The Saint and Mr Teal (Once More the Saint)

"Civilization be damned," said the Saint, in one of his few lucid moments. "I saw an English Gentleman in Piccadilly yesterday. With great daring he had re­moved his coat, waistcoat, collar, and tie, and he was walking about in a flannel shirt and a hideous pair of braces striped with his old school colours. Under the neck of his shirt and the roll-up of his sleeves you could see the edges of his abominable woollen vest. I refuse to discuss in detail the occult reasonings which may have made him ever put on the superfluous garments that he was carrying over his arm. But when you consider the abysmal chasms of imbecility personified in that perspiring oaf, and then realize that he was only a pale pink renegade-that a real English Gentleman and Public School Man would have died before he removed a single garment-then you know that the next deluge is long overdue."

He had a lot more to say, much of which would have made certain seaside borough councillors who spend most of their time deliberating on the minimum length of sleeve that may without peril to the public morality be permitted on bathing costumes foam at the mouth with indignation. He said it all very forcefully, using much of the language which by similarly coherent standards is judged to be harmless to an audience of three thousand men, women, and children congregated in a theatre, but definitely corrupting to the same audience if they happen to be congregated in a cinema. Also he travelled as fast and far as he possibly could on the strength of it, which perhaps has more to do with this story.

The Scilly Islands are not quite at the end of the world; but Simon Templar went there because a letter came to him which quite innocently told him some­thing that he could scarcely ignore.

"We have about the usual number of visitors for the time of year," wrote Mr. Smithson Smith. "They disappear just as they always do, and St. Mary's still seems uncrowded. . . , The Scillonian went aground in a fog the other day, but they got her off quite safely at high tide. . . . They caught some Frenchmen picking up their pots inside the three-mile limit on Sunday, and fined them Ł80, . .. . There are a couple of fine yachts anchored over at Tresco-one of them belongs to an Egyptian, a man called Abdul Osman. I've been wondering if he's the man I heard about once when I was in Assuan. . . ."

There were six pages of local gossip and general reminiscence, of the kind that Mr. Smithson Smith felt moved to write about three times a year. They had met in a dispute about a camel many years ago outside Ismailia; and the Saint, who was no letter writer, re­sponded at equally vague intervals. But the name of Abdul Osman was not strange to him, and he had no doubts about its associations.

There was a glint in his eye when he had finished reading.

"We're going to the Isles of Scilly, where the puffins go to breed," he said poetically; and Patricia Holm looked at him with an air of caution.

"I'm not a puffin," she said.

"Nevertheless, we'll go," said the Saint.

It may sound flippant to say that if Simon Templar had not shared some of the dim instincts of the puffin, Laura Berwick would undoubtedly have been drowned; but that is nothing but the truth.

She was sailing much too close to the wind-quite literally. Simon Templar saw it from the beginning, and had wondered whether it was pure daring or sheer foolishness. He was perched up on a comparatively smooth ledge of rock, sunning himself in a sublime vacancy of relaxation, and thinking of nothing in particular. The cool waters of the Atlantic were swish­ing and gurgling among the boulders a dozen feet below him, countering the pale brazen blue of the sky with a translucent intensity of colour that was as rich as anything in the Mediterranean: he had bathed in them for a few minutes, feeling the sticky heat of his walk dissolving under their icy impact with a gratitude that touched the foundations of utter physical contentment: then he had climbed up to his chosen ledge to let the sun dry his body. He wondered, lazily, whether the R.S.P.C.A. would have its views about the corruptive influence of his costume on the morals of a score of seagulls that were squabbling raucously over a scrap of food that had been left in a rocky pool by the falling tide; and he wondered also, with the same peaceful laziness, what strange discontent it was that had made Man of his own free will turn his back on the life that was always his, and take himself with his futile in­satiable ambitions to the stifling cities from which the escape to his own inheritance seemed so fantastic and impossible. And out of lazily half-closed eyes he watched the white sailing dinghy dancing over the swell. Too close to the wind-much too close. ...