13 The Saint Intervenes (Boodle)

good. Instinctive righteousness glows from me like an inward light. But nobody gives it a chance. What do you suggest?'

'You might go into business.'

'I know. Something safe and respectable, like manufacturing woollen combinations for elderly ladies and lorgnettes. We might throw in a pair of lorgnettes with every suit. You could knit them, and I'd do the fitting—the fitting of the lorgnettes, of course.' Simon raised his glass and drank deeply. 'It's an attractive idea, old darling, but all these schemes involve laying out a lot of capital on which you have to wait such a hell of a long time for a return. Besides, there can't be much of a profit in it. On a rough estimate, the amount of wool required to circumnavigate a fifty-four inch bust ——'

Monty Hayward, who was also present, took out a to­bacco-pouch and began to fill his pipe.

'I had some capital once,' he said reminiscently, 'but it didn't do me much good.'

'How much can you lend me?' asked the Saint hopefully.

Monty brushed stray ends of tobacco from his lap and tested the draught through his handiwork cautiously.

'I haven't got it any more, but I don't think I'd lend it to you if I had,' he said kindly. 'Anyway, the point doesn't arise, because a fellow called Oscar Newdick has got it. Didn't I ever tell you about that?'

The Saint moved his head negatively, and settled deeper into his chair.

'It doesn't sound like you, Monty. D'you mean to say you were hornswoggled ?'

Monty nodded.

'I suppose you might call it that. It happened about six years ago, when I was a bit younger and not quite so wise. It wasn't a bad swindle on the whole, though.' He struck a match and puffed meditatively. 'This fellow Newdick was a bloke I met on the train coming down from the office. He used to get into the same compartment with me three or four times a week, and naturally we took to passing the time of day—you know the way one does. He was an aeronautical engineer and a bit of an inventor, apparently. He was experi­menting with autogiros, and he had a little one-horse factory near Walton where he was building them. He used to talk a lot of technical stuff about them to me, and I talked techni­cal stuff about make-up and dummies to him—I don't sup­pose either of us understood half of what the other was talk­ing about, so we got on famously.'

With his pipe drawing satisfactorily, Monty possessed him­self of the beer-opener and executed a neat flanking move­ment towards the source of supply.

'Well, one day this fellow Newdick asked me if I'd like to drop over and have a look at his autogiros, so the follow­ing Saturday afternoon I hadn't anything particular to do and I took a run out to his aerodrome to see how he was getting along. All he had there was a couple of corrugated-iron sheds and a small field which he used to take off from and land at, but he really had got a helicopter effect which he said he'd made himself. He told me all about it and how it worked, which was all double-Dutch to me; and then he asked me if I'd like to go up in it. So I said 'Thank you very much, I should simply hate to go up in it.' You know what these things look like—an ordinary aeroplane with the wings taken off and just a sort of large fan business to hold you up in the air—I never thought they looked particularly safe even when they're properly made, and I certainly didn't feel like risking my neck in this home-made version that he'd rigged up out of old bits of wood and angle iron. However, he was so insistent about it and seemed so upset when I refused that eventually I thought I'd better gratify the old boy and just keep on praying that the damn thing wouldn't fall to pieces before we got down again.'

The Saint sighed.

'So that's what happened to your face,' he remarked, in a tone of profound relief. 'If you only knew how that had been bothering me——'

'My mother did that,' said Monty proudly. 'No—we didn't crash. In fact,