Saint Overboard Read Online Free PDF Page B

gun. Look, you pull a
gun. Hold your hand like that. Right. Well, I said ‘Ha, ha,’—like that,
very sinister. I switched out the lights! I leapt upon her! I grabbed her
wrist! We fell on the bunk—— ”
    “Steady on, sir, yer ‘urting!”
    “You shut up. She was crrrushed against
me. Her lips were an inch from mine. For heaven’s sake stop
whiffling your moustache like that. I felt her breath on my face. I
was on fire with passion. I seized her in my arms … and …”
Simon planted a smack ing kiss on his crew’s horrified brow.
“I said ‘Don’t you think Strindberg is too sweet?’ Now go and
drown yourself.”
    He picked himself up and erupted out of the
cabin, slinging the towel round his neck, while Orace gaped goggle-eyed
after him. In a few minutes he was back, tightening the belt of a pair of
swimming trunks, and stuffing cigarettes into a waterproof metal
case.
    “By the way,” he said, “we
aren’t full up on juice for the auxil iary. As soon as you’ve cleared up,
you’d better take the dinghy and fetch a couple of dozen bidons. Get
some oil, too, and see that there’s plenty of food and drink.
There’s another bird mixed up in this who’s less beautiful—a guy named
Kurt Vogel—and we ought to be ready for traveling.”
    He went up on deck and looked around. The sun
was flooding down on stucco villas and the rise of green behind, and cutting innumerable
diamonds from the surface of the water. It was going to be a hot
brilliant day. People were well awake on the other yachts near by.
A gramophone opened up cheerfully on one, and a loud splash and a shout
heralded another of the morn ing’s bathers. The Falkenberg was too
far away for him to be able to distinguish its signs of life: a
couple of seamen were swabbing down the paint forward, but nothing
that resembled the hooknosed man was visible. Simon noticed that besides
the outboard dinghy there was now a small speed tender also tied up alongside
which had not been there when he made his first sur vey—it had the air of being part of the Falkenberg’s equipment, and probably it had been away
on a trip to the shore and re turned
while he was below.
    After a while he dived off the side and swam round the Pointe du Moulinet to the beach. He strolled the length
of the plage while the sun dried
him, and then chose a clear space to stretch himself out opposite the Casino.
    He had not seen Loretta Page during his walk,
but he knew she would come. He lay basking in the voluptuous warmth,
and knew with an exquisite certainty that the kind gods of adventure would take
care of that. The story she had told him went through his memory,
not in an exuberant riot of comprehension as it had when he
first heard it, but in a steady flow, fact by fact, a sequence of
fragments of accepted knowledge which strung logically together to make a tale that was
breath-taking in its colossal implications.
If it was something on a more grandiose scale than anything he had ever
dreamed of even in his wildest flights of
buccaneering, he was still ready to give it a run. He blew smoke into
the sparkling air and considered the profile of Kurt Vogel. Properly worked on by an octet of bunched knuc kles… .
    “Hullo, old timer.”
    He dropped his gaze and saw her. She wore the
same ele mentary swim suit, with a bathrobe that fitted her better
than his had done, swept back by her hands on her hips and leaving her long satiny legs to the
sun. The grey eyes were dark with devilment.
    He rolled up on one elbow.
    “Hullo, pardner.”
    “Did you sleep well?”
    “I saw ghosts,” he said sepulchrally. “Ghosts of
the dead past that can never be undone. They
rose up and wiggled their bony fingers
at me, and said ‘You are not worthy of her!’ I woke up and burst into
tears.”
    She slipped out of the striped gown and sat
down beside him.
    “Wasn’t there any hope?”
    “Not unless you stretched out your
little hand and lifted me out of the abyss. Couldn’t you take