Prelude for War (3 page)

He put out a hand to
restrain her as she tried to get up,
but with a quick movement she wriggled
away from him and
found her feet. She was
dark and slender, but not so slender
that
the transparent nightgown which was her only covering
lacked fascinating contours to cling to. The
chiffon had
slipped aside to bare one
white shoulder and her curly hair was in a wild disarray, but even the
thoroughly petulant
spoiled-child
expression that pouted her face could not dis
guise its amazing beauty.

“All right, all
right,” she said impatiently. “You’ve res
cued
me now, and I’m very much obliged. But for heaven’s
sake
stop pawing me and find me something to wear.”

She seemed to regard the
fire as an event arranged by
a malicious fate solely for
her own inconvenience. The
young man looked somewhat
startled.

“Damn it,
Valerie,” he said in an injured tone, “do you
realize
——”

“Of course she
does,” said the Saint soothingly. “She
knows
you’re a little hero. She’s just being practical. And
while
we’re being practical, do you happen to know whether
anybody
else is left in the house?”

The young man turned. He
looked at Simon rather
blankly, as if taken aback
at being interrupted so uncere
moniously.

“Eh? What?” he
said. “I dunno. I fetched Valerie out.”

From the way he said it,
one gathered that nobody mat
tered except Valerie.

Simon patted him on the
back.

“Yes, we know,”
he said kindly. “We saw you. You’re
a
hero. We’ll give you a diploma. But just the same,
wouldn’t
it be a good idea to round up the others and make
sure
that nobody’s missing?”

Again the young man looked
blank and rather resentful.
His expression indicated
that having done his good deed
for the day by rescuing
Valerie, he expected to be set apart
on a pedestal
instead of being ordered about. But there was
something
about the Saint’s cool assumption of command
that
eliminated argument.

“Oh, certainly. I see
what you mean.”

He moved reluctantly away,
and presently people came straggling in from different parts of the lawn and
gathered
together near Simon’s car. There was a
tall red-faced man
with a white moustache and the
stereotyped chutney-and-scotch complexion of a professional soldier, a dour
large-
bosomed woman in a flannel dressing gown who could have
belonged to nobody else, an excited little fat man
who came
chattering pompously, the
guardsmanly youth who had
herded them
together, and a fourth man who strolled up
in the background. The reflection of the fire shone redly
in their faces as they assembled in a group with an
air of .
studied calm which proclaimed their consciousness of behaving
like
British aristocrats in an emergency.

Simon looked them over
without reverence. He knew
none of them by sight, and
it was none of his business, but
he was the only one present
who seemed to have any coher
ent ideas. His voice
stilled their chatter.

“Well,” he said,
“you ought to know. Are you all here?”

They glanced at each other
in an awed and scared sort of way and then turned and looked frightenedly at
the
blazing house and back again, as though it were the
first
time that any of their thoughts had gone beyond their own
personal safety.

Suddenly the voice of the
girl in the nightgown sounded
shrilly behind Simon.

“No! They aren’t all
here! John isn’t here! Where’s
Johnny?”

There was an awful
stillness, in which realization crawled
horribly
over chalky faces.

“B-but where can he
be?” asked the short fat man
in a quavering
voice. “He—he must have heard the
alarm——
”

The military-looking man
turned round and raised his
voice in a barrack-square
bawl.

“Kennet!” he
shouted.
“Kennet!”

He sounded as if he were
bellowing at a slovenly recruit
who was late on parade.

The only answer was the
derisive cackle of the leaping
flames.

The large-bosomed woman
shrieked. She opened her
mouth wide and yelled at
the top of her voice, her face
contorted with an awful
terror.

“No! No! It’s too
dreadful. He can’t be still in there!
You can’t have——
”

Her words broke off in a
kind of gulp. For a couple
of seconds her mouth went
on opening and shutting like
that of a fish out of
water; then, without another sound,
she collapsed like
an empty sack.

“She’s fainted,”
somebody said stupidly.

“So she has,”
said the Saint witheringly. “Now we all
ought
to gather round and hold her hands.”

The military man, bending
over her, turned up his purple
face.

“By Gad, sir!” he
burst out cholerically. “Haven’t
you——
” He stopped. Another thought, overwhelming in
its enormity, seemed to have erupted under his nose. He
straightened up, glaring at the Saint as if he had just really
become aware of his presence for the first time. “Anyway,”
he said, “what the devil are you doing here?”

The idea percolated into
the brains of the others and
brought them back to gaping
stillness. And while they were
staring in vacuous
indignation, the man who had stayed
in the background
moved to the front. He was short and very broad shouldered, with a square and
rather flat face
and very sunken shrewd dark eyes.
Unlike the others, he
was fully dressed. There
was no sign of flurry or alarm
about him; with his
powerful chin and thin straight mouth
he looked as solid
and impassive as a chunk of granite.

“Yes,” he said,
“who are you?”

Simon met his gaze with
cold insouciance. The antago
nism was instant and
intuitive. Perhaps it was that that
touched the Saint’s
swift mind with the queer itch of dis
satisfaction that
was to lead to so many things. Perhaps
it
was then that the first wraith of suspicion took nebulous
shape in his mind. But there was no time to dwell on the point just
then. He only knew that something like a fine
thread
of steel wove through the plastic outlines of his
attitude.

“At the moment,”
he said evenly, “I seem to be the only
person
who isn’t behaving like a stuffed owl. Where does
this
man Kennet sleep?”

“I don’t know,”
answered the square-built man. “Some
one
else will be able to tell you.”

His face was
expressionless; his tone was so expressionless as to sound almost ironical.
There seemed to be a stony sort of amusement lurking at the back of his
deep-set eyes. But that might have been an illusion created by the flickering
firelight.

The girl Valerie supplied
the information.

“He’s in the end room
on the left—that window there.”

Simon looked.

The room was at the end of
the house which was burning most fiercely—the end close to which the fire had
probably
started. Under it, the ground floor
looked like an open
furnace through which the draught from
the open windows
and the open front door was driving
flame in long roaring
streamers. The end upper
window was about fifteen feet
from the ground, and there
was no way of reaching it from
outside without a ladder.

The fat little man was
wringing his hands.

“He can’t still be
there,” he wailed. “He must have heard
the
alarm——
”

“Suppose he got the
wind up and fainted or something?” suggested the large young man in the
striped pajamas help
fully.

Simon almost hit him.

“Do you know where
there’s a ladder, you amazing
oaf?” he demanded.

The young man blinked at
him dumbly. Nobody else
answered. They all seemed
to be in a fog.

Simon swung round to
Patricia.

“Do what you can,
darling,” he said.

He turned away, and for a
moment the others seemed
to be held petrified.

“Stop him,”
bleated the little fat man suddenly. “For
God’s
sake, stop him! It’s suicide!”

“Hey!” bellowed the puce-faced
militarist commandingly.
“Comeback!”

The queenly woman screeched indistinguishably
and col
lapsed again,

Simon Templar heard none
of these things. He was half
way across the lawn by that
time, racing grimly towards
the house.

3

The heat from the hall
struck him like a physical blow
as he plunged through the front door; the air
scorched his lungs like a gust from a red-hot oven. At the far end of the
hall long sheets of flame were sweeping greedily
up a huge
pair of velvet curtains.
Smaller flames were dancing over a
rug
and leaping with fiercer eagerness up the blackening
banisters of a wide staircase. The paint on the
broad beams
crossing the high
ceiling was bubbling and boiling under the
heat, and occasionally small drops of it fell in a scalding rain to take
hold of new sections of the floor.

The Saint hardly checked
for an instant before he went
on. He dodged across the
hall like a flitting shadow and
leapt up the stairs four
at a time. Fire from the banisters
snatched at him as he went up, stung his
nostrils with the
smell of his own
scorching clothes.

On the upper landing the
smoke was thicker. It made
his eyes smart and filled
his throat with coughing; his heart
was hammering with
a dull force that jarred his ribs; he
felt an iron band
tightening remorselessly around his temples. He stared blearily down the
corridor which led in the
direction he had to go.
Halfway along it great gouts of
flame were starting up
from the floor boards, waving like
monstrous flowers
swaying in a blistering wind. It could
only
be a matter of seconds before the whole passage would
plunge
down into the incandescent inferno below.

The Saint went on.

It was not so much a
deliberate effort as a yielding to
instinctive
momentum. He had no time to think about being
heroic—or
about anything else, for that matter. In that
broiling
nightmare a second’s hesitation might have been
fatal.
But he had set out to do something, knowing what
it
might mean; and so long as there was any hope of doing
it
his only idea was to go on. He kept going with nothing
to
carry him on but the epic drive of a great heart that had
never known what it was to turn back for the threat of
danger.

He came out in a clear
space on the other side of the
flames, beating the sparks
from his sleeves and trousers.
Open doors and glimpses of
disordered beds on either side of the passage showed where various rooms had
been has
tily vacated; but the door of the room
at the very end was
closed. He fell on the handle and
turned it.

The door was locked.

He thundered on it with
fists and feet.

“Kennet!” he
shouted. “Kennet, wake up!”

His voice was a mere harsh
croak that was lost in the
hoarse roar of the fire. It
brought no answer from behind
the door.

He drew back across the
corridor, braced himself momen
tarily and flung himself
forward again. Hurled by the
muscles of a trained
athlete, his shoulder crashed into the
door
with all the shattering force of one hundred and
seventy-five
pounds of fighting weight behind it, in an
impact
that shook every bone in his body; but he might
just
as well have charged a steam roller. The floor might
be
cracking and crumbling under his feet, but that door
was
of tough old English oak seasoned by two hundred
years
of history and still untouched by the fire. It would
have
taken an axe or a sledge-hammer to break it down.