A smile touched his lips under the mask. He pocketed one of his guns and picked up a black gladstone bag from the dais and tossed it out on to the floor. Then he put a cigarette between his lips and lighted it with a match flicked on the thumbnail of the same hand.
"The holdup will now proceed," he remarked affably. "The line forms on the right, and that means everybody except the waiters. Each of you will put a contribution in the bag as you pass by. Lady Instock, that's a nice pair of earrings… "
Amazed, giggling, white-faced, surly, incredulous, according to their different characters, the procession began to file by and drop different articles into the bag under his directions. There was nothing much else that they could do. Each of them felt that gently waving gun centred on his own body, balancing its bark of death against the first sign of resistance. To one red-faced man who started to bluster, a waiter said tremulously: "Better do what he says. Tink of all da ladies. Anybody might get hit if he start shooting." His wife shed a pearl necklace and hustled him by. Most of the gathering had the same idea. Anyone who had tried to be a hero would probably have been mobbed by a dozen others who had no wish to die for his glory. Nobody really thought much beyond that. This wasn't what they had expected, but they couldn't analyze their reactions. Their brains were too numbed to think very much.
Two brains were not numbed. One of them belonged to the chairman who had lost his glasses, adding dim-sightedness to his other failings."From where he stood he couldn't distinguish anything as small as a mask or a gun but somebody seemed to be standing up on the platform and was probably making a speech. The chairman nodded from time to time with an expression of polite interest, thinking busily about the new corn plaster that somebody had recommended to him. The other active brain belonged to the Countess Jannowicz but there seemed to be nothing useful that she could do with it. There was no encouraging feeling of enterprise to be perceived in the guests around her, no warm inducement to believe that they would respond to courageous leadership.
"Can't you see he's bluffing?" she demanded in a hoarse bleat. "He wouldn't dare to shoot!"
"I should be terrified," murmured the Saint imperturbably, without moving his eyes from the passing line. "Madam, that looks like a very fine emerald ring… "
Something inside the countess seemed to be clutching at her stomach and shaking it up and down. She had taken care to leave her own jewels in a safe place, but it hadn't occurred to her to give the same advice to her guests. And now the Saint was robbing them under her nose — almost under her own roof. Social positions had been shattered overnight on slighter grounds.
She grabbed the arm of a waiter who was standing near.
"Send for the police, you fool!" she snarled.
He looked at her and drew down the corners of his mouth in what might have been a smile or a sneer, or both, but he made no movement.