The Saint in Europe (17 page)

She waddled on towards the water’s edge through a cloud of giggles, grins, and whispered comments that were pitched just loud enough to reach her ears; and Simon kicked his toes through the sand and gazed after her thoughtfully. The daily baiting of the Spanish Cow had lost most of its novelty as a spectacle, for him; though the rest of the beach showed no signs of tiring of it. It had already rivalled water skiing among the sports of that season. It had the priceless advanнtage of costing nothing, and of giving a satisfactory reaction to the most awkward tyro. Goaded far enough, Mrs Nussнberg could always be relied upon to give a demonstration in return which dissolved the onlookers into shrieks of laughter. It happened, according to plan, that morning. As Mrs Nussberg tested the temperature of the water with her toes, the Adonis of the beach came swaggering along the rim of wet sand, rippling his rounded muscles-Maurice Walmar, heir to millions and one of the oldest titles in the Almanac de Gotha, a privileged person at any time, and the most daring leader of the new sport. His dark sensual eyes took in the situation at once, and a smile touched his lips. He fell on his knees and bowed his head to the ground in an elaborate mockery of homage.

Mrs Nussberg put out her tongue at him. The beach howled with delight. “She must be screwy,” opined Myra Campion, fascinated.

The opinion was pretty generally held. Properly proнvoked, Mrs Nussberg could be depended on to pull the most horrible faces at her tormentors, squawk abuse at them like a trained parrot, and even put her fingers to her nose. Far from bringing forbearance, that apparent screwiness seemed to fan a spark of pure sadism in the onlookers-the same savage instinct that impels urchins to throw stones at an idiot village boy.

“Have you seen that caricature of her outside the Freнgate?” asked Miss Campion. “The boy who draws portraits on the beach did it. It’s too perfect. She tried to make them take it down, and they said she could have it if she bought it. They told her she could have it for fifty thousand francs, but it’s still there. In a frame, hanging up in the entrance.”

“I’ll have to take a look at it,” said the Saint. He stood up, dusting the sand from his legs. “Do you think you could get around that buoy again before lunch?”

As he slid easily through the cool smooth water he looked back and saw the bright yellow bathing cap of the Spanish Cow bobbing in the sunlight close to the shore, as she padнdled about with her clumsy breast stroke. He pillowed his face in the blue sea and drifted on with a sweep of long effortless arms, gazing down through the crystalline transнparency to the misty depths where tiny fish flicked and turned like silver sparks, and decided that the time was ripe for Mrs Nussberg and her jewels to meet Romance.

2

It all began the day after Simon arrived at Juan-les-Pins. He was sitting on a high stool in a sandwich bar, refreshing his interior with a glass of iced orange juice, when the Spanнish Cow came in. Simon did not then know her real name, nor had he become sufficiently interested to christen her, but, observing that she wore voluminous beach pyjamas with broad horizontal stripes of purple and yellow, which made her look like a great blowsy wasp, it is probable that some of the emotion he felt might have been detected by an eagle eye. The Saint’s sense of humour was very human; and the barman looked at him and grinned sympathetically, as one who in his day had also been confronted by the specнtacle for the first time. It is therefore possible that the Saint’s face was not quite so woodenly disciplined as a meticulous politeness might have wished. It is possible that one of his eyebrows may have twitched involuntarily, or the corners of his mouth widened a slight half-millimetre, in answer to the barman’s confidence. And then he glanced at the vision again, and saw that it was staring at him through a pair of lorgnettes and pulling faces at him.

The Saint blinked. He regarded his orange juice suspiнciously. To a man of his abstemious habits, it was a remarkнable hallucination to affront the brain at eleven o’clock in the morning-even in a morning of such potent sunshine as those shores boast in July.

He looked again. Mrs Nussberg put out her tongue in a grimace of bloodcurdling menace.

Simon swayed slightly on his stool. His friends had freнquently told him that he was quite mad, but he had never expected to lose his last vestige of sanity in quite so disturbнing a way. He turned uneasily to an inspection of the other patrons of the bar, wondering if the portly Dutchman on his left would suddenly seem to be elongating and turning bright green, or if the charming honey-blonde damsel on his right would be pulling off her pink ears and stirring them into her coffee. Instead he found the other customers still of normal shape and hue, smiling broadly. He braced himself to look at the striped vision again. It applied its thumb to its nose and extended its fingers towards him, waggling them with hideous glee.

The charming damsel on his right spoke, through the daze of alarm that was rapidly enveloping him.

“Don’t pay any attention to her,” she said. “She’s always like that.”

“Bless you, darling,” murmured the Saint fervently. “For a moment I thought the heat had got me.”

“Who’s always like what?” screamed Mrs Nussberg.

The charming damsel sipped her coffee.

“We’re off,” she remarked.

“I can pull faces just as well as you can,” yelled Mrs Nussberg, with justifiable pride and the little imps of Satan elected that instant to enter into the Saint.

He turned.

“Madam,” he said generously, “you can pull them better.”

Simon had never spoken boastfully of the encounter. He was ordinarily a very chivalrous bloke, kind to the fat and infirm, and willing to oblige a lady in any manner that was in his power; but there were moments when he ceased to be a truly responsible captain of his soul, and that was one of them.

The result was that three minutes later he found himself strolling back to the beach with the charming damsel on his arm and a delirious bar behind him. Few people had ever been known to score off the Saint in an exchange of back-chat, and Mrs Nussberg was certainly not one of them. It was that same night, in the Casino, that he saw Mrs Nussнberg plastered with all her jewels, and the modest glow of those three minutes of light-headed revelry abruptly vanнished.

Which explained his abstracted thoughtfulness on this subsequent morning.

For it was a principle of the Saint’s sparsely principled career that one never exchanged entirely carefree badinage with anyone so liberally adorned with diamonds as Mrs Porphyria Nussberg. On the contrary, one tended to be patient-almost longsuffering. Following the example of the sun-worshippers simmering in their grease, one stewed to conquer. Diamonds so large and plentiful could not be gazed upon at any time by any honest filibuster without sentiment; and when they chanced to be hung around a woman who pulled faces and shouted wrathfully across bars, it became almost a sacred duty to give that sentiment full rein. Unfortunately Simon saw the grimaces first and the jewellery afterwards; and he had spent some days regretting that chance order of events-the more earnestly when he discovered that Myra Campion had helped to spread the fame of his achievement, and that he was widely expected to repeat the performance every time he and Mrs Nussberg passed close enough to speak.

He hoped speechlessly that the call of Romance, which he had at last decided was the only possible approach, might be strong enough to obliterate the memory of that earlier argument. The Spanish Cow had no friends-he had had some difficulty in learning her official name, which no one had apparently troubled to inquire. From local gossip he learned that she had once had a gigolo, a noisome biped with tinted fingernails and a lisp; but even that specimen had found the penalties of his job too high, and had minced on to pastures less conspicuous. It seemed as if a cavalier with stamina to last the course might get near enough to those lavish ropes of gems to pay his expenses; and having reached that decision Simon made up his mind to go ahead with it before his nerve failed him.

He had his chance at the Casino that evening. Miss Camнpion was safely settled at the boule table with a pile of chips, and the Saint looked around and saw Mrs Nussberg emergнing majestically from the baccarat room and proceeding towards a table in the lounge. Simon drew a deep breath, straightened his tie, and sauntered after her.

She stared at him belligerently.

“What do you want?”

“I think I owe you an apology,” said the Saint quietly.

“You’ve found that out, have you?” she barked.

A smirking waiter was dusting off the table. Simon sat down opposite her and ordered a fine a l’eau. Parties at adjoining tables were already glancing curiously and exнpectantly towards them, and the movement cost Simon a clammier effort than anything he had done for a long time.

“That morning-a few days ago,” he explained contritely. “You misunderstood me. I wasn’t being fresh. But when you called me down, I sort of forgot myself.”

“I should think you did,” rasped Mrs Nussberg, without friendliness.

“I’m sorry.”

“So you ought to be.”

It dawned on the Saint that this vein of dialogue could be continued almost indefinitely, if Mrs Nussberg insisted on it. He looked around somewhat tensely for inspiration, wonнdering if after all the jewels could be worth the price; and by the mercy of his guardian angel the inspiration was provided.

It was provided in the person of Maurice Walmar, who at that moment came strolling superbly across the lounge and recognized an acquaintance in the far corner. With an elegant wave of his hand he started in that direction. His route took him past the table where Simon was prayerfully groping for the light. Walmar recognized the Spanish Cow, and flashed a meaning sneer towards his acquaintance. As he squeezed past the table, he deliberately swerved against Mrs Nussberg’s arm as she raised her glass. The drink spilled heavily across her lap.

“Pardon,” said Walmar casually, and went on.

Simon leapt up.

Even if he had not been interested in Mrs Nussberg’s jewels, he would probably have done the same thing. He had witnessed every phase of the incident, and at any time he would have called that carrying a joke too far. Nor did he care much for Maurice Walmar, with his too beautifully modelled face and platinum watch bracelet. He caught the young humorist by the elbow and spun him around.

“I don’t think you saw what you did,” he remarked evenly.

For a second the other was startled to incredulity. Then he glanced down at the soaked ruin of Mrs Nussberg’s gown, and back from that to the Saint. His aristocratic lips curled in their most polished insolence.

“I have apologized,” he said carelessly. “It was an acciнdent.”

“Then so is this,” said the Saint mildly, and his fist shot over and slammed crisply into the centre of the sneering mouth.

Walmar rocked on his heels. He clutched at a table and went down in a spatter of glass and splashing fluids.

There was an instant’s deathly stillness; and then a gray-haired Englishman observed quietly: “He asked for it.”

Walmar crawled up shakily. His mouth was a mess, and there was blood on his silk shirt. A covey of waiters awoke from their momentary stupour and buzzed in among the tables, interposing themselves between a resumption of the strife. The players abandoned the boule table and swarmed out towards the prospect of more primitive sport, leaving the high priest to intone his forlorn “Rien ne va plus!” to a skeleton congregation. The two inevitable policemen, who appear as if at the rubbing of a kind of Aladdin’s lamp on the scene of any French fracas, stalked ponderously into the perspective, closely followed by an agitated manager. The tableau had all the makings of a second-act musical comedy curtain, but Simon overcame the temptation to explore all the avenues of extravagant burlesque which it opened up. He spoke calmly and to the point.

“He upset this lady’s drink-purposely.”

Walmar, struggling dramatically in the grasp of a waiter whom he could have shaken off with a wave of his hand, shouted: “Messieurs! It was an accident. He attacked me-“

The larger agent turned to the waiter.

“Qu’est-ce qui est arrive?” he demanded.

“Je n’ai rien vu,” answered the man tactfully.

It was the gray-haired Englishman who came forward with quiet corroboration, and the affair turned into a general soothing-party for Maurice Walmar, whose wealth and family entitled him to eccentricities that would rapidly have landed an ordinary visitor in jail. The jaundiced eye with which private battles are viewed in France was well known to the Saint, and he was rather relieved to be spared the unheroic sequels in which offenders against the code of peace are usually involved.

He went out on to the terrace with Mrs Nussberg, and as he left the lounge he caught sight of Myra Campion’s face among the spectators who were staring after him in the pained blank manner of a row of dowagers who have been, simultaneously bitten in the fleshy part of the leg by their favourite Pomeranians. Miss Campion’s sweet symmetrical features were almost egg-like in their stupefied bewilderнment; and Simon’s smile as he reached the edge of the balcony and looked out over the dark sea came quite naturally.

“You’ve seen for yourself,” he said. “I’ve just got a natural gift for getting into trouble.”

“Served him right,” blared Mrs Nussberg. “The dirty little-“

Her comment on Maurice Walmar’s lineage was certainly inaccurate, but Simon could understand her feelings.

The orchestra wailed into another erotic symphony, and the Saint expanded his chest and flicked his cigarette over the parapet. The job had to be completed.

“Would you like to dance?” he asked.

The Spanish Cow gazed at him suspiciously, her small eyes hard and bright in the sallow puffy face. Then, without answering, she marched towards the floor.

As they completed their first circle under the fairy lights, Simon saw that the colony was following his movements with bulging eyes. It went into small huddles and buzzed, as openly as convention would permit. He began to find more innocent entertainment in his sudden notoriety than he had ever expected-and the Saint had never found the appalled reactions of respectable society dull. There were times when he derived a purely urchin satisfaction from the flouting of the self-appointed Best People, and he was quite disappointed when the Spanish Cow broke away from him after a half-dozen turns.