Leslie Charteris - The Saint and Mr. Teal

As he left the room he heard the man called Jones coming up the stairs again. Peeping over the wooden balustrade, he saw that the man carried a tray — the catering arrangements in that house appeared to be highly commendable, even if nothing else was.

Simon slipped along the gallery without a sound. He opened two more rooms and found them both empty; then he paused outside another and saw a narrow line of light under the door.

He stood still for a few seconds, listening. He heard an occasional faint chink of glass or metal, and the shuffling of slippered feet over the carpet; but there were no voices. Almost mechanically he tried the door, and had one of the biggest surprises of his life when he felt it opening.

The Saint froze up motionless, with a dry electric tingle glissading over the surface of his skin. The way the door gave back under his light touch disintegrated the very ground from under his nebulous theory about the occupant of that room. In the space of four seconds his brain set up, surveyed, and bowled over a series of possible explanations that were chiefly notable for their complete uselessness. In the fifth second that ultimate fact impressed itself unanswerably on his consciousness, and he acknowledged it with a wry shrug and the decimal point of a smile. Theories were all very well in their place; but he had come to the house of Mr. Jones on a quest for irrefutable knowledge, and an item of irrefutable knowledge was awaiting his attention inside that room. It remained for him to go in and get introduced — and that was what he had given up a peaceful evening in his own home to do.

He glanced downwards into the hall. There was no sound or movement from below. For a minute or two he might consider he had the field to himself — if he was quick and quiet about taking it over.

The door of the lighted room opened further, inch by inch, against the steady persuasion of his fingers, while his nerves were keyed up to check its swing at the first faint hint of a squeak out of the hinges. Gradually the strip of light at the edge widened until he could see part of the room. A grotesque confusion of metal and glass, tangled up with innumerable strands and coils of wire, was heaped over all the floor space that he could see like the scrap heap of one of those nightmare laboratories of the future which appear in every magazine of pseudo-scientific fiction. The Saint's unscientific mind could grasp nothing but the bare visual impression of it — an apparently aimless conglomeration of burnished steel spheres and shining crystal tubes that climbed in and out of each other like a futurist sculptor's rendering of two all-in wrestlers getting acquainted. Back against the far wall ran a long workbench of wood and porcelain surmounted by racks and shelves of glass vessels and bottles of multicoloured mixtures. It was the most fantastic collection of incomprehensible apparatus that Simon Templar had ever seen; and yet in some ridiculously conventional way it seemed to have its perfect focus and presiding genius in the slender white-haired man in a stained and grimy white overall who stood at the bench with his back to the open door.

Simon Templar walked very quietly into the room and closed the door noiselessly behind him. He stood with his back leaning against it and his right hand circling comfortably round the butt of the automatic in his pocket, and cleared his throat apologetically.

"Hullo," he said.

The figure at the bench turned round sharply. He was a mild-faced man with a pair of thick gold-rimmed pince-nez perched slantwise on the end of a long fleshy nose; and his response was pitched in the last key on earth that the Saint had expected to hear.

"What the devil do you want?" he demanded.

To say that the Saint was taken aback means nothing. The effect on his emotional system was much the same as it would have been if the aged scientist had tittered a shrill war whoop and begun to turn cartwheels over the test tubes. Even in these days of free thought and speech the greeting seemed singularly unusual. When you have been at considerable pains, without appreciable hope of reward, to hunt along the trail of a kidnapped professor — when, in the process, you have been warned off the course with a couple of bullets, and have found it necessary to let yourself in for a charge of vulgar burglary in the good cause — you are definitely entitled to expect a fairly cordial welcome from the object of your rescue expedition, Once before the Saint had been greeted something like that in rather similar circumstances, and the memory of that adventure was still fresh with him. It cut short the involuntary upward jerk of his eye-brows; and when he found an answer his voice was absolutely level and natural. Only an ear that was listening for it would have sensed the rapier points that stroked in and out of its casual syllables. "I just came to see how you were getting on, Dr. Quell"

"Well, why can't you leave me alone? How do you expect me to get any work done while I'm being pestered with your absurd questions every ten minutes?" The old man was gesticulating his disgust with everything from his feet to his forehead, till the glasses on his nose quivered with indignation. "What d'you think I am — a lazy schoolboy? Eh? Dammit, haven't you any work of your own?"

"You see, we don't want you to have a breakdown, Professor," said the Saint soothingly. "If you took a little rest now and then—"

"I had seven hours' rest last night. I'm not an invalid. And how would I get this done in time if I lay in bed all day? Think it would get done by itself? Eh?"

Simon took out his cigarette case and moved over to sit down on a conveniently shaped dome of metal.

"All the same, Professor, if you wouldn't mind—"

The old man leapt towards him with a kind of yelp Simon drew back hurriedly; and the professor glared at him, breathing heavily.

"Dammit, if you want to commit suicide, must you come and do it here?"

"Suicide?" repeated the Saint vaguely. "I hadn't—"

"Pish!" squawked the professor.

He snatched up a loose length of wire and tossed it onto the dome on which Simon had been preparing to rest himself. There was a momentary crackle of hot blue flame — and the wire ceased to resemble anything like wire. It simply trickled down the side of the dome in the shape of a few incandescent drops of molten metal; and Simon Templar mopped his brow.

He retreated towards the clear space around the door with some alacrity.

"Thanks very much, Professor," he remarked. "Have you any more firework effects like that?"

"Bah!" croaked the professor huffily.

He went back to his bench and wiped his hands on a piece of rag, with every symptom of a society welfare worker removing the contamination of an afternoon with the deserving poor.

"Is there anything else you want to know?" he barked; and the Saint braced himself for the shot that had to be taken in the dark.

"When are we going to see some gold?"

The professor seemed on the verge of an outburst beside which his former demonstrations would pale into polite tea-table chatter. And then with a tremendous effort he controlled himself. He addressed the Saint with the dreadfully laboured restraint of a doting mother taking an interest in the precocities of a rival parent's prodigy and thinking what an abominable little beast he is.

"When you can use your eyes. When you can get some glasses powerful enough to show you something smaller than a haystack. Or else when you can improve on my methods and make gold run out of the bathroom tap. That's when." The old man stalked across to a cupboard and flung it open. "There. Look again. Try to see it. Borrow a microscope if you have to. But for heaven's sake, young man" — the quavering voice lost some of its self-control and rose two shrill notes — "for heaven's sake, don't utter any more blithering idiocies like that in my laboratory."