Simon Templar read newspapers rarely, and when he did read them he skimmed through the pages as quickly as possible and gleaned information with a hurried eye. Most of the matter offered in return for his penny was wasted on him. He was not in the least interested in politics; the announcement that the wife of a Walthamstow printer had given birth to quadruplets found him unmoved; articles such as "A Man's Place is in the Home" (by Anastasia Gowk, the brilliant authoress of Passion in Pimlico) left him completely cold. But a quarter-column, with photograph, in a paper he bought one evening for the racing results chanced to catch his roving gaze, and roused a very faint flicker of attention.
Two coincidences led him from that idly assimilated item of news to a red-hot scent, the fascination of which for him was anything but casual.
The first came the next day, when, finding himself at Ludgate Circus towards one o'clock, it occurred to him to call in at the Press Club in the hope of finding someone he knew. He found Barney Malone, of the Clarion, and was promptly invited to lunch, which was exactly what he had been looking for. The Saint had an ingrained prejudice against lunching alone.
Conversation remained general throughout the meal, except for one bright interlude.
"I suppose there's nothing new about the Saint?" asked Simon innocently, and Barney Malone shook his head.
"He seems to have gone out of business."
"I'm only taking a rest," Simon assured him. "After the calm, the storm. You wait for the next scoop."
Simon Templar always insisted on speaking of the Saint as "I"—as if he himself was that disreputable outlaw. Barney Malone, for all his familiarity with Simon's eccentric sense of humour, was inclined to regard this affectation as a particularly aimless pleasantry.
It was half an hour later, over coffee, that the Saint recalled the quarter-column which had attracted his attention, and asked a question about it.
"You may be quite frank with your Uncle Simon," he said. "He knows all the tricks of the trade, and you won't disappoint him a bit if you tell him that the chief sub-editor made it up himself to fill the space at the last moment." Malone grinned.
"Funnily enough, you're wrong. These scientific discoveries you read about under scare headlines are usually stunt stuff; but if you weren't so uneducated you'd have heard of K. B. Vargan. He's quite mad, but as a scientist his class is A 1 at the Royal Society."
"So there may be something in it?" suggested the Saint. "There may, or there may not. These inventions have a trick of springing a leak as soon as you take them out of the laboratory and try using them on a large scale. For instance, they had a death-ray years ago that would kill mice at twenty yards, but I never heard of them testing it on an ox at five hundred."
Barney Malone was able to give some supplementary details of Vargan's invention which the sub-editor's blue pencil had cut out as unintelligible to the lay public. They were hardly less unintelligible to Simon Templar, whose scientific knowledge stopped a long way short of Einstein, but he listened attentively.
"It's curious that you should refer to it," Malone said, a little later, "because I was only interviewing the man this morning. He burst into the office about eleven o'clock, storming and raving like a lunatic because he hadn't been given the front page."
He gave a graphic description of the encounter.
"But what's the use?" asked the Saint. "There won't be another war for hundreds of years."
"You think so?"
"I'm told so."
Malone's eyebrows lifted in that tolerantly supercilious way in which a journalist's eyebrows will sometimes lift when an ignorant outsider ventures an opinion on world affairs.
"If you live for another six months," he said, "I shall expect to see you in uniform. Or will you conscientiously object?"
Simon tapped a cigarette deliberately on his thumbnail.
"You mean that?"
"I'm desperately serious. We're nearer to these things than the rest of the public, and we see them coming first. In another few months the rest of England will see it coming. A lot of funny things have been happening lately."
Simon waited, suddenly keyed up to interest; and Barney Malone sucked thoughtfully at his pipe, and presently went on:
"In the last month, three foreigners have been arrested, tried, and imprisoned for offences against the Official Secrets Act. In other words, espionage. During the same period, four Englishmen have been similarly dealt with in different parts of Europe. The foreign governments concerned have disowned the men we've pinched; but since a government always disowns its spies as soon as they get into trouble, on principle, no one ever believes it. Similarly, we have disclaimed the four Englishmen, and, naturally, nobody believes us, either—and yet I happen to know that it's true. If you appreciate really subtle jokes, you might think that one over, and laugh next time I see you."
The Saint went home in a thoughtful mood.
He had a genius that was all his own—an imaginative genius that would take a number of ordinary facts, all of which seemed to be totally unconnected, and none of which, to the eye of anyone but himself, would have seemed very remarkable, and read them into a sign-post pointing to a mystery. Adventure came to him not so much because he sought it as because he brazenly expected it. He believed that life was full of adventure, and he went forward in the full blaze and surge of that belief. It has been said of a man very much like Simon Templar that he was "a man born with the sound of trumpets in his ears"; that saying might almost equally well have been said of the Saint, for he also, like Michael Paladin, had heard the sound of the trumpet, and had moved ever afterwards in the echoes of the sound of the trumpet, in such a mighty clamour of romance that at least one of his friends had been moved to call him the last hero, in desperately earnest jest.
"From battle, murder, and sudden death, Good Lord, deliver us!' " he quoted once. "How can any live man ask for that? Why, they're meat and drink—they're the things that make life worth living! Into battle, murder, and sudden death, Good Lord, deliver me up to the neck! That's what I say. . . ."
Thus spoke the Saint, that man of superb recklessness and strange heroisms and impossible ideals; and went on to show, as few others of his age have shown, that a man inspired can swashbuckle as well with cloak and stick as any cavalier of history with cloak and sword, that there can be as much chivalry in the setting of a modern laugh as there can ever have been in the setting of a medieval lance, that a true valour and venture finds its way to fulfilment, not so much through the kind of world into which it happens to be born, as through the heart with which it lives.
But even he could never have guessed into what a strange story this genius and this faith of his were to bring him.
On what he had chanced to read, and what Barney Malone had told him, the Saint built in his mind a tower of possibilities whose magnitude, when it was completed, awed even himself. And then, because he had the priceless gift of taking the products of his vivid imagination at their practical worth, he filed the fancy away in his mind as an interesting curiosity, and thought no more about it.
Too much sanity is sometimes dangerous.
Simon Templar was self-conscious about his imagination. It was the one kind of self-consciousness he had, and certainly he kept it a secret which no one would have suspected. Those who knew him said that he was reckless to the point of vain bravado; but they were never more mistaken. If he had chosen to argue the point, he would have said that his style was, if anything, cramped by too much caution.
But in this case caution was swept away, and imagination triumphantly vindicated, by the second coincidence.
This came three days later, when the Saint awoke one morning to find that the showery weather which had hung over England for a week had given place to cloudless blue skies and brilliant sunshine. He hung out of his bedroom window and sniffed the air suspiciously, but he could smell no rain. Forthwith he decided that the business of annoying criminals could be pardonably neglected while he took out his car and relaxed in the country.
"Darling Pat," said the Saint, "it'd be a crime to waste a day like this!"
"Darling Simon," wailed Patricia Holm, "you know we'd promised to have dinner with the Hannassays."
"Very darling Pat," said the Saint, "won't they be disappointed to hear that we've both been suddenly taken ill after last night's binge?"
So they went, and the Saint enjoyed his holiday with the comfortable conviction that he had earned it.
They eventually dined at Cobham, and afterwards sat for a long time over cigarettes and coffee and matters of intimate moment which have no place here. It was eleven o'clock when the Saint set the long nose of his Furillac on the homeward road.
Patricia was happily tired; but the Saint drove very well with one hand.
It was when they were still rather more than a mile from Esher that the Saint saw the light, and thoughtfully braked the car to a standstill.
Simon Templar was cursed, or blessed, with an insatiable inquisitiveness. If ever he saw anything that trespassed by half an inch over the boundaries of the purely normal and commonplace, he was immediately fired with the desire to find out the reason for such erratic behaviour. And it must be admitted that the light had been no ordinary light.
The average man would undoubtedly have driven on somewhat puzzledly, would have been haunted for a few days by a vague and irritating perplexity, and would eventually have forgotten the incident altogether. Simon Templar has since considered, in all sober earnestness, what might have been the consequences of his being an average man at that moment, and has stopped appalled at the vista of horrors opened up by the thought.
But Simon Templar was not an average man, and the gift of minding his own business had been left out of his make-up. He slipped into reverse and sent the car gently back a matter of thirty yards to the end of a lane which opened off the main road.
A little way down this lane, between the trees, the silhouette of a gabled house loomed blackly against the star-powdered sky, and it was in an upper window of this house that the Saint had seen the light as he passed. Now he skilfully lighted a cigarette with one hand, and stared down the lane. The light was still there. The Saint contemplated it in silence, immobile as a watching Indian, till a fair, sleepy head roused on his shoulder.
"What is it?" asked Patricia.
"That's what I'd like to know," answered the Saint, and pointed with the glowing end of his cigarette.
The blinds were drawn over that upper window, but the light could be clearly seen behind them—a light of astounding brilliance, a blindingly white light that came and went in regular, rhythmic flashes like intermittent flickers of lightning.
The night was as still as a dream, and at that moment there was no other traffic on that stretch of road. The Saint reached forward and switched off the engine of the Furillac. Then he listened—and the Saint had ears of abnormal sensitiveness— in a quiet so unbroken that he could hear the rustle of the girl's sleeve as she moved her arm.
But the quiet was not silence—it was simply the absence of any isolated noise. There was sound—a sound so faint and soothing that it was no more than a neutral background to a silence. It might have been a soft humming, but it was so soft that it might have been no more than a dim vibration carried on the air.
"A dynamo," said the Saint; and as he spoke he opened the door of the car and stepped out into the road.
Patricia caught his hand.
"Where are you going, Saint?"
Simon's teeth showed white in the Saintly smile.
"I'm going to investigate. A perfectly ordinary citizen might be running a dynamo to manufacture his own electric light— although this dynamo sounds a lot heavier than the breed you usually find in home power plants. But I'm sure no perfectly ordinary citizen uses his dynamo to make electric sparks that size to amuse the children. Life has been rather tame lately, and one never knows. . . ."
"I'll come with you."
The Saint grimaced. •
Patricia Holm, he used to say, had given him two white hairs for every day he had known her. Even since a memorable day in Devonshire, when he had first met her, and the hectic days which followed, when she had joined him in the hunting of the man who was called the Tiger, the Saint had been forcing himself to realise that to try and keep the girl out of trouble was a hopeless task. By this time he was getting resigned to her. She was a law unto herself. She was of a mettle so utterly different to that of any girl he had ever dreamed of, a mettle so much finer and fiercer, that if she had not been so paradoxically feminine with it he would have sworn that she ought to have been a man. She was—well, she was Patricia Holm, and that was that. . . .
"O.K., kid," said the Saint helplessly.
But already she was standing beside him. With a shrug, the Saint climbed back into his seat and moved the car on half a dozen yards so that the lights could not be seen from the house. Then he rejoined her at the corner of the lane.
They went down the lane together.
The house stood in a hedged garden thickly grown with trees. The Saint, searching warily, found the alarm on the gate, and disconnected it with an expert hand before he lifted the latch and let Patricia through to the lawn. From there, looking upwards, they could see that queer, bleak light still glimmering behind the blinds of the upper window.
The front of the house was in darkness, and the ground-floor windows closed and apparently secured. The Saint wasted no time on those, for he was without the necessary instrument to force the catch of a window, and he knew that front doors are invariably solid. Back doors, on the other hand, he knew equally well, are often vulnerable, for the intelligent foresight of the honest householder frequently stops short of grasping the fact that the best-class burglar may on occasion stoop to using the servants' entrance. The Saint accordingly edged round the side of the house, Patricia following him.
They walked over grass, still damp and spongy from the rain that had deluged the country for the past six days. The humming of the dynamo was now unmistakable, and with it could be heard the thrum and whir of the motor that drove it. The noise seemed, at one point, to come from beneath their feet.
Then they rounded the second corner, and the Saint halted so abruptly that Patricia found herself two paces ahead of him.
"This is fun!" whispered the Saint.
And yet by daylight it would have been a perfectly ordinary sight. Many country houses possess greenhouses, and it is even conceivable that an enthusiastic horticulturist might have attached to his house a greenhouse some twenty-five yards long, and high enough to give a tall man some four feet of headroom.
But such a greenhouse brightly lighted up at half-past eleven at night is no ordinary spectacle. And the phenomenon becomes even more extraordinary—to an inquisitive mind like the Saint's—when the species of vegetable matter for which such an excellent illumination is provided is screened from the eyes of the outside world by dark curtains closely drawn under the glass.
Simon Templar needed no encouragement to probe further into the mystery, and the girl was beside him when he stepped stealthily to a two-inch gap in the curtains.
A moment later he found Patricia Holm gripping his arm with hands that trembled ever so slightly.
The interior of the greenhouse was bare of pots and plants; for four-fifths of its length it was bare of anything at all. There was a rough concrete floor, and the concrete extended up the sides of the greenhouse for about three feet, thus forming a kind of trough. And at one end of the trough there was tethered a goat.
At the other end of the building, on a kind of staging set on short concrete pillars, stood four men.
The Saint took them in at a glance. Three of them stood in a little group—a fat little man with a bald head and horn-rimmed spectacles, a tall, thin man of about forty-five with a high, narrow forehead and iron-grey hair, and a youngish man with pince-nez and a notebook. The fourth man stood a little apart from them, in front of a complicated switchboard, on which glowed here and there little bulbs like the valves used in wireless telegraphy. He was of middle height, and his age might have been anything from sixty to eighty. His hair was snow-white, and his clothes were shapeless and stained and shabby.
But it was on nothing human or animal in the place that the Saint's gaze concentrated after that first swift survey.
There was something else there, on the concrete floor, between the four men and the goat at the other end. It curled and wreathed sluggishly, lying low on the ground and not rising at all; and yet, though the outside of it was fleecily inert, it seemed as if the interior of the thing whirled and throbbed as with the struggling of a tremendous force pent up in ineffectual turmoil. This thing was like a cloud; but it was like no cloud that ever rode the sky. It was a cloud such as no sane and shining sky had ever seen, a pale violet cloud, a cloud out of hell. And here and there, in the misty violet of its colour, it seemed as if strange little sparks and streaks of fire shot through it like tiny comets, gleamed momentarily, and were gone, so that the cloud moved and burned as with an inner phosphorescence.
It had been still when the Saint first set eyes on it, but now it moved. It did not spread aimlessly over the floor; it was creeping along purposefully, as though imbued with life. The Saint, afterwards, described it as like a great, ghostly, luminous worm travelling sideways. Stretched out in a long line that reached from side to side of the greenhouse, it humped itself forward in little whirling rushes, and the living power within it seemed to burn more and more fiercely, until the cloud was framed in a faint halo of luminance from the whirl of eye-searing violet at its core.
It had seemed to be creeping at first, but then the Saint saw that that impression had been deceptive. The creeping of the cloud was now the speed of a man running, and it was plain that it could have only one objective. The goat at the end of the trough was cringing against the farthest wall, frozen with terror, staring wild-eyed at the cloud that rolled towards it with the relentlessness of an inrushing tide.
The Saint flashed a lightning glance back at the staging, and divined, without comprehending, why the cloud moved so decisively. The white-haired man was holding in one hand a thing of shining metal rather like a small electric radiator, which he trained on the cloud, moving it from side to side. From this thing seemed to come the propulsive force which drove the cloud along as a controlled wind might have done.
Then the Saint looked back at the cloud; and at that instant the foremost fringe of it touched the petrified goat.
There was no sound that the Saint could hear from outside. But at once the imprisoned power within the cloud seemed to boil up into a terrible effervescence of fire; and where there had been a goat was nothing but the shape of a goat starkly outlined in shuddering orange-hued flame. For an instant, only the fraction of a second, it lasted, that vision of a dazzling glare in the shape of a goat; and then, as if the power that had produced it was spent, the shape became black. It stood of itself for a second; then it toppled slowly and fell upon the concrete. A little black dust hung in the air, and a little wreath of bluish smoke drifted up towards the roof. The violet cloud uncoiled slothfully, and smeared fluffily over the floor in a widening pool of mist.
Its force was by no means spent—that was an illusion belied by the flickering lights that still glinted through it like a host of tiny fireflies. It was only that the controlling rays had been diverted. Looking round again, Simon saw that the white-haired man had put down the thing of shining metal with which he had directed the cloud, and was turning to speak to the three men who had watched the demonstration.
The Saint stood like a man in a dream.
Then he drew Patricia away, with a soft and almost frantic laugh.
"We'll get out of here," he said. "We've seen enough for one night."
And yet he was wrong, for something else was to be added to the adventure with amazing rapidity.
As he turned, the Saint nearly cannoned into the giant who stood over them; and, in the circumstances, Simon Templar did not feel inclined to argue. He acted instantaneously, which the giant was not expecting. When one man points a revolver at another, there is, by convention, a certain amount of backchat about the situation before anything is done; but the Saint held convention beneath contempt.
Moreover, when confronted by an armed man twice his own size, the Saint felt that he needed no excuse for employing any damaging foul known to the fighting game, or even a speciality of his own invention. His left hand struck the giant's gun arm aside, and at the same time the Saint kicked with one well-shod foot and a clear conscience.
A second later he was sprinting, with Patricia's hand in his.
There was a car drawn up in front of the house. Simon had not noticed it under the trees as he passed on his way round to the back; but now he saw it, because he was looking for it; and it accounted for the stocky figure in breeches and a peaked cap which bulked out of the shadows round the gate and tried to bar the way.
"Sorry, son," said the" Saint sincerely, and handed him off with some vim.
Then he was flying up the lane at the girl's side, and the sounds of the injured chauffeur's pursuit were too far behind to be alarming.
The Saint vaulted into the Furillac, and came down with one foot on the self-starter and the other on the clutch pedal.
As Patricia gained her place beside him he unleashed the full ninety-eight horse-power that the speedster could put forth when pressed.
His foot stayed flat down on the accelerator until they were running into Putney, and he was sure that any attempt to give chase had been left far astern; but even during the more sedate drive through London he was still unwontedly taciturn, and Patricia knew better than to try to make him talk when he was in such a mood. But she studied, as if she had never seen it before, the keen, vivid intentness of his profile as he steered the hurtling car through the night, and realised that she had never felt him so sheathed and at the same time shaken with such a dynamic savagery of purpose. Yet even she, who knew him better than anyone in the world, could not have explained what she sensed about him. She had seen, often before, the inspired wild leaps of his genius; but she could not know that this time that genius had rocketed into a more frantic flight than it had ever taken in all his life. And she was silent.
It was not until they were turning into Brook Street that she voiced a thought that had been racking her brain for the past hour.
"I can't help feeling I've seen one of those men before—or a picture of him——"
"Which one?" asked the Saint, a trifle grimly, "The young secretary bird—or Professor K. B. Vargan—or Sir Roland Hale—or Mr. Lester Hume Smith, His Majesty's Secretary of State for War?"
He marked her puzzlement, turning to meet her eyes. Now Patricia Holm was very lovely; and the Saint loved her. At that moment, for some reason, her loveliness took him by the throat.
He slipped an arm around her shoulders, and drew her close to him.
"Saint," she said, "you're on the trail of more trouble. I know the signs."
"It's even more than that, dear," said the Saint softly. "Tonight I've seen a vision. And if it's a true vision it means that I'm going to fight something more horrible than I've ever fought before; and the name of it may very well be the same as the name of the devil himself."