"Your parole has still more than four hours to run," he said, "but I give it back to you now."
She could thank him coldly, and go. She could thank him nicely, rather puzzledly—and go. And if she had made the least move to do either of those things, he would not have said another word. It would be no use, unless she delayed of her own free will. And only one thing could so bend her will—a thing that he hardly dared to contemplate. ...
"Why do you do that? "she asked simply.
3
"Why do you do that?" . . . "I'll give you my parole." ... He turned over those forthright sentences in his mind. And the way in which they had been spoken. The way in which everything he had heard her say had been spoken. Her superb simplicity...
"America's Loveliest Lady," the Bystander caption had called her; and the Saint reflected how little meaning was left in that last word. And yet it was the only word for her. There was something about her that one had to meet to understand. If he had had to describe it, he could only have done so in flowery phrases—and a flowery phrase would have robbed the thing of all its fresh naturalness, would have tarnished it, might even have made it seem pretentious. And it was the most unpretending thing he had ever known. It was so innocent that it awed him; and yet it made his heart leap with a fantastic hope.
"I did my thinking last night, as I said I would," he answered her quietly.
Still she did not move.
She prompted him: "And you made your plan?"
"Yes."
"I wonder if it was the same as mine?"
Simon raised his eyebrows.
"'The same as yours?''
She smiled.
"I can think, too, Mr.—Saint," she said. "I've been taught to. And last night I thought a lot. I thought of everything you'd said, and everything I'd heard about you. And I believed what you'd told me. So—I knew there was only one thing to do."
"Namely?"
"Didn't you call me—Marius's battle-axe? I think you were right. And that's something for us to know. But there's so much else that we don't know—how the axe is to be used, and what other weapons there are to reinforce it. You've taken the axe away, but that's all. Marius still means to bring down the tree. Once before you've thought he was beaten; but you were wrong. This time, if you just take away his axe, you'll know he isn't beaten. He's already undermined the tree. Even now it may fall before the next natural storm. It may be hard enough to prop it up now, until the roots grow down again—without leaving Marius free to strike at it again. And to make sure that he won't strike again, you've got to break his arm."
"Or his neck," said the Saint grimly.
Again she smiled.
"Haven't I read your thoughts?"
"Perfectly."
"And what was your plan?"
Simon met her eyes.
"I meant," he said deliberately, "to ask you to go back—to Heinrich Dussel."
"That was what I meant to suggest."
In that moment Roger Conway felt utterly off the map. The Saint had told him nothing. The Saint had merely sung continuously in his bath— which, with the Saint, was a sure sign of peace of mind. And, in the circumstances, Roger Conway had wondered. . . . But Simon had donned his disguise and departed in the car without a word in explanation of his high spirits; and Roger had been left to wonder. . . . And then—this. He saw the long, deliberate glance which the other two exchanged, and felt that they were moving and speaking in another world—a world to which he could never aspire. And like a man in a dream he heard them discussing the impossible thing.
He knew the Saint, and the thunderbolts of dazzling audacity which the Saint could launch, as no other man could have claimed to know them; and yet this detonation alone would have reeled him momentarily off his balance. But it didn't stand alone. It was matched—without a second's pause. They were of the same breed, those two. Though their feet were set on different roads, they walked in the same country—a country that ordinary people could never reach. And it was then that Roger Conway, who had always believed that no one in all the world could walk shoulder to shoulder with the Saint in that country, began to understand many things.
He heard them, in his dream—level question and answer, the quiet, crisp words. He would have been less at sea if either of them had said any of the things that he might have expected, in any way that he might have expected; but there was none of that. Those things did not exist in their language. Their calm, staccato utterances plunged into his brain like clear-cut gems falling through an infinite darkness.
"You've considered the dangers?"
"To myself?"
"Yes."
"I'm never safe—at any time."
"The destinies we're playing with, then. I might fail you. That would mean we'd given Marius the game."
"You might not fail."
"Have we the right?" asked the Saint.
And then Roger saw him again—the new Saint to whom he had still to grow accustomed. Simon Templar, with the old careless swashbuckling days behind him, more stern and sober, playing bigger games than he had ever touched before—yet with the light of all the old ideals in blue eyes that would never grow old, and all the old laughing hell-for-leather recklessness waiting for his need.
"Have we the right to risk failure?" Simon asked.
"Have you the right to turn back?" the girl answered him. "Have you the right to turn back and start all over again—when you might go forward?"
The Saint nodded.
"I just meant to ask you, Sonia. And you've given your answer. More—you've taken the words out of my mouth, and the objections I'm making are the ones you ought to have made."
"I've thought of them all."
"Then—we go forward."
The Saint spoke evenly, quite softly; yet Roger seemed to hear a blast of bugles. And the Saint went on:
"We've had enough of war. Fighting is for the strong—for those who know what they're fighting for, and love the fight for its own sake. We were like that, my friends and I—and yet we swore that it should not happen again. Not this new fighting—not this cold-blooded scientific maiming and slaughter of school-boys and poor grown-up fools herded to squalid death to make money for a bunch of slimy financiers. We saw it coming again. The flags flying, and the bands playing, and the politicians yaddering about a land fit for heroes to live in, and the poor fools cheering and being cheered, and another madness, worse than the last. Just another war to end war. . . . But we know that you can't end war by war. You can't end war by any means at all, thank God, while men believe in right and wrong, and some of them have the courage to fight for their belief. It has always been so. And it's my own creed. I hope I never live to see the day when the miserable quibbling hair-splitters have won the earth, and there's no more black and white, but everything's just a dreary relative gray, and everyone has a right to his own damned heresies, and it's more noble to be broadminded about your disgusting neighbours than to push their faces in as a preliminary to yanking them back into the straight and narrow way. . . . But this is different. There's no crusading about it. It's just mass murder — for the benefit of the men with the big bank balances. That's what we saw — and we were three blistered outlaws who'd made scrap-iron of every law in Europe, on one quixotic excuse or another, just to make life tolerable for ourselves in this halfhearted civilization. And when we saw that, we knew that we'd come to the end of our quest. We'd found the thing worth fighting for — really worth fighting for — so much more worth fighting for than any of the little things we'd fought for before. One of us has already died for it. But the work will go on. ..."