The Naturalist
Algernon de Breton Lomas-Coper was one of the genial Algys made famous
by Mr. P. G. Wodehouse, and accordingly he often ejaculated “What?
What?” to show that he could hardly believe his own brilliance; but
now he ejaculated “What? What?” to show that he could hardly believe
his own ears.
“It’s perfectly true,” said Patricia. “And he’s coming to lunch.”
“Wow!” gasped Algy feebly, and relapsed into open-mouthed amazement.
He was one of those men who are little changed by the passage of time:
he might have been twenty-five or thirty-five. Studying him very
closely—which few took the trouble to do—one gathered that the latter
age was more probably right. He was fair, round-faced, pink-and-white.
“He was quite tame,” said Patricia. “In fact, I thought he was awfully
nice. But he would keep on talking about the terrifying things that he
thought were going to happen. He said people were trying to murder
him.”
“_Dementia persecutoria_,” opined Algy. “What?”
The girl shook her head.
“He was as sane as anyone I’ve ever met.”
“_Extensio cruris paranoia_?” suggested Algy sagely.
“What on earth’s that?” she asked.
“An irresistible desire to pull legs.”
Patricia frowned.
“You’ll be thinking I’m crazy next,” she said. “But somehow you can’t
help believing him. It’s as if he were daring you to take him
seriously.”
“Well, if he manages to wake up this backwater I’ll be grateful to
him,” said the man. “Are you going to invite me to stay and meet the
ogre?”
He stayed.
Towards one o’clock Patricia sighted Templar coming up the road, and
went out to meet him at the gate. He was dressed as he had been the
day before, but he had fastened his collar and put on a tie.
He greeted her with a smile.
“Still alive, you see,” he remarked. “The ungodly prowled around last
night, but I poured a bucket of water over him, and he went home. It’s
astonishing how easy it is to damp the ardour of an assassin.”
“Isn’t that getting a bit stale?” she protested, although she was
annoyed to find that the reproof she forced into her tone lacked
conviction.
“I’m surprised you should say that,” he returned gravely. “Personally,
I’m only just beginning to appreciate the true succulence of the
jest.”
“At least, I hope you won’t upset everybody at lunch,” she said, and
his eyes twinkled.
“I’ll try to behave,” he promised. “At any other time it would have
been a fearful effort, but to-day I’m on my party manners.”
There were cocktails in the drawing-room (Baycombe society prided
itself on being up to date), and there Algy was brought forward and
introduced.
“Delighted—delighted—long expected pleasure—what?” he babbled.
“Is it really?” asked the Saint guilelessly.
Algy screwed a pane of glass into his eye and surveyed the visitor
with awe.
“So you’re the Mystery Man!” he prattled on. “You don’t mind being
called that? I’m sure you won’t. Everybody calls you the Mystery Man,
and I honestly think it suits you most awfully well, don’t you know.
And fancy taking the Pill Box! Isn’t it too frightfully draughty? But
of course you’re one of these strong, hearty he-men we see in the
pictures.”
“Algy, you’re being rude,” interrupted the girl.
“Am I really? Only meant for good-fellowship and all that sort of
thing. What? What? No offence, old banana pip, you know, don’t you
know.”
“Do I? Don’t I?” asked the Saint, blinking.
The girl rushed into the pause, for she already had a good estimate of
the Saint’s perverse sense of fun, and dreaded its irresponsibility.
She felt that at any moment he would produce a revolver and ask if
they knew anyone worth murdering.
“Algy, be an angel and go and tell Aunt Agatha to hurry up.”
“That is Mynheer Hans Bloem’s nephew,” observed the Saint calmly as
the door closed behind the talkative one. “He is thirty-four. He lived
for some years in America; in the City of London he is known as a man
with mining property in Transvaal.”
Patricia was astonished.
“You know more about him than I do,” she said.
“I make it my business to pry into my neighbour’s affairs,” he
answered solemnly. “It mayn’t be courteous, but it’s cautious.”
“Perhaps you know all about me?” she was tempted to challenge him.
He turned on her a clear blue eye which held a mocking gleam.
“Only the unimportant things. That you were educated at Mayfield. That
Miss Girton isn’t your aunt, but a very distant cousin. That you’ve
led a very quiet life, and travelled very little. You’re dependent on
Miss Girton, because she has the administration of your property until
you’re twenty-five. That is for another five years.”
“Are you aware,” she demanded dangerously, “that you’re most
impertinent?”
He nodded.
“Quite unpardonably,” he admitted. “I can only plead in excuse that
when there’s a price on one’s head one can’t be too particular about
one’s acquaintances.”
And he looked meditatively at the yellow-golden contents of his glass,
which he had held untasted since it was given him.
“Your health,” he wished her; and, as he set down the empty glass, he
smiled and added: “At least I’ve no fear of you.”
She had no time to find an adequate answer before Algy returned with
Miss Girton and a tall, thin, leather-faced man who was introduced as
Mr. Bloem.
“Pleased to meet you,” murmured the Saint. “So sorry T. T. Deeps are
going badly in the market, but this is just the time to make your
corner.”
Bloem started, and his spectacles fell off and dangled at the length
of their black watered ribbon as the Boer stared blankly at Simon
Templar.
“You must be very much on the inside in the City, Mr. Templar,” said
Bloem.
“Extraordinary, isn’t it?” agreed Simon, with his most saintly smile.
Then he was being introduced to a new arrival, Sir Michael Lapping.
The ex-judge shook hands heartily, peering short-sightedly into the
Saint’s face.
“You remind me of a man I once met in the Old Bailey—and I’m hanged if
I can remember whether it was a professional encounter or not.”
“I was just going to,” said the Saint blandly, if a trifle
cryptically. “His name was Harry the Duke, and you gave him seven
years. He escaped abroad six years ago, but I hear he’s been back in
England some months. Be careful how you go out after dark.”
It should have fallen to the Saint to take Miss Girton in to lunch,
but his hostess passed him on to Patricia, and the girl was thus able
to get a word with him aside.
“You’ve already broken your promise twice,” she said. “Do you have to
go on like this?”
“I’m merely attracting attention,” he said. “Having now become the
centre of interest, I shall rest on my laurels.”
He was as good as his word, but Patricia was unreasonably irritated to
observe that he had succeeded in attaining his shamelessly confessed
object. The others of the party felt vaguely at a disadvantage, and
favoured the Saint with furtive glances in which was betrayed not a
little superstitious awe. Once the Saint caught Patricia’s eye, and
the silent mirth that was always bubbling up behind his eyes spread
for a moment into an open grin. She frowned and tossed her pretty
head, and entered upon an earnest discussion with Lapping; but when
she stole a look at the Saint to see how he had taken the snub she saw
that beneath his dutifully decorous demeanour he was shaking with
silent laughter, and she was furious.
The Saint had travelled. He talked interestingly—if with a strong
egotistical bias—about places as far removed from civilisation and
from each other as Vladivostok, Armenia, Moscow, Lapland, Chung-king,
Pernambuco, and Sierra Leone. There seemed to be few of the wilder
parts of the world which he had not visited, and few of those in which
he had not had adventures. He had won a gold rush in South Africa, and
lost his holding in a poker game twenty-four hours later. He had run
guns into China, whisky into the United States, and perfume into
England. He had deserted after a year in the Spanish Foreign Legion.
He had worked his passage across the Atlantic as a steward, tramped
across America, fought his way across Mexico during a free-for-all
revolution, picked up a couple of thousand pounds in the Argentine,
and sailed home from Buenos Aires in a millionaire’s suite—to lose
nearly all the fruit of his wanderings on Epsom Downs.
“You’ll find Baycombe very dull after such an exciting life,” said
Miss Girton.
“Somehow, I don’t agree,” said the Saint. “I find the air very
bracing.”
Bloem adjusted his spectacles and enquired:
“And what might your employment be at the moment?”
“Just now,” said the Saint suavely, “I’m looking for a million
dollars. I feel that I should like to end my days in luxury, and I
can’t get along on less than fifteen thousand a year.”
Algy squawked with merriment.
“Haw-haw!” he yapped. “Jolly good! Too awfully horribly priceless!
What? What?”
“Quite,” the Saint concurred modestly.
“I fear,” said Lapping, “that you will hardly find your million
dollars in Baycombe.”
The Saint put his hands on the tablecloth and studied his finger-nails
with a gentle smile.
“You depress me, Sir Michael,” he remarked. “And I was feeling very
optimistic. I was told that there were a million dollars to be picked
up here, and one can hardly disbelieve the word of a dying man,
especially when one has tried to save his life. It was at a place
called Ayer Pahit, in the Malay States. He’d taken to the
jungle—they’d hunted him through every town in the Peninsular, ever
since they located him settling down in Singapore to enjoy an unjust
share of the loot—and one of their Malay trackers had caught him and
stuck a kris in him. I found him just before he passed out, and he
told me most of the story. . . . But I’m boring you.”
“Not a bit, dear old sprout, not a bit!” rejoined Algy eagerly, and he
was supported by a chorus of curiosity.
The Saint shook his head.
“But I’m quite certain I shall bore you if I go on,” he stated
obstinately. “Now suppose I’d been talking about Brazil—did you know
there was a village behind an almost impassable range of hills covered
with thick poisonous jungle where some descendants of Cortes’ crowd
still live? They’re gradually being absorbed into the native
stock—Mayas—by intermarriage, but they still wear swords and talk good
Castilian. They could hardly believe my rifle. I remember . . .”
And it was impossible to wheedle him back to any further discussion of
his million dollars.
He made his excuses as soon after coffee as was decently possible, and
spoke last to Patricia.
“When you get to know me better—as you must—you’ll learn to forgive my
weakness.”
“I suppose it’s nothing but a silly desire to cause a sensation,” she
said coldly.
“Nothing but that,” said the Saint with disarming frankness, and went
home with a comfortable feeling that he had had the better of the
exchange.
In spite of the protestations of Orace, he took a walk during the
afternoon. He wanted to be familiar with the territory for some
distance around, and thus his route took him inland towards the
uplands which sheltered the village on the south. It was the first
time he had surveyed the ground, but his hunting experience had given
him a good eye for country, and at the end of three hours’ hard
tramping he had every detail of the district mapped in his brain.
It was on the homeward hike that he met the stranger. His walk had
been as solitary as a walk in North Devon can be: he had not even
encountered any farm labourers, for the land for miles around was
unclaimed moor. But this man was so obviously harmless, even at a
distance of half a mile, that the Saint frowned thoughtfully.
The man was in plus-fours of a dazzling purple hue. He had a kind of
haversack slung over his shoulder, and he carried a butterfly net. He
moved aimlessly about—sometimes in short violent rushes, sometimes
walking, sometimes crawling and rooting about on his hands and knees.
He did not seem to notice Templar at all, and the Saint, moving very
silently, came right up and stood over him during an exceptionally
zealous burrowing exploration among some gorse bushes. While Simon
watched, the naturalist made a sudden pounce, accompanied by a gasp of
triumph, and wriggled back into the open with a small beetle held
gingerly between his thumb and forefinger. The haversack was hitched
round, a matchbox secured, the insect imprisoned therein, and the box
carefully stowed away. Then the entomologist rose to his feet,
perspiring and very red in the face.
“Good afternoon, sir,” he remarked genially, mopping his brow with an
appallingly green silk handkerchief.
“So it is,” agreed the Saint.
Mr. Templar had a disconcerting trick of taking the most conventional
speech quite literally—a device which he had adopted because it threw
the onus of continuing the conversation upon the other party.
“An innocuous and healthy pastime,” explained the stranger, with a
friendly and all-embracing sweep of his hand. “Fresh air—exercise—and
all in the most glorious scenery in England.”
He was half a head shorter than the Saint, but a good two stone
heavier. His eyes were large and child-like behind a pair of enormous
horn-rimmed glasses, and he wore a straggly pale walrus moustache. The
sight of this big middle-aged man in the shocking clothes, with his
ridiculous little butterfly net, was as diverting as anything the
Saint could remember.
“Of course—you’re Dr. Carn,” said the Saint, and the other started.
“How did you know?”
“I always seem to be giving people surprises,” complained Simon,
completely at his ease. “It’s so simple. You look less like a doctor
than anyone but a doctor could look, and there’s only one doctor in
Baycombe. How’s trade?”
Suddenly Carn was no longer genial.
“My profession?” he said stiffly. “I don’t quite understand.”
“You are one of many,” sighed the Saint. “Nobody ever quite
understands me. And I wasn’t talking about your new profession, but
about your old trade.”
Carn looked very closely at the younger man, but Simon was gazing at
the sea, and his face was inscrutable except for a faintly mocking
twist at the corners of his mouth—a twist that might have meant
anything.
“You’re clever, Templar——”
“Mr. Templar to the aristocracy, but Saint to you,” Simon corrected
him benevolently. “Naturally I’m clever. If I wasn’t, I’d be dead. And
my especial brilliance is an infallible memory for faces.”
“You’re clever, Templar, but this time you’re mistaken, and persisting
in your delusion is making you forget your manners.”
The Saint favoured Carn with a lazy smile.
“Well, well,” he murmured, “to err is human, is not it? But tell me,
Dr. Carn, why you allow an automatic pistol to spoil the set of that
beautiful coat? Are you afraid of a scarabæus turning at bay? Or is it
that you’re scared of a Great White Woolly Wugga-Wugga jumping out of
a bush?”
And the Saint swung his heavy staff as though weighing its efficiency
as a bludgeon, and the clear blue eyes with that lively devil of
mischief glimmering in their depths never left Carn’s red face. Carn
glared back chokingly.
“Sir,” he exploded at length, “let me tell you——”
“I, too, was once an Inspector of Horse Marines to the Swiss Navy,”
the Saint encouraged him gently; and, when Carn’s indignation proved
to have become speechless, he added: “But why am I so unsociable? Come
along to the Pill Box and have a spot of supper. I’m afraid it’ll only
be tinned stuff—we stopped having fresh meat since a seagull died
after tasting the Sunday joint—but our brandy is Napoleon . . . and
Orace grills sardines marvellously. . . .”
He linked his arm in Carn’s and urged the naturalist along, chattering
irrepressibly. It is an almost incredible tribute to the charm which
the Saint could exert, to record that he coaxed Carn into acceptance
in three minutes and had him chuckling at a grossly improper limerick
by the time they reached the Pill Box.
“You’re a card, Templar,” said Carn as they sat over Martinis in the
sitting-room, and the Saint raised indulgent eyebrows.
“Because I called your bluff?”
“Because you didn’t hesitate.”
“He who hesitates,” said the Saint sententiously, “is bossed. No
mughopper will ever spiel this baby.”
They talked politics and literature through supper (the Saint had
original and heretical views on both subjects) as dispassionately as
the most ordinary men, met together in the most ordinary
circumstances, might have done.
After Orace had served coffee and withdrawn, Carn produced a
cigar-case and offered it to the Saint. Templar looked, and shook his
head with a smile.
“Not even with you, dear heart,” he said, and Carn was aggrieved.
“There’s nothing wrong with them.”
“I’m so glad you haven’t wasted a cigar, then.”
“If I give you my word——”
“I’ll take it. But I won’t take your cigars.”
Carn shrugged, took one himself and lighted it. The Saint settled
himself more comfortably in his arm-chair.
“I’m glad to see you don’t pack a gun yourself,” observed the Doctor
presently.
“It makes one so unpopular, letting off artillery and things all over
Devonshire,” said Simon. “You can only do that in shockers: in real
life, the police make all sorts of awkward enquiries if you go
slaughtering people here and there because they look cock-eyed at you.
But I don’t advise anyone to bank on my consideration for the nerves
of the neighbourhood when I’m in my own home.”
Carn sat forward abruptly.
“We’ve bluffed for an hour and a half by the clock,” he said. “Suppose
we get down to brass tacks?”
“I’ll suppose anything you like,” assented Simon.
“I know you’ve got some funny game on; and I know you aren’t one of
those dude detectives, because I’ve made enquiries. You aren’t even
Secret Service. I know something about your record, and I gather you
haven’t come to Baycombe because you got an idea you’d like to
vegetate in rural England and grow string beans. You aren’t the sort
that goes anywhere unless they can see easy money or big trouble
waiting for collection.”
“I might have decided to quit before I stopped something.”
“You might—but your sort doesn’t quit while there’s a kick left in
’em. Besides, what do you think I’ve been doing all the time I’ve been
down here?”
“Huntin’ the elusive Wugga-Wugga, presumably,” drawled the Saint.
Carn made a gesture of impatience.
“I’ve told you you’re clever,” he said, “and I meant every letter of
it—in capital italics. But you don’t have to pretend you think I’m a
fool, because I know you know better. You’re here for what you can
get, and I’ve a good idea what that is. If I’m right, it’s my job to
get in your way all I can, unless you work in with me. Templar, I’m
paying you the compliment of putting the cards on the table, because
from what I hear I’d rather work with you than against you. Now, why
can’t you come across?”
The Saint had sunk deeper into his arm-chair. The room was lighted
only by the smoky oil lamp that Orace had brought in with the coffee,
for the sky had clouded over in the late afternoon and night had come
on early.
“There are just one million reasons why I shouldn’t come across,” said
the Saint tranquilly. “They were lost to the Confederated Bank of
Chicago quite a time ago, and I want them all to myself, my good
Carn.”
“You don’t imagine you could get away with it?”
“I can think of no limits to my ingenuity in getting away with
things,” said the Saint calmly.
He moved in the shadows, and a moment later he said quietly:
“There is a million-and-first argument which prevents me coming across
just now, Carn—and that is that I never allow Tiger Cubs to listen-in
on my confessions.”
“What do you mean?” asked Carn.
“I mean,” said the Saint in a clear strong voice, “that at this moment
there’s some son-of-a-gun peeking through that embrasure. I’ve got him
covered, and if he so much as blinks I’m going to shoot his eyelids
off!”