'All things in a man's mind are linked up. If one cog slips, the whole machine is altered. If you will cheat at cards, you will cheat at snakes-and-laddders. Hallin cheated for life; it was quite natural that he should cheat for love. Because Nigel was Moyna's favourite, Hallin had to try and take away the one little thing that gave Nigel a chance. Because Teddy could have discovered the swindle, he killed Teddy. His fear drove him on, as it will keep on driving him on: it's the most ruthless master a man can have. Now, because he saw me with Teddy at Basingstoke, and then saw me last night leaving Nigel's, he will try to kill me. If he thought Nigel believed me, he would try to kill Nigel--that's why I had to tell the story in such a way that I know Nigel wouldn't believe it Even now, Hallin is wondering....'
'But if Nigel had given up the shares without suspecting anything, and then they'd soared up as Teddy said they would--'
'What would that have mattered?'
'Nigel would have known.'
'Known what? Hallin would have said that he sold the shares for the best price he could get, and Nigel would never have thought that it might be a lie. . . . But now--do you remember how I said I wanted to make Hallin live?'
'Yes.'
'That was the test--before I knew any of this. I wanted to see what would happen to him if he put aside his joke. I wanted to know what he. would be like if he became an ordinary mortal man--a man to whom death might not be a terror:, but to whom death was still no joke. And now I know,'
With her chin on her hands, Patricia regarded him. Not as she had regarded him when he had spoken of Miles Hallin before; but with a seriousness that wore a smile.
'I shall never get to the end of your mind, lad,'' she said; and the Saint grinned.
'At the moment,' he murmured, 'I'm enjoying my brandy.'
And he actually did forget Miles Hallin for the rest of that afternoon and evening; for Simon Templar had the gift of taking life as it came--when once he knew from what quarter it might be coming.
His impatience disappeared. It seemed as if that talk over the coffee and brandy had cleared the air for him. He knew that trouble was coming; but that was nothing unusual. He could meet all the trouble in the world with a real enjoyment, now that he had purged his mind of the kind of puzzle that for him was gloom and groping and unalloyed Gehenna. Even the reflection that Miles Hallin had still failed to die did not depress him. He had not loosened that wheel in high hopes of a swift and catastrophic denouement, for he had known how slight was the chance that the wheel would elect to part company with the car at the very moment when Hallin was treading the accelerator flat down to the flooring; the thing had been done on the spur of the moment, more in mischief than anything else, just to pep up the party's future. And it would certainly do that.
As for Teal, and Teal's horrific warnings of what would happen if the Saint should again attract the attention of the law--those were the merest details. They simply made the practical problem more amusing....
So the Saint, over his brandy, swung over to a contentment as genuine and as illogical as his earlier impatience had been, and was happy for the rest of that day, and nearly died that night.
He had danced with Patricia at the May Fair, and he had thought that Patricia looked particularly beautiful; and so presently they strolled home arm in arm through the cool lamplit streets, talking intently and abstractedly about certain things that are nobody's business. And the Saint was saying something or other, or it may have been Patricia who was saying something or other, as they crossed Berkeley Square, but whoever it was never finished the speech.
Some instinct made the Saint look round, and he saw the lights of a car behind them swerve suddenly. An ordinary sight enough, perhaps, on the face of it; but he knew by the same instinct that it was not ordinary. It may have been that he had not forgotten Miles Hallin so completely, after all.
He stopped in his stride, and stooped; and Patricia felt herself swept up in his arms. There was a lamp-post close behind them, and the Saint leaped for it. He heard the screech of brakes and tires before he dared to look round; even then he was in time to see the pillar that sheltered him bend like a reed before the impact of the car; and he moved again, this time to one side, like lightning, as the iron column snapped at the base and came crashing down to the pavement.
Then there was a shout somewhere, and a sound of running feet; and the mutter of the car stopped.
Quietly the Saint set Patricia down again.
