"Unless what?" prompted the girl.
The Saint picked up his cigarette from the edge of the ashtray and fell into his chair again with a slow laugh.
"I wonder! If there's anything more dangerous than being just that little bit too clever, it's being in too much of a hurry to say that very thing of the other man. There's certainly some energetic vendetta going on against the Quell family, and since I've been warned to keep out I shall just naturally have to be there."
"Not today, if you don't mind," said the girl calmly. "I met Marion Lestrange in Bond Street yesterday, and I promised to drop in for a cocktail this evening."
Simon looked at her.
"I think it might happen about then," he said. " Don't be surprised if you hear my melodious voice on the telephone."
"What are you going to do?" she asked; and the a Saint smiled.
"Almost nothing," he said.
He kept her in suspense for the rest of the afternoon, while he smoked innumerable cigarettes and tried to build up a logical story out of the snatches of incoherent explanation that Brian Quell had babbled before he died. It was something about a man called Binks, who could make gold. . . . But no consecutive sense seemed to emerge from it. Dr. Sylvester Quell might have been interested-and he had disappeared. The Saint could get no further than his original idea.
He told Patricia Holm about it at teatime. It will be remembered that in those days the British government was still pompously deliberating whether it should take the reckless step of repealing an Act of 1677 which no one obeyed anyhow, and the Saint's feelings on the matter had been finding their outlet in verse when the train of his criminal inspiration faltered. He produced the more enduring fruits of his afternoon's cogitation with some pride.
"Wilberforce Egbert Levi Gupp Was very, very well brought up, Not even in his infant crib Did he make messes on his bib, Or ever, in his riper years, Forget to wash behind his ears.
Trained from his rawest youth to rule (At that immortal Public School Whose playing fields have helped to lose Innumerable Waterloos), His brains, his wit, his chin, were all Infinitesimal, But (underline the vital fact) He was the very soul of tact.
And never in his innocence Gave anyone the least offense: Can it be wondered at that he Became, in course of time, M.P.?"
"Has that got anything to do with your Mr. Jones?" asked Patricia patiently.
"Nothing at all," said the Saint. "It's probably far more important. Posterity will remember Wilberforce Gupp long after Comrade Jones is forgotten. Listen to some more:
"Robed in his faultless morning dress They voted him a huge success.
The sober drabness of the garb Fittingly framed the pukka sahib; And though his many panaceas Showed no original ideas, Gupp, who could not be lightly baulked, Just talked, and talked, and talked, and talked, Until the parliamentary clan Prophesied him a coming man."
"I seem to have heard something in the same strain before," the girl remarked.
"You probably have," said the Saint. "And you'll probably hear it again. So long as there's ink in my pen, and I can make two words rhyme, and this country is governed by the largest collection of soft-bellied halfwits and doddering grandmothers on earth, I shall continue to castigate its imbecilities-whenever I have time to let go tankard of old ale. I have not finished with Wilberforce."
"Shall I be seeing you after I leave Marion's?" she asked; and the Saint was persuaded to put away the sheet of paper on which he had been scribbling and tell her something which amazed her.
He expounded a theory which anyone else would have advanced hesitantly as a wild and delirious guess with such vivid conviction that her incredulity wavered and broke in the first five minutes. And after that she listened to him with her heart beating a little faster, helplessly caught up in the simple audacity of his idea. When he put it to her as a question she knew that there was only one answer.
"Wouldn't you say it was worth trying, old Pat? We can only be wrong-and if we are it doesn't cost a cent. If we're right --"
"I'll be there."
She went out at six o'clock with the knowledge that if his theory was right they were on the brink of an adventure that would have startled the menagerie of filleted young men and sophisticated young women whom she had promised to help to entertain. It might even have startled a much less precious audience, if she had felt disposed to talk about it; but Patricia Holm was oblivious of audiences-in which attitude she was the most drastic possible antithesis of Simon Templar. Certainly hone of the celebrated or nearly celebrated prodigies with whom it pleased Marion Lestrange to crowd her drawing room once a month would have believed that the girl who listened so sympathetically to their tedious autobiographies was the partner in crime of the most notorious buccaneer of modern times.
The cocktail party ploughed on through a syrupy flood of mixed alcohols, mechanical compliments, second-hand scandal, vapid criticism, lisps, beards, adolescent philosophy, and personal pronouns. Patricia attended with half her mind, while the other half wondered why the egotism which was so delightful and spell-binding in the Saint should be so nauseatingly flatulent in the assorted hominoids around her. She watched the hands of her wrist watch creep round to seven and seven-thirty, and wondered if the Saint could have been wrong.
It was ten minutes to eight when her hostess came and told her that she was wanted on the telephone.
"Is that you, Pat?" said the Saint's voice. "Listen- I've had the most amazing luck. I can't tell you about it now. Can you get away?"
The girl felt a cold tingle run up her spine.
"Yes-I can come now. Where are you?"
"I'm at the May Fair. Hop into a taxi and hurry along-I'll wait for you in the lounge."
She pulled on her hat and coat with a feeling somewhere between fear and elation. The interruption had come so exactly as the Saint had predicted it that it seemed almost uncanny. And the half-dozen bare and uninformative sentences that had come through the receiver proved beyond doubt that the mystery was boiling up for an explosion that only Simon Templar would have gone out of his way to interview at close quarters. As she ran down the stairs, the fingers of her right hand ran over the invisible outlines of a hard squat shape that was braced securely under her left arm, and the grim contact gave her back the old confidence of other dangerous days.
A taxi came crawling along the curb as she stepped out into Cavendish Square, and she waved to it and climbed in. The cab pulled out again with a jerk; and it was then that she noticed that the glass in the windows was blackened, and protected against damage from the inside by a closely woven mesh of steel wire.
She leaned forward and felt around in the darkness for a door handle. Her fingers encountered only a smooth metal plate secured over the place where the handle should have been; and she knew that the man who called himself Jones was no less fast a thinker, and not one whit less efficient, than Simon Templar had diagnosed him to be.
CHAPTER V SIMON TEMPLAR refuelled his duofold and continued with the biography of the coming politician:
"And down the corridors of fame Wilberforce Egbert duly came.
His human kindness knew no bounds: Even when hunting with the hounds He always had a thought to spare For the poor little hunted hare, But manfully he set his lips And did the bidding of the Whips; And though at times his motives would Be cruelly misunderstood, Wilberforce plodded loyally on Like a well-bred automaton Till 1940, when the vote Placed the Gupp party in the boat, And Wilberforce assumed the helm And laboured to defend the realm."
Simon glanced at his watch, meditated for a few moments, and continued: "And through those tense and tedious days Wilberforce gambolled (in his stays); The general public got to know That Gupp, who never answered 'No,'
Could be depended on to give Deft answers in the negative; And Royal Commissions by the score Added to Wisdom's bounteous store: The Simple Foods Commission found That turnips still grow underground; The Poultry Farms Commission heard That turkeys were a kind of bird; While in an office in the City The famous Vicious Drugs Committee Sat through ten epic calendars To learn if women smoked cigars; And with the help Gupp's party gave Britannia proudly ruled the wave.