06 Alias the Saint

Teal looked at him curiously.

"Is that the truth?" he asked.

"No," said the Saint. "I'm just making it up to amuse you. Good morning."

He felt annoyed with Chief Inspector Teal that day. He felt annoyed with a lot of things--the story in general, and Miles Hallin in particular. There were many things that were capable of annoying the Saint in just that way; and when Mr. Teal had departed the Saint sat down and smoked three cigarettes with entirely unnecessary violence.

Patricia Holm, coming in just after the third of these cigarettes had been hurled through the open window, read his mood at once.

"What is it this time?" she asked.

Simon broke a match into small pieces as if it had done him a grievous injury.

"Teal, Nigel Perry, Miles Hallin," he answered, comprehensively. "Also, an old joke about death,"

It was some time before she secured a coherent explanation. The incidents of the night before she had already heard; but he had stated them without adornment, and his manner had encouraged the postponement of questions. Now he told her, in the same blunt manner, about Teal's visit; but she had to wait until after lunch, when the coffee cups were in front of them and the Saint was gently circulating a minute quantity of Napoleon brandy around the bowl of an enormous glass, before she could get him to expound his grievance.

"When I first spoke about Miles Hallin--you remember?--you thought I was raving. I don't want to lay on any of the 'I told you so' stuff; but now you know what you do know, I want you to try and appreciate my point. I know you'll say what anyone else would say--that the whole thing simply boils down to the most unholy fluke. I'm saying it doesn't. The point is that I'm going back far beyond that share business--even beyond poor old Teddy. I'm going back to Nigel's brother, and that little story of the great open spaces that I've heard so much about. I tell you, this just confirms what I thought about that."

"You didn't say you thought anything about it," Patricia remarked.

"I wasn't asking to be called a fool," said the Saint. "I knew that as things stood I had rather less chance of convincing any sane person than I'd have of climbing the Matterhorn with my hands tied behind me and an elephant in each pocket. But you ought to see the joke now. What would you say was the most eccentric thing about a man who could not die?"

Patricia smiled at him patiently.

"I shouldn't know what to say," she answered truthfully.

"Why," said the Saint, with a kind of vast impatience, "what else should be the most eccentric thing about him but the fact that he can die, and always could? Don't you understand that whatever jokes people make about death, they never make that kind of joke? There are impossibilities that are freakish and funny,-and impossibilities that are freakish and unfunny; pigs with wings belong to the first kind, but men who cannot die belong to the second kind. Now, what could induce a man to pursue that second kind of joke with such a terrible eagerness?"

The girl shrugged.

"It's beyond me, Simon."

"The answer," said the Saint, "is that he knew it wasn't true. Because he'd once looked death in the face--slow and deliberate death, not the kind that comes with a rush. And he found he was afraid of it."

"Then that story about Nigel's brother--"

"Perhaps we shall never know the truth of it. But I'm as certain as I've ever been about anything that the story we're told isn't the truth. I'm certain that that was the time when Miles Hallin discovered, not that he could not die, but that he couldn't bear to die. And he saved his life at the expense of his partner."

"But he's risked his life so often since--"

"I wonder how much of that is the unvarnished truth--how much he engineered, and how much he adorned his stories so as to give the impression he wanted to give? , . . Because I think Miles Hallin is a man in terror. Once, he yielded to his fear; and after that his fear became the keynote of his life, which a fear will become if you yield to it. And he found another fear--the fear of being found out. He was afraid of his own legend. He had to bolster it up, he had to pile miracle upon miracle--only to make one miracle seem possible. He had to risk losing his life in order to save it."

"But why should he have killed Teddy?-"

The Saint took another cigarette. He gazed across the restaurant with eyes that saw other things.