'Dat's what I mean, boss, when I say I done it,' he explained, his brow furrowed with the effort of amplifying a statement which seemed to him to be already obvious enough. 'When you call out de butler, he is just opening me anudder bottle of Scotch. An' dis time I make de grade. I drink it down to de last drop wit'out stopping. So I come right out to tell ya.' A broad beam of ineffable pride opened up a gold mine in the centre of Mr Uniatz's face. 'I done it, boss! Ain't dat sump'n ?'
I
THERE ARE times,' remarked Simon Templar, putting down the evening paper and pouring himself a second glass of Tio Pepe, 'when I am on the verge of swearing a great oath never to look at another newspaper as long as I live. Here you have a fascinating world full of all kinds of busy people, being born, falling in love, marrying, dying and being killed, working, starving, fighting, splitting atoms and measuring stars, inventing trick corkscrews and relativity theories, building skyscrapers and suffering hell with toothache. When I buy a newspaper I want to read all about them. I want to know what they're doing and creating and planning and striving for and going to war about — all the exciting vital things that make a picture of a real world and real people's lives. And what do I get?'
'What do you get, Saint?' asked Patricia Holm with a smile.
Simon picked up the newspaper again.
'This is what I get,' he said. 'I get a guy whose name, believe it or not, is Ebenezer Hogsbotham. Comrade Hogsbotham, having been born with a name like that and a face to match it, if you can believe a newspaper picture, has never had a chance in his life to misbehave, and has therefore naturally developed into one of those guys who feel that they have a mission to protect everyone else from misbehaviour. He has therefore been earnestly studying the subject in order to be able to tell other people how to protect themselves from it. For several weeks, apparently, he has been frequenting the bawdiest theatres and the nudest night clubs, dis covering just how much depravity is being put out to ensnare those people who are not so shiningly immune to contamination as himself; as a result of which he has come out hot and strong for a vigorous censorship of all public entertainment. Since Comrade Hogsbotham has carefully promoted himself to be president of the National Society for the Preservation of Public Morals, he hits the front-page headlines while five hundred human beings who get themselves blown to bits by honourable Japanese bombs are only worth a three-line filler on page eleven. And this is the immortal utterance that he hits them with: 'The public has a right to be protected,' he says, 'from displays of suggestiveness and undress which are disgusting to all right-thinking people.' . . . 'Right-thinking people', of course, only means people who think like Comrade Hogsbotham; but it's one of those crushing and high-sounding phrases that the Hogsbothams of this world seem to have a monopoly on. Will you excuse me while I vomit ?'
Patricia fingered the curls in her soft golden hair and considered him guardedly.
'You can't do anything else about it,' she said. 'Even you can't alter that sort of thing, so you might as well save your energy.'
'I suppose so.' The Saint scowled, 'But it's just too hopeless to resign yourself to spending the rest of your life watching nine-tenths of the world's population, who've got more than enough serious things to worry about already, being browbeaten into a superstitious respect for the humbug of a handful of yapping cryptorchid Hogsbothams. I feel that somebody on the other side of the fence ought to climb over and pin his ears back.. . I have a pain in the neck. I should like to do something to demonstrate my unparalleled immorality. I want to go out and burgle a convent; or borrow a guitar and parade in front of Hogsbotham's house, singing obscene songs in a beery voice.'
He took his glass over to the window and stood there looking down over Piccadilly and the Green Park with a faraway dreaminess in his blue eyes that seemed to be playing with all kinds of electric and reprehensible ideas beyond the humdrum view on which they were actually focused; and Patricia Holm watched him with eyes of the same reckless blue but backed by a sober understanding. She had known him too long to dismiss such a mood as lightly as any other woman would have dismissed it. Any other .man might have voiced the same grumble without danger of anyone else remembering it beyond the next drink; but when the man who was so fantastically called the Saint uttered that kind of unsaintly thought, his undercurrent of seriousness was apt to be translated into a different sort of headline with a frequency that Patricia needed all her reserves of mental stability to cope with. Some of the Saint's wildest adventures had
