He picked up the telephone.
"Hello, Jacqueline," he said when she answered. "Do you know who this is?"
"I know," she said. "It's Franklin D. Roosevelt."
"You have a marvellous memory. Do you still eat?"
"Whenever I'm thirsty. Do you?"
"I nibble a crumb now and then. Come out with me tonight and see if we can still take it."
"Simon, I'd love to; but I'm in the most frantic muddle----"
"So is the rest of the world, darling. But it's two years since I've seen you, and that's about seven hundred and thirty days too long. Don't you realize that I've come halfway around the world, surviving all manner of perils and slaying large numbers of ferocious dragons, just to get here in time to take you out to dinner tonight?"
"I know, but-- Oh well. It would be so thrilling to see you. Come around about seven and I'll try to get a bit straightened out before then."
"I'll be there," said the Saint.
He spent some of the intervening time in making himself the owner of. a car, and shortly after half-past six he turned it westwards into the stream of studio traffic homing towards Beverly Hills. Somewhere along Sunset Boulevard he turned off to the right and began to climb one of the winding roads that led up into the hills. The street lights were just beginning to trace their twinkling geometrical network over the vast panorama of cities spread out beneath him, as the car soared smoothly higher into the luminous blue-grey twilight.
He found his way with the certainty of vivid remembrance; and he was fully ten minutes early when he pulled the car into a bay by the roadside before the gate of Jacqueline Laine's house. He climbed out and started towards the gate, lighting a cigarette as he went, and as he approached it he perceived that somebody else was approaching the same gate from the opposite side. Changing his course a little to the left so that the departing guest would have room to pass him, the Saint observed that he was a small and elderly gent arrayed in clothes so shapeless and ill fitting that they gave his figure a comical air of having been loosely and inaccurately strung together from a selection of stuffed bags of cloth. He wore a discolored Panama hat of weird and wonderful architecture, and carried an incongruous green umbrella furled, but still flapping in a bedraggled and forlorn sort of way, under his left arm; his face was rubicund and bulbous like his body, looking as if it had been carelessly slapped together out of a few odd lumps of pink plasticine.
As Simon moved to the left, the elderly gent duplicated the manoeuvre. Simon turned his feet and swerved politely to the right. The elderly gent did exactly the same, as if he were Simon's own reflection in a distorting mirror. Simon stopped altogether and decided to economize energy by letting the elderly gent make the next move in the ballet on his own.
Whereupon he discovered that the game of undignified dodging in which he had just prepared to surrender his part was caused by some dimly discernible ambition of the elderly gent's to hold converse with him. Standing in front of him and blinking short-sightedly upwards from his lower altitude to the Saint's six foot two, with his mouth hanging vacantly open like an inverted "U" and three long yellow teeth hanging down like stalactites from the top, the elderly gent tapped him on the chest and said, very earnestly and distinctly: "Hig fwmgn glugl phnihklu hgrm skhlglgl?"
"I beg your pardon?" said the Saint vaguely.
"Hig fwmgn," repeated the elderly gent, "glugl phnihklu hgrm skhlglgl?" Simon considered the point. "If you ask me," he replied at length, "I should say sixteen."
The elderly gent's knobbly face seemed to take on a brighter shade of pink. He clutched the lapels of the Saint's coat, shaking him slightly in a positive passion of anguish.
"Flogh ghoglu sk," he pleaded, "klngnt hu ughl-gstghnd?"
Simon shook his head.
"No," he said judiciously, "you're thinking of weevils."
The little man bounced about like a rubber doll. His eyes squinted with a kind of frantic despair.
"Ogmighogho," he almost screamed, "klngt hu ughglstghnd ? Ik ghln ngmnpp sktlghko 1 Klugt hu hgr ? Ik wgnt hlg phnihkln hgrm skhlglgl!"
The Saint sighed. He was by nature a kindly man to those whom the Gods had afflicted, but time was passing and he was thinking of Jacqueline Laine.
"I'm afraid not, dear old bird," he murmured regretfully. "There used to be one, but it died. Sorry, I'm sure."
He patted the elderly gent apologetically upon the shoulder, steered his way around him, and passed on out of earshot of the frenzied sputtering noises that continued to honk despairingly through the dusk behind him. Two minutes later he was with Jacqueline.
Jacqueline Laine was twenty-three; she was tall and slender; she had grey eyes that twinkled and a demoralizing mouth. Both of these temptations were in play as she came towards him; but he was still slightly shaken by his recent encounter.
"Have you got any more village idiots hidden around?" he asked warily, as he took her hands; and she was puzzled.
"We used to have several, but they've all got into Congress. Did you want one to take home?"
"My God, no," said the Saint fervently. "The one I met at the gate was bad enough. Is he your latest boy friend?"
Her brow cleared.
"Oh, you mean the old boy with the cleft palate? Isn't he marvellous? I think he's got a screw loose or something. He's been hanging around all day--he keeps ringing the bell and bleating at me. I'd just sent him away for the third time. Did he try to talk to you?"
"He did sort of wag his adenoids at me," Simon admitted, "but I don't think we actually got on to common ground. I felt quite jealous of him for a bit, until I realized that he couldn't possibly kiss you nearly as well as I can, with that set of teeth."
He proceeded to demonstrate this.
"I'm still in a hopeless muddle," she said presently. "But I'll be ready in five minutes. You can be fixing a cocktail while I finish myself off."
In the living room there was an open trunk in one corner and a half-filled packing case in the middle of the floor. There were scattered heaps of paper around it, and a few partially wrapped and unidentifiable objects on the table. The room had that curiously naked and inhospitable look which a room, has when it has been stripped of all those intimately personal odds and ends of junk which make it a home, and only the bare furniture is left.
The Saint raised his eyebrows.
"Hullo," he said. "Are you moving?"
"Sort of." She shrugged. "Moving out, anyway."
"Where to?"
"I don't know."
He realized then that there should have been someone else there, in that room.
"Isn't your grandmother here any more ?"
"She died four weeks ago."
"I'm sorry."
"She was a good soul. But she was terribly old. Do you know she was just ninety-seven ?" She held his hand for a moment. "I'll tell you all about it when I come down. Do you remember where to find the bottles?"
"Templars and elephants never forget."
He blended bourbon, applejack, vermouth and bitters, skilfully and with the zeal of an artist, while he waited for her, remembering the old lady whom he had seen so often in that room. Also, he remembered the affectionate service that Jacqueline had always lavished on her, cheerfully limiting her own enjoyment of life to meet the demands of an unconscious tyrant who would allow no one else to look after her, and wondered if there was any realistic reason to regret the ending of such a long life. She had, he knew, looked after Jacqueline herself in her time, and had brought her up as her own child since she was left an orphan at the age of three; but life must always belong to the young. . . . He thought that for Jacqueline it must be a supreme escape, but he knew that she would never say so.