“By itself, no,” answered Simon. “But if it were not by itself—”
He did not finish the sentence, and they were silent for the rest of the drive. Before they went to bed he asked one more question.
“Who else knows about these experiments?”
“No one, I believe. He told me the other day that he was not prepared to say anything about them until he could show complete success. As a matter of fact, I lent him some money to go on with his work, and that is the only reason he took me into his confidence. I was surprised when he showed us his laboratory tonight—even I had never seen it before.”
“So he is convinced now that he can show a complete success,” said the Saint quietly, and was still subdued and preoccupied the next morning.
In the afternoon he refused to swim or play tennis. He sat hunched up in a chair on the veranda, scowling into space and smoking innumerable cigarettes, except when he rose to pace restlessly up and down like a big nervous cat.
“What you are really worried about is the girl,” Nordsten teased him.
“She’s pretty enough to worry about,” said the Saint shamelessly. “I think I’ll go over and ask her for a cocktail.”
Nordsten smiled.
“If it will make you a human being again, by all means do,” he said. “If you don’t come back to dinner I shall know that she is appreciating your anxiety. In any case I shall probably be very late myself—I have to attend a committee meeting at the golf club, and that always adjourns to the bar and goes on for hours.”
But the twilight had already given way to the dark before Simon made good his threat. He took out Ivar Nordsten’s spare Rolls-Royce and drove slowly over the highway until he found the turning that led through the deep sprawling woods to the doctor’s house. He was prepared to feel foolish, and yet as his headlights circled through the iron gates he touched his hip pocket to reassure himself that if the need arose he might still feel wise.
The trees arching over the drive formed a ghostly tunnel down which the Rolls chased its own forerush of light. The smooth hiss of the engine accentuated rather than broke the silence, so that the mind even of a hardened and unimaginative man might cling to the comfort of that faint sound in the same way that the mind of a child might cling to the light of a candle as a comfort against the gathering terrors of the night. The Saint’s lip curled cynically at the flight of his own thoughts…
And then, as the car turned a bend in the drive, he saw the girl, and trod fiercely on the brakes.
The tyres shrieked on the macadam, and the engine stalled as the big car rocked to a standstill. It flashed through the Saint’s mind, at that instant, when all sound was abruptly wiped out, that the stillness which he had imagined before was too complete for accident. He felt the skin creep over his back, and had to call on an effort of will to force himself to open the door and get out of the car.
She lay face downwards, half way across the drive, in the pool of illumination shed by the glaring headlights. Simon turned her over and raised her head on his arm. Her eyelids twitched as he did so; a kind of moan broke from her lips, and she fought away from him, in a dreadful wildness of panic, for the brief moment before her eyes opened and she recognised him.
“My dear,” he said, “what has been happening?”
She had gone limp in his arms, the breath jerking pitifully through her lips, but she had not fainted again. And behind him, in that surround of stifling stillness, he heard quite clearly the rustle of something brushing stealthily over the grass beside the drive. He saw her eyes turning over his shoulder, saw the wide terror in them.
“Look!”
He spun round, whipping the gun from his pocket, and for more than a second he was paralysed. For that eternity he saw the thing, deep in the far shadows, dimly illumined by the marginal reflections from the beam of the headlights—something gross and swollen, a dirty grey-white, shaped rather like a great bleached sausage, hideously bloated. Then the darkness swallowed it again even as his shot smashed the silence into a hundred tiny echoes.
The girl was struggling to her feet. He snatched at her wrist.
“This way.”
He got her into the car and slammed the door. Steel and glass closed round them to give an absurd relief, the weak, unreasoning comfort to the naked flesh which men under a bombardment find in cowering behind canvas screens. She slumped against his shoulder, sobbing hysterically.
“Oh, my God! My God!”
“What was it?” he asked.
“It’s escaped again. I knew it would. He can’t handle it—”
“Has it got loose before?”
“Yes. Once.”
He tapped a cigarette on his thumbnail, stroked his lighter. His face was a beaten mask of bronze and granite in the red glow as he drew the smoke down into the mainsprings of his leaping nerves.
“I never dreamed it had come to that,” he said. “Even last night, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
“He wouldn’t have shown you that. Even when he was boasting, he wouldn’t have shown you. That was his secret…And I’ve helped him. Oh, God!” she said. “I can’t go on!”
“Carmen,” he said quietly. “You must go away from here.”
“He’d kill me.”
“You must go away.”
The headlamps threw back enough light for him to see her face, tear-streaked and desperate.
“He’s mad,” she said. “He must be. Those horrible things…I’m afraid. I want to go away, but he wouldn’t let me. I can’t go on. Something terrible is going to happen. One day I saw it catch a dog…Oh, my God, if you hadn’t come when you did—”
“Carmen.” He still held her, speaking slowly and deliberately, putting every gift of sanity that he possessed into the level dominance of his voice. “You must not talk like that. You’re safe now. Take hold of your self.”
She nodded.
“I know. I’m sorry. I’ll be all right. But—”
“Can you drive?”
“Yes.”
He started the engine and turned the car round. Then he pushed the gear lever into neutral and set the hand-brake.
“Drive this car,” he said. “Take it down to the gates and wait for me there. You’ll be close to the highway, and there’ll be plenty of other cars passing for company. Even if you do see anything, you needn’t be frightened. Treat the car like a tank and run it over. Ivar won’t mind—he’s got plenty more cars. And if you hear anything, don’t worry. Give me half an hour, and if I’m not back go to Ivar’s and talk to him.”
Her mouth opened incredulously.
“You’re not getting out again?”
“I am. And I’m scared stiff.” The ghost of a smile touched his lips, and then she saw that his face was stern and cold. “But I must talk to your uncle.”
He gripped her arm for a moment, kissed her lightly, and got out. Without a backward glance he walked quickly away from the car, up the drive towards the house. A flashlight in his left hand lanced the darkness ahead of him with its powerful beam, and he swung it from left to right as he walked, holding his gun in his right hand. His ears strained into the gloom which his eyes could not penetrate, probing the silence under the soft scuff of his own footsteps for any sound that would give him warning, but he forced himself not to look back. The palms of his hands were moist.
The house loomed up in front of him. He turned off to one side of the building, followed the direction in which he remembered that Dr Sardon’s laboratory lay. Almost at once he saw the squares of lighted windows through the trees. A dull clang of sound came to him, followed by a sort of furious thumping. He checked himself, and then as he walked on more quickly some of the lighted windows went black. The door of the laboratory opened as the last light went out, and his torch framed Dr Sardon and the doorway in its yellow circle.
Sardon was pale and dishevelled, his clothes awry. One of his sleeves was torn, and there was a scratch on his face from which blood ran. He flinched from
the light as if it had burnt him.
“Who is that?” he shouted.
“This is Simon Templar,” said the Saint, in a commonplace tone. “I just dropped in to say hullo.”
Sardon turned the switch down again and went back into the laboratory. The Saint followed him.
“You just dropped in, eh? Of course. Good. Why not? Did you run into Carmen, by any chance?”
“I nearly ran over her,” said the Saint evenly.
The doctor’s wandering glance snapped to his face. Sardon’s hands were shaking, and a tiny muscle at the side of his mouth twitched spasmodically.
“Of course,” he said vacantly. “Is she all right?”
“She is quite safe.” Simon had put away his gun before the other saw it. He laid a hand gently on the doctor’s shoulder. “You’ve had trouble here,” he said.
“She lost her nerve,” Sardon retorted furiously. “She ran away. It was the worst thing she could do. They understand, these creatures. They are too much for me to control now. They disobey me. My commands must seem so stupid to their wonderful brains. If it had not been that this one was heavy and waiting for her time—”
He checked himself.
“I knew,” said the Saint calmly.
The doctor peered up at him out of the corners of his eyes.
“You knew?” he repeated cunningly.
“Yes. I saw it.”
“Just now?”
Simon nodded.
“You didn’t tell us last night,” he said. “But it’s what I was afraid of. I have been thinking about it all day.”
“You’ve been thinking, have you? That’s funny.” Sardon chuckled shrilly. “Well, you’re quite right. I’ve done it. I’ve succeeded. I don’t have to work anymore. They can look after themselves now. That’s funny, isn’t it?”
“So it is true. I hoped I was wrong.”
Sardon edged closer to him.
“You hoped you were wrong? You fool! But I would expect it of you. You are the egotistical human being who believes in his ridiculous conceit that the whole history of the world from its own birth, all the species and races that have come into being and been discarded, everything—everything has existed only to lead up to his own magnificent presence on the earth. Bah! Do you imagine that your miserable little life can stand in the way of the march of evolution? Your day is over! Finished! In there”—his arm stiffened and pointed—“in there you can find the matriarch of the new ruling race of the earth. At any moment she will begin to lay her eggs, thousands upon thousands of them, from which her sons and daughters will breed—as big as she is, with her power and her brains.” His voice dropped. “To me it is only wonderful that I should have been Nature’s chosen instrument to give them their rightful place a million years before Time would have opened the door to them.”
The flame in his eyes sank down as his voice sank, and his features seemed to relax so that his square clean-cut efficient face seemed soft and beguiling like the face of an idiot child.
“I know what it feels like to be God,” he breathed.
Simon held both his arms.
“Dr Sardon,” he said, “you must not go on with this experiment.”
The other’s face twisted.
“The experiment is finished,” he snarled. “Are you still blind? Look—I will show you.”
He was broad-shouldered and powerfully built, and his strength was that of a maniac. He threw off the Saint’s hands with a convulsive wrench of his body, and ran to the sliding door at the end of the room. He turned with his back to it, grasping the handle, as the Saint started after him.
“You shall meet them yourself,” he said hoarsely. “They are not in their cage any more. I will let them out here, and you shall see whether you can stand against them. Stay where you are!”
A revolver flashed in his hand, and the Saint stopped four paces from him.
“For your own sake, Dr Sardon,” he said, “stand away from that door.”
The doctor leered at him crookedly.
“You would like to burn my ants,” he whispered.
He turned and fumbled with the spring catch, his revolver swinging carelessly wide from its aim, and the door had started to move when Simon shot him twice through the heart.
Simon was stretched out on the veranda, sipping a highball and sniping mosquitoes with a cigarette-end, when Nordsten came up the steps from his car. The Saint looked up with a smile.
“My dear fellow,” said Nordsten, “I thought you would be at the fire.”
“Is there a fire?” Simon asked innocently.
“Didn’t you know? Sardon’s whole laboratory has gone up in flames. I heard about it at the club, and when I left I drove back that way thinking I should meet you. Sardon and his niece were not there, either. It will be a terrible shock for him when he hears of it. The place was absolutely gutted—I’ve never seen such a blaze. It might have been soaked in petrol. It was still too hot to go near, but I suppose all his work has been destroyed. Did you miss Carmen?”
The Saint pointed over his shoulder.
“At the present moment she’s sleeping in your best guestroom,” he said. “I gave her enough of your sleeping tablets to keep her like that till breakfast time.”
Nordsten looked at him.
“And where is Sardon?” he asked at length.
“He is in his laboratory.”
Nordsten poured himself out a drink and sat down.
“Tell me,” he said.
Simon told him the story. When he had finished, Nordsten was silent for a while. Then he said, “It’s all right, of course. A fire like that must have destroyed all the evidence. It could have been an accident. But what about the girl?”
“I told her that her uncle had locked the door and refused to let me in. Her evidence will be enough to show that Sardon was not in his right mind.”
“Would you have done it anyhow, Simon?”
The Saint nodded.
“I think so. That’s what I was worried about, ever since last night. It came to me at once that if any of those brutes could breed—” He shrugged, a little wearily. “And when I saw that great queen ant, I knew that it had gone too far. I don’t know quite how rapidly ants can breed, but I should imagine that they do it by thousands. If the thousands were all the same size as Sardon’s specimens, with the same intelligence, who knows, what might have been the end of it?”
“But I thought you disliked the human race,” said Nordsten.
Simon got up and strolled across the veranda.
“Taken in the mass,” he said soberly, “it will probably go on nauseating me. But it isn’t my job to alter it. If Sardon was right, Nature will find her own remedy. But the world has millions of years left, and I think evolution can afford to wait.”
His cigarette spun over the rail and vanished into the dark like a firefly as the butler came out to announce dinner, and they went into the dining-room together.
PUBLICATION HISTORY
As with virtually all short adventures for the Saint most of the stories in this book made a magazine appearance prior to being published in book form. Many appeared in The American Magazine, to whom Charteris was under contract in the mid-1930s; “The Man Who Was Lucky” appeared under the title of “Date in the Dark” in the December 1935 edition whilst “The Smart Detective” was first published as “The Saint and the Siren” in the June 1936 edition. “The Wicked Cousin” appeared under the bibliographically challenging title of “The Saint in Hollywood” in the October 1936 edition whilst “The Well-Meaning Mayor” appeared as the much more entertainingly titled “Don’t Shoot the Mayor’ in the August 1936 edition
Of the remaining stories “The Charitable Countess” first appeared in the 4 March 1939 edition of Detective Fiction Weekly whilst “The Star Producers” appeared in that same publication a couple of weeks later.
“The Man Who liked Ants” was first published in the December 1937 edition of Double Detective Magazine whilst “
The Benevolent Burglary” and “The Mug’s Game” were written specifically for this book.
The book itself was first published in March 1939 and was so well received that by June Doubleday was on its second printing. A British edition appeared in July and just two years later, in September 1941, Hodder & Stoughton was on its sixteenth edition. Some later editions of the book were christened The Saint and the Happy Highwayman, much to Charteris’s displeasure, for of course the Saint is the Happy Highwayman.
Six of the stories in this book were adapted for The Saint television series with Roger Moore; “The Man Who Was Lucky” was written and directed by John Gilling and first aired on 13 December 1962 as part of the first season. “The Charitable Countess” with Patricia Donahue as the eponymous Countess Rovagna, aired the following week. “The Well-Meaning Mayor” first aired on 5 December 1963, whilst “The Benevolent Burglary” aired on 22 December 1961; “The Smart Detective” aired as part of the fourth season on 17 July 1965, whilst “The Man Who Liked Ants” made it into colour as “The House on Dragon’s Rock” and first aired on 2 October 1966.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“I’m mad enough to believe in romance. And I’m sick and tired of this age—tired of the miserable little mildewed things that people racked their brains about, and wrote books about, and called life. I wanted something more elementary and honest—battle, murder, sudden death, with plenty of good beer and damsels in distress, and a complete callousness about blipping the ungodly over the beezer. It mayn’t be life as we know it, but it ought to be.”
—Leslie Charteris in a 1935 BBC radio interview
Leslie Charteris was born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin in Singapore on 12 May 1907.
He was the son of a Chinese doctor and his English wife, who’d met in London a few years earlier. Young Leslie found friends hard to come by in colonial Singapore. The English children had been told not to play with Eurasians, and the Chinese children had been told not to play with Europeans. Leslie was caught in between and took refuge in reading.
“I read a great many good books and enjoyed them because nobody had told me that they were classics. I also read a great many bad books which nobody told me not to read…I read a great many popular scientific articles and acquired from them an astonishing amount of general knowledge before I discovered that this acquisition was supposed to be a chore.”1
The Happy Highwayman (The Saint Series) Page 21