12 The Saint in London (The Misfortunes of Mr Teal)

The peremptory zing of the front doorbell interrupted him, and he looked up with the mischief hardening on his lips. Then he chuckled again.

"I expect this is the deputation. Give them my love, Orace--and some of those exploding cigarettes. I'll be seein' ya!"

He reached the window in a couple of strides and swung himself nimbly through. Orace watched him disappear into the dell of bracken at the other end of the lawn and strutted off, glower-ing, to answer the front door.

VI

There is believed to exist a happy band of halfwits whose fondest faith it is that the life of a government official, the superman to whom they entrust their national destiny, is one long treadmill of selfless toil from dawn to dusk. They picture the devoted genius labouring endlessly over reports and figures, the massive brain steaming, the massive stomach scarcely daring even to call a halt for food. They picture him returning home at the close of the long day, his shoulders still bowed beneath the cares of state, to fret and moil over their problems through the night watches. They are, we began by explaining, a happy band of half-wits.

The life of a government official is very far from that; particularly if he is of the species known as "permanent," which means that he is relieved even of the sordid obligation of being heckled from time to time by audiences of weary electors. His job is safe. Only death, the Great Harvester, can remove him; and even when he dies, the event may pass unnoticed until the body begins to fall apart. Until then, his programme is roughly as follows.

10:30 a.m. Arrive at office in Whitehall. Read newspaper. Discuss night before with fellow officials. Talk to secretary. Pick up correspondence tray. Put down again. 11:30 a.m. Go out for refreshment. 12:30 p.m. Return to office. Practise putting on H. M. carpet.

1:00 p.m. Go out to lunch.

3 :00 p.m. Back from lunch. Pick up correspondence tray. Refer to other department.

3:30 p.m. Sleep in armchair.

4:00 p.m. Tea.

4:30 p.m. Adjourn to club. Go home.

As a matter of fact, Sir Hugo Renway was not thinking of his office at all at half-past nine that morning. He was discussing the ravages of the incorrigible green fly with his gardener; but he was not really thinking of that, either.

He was a biggish thin-lipped man, with glossily brushed grey hair and a slight squint. The squint did not make him look sinister: it made him look smug. He was physically handicapped against looking anyone squarely in the face; but the impression he managed to convey was, not that he couldn't, but that he didn't think it worth while. He was looking at the gardener in just that way while they talked, but his air of well-fed Jmugness was illusory. He was well-fed, but he was troubled. Under that smooth supercilious exterior, his nerves were on edge; and the swelling drone of an aeroplane coming up from the Channel harmonized curiously well with the rasp of his thoughts.

"I don't think none of them new-fangled washes is any good, zir, if you aarsk me," the man was reiterating in his grumbling brogue; and Renway nodded and noticed that the steady drone had suddenly broken up into an erratic popping noise.

The man went on grumbling, and Renway went on pretending to listen, in his bored way. Inwardly he was cursing--cursing the stupidity of a man who was dead, whose death had transformed the steady drone of his own determination into the erratic popping which was going through his own, nerves.

The aeroplane swept suddenly over the house. It was rather low, wobbling indecisively; and his convergent stare hardened on it with an awakening of professional interest. The popping of the engine had slackened away to nothing. Then, as if the pilot had seen sanctuary at that moment, the machine seemed to pull itself together. Its nose dipped, and it rushed downwards in a long glide, with no other accompaniment of sound than the whining thrum of the propeller running free. Instinctively Renway ducked; but the plane sideslipped thirty feet over his head and fishtailed down to a perfect three-point landing in the flat open field beyond the rose garden.

Renway turned round and watched it come to a standstill. He knew at once that the helmeted figure in the cockpit had nothing left to learn about the mastery of an aeroplane. That field was a devil to get into, he had learned from experience; but the unknown pilot had dumped his ship in it with a dead stick as neatly as if he had had a whole prairie to choose from. Enrique had been the same--a swarthy daredevil who could land on a playing card and make an aeroplane do anything short of balancing billiard balls on its tail, whose nerveless brilliance had been so maddeningly beyond the class of all Renway's own taut-strung effort. . . . Renway's hands tensed involuntarily at his sides for a moment while he went on thinking; and then he turned away and began minutely examining some buds of rose-crimson Papa Gontiers as the pilot walked under a rustic arch and came towards him.