He did not consider any further argument. As far as he I was concerned, there was no more arguing to be done. He simply issued his commands. As he finished he stood up, and before any of them could raise any more objections he had walked out of the room.
They sat still for some moments after he had gone, each knowing what was in the minds of the others, each trying to pretend that he alone was still dominant and unshaken.
Fairweather got up first. He pulled out a big old-fashioned gold watch and consulted it with a brave imitation of his old portly pomposity.
"Well," he said croakily, "I must be getting along. Got things to attend to,"
He bustled out, very quickly and busily.
The Sangores looked at each other. Then Lady Sangore spoke.
"It's all that little tart's fault," she said bitterly. "If she'd had any sense or decency at all we shouldn't be in all this trouble now. As for Luker, he ought to be kicked out of every club in London."
"I don't suppose he belongs to every club in London," said General Sangore dully.
His figure, usually so ramrod erect, was bowed and sagging; his shoulders drooped. Suddenly he looked very old and tired and pasty. He seemed bewildered, like a man lost in a chamber of unimaginable horrors; he seemed to be groping through the rusty machinery of his mind for one wheel that would turn to a task for which it had never been designed.
2
"Once upon a time," said the Saint, "there was a walleyed wombat named Wilhelmina, who lived in a burrow in Tasmania and grieved resentfully over the fact that Nature had endowed her, like all females of the marsupial family, with an abdominal pouch or sac intended for the reception and protection of newborn marsupials. Since," however, the strabismic asymmetry of Wilhelmina's features had always deterred discriminating males of her species from making such advances to her as might have resulted in the production of young wombats, she was easily persuaded to regard this useful and ingenious organ as an indecent excrescence invented by the Creator in a lewd and absent-minded moment, and she soon became the leader of a strong movement among other unattractive wombats to suppress all references to it and to decry its use as sinful and reprehensible, and invariably wore a species of apron or sporran to conceal this obscene conformation of tissue from the world. Now it so happened that one night a purblind male wombat named Widgery, of dissolute habits…"
He was in the scullery of Bledford Manor with Lady Valerie Woodchester. They sat on the hard cold tile floor with their wrists and ankles bound with strong cord. A smear of blood had dried across Simon's face and in spite of his quiet satiric voice his head was aching savagely. Lady Valerie's face was very dirty and her hair was in wild disarray; she also had a headache, and she was in a poisonous temper.
"Oh, stop it!" she burst out jittery. "You've got me into a hell of a nice mess, haven't you? I suppose you enjoy this sort of thing, but I don't. Aren't you going to do something about it?"
"What would you like me to do?" he asked accommodatingly.
"What are they going to do with us?"
He shrugged.
"I'm not a thought reader. But you can use your imagination."
She brooded. Her lower lip was thrust out, her pencilled eyebrows drawn together in a vicious' scowl.
"The damned swine," she said. "I'd like to see them all die the most horrible deaths. I'd like to see them being burnt alive or something, and jeer at them… My God, I wish I had a cigarette… Doesn't it seem ages since we were having dinner at the Berkeley? Simon, do you think they're really going to kill us?"
"I expect their ideas are running more or less along those lines," he admitted. "But they haven't done it yet. What 'll you bet me we aren't dining at the Berkeley again tomorrow?"
"It's all very well for you to talk like that," she said. "It's your job. But I'm scared." She shivered. Her voice rose a trifle. "It's horrible! I don't want to die! I–I want to have a good time, and wear nice clothes, and — and… Oh, what's the good?" She stared at him sullenly in the dimming light. "I suppose you think that's frightful of me. If your girl friend was in my place I expect she'd think this was an awfully jolly party. I suppose she simply revels in being rolled over in cars, and knocked on the head, and mauled about and tied up and waiting to be killed, and all the rest of it. Well, all I can say is, I wish she was here instead of me."
The Saint chuckled. He was not particularly amused, but he didn't want her nerve to crack completely, and he knew that her breaking point was not very far away. "After all, you chose me for a husband, darling. I tried to discourage you, but you seemed to have made up your mind that you liked the life. Never mind. I'm pretty good at getting out of jams."
"Even if we do get out, I expect my hair will be snow white or something," she said miserably.
She blinked. Her eyes were very large and solemn; she looked very childish and pathetic. A pair of big bright tears formed in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks.
"I… I do hate this so much," she whispered. "And I'm so uncomfortable."
"All the same, you mustn't cry," he said. "The floor's damp enough already."
"It couldn't be any damper. So why shouldn't I cry? I can think of dozens of things I'd like to do, and crying's the only one of them I can do. So why shouldn't I?"
"Because it makes you look like an old hag."
She sniffed.
"Well, that's your fault," she said; but she stopped crying. She twisted her head down and hunched up one shoulder and wriggled comically, trying to dry the tears on her blouse. She drew a long shuddering sigh like a baby. She said: "All right, why don't you talk to me about something and take my mind off it? What were you getting so excited about when the car turned over?"
The Saint gazed past her, into one of the corners where the dusk was rapidly deepening. That memory had been the first to return to his mind when he painfully recovered consciousness, had haunted him ever since under the surface of his unconcern, embittering the knowledge of his own helplessness.
"The Reichstag," he said. "Remember the Reichstag. That's what Kennet wrote on that bit of paper, which he probably pinched from the headquarters of the Sons of France when he was a member. That's why he had to be cooled off. He knew one thing too much, among a lot of stuff that didn't matter, and if he'd lived that one thing might have wrecked the whole scheme."
"But what did he know?"
"Do you remember the Reichstag fire, in Berlin? That was the thing that started the Nazi tyranny in Germany. Of course the Nazis said that the Communists had done it; but a good many people have always believed that the Nazis arranged it themselves, to give themselves a grand excuse for what they went on to do afterwards. It seems pretty plain that the Sons of France have planned something on the same lines for tomorrow. That piece of paper was a list of various suitable occasions for a blowup of that sort which had been jotted down and discussed and eliminated for various reasons until just one was left — the opening of the Hostel of Memory at Neuilly by Comrade Chaulage. The scheme will be to have Comrade Chaulage assassinated during the proceedings. This of course will be the work of the Communists, like the Reichstag fire; and it will not only be proof of what desperate and disgusting people they are, but it will also be evidence of their contempt for the Heroes of France, which is always a very strong point with the Fascist gang. The Sons of France will claim the assassination as a crowning example of the incompetence of the present government to keep the Red bandits in check; so they will mobilize their forces, seize the government and proclaim a dictatorship. And there you are."