Charteris, Leslie by Catch the Saint

Author:Catch the Saint
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-09-30T22:24:57.493000+00:00

CHAPTER 1

In the course of his good works, of which he himself was not the smallest beneficiary, the man so

paradoxically called the Saint had assumed many roles and placed himself in such a fantastic variety of

settings that the adventures of a Sinbad or a Ulysses had by comparison all the excitement of a housewife's trip to the market. His range was the world. His identities had encompassed cowboy and playboy, poet and

revolutionary, hobo and mil ionaire. The booty he had gathered in his years of buccaneering had certainly

made the last category genuine: The assets he had salted away would have made headlines if they had been

exposed to counting. He could have comfortably retired at an age when most men are stil angling for

their second promotion. But strong as the profit motive was as a factor in his exploits, there were other

drives which would never al ow him to put the gears of his mind permanently in neutral and hang up his

heels on the stern rail of a yacht. He had an insatiable lust for action, in a world that squandered its

energies on speeches and account books. He craved the individual expression of his own personal ideals,

and his rules were not those of parliaments and judges but those of a man impatient to accomplish his

purposes, according to his own lights, by the most effective means available at the moment. This does not

mean that all his waking hours were consecrated to one clear-cut objective or another, attached to

which there had to be the eventual prospect of some pecuniary reward. Like anyone else, he often found

himself enmeshed in quite aimless activities, some of which promised nothing but entries on the debit

side of his imaginary ledgers.

Like, for instance, this very Main-Line charity ball in Philadelphia, for which the tickets cost a mere

$100 each against the $1,000 that many social climbers would have paid to get one. In a situation

that has nothing to do with this story, Simon Templar had been offered the ineffable privilege of

buying one at cost, as a favour that he could not gracefully refuse; and since he had paid his money and

had nothing more exciting on his agenda at the moment, he had decided that he might as well look in,

in a spirit of scientific if not whol y unmalicious curiosity, and see what cooked in this particular

segment of the Upper Crust.

It was an impulse for which his first impression was that he should have had his head examined.

The Adelphi Ballroom of the New Sylvania Hotel was like a claustrophobic footbal field thronged with

players attempting to get champagne glasses from one point to another without splashing the contents

over themselves or their neighbours or being toppled by dancers encroaching on drinkers' territory.

The air was dense with the essence of acres of French flowers and the effluvium of smouldering to-

bacco leaves. Words were lost in a whirlpool of words. Individuality was swal owed up in the mass.

The Saint stood observing the scene cynically, restless, his mind in other places, like a privateer

waiting for the tide that would set him free from the shore.

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