The Saint Steps In

to read nothing in her face, not even embarrassment; and they hadn't been alone together for a moment. He didn't know whether to be glad of that or not. They watched each other inscrutably, like a pair of cats at op­posite ends of a wall.

There was one other person who had to be there to complete the pattern, and a few minutes later he came in, looking very much freshly scrubbed and brushed, in a plain blue suit that was a little tight around the chest and biceps, so that he had some of the air of a stevedore dressed up in his Sunday best. Mr. Quennel patted him on the shoulder and said: 'Hullo, Walter . . . You've met Mr. Templar, haven't you?'

'I certainly have.' Walter Devan shook hands with a cordial grin. '1 didn't know who I was picking a fight with at that time, though, or I'd have been a bit more careful about butt­ing in.'

'I'm glad you weren't,' Simon said just as cordially, 'or you might have done much too good a job.'

'What do you think about the news from Russia?' Quennel asked.

So it was to be played like that. And the Saint was quite ready to go along with it that way. Perhaps he even preferred it. He had quite a little background to fill in, and in it he knew that there were things which were important to his philosophy, even if anyone else would have found them incidental. He could wait now for the explosive action which was ultimately the only way in which the difference of basic potential could be resolved, like the difference between two thunderclouds. But before that he was glad to explore and weigh the charge that was going to match itself against his own.

He lighted a cigarette, and relaxed, and for the first time since the beginning of the episode he knew that it had a sig­nificance beyond any simple violence that might come out of it.

They had another drink. And dinner. It was not a lavish-dinner, but just quietly excellent, served by a butler whose presence didn't keep reminding you of the dignity of having a butler. There was not a dazzling display of silver and crystal on the table. They drank, without discussion or fanfares, an excellent Fountaingrove Sonoma Cabernet. Everything had the cachet of a man to whom luxury was as natural and essential as a daily bath, without making a De Mille sequence out of it.

'I think you'll like Pinehurst, if Andrea takes you down there,' Quennel said. 'I just got a couple of new strings of polo ponies from Buenos Aires—I haven't even seen them yet. You might be able to try them out for me. Do you play polo?'

'A bit,' said the Saint, who had once had a six-goal rating.

'I can't wait to get down there myself,' said Quennel. 'But Washington never stops conspiring against me.'

'I imagine the war has something to do with it, too.'

Quennel nodded.

'It has made us pretty important,' he said deprecatingly. 'We were doing quite all right before, but war-time require­ments are making us expand very considerably. Of course, we're working about ninety-five per cent on Government orders now. But after the war we'll really have the advantage of a tremendous amount of building and plant expansion, as well as some great strides in technical experience.'

'All of which the Government, meaning the people, will have given you and paid for,' Simon observed sympathetically.

'Yes.' Quennel accepted it quite directly and disarmingly. 'We don't expect to do any profiteering at this time, and in any case the tax system wouldn't let us, but in the end we shall get our return—fundamentally in improved methods and increased capital values, which good management will turn back into income.'

Simon made idle mosaics with a fork in the things on his plate; and presently he said: 'How have you been making out with labor problems in your field?'

'We really don't have any labor trouble. All our plants are in the South, of course, where you get less of that sort of thing than anywhere else. Labor is always a bit of a problem in these days, but I honestly think it only boils down to knowing how to handle your employees? How about it, Walter?—that's your headache.'

'Quenco pays as good wages as any other industry in our areas,' Devan said ruggedly. 'And I think we do as much to look after them as any other firm you can mention. You'd be surprised at what we do. We have our own health insurance, and our own group clinics—we organise all kinds of social and athletic clubs for them—we even build their homes and finance them.'

'That,' said the Saint, 'is the sort of thing that makes some of the things one hears so puzzling.'

'What things?'

'I mean some of the rumors—you must have heard them yourself—about your private Gestapo, and that kind of talk.'

Devan smiled with his strong confident mouth.

'Of course we have our private plant investigators. You couldn't possibly handle thousands of employees like we have without them. But when they aren't looking for cases of petty larceny and organised laziness, which you have to contend with in any outfit as big as ours, they're mostly just keeping in touch with the morale of the staff. That's the only way we can really insure against trouble, by anticipating it before it comes.'

'That's one of the crosses we have to bear,' Quennel said. 'I'd like to know any other company that hasn't been smeared with the same gossip.'

'I suppose so,' Simon agreed flexibly. 'But it must be spe­cially tough when there's an accident they can hang it on. Like those union organisers who got killed in the riot at Mobile last year, for instance.'

Devan made a blunt admissive movement of his head.

'Things like that are bound to happen sometimes. It was too bad it had to be us. But some of our people have been with us a long time, and you'd be surprised what a strong feeling they've got about the company. When some cheap racketeer­ing rabble-rousers come around trying to stir up trouble, they can't help getting sore, and then somebody may get hurt.'

'After all,' Quennel said, 'we aren't fighting a war against Fascism to make the country safe for the Communists. We're fighting for liberty and democracy, and that automatically means that we're also fighting to preserve the kind of social stability that liberty and democracy have built up in this coun­try.'

'What particular kind of social stability were you thinking of?' Simon asked.

'I mean a proper and progressive relationship between Cap­ital and Labor. I don't believe in Labor run wild. No sensible man does. Without any revolutions, we've been slowly improv­ing the conditions and standards of Labor, but we haven't dis­rupted our economic framework to do it. We believe that all men were created free and equal, but we admit that they don't all develop equal abilities. Therefore, for a long time to come, there are bound to be great masses of people who need to be restrained and controlled and brought along gradually. We don't need storm troopers and concentration camps to do it, because we have a sound economic system which obtains the same results in a much more civilised way. But we do have to recognise, and we do tacitly recognise, that we can't do without a strong and capable executive class who know how to nurse these masses along and feed them their rights in reasonable doses.'

There was a weird fascination, a hypnotic rationality about the discussion, in those terms and at that moment, with every­thing that was tied up with it and looming over it, which had a certain dreamlike quality that was weirder and worse because it was not a dream. But the Saint would not have let it break up uncompleted even if he could.

He said, in exactly the same way as he had listened: 'I won­der if it's only what you might call the lower classes who need nursing along.'

'Who else are you thinking of?'

'I'm thinking of what the same terminology would call the upper classes. I suppose—the people that you and I both spend a lot of our time with. I wonder, for instance, if they've got just as clear an idea that there's a war on and what it's all about.'

'I should say they've got just as clear an idea.'

'I wish I were so sure,' said the Saint, out of that same de­tachment. 'I've looked at them. I've