“He’s spent his life getting one bee after another in his bonnet. About the first time I can remember him visiting us, when I was a kid, he insisted on having the bed taken out of his room and sleeping on the floor. Said it was the only way to have a healthy backbone. He thought it was disgraceful that Mother was letting me sleep on a mattress and ruin my spine. Another time he had a theory that expectant mothers would have a much easier time if they went around for the last few months on all fours. He got in a bit of trouble when he started telling this to perfectly strange women that he saw in the street. He’s had a fling at vegetarianism, theosophy, yoga, folk dancing, and trying to live in a tree. Of course, he started going to nudist camps years ago. Then he finally heard about this Ile du Levant. Naturally he had to go and see it, and he’s been living there ever since. At last he’s found the one place where he can lead what he calls a normal civilized life and never needs to put any clothes on even to go out and buy a stamp. That would be fine as far as I’m concerned, if only he hadn’t asked me to visit him.”
“Do you have to go?”
“I’ve put it off as long as I can, but I can’t make it so obvious that I’d hurt the old codger’s feelings.”
Simon could well understand that the feelings of a certain class of old codger are customarily treated with the utmost consideration. Not letting it sound too obvious, he remarked, “At least it sounds like a nice inexpensive fad. Or wouldn’t that make any difference?”
“Well, he doesn’t have to worry too much about money.” McGeorge seemed a little embarrassed and anxious to change that subject. “But lately his letters have been full of some French girl who appears to be living with him, and I’ve wondered if she’s thinking of hitching on to a good thing.”
“It couldn’t be love, could it?”
“It could be, I suppose. But he’s over sixty and she’s only twenty-five.”
“I wouldn’t think a guy like that could be sold on anything so conventional as marriage.”
“I know Free Love was another thing that he used to be steamed up about. But you never can tell,” Mr McGeorge said pessimistically. “Anyhow, that’s another reason why I thought I’d better go and look things over.”
Simon needed no diagrams to visualize the threat that a belated romance could pose to a man in the position to which George McGeorge seemed so perfectly adapted, and he rather admired the other’s brazen candor.
It was the first time that the Saint, whose years of adventure had taken him to some of the most outlandish reaches of the globe and whose fund of uncommon lore was sometimes astounding in its range, had ever heard of the Ile du Levant and its peculiar tradition; but even for him there could still be something new under the sun, and it was just as likely to be something so close to familiar settings that he might never have noticed it if he had not stubbed his toe on it. Now that he had stumbled on it, a closer look became almost mandatory. The idea of visiting such an informally accessible Eden intrigued him, not pruriently, but with a most human curiosity. The privilege of simultaneously watching the reactions to it of such a person as George McGeorge was an added spice, while the possibility of also observing the by-play between Mr McGeorge and his Uncle Waldo made it completely irresistible.
Simon Templar gazed dreamily out at the island, still visible beyond the terrace where they sat, and said, “I wouldn’t miss that island if I had to swim there. Maybe we could go over together.”
Which was how they came to be sitting side by side on a bench on the good ship Flèche d’Or, watching the rugged slopes of the island loom rapidly nearer over the intense blue water.
The little ferry, which still had the sturdy lines of a converted fishing boat, was dressed with gay strings of flags from the masthead to the bow and stern, which gave it a very gallant and festive air. In the pilot house, the captain, who called himself on his own handbills Loulou the Corsair, was eating breakfast with his crew of two men and a boy, all of them stripped to the waist, barefooted, and with brightly colored bandannas knotted around their heads. This meal, Simon had noted with some awe, consisted of a long loaf of bread, a wedge of blue cheese, a cylinder of salami, and a large slab of raw beef, from all of which they alternately hacked off generous hunks with their clasp knives, nibbling whole cloves of garlic between mouthfuls and washing them down with swigs from a bottle of white wine — a heroic performance which would have been a grave shock to those who have been brought up to believe that the French working man embarks on a full morning’s toil with no more sustenance than a croissant and a cup of coffee. The entire combination, with the sunlight sparkling on harmless little waves, gave the voyage a play-acting zest that could not possibly attend a ferry trip, anywhere else in the world.
The other passengers, some thirty of them on that early run, could mostly be separated without much difficulty into two broad groups. One, which could be distinguished by generally paler skins, a subtle tendency towards superfluities of apparel or ornament, and a state of ill-concealed trepidation or excitement, consisted of the inevitable sightseers and perhaps a few tentative recruits. The others, usually marked by a deep tan, a simpler carelessness of costume, and a more earnest or relaxed demeanour, could be picked out with relative certainty as habitués or at least full-fledged initiates. The Saint, with his bronzed skin, in the cotton shirt and old shorts and espadrilles which he had sensibly chosen to wear, could easily have passed for one of the latter. McGeorge, on the other hand, was easily the most conspicuous example of the first category. Anyone seeing them together would have assumed at once that it was the Saint who had business on the island, and that McGeorge was the one who had decided on the spur of the moment to come along for the ride — and was now vainly regretting the impulse. It was a switch that Simon found highly diverting.
None of the passengers had yet disrobed to any unorthodox extent, but McGeorge did not seem to derive much solace from the delay. His eyes had become fixed on a flattish promontory of rock that stood out a little towards them from the body of the island. On it, tiny figures could be seen lying or strolling and sometimes plunging into the water like seals.
“Would you,” McGeorge asked huskily, at last, “say that they had anything on?”
Simon kept his eyes focused as the point drew steadily nearer.
“No,” he said at last. “I wouldn’t.”
“Oh, Lord,” said McGeorge, as if right up until that moment he had been clutching a wisp of hope that all the reports about the Ile du Levant might still somehow prove to be a myth.
The ferry headed into the narrow gap between Levant and Port-Cros, and began to swing in towards the eastern island. Loulou personally took the wheel again and tooted a cheerful annunciatory blast on the ship’s horn, while his fellow Corsairs dispersed efficiently fore and after to make ready the mooring lines.
From the water, dusky green slopes of brush and stunted pine rose steeply to a rounded summit some four hundred feet above. All over the hillside, the tile roofs and tinted walls of villas and more considerable buildings broke through the scrub at decent intervals, while near the peak, somewhat unexpectedly, stood out the unmistakable lines of a modern chapel. The ferry kept turning still more sharply in towards a little cove that opened suddenly ahead of it, with the rusty hull of an old ship sunk across part of the entrance for a breakwater, and the reassuringly normal-looking windows and terrace of a typical small restaurant overlooking it from a ledge just a short climb above the jetty. To the right of the port as they approached it, the lower slopes were dotted with white and orange glimpses of scores of little tents, and on the rocks below the outlines of basking campers could be made out in just enough detail to establish that they were letting no artificial obstructions come between them and the health-giving rays of the sun.