Send for the Saint by Leslie Charteris, Peter Bloxsom Page B

their most munificent combined efforts can supply. The Winner is that rare man who seems to lead a charmed life right from the beginning. As an infant, he never knows what it is to be short of a lollipop. His schoolboy marbles invariably conquer and multiply, and he attacks a ball with various conventional implements with seemingly innate dexterity. Later, his girlfriends are abundantly plural and pulchritudinous; he reaps sporting or academic honours, or both, by the dozen; and plum jobs drop into his lap even when he hasn’t exerted himself beyond the effort of sitting under the tree.
    Success, recognition, popularity, money, affection: all through his life the Winner seems to attract them with nonchalant ease. He enjoys a distinguished and rewarding career, leading a blamelessly honourable existence and in due season breeding tribes of children and grandchildren — themselves doubtless including a goodly proportion of Winners.
    Now to someone whose outlook as a respectable dutiful citizen has been perverted by exposure to some heretical scepticism about the Establishment, this picture of fulfilled felicity will undeniably seem tinged with dullness around at least some of its edges. Albert Nobbins, however, as he plodded along by the Serpentine on that damp grey November day, could contemplate it only with envy.
    Nobbins was a Loser — an insignificant little man whose failures seemed to him as congenital as a Winner’s successes. As if it were not enough to have inherited such a risible cognomen as Nobbins, his parents had compounded his misfortune by linking it with one of the most unglamorous of Christian names. And from that depressing start, his fortune was apparently foredoomed. Lollipops, marbles, girls, success in sport or studies or career, were all one to Albert Nobbins: they had all evaded him as if by some inexorable magnetic repulsion. And despite his most desperate endeavours, his attempts to wield a bat or club or racquet had infallibly wobbled themselves into a shape so ineffectually awkward, so far removed from any semblance of style, that onlookers were invariably reduced to helpless howls of laughter.
    He could hear that cruel laughter still, more than forty years on.
    He stopped and stared glumly at the water: half a dozen ducks scudded hopefully towards him and converged on a spot a few yards from the bank, the distance which they knew from experience to be the average crust-tossing range of the general public. But Albert Nobbins shook his head at them abstractedly, and they dispersed as he plodded on with the same short, somehow inefficient steps. An insignificant little man, plump and balding and bespectacled, who every morning shaved his face to the same pink well-scrubbed shininess.
    He had always been acutely resentful of his puny physique. He knew it was one of the roots of his lack of confidence, and he knew that his lack of confidence in turn explained his lifelong failures. He had no presence. Nobody noticed him; and the ultimate result of that was that whatever potentialities he might have had to be positive, assertive — effective — had been stunted. But buried within him was a smouldering core of angry rebellion; buried less deeply now than at any time in his life, but still unsuspected by nearly everyone who knew him. He had ability and diligence — enough to have served his country in positions of modest responsibility and trust (as he might have put it himself) but he was bitterly conscious of how much he might have done but hadn’t, of how much of him was unfulfilled.
    A few spots of heavier rain splattered down. Nobbins turned up the collar of his fawn gabardine raincoat and walked on. He lived near by in a small bachelor flat in Knightsbridge, and had made a habit of walking in the park for an hour or so whenever he had an afternoon free. If it rained, he got wet: a trivial matter to a confirmed Loser, a man born — and a sardonic smile flickered briefly on his lips as the