The Saint Steps In

tried to get a feeling about them. They buy War Bonds. They submit to having their sugar rationed. They wonder how the hell they're going to keep up with their taxes. They grumble and connive a bit about tires and gasoline. They read the newspapers and become barroom strategists. Some of them have been put out of business—just as some of them have found new bonanzas. Some of them have been closer to the draft than others. But it still isn't real.'

'I think it's very real.'

'It isn't real. Thousands of men dying in some bloody Rus­sian swamp are just newspaper figures. Prisoners being tor­tured and mutilated and bayoneted in the Far East are just good horror reading like a good thriller from the library. They haven't been hurt themselves. It's going to be all right. The war is expensive and inconvenient, but it's going to be all right. It's all going to be taken care of eventually. That's what we pay taxes for.'

'Everybody can't do the fighting,' said Devan. 'In these days it takes—I forget the exact statistics, but I read them some­where—something like ten people working at home to keep one soldier at the front.'

'But the people behind the lines have to feel just as sure as the soldier that they're in a war. They've got to feel that the whole course and purpose of their lives has been changed, just as his has—and you don't feel that just from getting by on one pound of sugar a week. They've got to have something that the people of England have got, because their war was never thou­sands of miles away. It's something that you only get from go­ing hungry, and walking in the dark at night, and seeing things you've grown up with destroyed, and watching your friends die. That's when you know you're really in a war, whatever job you happen to be doing, and literally fighting for your life, and everything has to go into it. There isn't that feeling here yet. I think there are still too many people who sincerely think that all they have to do is root for the home team. I think there are still too many people who think you can fight total war on a basis of golf as usual every Saturday and nothing must be allowed to interfere with our dear old social stability. Particu­larly the people who ought to be leading in the opposite di­ rection. Particularly,' said the Saint carefully, 'the wrong people.'

Quennel made a slight impatient gesture.

'I can't think where you'd get that impression. Where have you been lately?'

'I was in Florida for a while. And then I was in New York for a couple of weeks.'

'And in New York I suppose you go to El Morocco and 21 and places like that.'

'I don't live there, but I've been to them. They seem to be doing all right.'

Quennel raised his shoulders triumphantly.

'Then of course you'd get a wrong impression. The class of people you find in those places—in Miami Beach and Palm Beach and New York night clubs—they're a class that this war is going to wipe out completely. They're dead now, but they don't know it.'

He settled back confidently, efficiently, and took a cigar from the box which the unobtrusive butler was passing. He lighted it and tasted it approvingly, and said: 'I'm glad I remembered to keep some of these locked up.'

'Mice, or pixies?' Simon inquired with a smile.

'Just Andrea's friends,' Quennel said tolerantly, 'She throws parties for them up here all the time, and they go through the place like locusts. She had one only a week ago, and they drank up thirty cases of champagne, and that wasn't enough. They got into the cellar and finished half a dozen bot­tles of Benedictine that I was saving.'

It came upon the Saint like the deep tolling of a bell in the far distance, like the resonance of an alarum that he had known about and been waiting for, and yet which had to be actually heard before it could compress the diaphragm and be felt throbbing out along the veins. But he knew now that this was it, and that it was the last of everything that had been miss­ing, and that now he had seen all of his dragon, and he knew all the ugliness and tbe evil of it, and it was a bigger and sleeker dragon than he had ever seen before.

He bent his head for a moment so that it should not show in his face before he was quite ready, while it went through him like light would have gone through his eyes, and while he tapped and lighted a cigarette because he didn't feel like a cigar; and Hobart Quennel must have felt that there was an implied submission in his withdrawal, because Simon could feel it in the way Quennel settled himself back in his chair and told the butler to bring in some brandy, the solid good humor of a man who has made a rightful point. But when Si­mon looked up he looked at Andrea, who had been silent for a long while, only following the argument with her eyes from face to face. She was the one person who until then had been physically in the picture more than either of the two men, and yet she had never been a fixed part of the composition. He wondered whether she ever would have any such place, or whether it was only an insatiable artistic sense of his own that made him imagine that she should have found one.

He said lightly: 'You must know a lot of gay people.'

'I like parties,' she said. She added, almost defiantly: 'I like El Morocco, too, when I'm in the mood. I don't see how it's going to help us win the war if everybody sits around being miserable.'

But she went on looking at the Saint, and her eyes were still like windows opening on to an empty sky. You could look through them and out and out and there was still nothing but the clear pale blue and nothing.

Quennel smiled indulgently, and said: 'It's pretty cool to­night. Why don't you go and get a fire started in the library, and we'll join you in a few minutes.'

She got up.

'Don't forget you had something you wanted to tell Simon,' she said.

'No—1 was just thinking of that.'

She had to look at the Saint again before she went out.

'Daddy always wants to have his own way,' she said rather vaguely. 'Don't let him keep you here for ever.'

'I won't,' said the Saint, with a last upward glance. Then the door closed behind her, and he was alone with one last sudden disturbing question in his mind, but quite alone, like a fighter when the gong sounds and the seconds disappear through the ropes. He knew that this was the gong, and the preliminary routines were over; and he knew just what he was fighting, and all his senses were keyed and calm and ice-cold. He turned to Quennel just as easily as he had played every waiting line of the scene, and murmured: 'Andrea did say you had something to tell me.'

Quennel trimmed his cigar on the ashtray in front of him.

'Yes,' he said. 'Andrea told me you were taking an interest in Calvin Gray's synthetic rubber, so I thought you'd like to know. Gray showed me a sample of it not long ago, as I think Walter told you. I had a report on it from my chief chemist today.' He settled even more safely and positively in his chair. 'I'm afraid Calvin Gray is a complete fraud.'

2

Simon's right hand rested on the table in front of him like a bronze casting set on stone, and he watched the smoke rising from his cigarette like a pastel stroke against the dark wood.

'You had a specimen analysed?'

'Yes. I don't know whether you know it, but that kind of analysis is one of the most difficult things in the world to do. In fact, a lot of people would say it was almost impossible. But I've got some rather unusual men on my staff.'

'Did you ever see it made?' Simon asked slowly.

'No.'

'I have.'

'Can you describe the process?'

Simon gave a rough description of what he had seen. He knew that it was technically meaningless, and admitted it.

'That doesn't matter,' said Quennel. 'I'm sure you can see now where the trick was worked.'