Authors: Leslie Charteris
“That,”
said the Saint, “is the sort of thing that makes some
of the things one hears so
puzzling.”
“What
things?”
“I
mean some of the rumors—you must have heard them
yourself—about your private Gestapo, and that kind of
talk.”
Devan smiled with his strong confident mouth.
“Of course we have our private plant investigators. You
couldn’t possibly handle thousands of
employees like we have without them. But when they aren’t looking for cases of
petty larceny and organised laziness, which you have to contend with in any
outfit as big as ours, they’re mostly just keeping in touch with the morale of
the staff. That’s the only way we can really
insure against trouble, by anticipating it before it
comes.”
“That’s
one of the crosses we have to bear,” Quennel said.
“I’d like to know any other
company that hasn’t been smeared
with
the same gossip.”
“I
suppose so,” Simon agreed flexibly. “But it must be specially tough
when there’s an accident they can hang it on. Like those union organisers who
got killed in the riot at Mobile last
year, for instance.”
Devan
made a blunt admissive movement of his head.
“Things
like that are bound to happen sometimes. It was too
bad it had to be us. But some of our people have been
with us
a long time, and you’d be
surprised what a strong feeling
they’ve got about the company. When some cheap racketeer
ing rabble-rousers come around trying
to stir up trouble, they can’t help getting sore, and then somebody may get
hurt.”
“After
all,” Quennel said, “we aren’t fighting a war against
Fascism to make the country safe for
the Communists. We’re
fighting for liberty and democracy, and that automatically
means that we’re also fighting to
preserve the kind of social stability that liberty and democracy have built up
in this coun
try.”
“What
particular kind of social stability were you thinking
of?” Simon asked.
“I mean a proper and progressive relationship between Cap
ital and Labor. I don’t believe in
Labor run wild. No sensible
man does. Without any revolutions, we’ve been slowly improv
ing the conditions and standards of
Labor, but we haven’t dis
rupted our economic framework to do it. We believe that all
men were created free and equal, but we
admit that they don’t
all
develop equal abilities. Therefore, for a long time to come,
there are bound to be great masses of
people who need to be
restrained
and controlled and brought along gradually. We
don’t need storm troopers and concentration camps to
do it,
because we have a sound
economic system which obtains the
same results in a much more civilised way. But we do have
to
recognise, and we do
tacitly recognise, that we can’t do without
a strong and capable executive class who know how to
nurse
these masses along and feed
them their rights in reasonable
doses.”
There
was a weird fascination, a hypnotic rationality about
the discussion, in those terms and at that moment,
with every
thing that was tied up with
it and looming over it, which had
a certain dreamlike quality that was weirder and worse
because
it was not a dream. But the
Saint would not have let it break
up uncompleted even if he could.
He
said, in exactly the same way as he had listened: “I won
der if it’s only what you might call
the lower classes who need
nursing
along.”
“Who
else are you thinking of?”
“I’m thinking of what the same terminology would call the upper
classes. I suppose—the people that you and I both spend
a lot of our time with. I wonder, for
instance, if they’ve got
just as clear an idea that there’s a war on and what it’s all
about.”
“I
should say they’ve got just as clear an idea.”
“I wish I were so sure,” said the Saint, out of that same de
tachment. “I’ve looked at them.
I’ve tried to get a feeling
about them. They buy War Bonds. They submit to having their
sugar rationed. They wonder how the
hell they’re going to keep
up with their taxes. They grumble and connive a bit about tires
and gasoline. They read the newspapers
and become barroom
strategists.
Some of them have been put out of business—just
as some of them have found new bonanzas. Some of them
have
been closer to the draft
than others. But it still isn’t real.”
“I think it’s very real.”
“It isn’t real. Thousands of men dying in some bloody Rus
sian swamp are just newspaper figures.
Prisoners being tor
tured and
mutilated and bayoneted in the Far East are just
good horror reading like a good thriller from the
library. They
haven’t been hurt
themselves. It’s going to be all right. The
war is expensive and inconvenient, but it’s going to
be all
right. It’s all going to be
taken care of eventually. That’s what
we pay taxes for.”
“Everybody can’t do the fighting,” said Devan. “In these
days it takes—I forget
the exact statistics, but I read them some
where—something like ten people working at home to
keep
one soldier at the
front.”
“But
the people behind the lines have to feel just as sure as the soldier that
they’re in a war. They’ve got to feel that the
whole course and purpose of their lives has been
changed, just as his has—and you don’t feel that just from getting by on one
pound of sugar a week. They’ve got to have something that the
people of England have got, because
their war was never thou
sands of miles
away. It’s something that you only get from go
ing hungry, and walking in the dark at night, and seeing things
you’ve grown up with destroyed, and watching your
friends
die. That’s when you know you’re really in a war, whatever job
you happen to be doing, and literally fighting for
your life,
and everything has to go
into it. There isn’t that feeling here
yet. I think there are still too
many people who sincerely think that all they have to do is root for the home
team. I think there
are still too many people
who think you can fight total war on
a
basis of golf as usual every Saturday and nothing must be allowed to interfere
with our dear old social stability. Particu
larly the people who ought to be leading in the opposite di
rection. Particularly,” said the Saint
carefully, “the wrong
people.”
Quennel made a slight impatient gesture.
“I
can’t think where you’d get that impression. Where have
you been lately?”
“I was in Florida for a while. And then I was in New York
for a couple of weeks.”
“And in New York I suppose you go to El Morocco and 21
and places like that.”
“I
don’t live there, but I’ve been to them. They seem to be
doing all right.”
Quennel raised
his shoulders triumphantly.
“Then of
course you’d get a wrong impression. The class of
people you find in those places—in Miami Beach and Palm
Beach and New York night clubs—they’re a class
that this war
is going to wipe out
completely. They’re dead now, but they
don’t
know it.”
He settled back confidently, efficiently, and took a cigar from
the box which the unobtrusive butler
was passing. He lighted it and tasted it approvingly, and said: “I’m glad
I remembered
to keep some of these
locked up.”
“Mice, or pixies?” Simon inquired with a smile.
“Just
Andrea’s friends,” Quennel said tolerantly, “She
throws parties for them up here all the
time, and they go
through
the place like locusts. She had one only a week ago,
and they drank up thirty cases of champagne, and that wasn’t
enough. They got into the cellar and finished half
a dozen bot
tles of Benedictine that I was saving.”
It came upon the Saint like the deep tolling of a bell in the
far distance, like the resonance of an
alarum that he had
known
about and been waiting for, and yet which had to be
actually heard before it could compress the diaphragm
and be
felt throbbing out along
the veins. But he knew now that this
was it, and that it was the last of everything that had
been miss
ing, and that now he had
seen all of his dragon, and he knew
all the ugliness and tbe evil of it, and it was a bigger
and sleeker dragon than he had ever seen before.
He bent his head for a moment so that it should not show in
his face before he was quite ready,
while it went through him
like
light would have gone through his eyes, and while he
tapped and lighted a cigarette because he didn’t feel
like a
cigar; and Hobart Quennel
must have felt that there was an
implied submission in his withdrawal, because Simon could
feel it in the way Quennel settled
himself back in his chair
and
told the butler to bring in some brandy, the solid good
humor of a man who has made a rightful
point. But when Si
mon looked up he looked at
Andrea, who had been silent for a
long
while, only following the argument with her eyes from
face to face. She was the one person who until
then had been
physically in the
picture more than either of the two men, and
yet she had never been a fixed part of the composition. He
wondered whether she ever would have any such
place, or
whether it was only an insatiable artistic sense of his own
that made him imagine that she should have found one.
He said lightly:
“You must know a lot of gay people.”
“I like parties,” she said. She added, almost defiantly:
“I like
El Morocco, too, when I’m
in the mood. I don’t see how it’s
going to help us win the war if everybody sits around being
miserable.”
But she went on
looking at the Saint, and her eyes were still
like
windows opening on to an empty sky. You could look through them and out and out
and there was still nothing but
the
clear pale blue and nothing.
Quennel
smiled indulgently, and said: “It’s pretty cool to
night. Why don’t you go and get a fire
started in the library,
and we’ll join
you in a few minutes.”
She got up.
“Don’t forget you had something you wanted to tell Simon,”
she said.
“No—1
was just thinking of that.”
She
had to look at the Saint again before she went out.
“Daddy
always wants to have his own way,” she said rather
vaguely. “Don’t let him keep you
here for ever.”
“I
won’t,” said the Saint, with a last upward glance. Then
the door closed behind her, and he was
alone with one last
sudden
disturbing question in his mind, but quite alone, like a
fighter when the gong sounds and the
seconds disappear
through
the ropes. He knew that this was the gong, and the
preliminary routines were over; and he knew just what
he was
fighting, and all his
senses were keyed and calm and ice-cold.
He turned to Quennel just as easily as he had played
every
waiting line of the scene,
and murmured: “Andrea did say
you had something to tell me.”
Quennel trimmed his cigar on the ashtray in front of him.
“Yes,”
he said. “Andrea told me you were taking an interest in Calvin Gray’s
synthetic rubber, so I thought you’d like to
know. Gray showed me a sample of it not long ago, as
I think
Walter told you. I had a
report on it from my chief chemist
today.” He settled even more safely and positively in
his chair.
“I’m afraid Calvin
Gray is a complete fraud.”
2
Simon’s right hand rested on the table in front of him like a bronze
casting set on stone, and he watched the smoke rising
from his cigarette like a pastel stroke against the
dark wood.
“You had a specimen analysed?”
“Yes.
I don’t know whether you know it, but that kind of analysis is one of the most
difficult things in the world to do.
In fact, a lot of people would say it was almost
impossible. But
I’ve got
some rather unusual men on my staff.”