The Thirty Nine Steps
The Thirty Nine StepsCHAPTER 1CHAPTER 2CHAPTER 3CHAPTER 4CHAPTER 5CHAPTER 6CHAPTER 7CHAPTER 8CHAPTER 9CHAPTER 10Copyright
The Thirty Nine Steps
John Buchan
CHAPTER 1
THE MAN WHO DIED
I returned from the City about three o'clock on that May
afternoon pretty well disgusted with life. I had been three months
in the Old Country, and was fed up with it. If anyone had told me a
year ago that I would have been feeling like that I should have
laughed at him; but there was the fact. The weather made me
liverish, the talk of the ordinary Englishman made me sick, I
couldn't get enough exercise, and the amusements of London seemed
as flat as soda-water that has been standing in the sun. 'Richard
Hannay,' I kept telling myself, 'you have got into the wrong ditch,
my friend, and you had better climb out.' It made me bite my lips
to think of the plans I had been building up those last years in
Bulawayo. I had got my pile—not one of the big ones, but good
enough for me; and I had figured out all kinds of ways of enjoying
myself. My father had brought me out from Scotland at the age of
six, and I had never been home since; so England was a sort of
Arabian Nights to me, and I counted on stopping there for the rest
of my days.But from the first I was disappointed with it. In about a
week I was tired of seeing sights, and in less than a month I had
had enough of restaurants and theatres and race-meetings. I had no
real pal to go about with, which probably explains things. Plenty
of people invited me to their houses, but they didn't seem much
interested in me. They would fling me a question or two about South
Africa, and then get on their own affairs. A lot of Imperialist
ladies asked me to tea to meet schoolmasters from New Zealand and
editors from Vancouver, and that was the dismalest business of all.
Here was I, thirty-seven years old, sound in wind and limb, with
enough money to have a good time, yawning my head off all day. I
had just about settled to clear out and get back to the veld, for I
was the best bored man in the United Kingdom.That afternoon I had been worrying my brokers about
investments to give my mind something to work on, and on my way
home I turned into my club—rather a pot-house, which took in
Colonial members. I had a long drink, and read the evening papers.
They were full of the row in the Near East, and there was an
article about Karolides, the Greek Premier. I rather fancied the
chap. From all accounts he seemed the one big man in the show; and
he played a straight game too, which was more than could be said
for most of them. I gathered that they hated him pretty blackly in
Berlin and Vienna, but that we were going to stick by him, and one
paper said that he was the only barrier between Europe and
Armageddon. I remember wondering if I could get a job in those
parts. It struck me that Albania was the sort of place that might
keep a man from yawning.About six o'clock I went home, dressed, dined at theCafé
Royal, and turned into a music-hall. It was a silly show, all
capering women and monkey-faced men, and I did not stay long. The
night was fine and clear as I walked back to the flat I had hired
near Portland Place. The crowd surged past me on the pavements,
busy and chattering, and I envied the people for having something
to do. These shop-girls and clerks and dandies and policemen had
some interest in life that kept them going. I gave half-a-crown to
a beggar because I saw him yawn; he was a fellow-sufferer. At
Oxford Circus I looked up into the spring sky and I made a vow. I
would give the Old Country another day to fit me into something; if
nothing happened, I would take the next boat for the
Cape.My flat was the first floor in a new block behind Langham
Place. There was a common staircase, with a porter and a liftman at
the entrance, but there was no restaurant or anything of that sort,
and each flat was quite shut off from the others. I hate servants
on the premises, so I had a fellow to look after me who came in by
the day. He arrived before eight o'clock every morning and used to
depart at seven, for I never dined at home.I was just fitting my key into the door when I noticed a man
at my elbow. I had not seen him approach, and the sudden appearance
made me start. He was a slim man, with a short brown beard and
small, gimlety blue eyes. I recognized him as the occupant of a
flat on the top floor, with whom I had passed the time of day on
the stairs.'Can I speak to you?' he said. 'May I come in for a minute?'
He was steadying his voice with an effort, and his hand was pawing
my arm.I got my door open and motioned him in. No sooner was he over
the threshold than he made a dash for my back room, where I used to
smoke and write my letters. Then he bolted back.'Is the door locked?' he asked feverishly, and he fastened
the chain with his own hand.'I'm very sorry,' he said humbly. 'It's a mighty liberty, but
you looked the kind of man who would understand. I've had you in my
mind all this week when things got troublesome. Say, will you do me
a good turn?''I'll listen to you,' I said. 'That's all I'll promise.' I
was getting worried by the antics of this nervous little
chap.There was a tray of drinks on a table beside him, from which
he filled himself a stiff whisky-and-soda. He drank it off in three
gulps, and cracked the glass as he set it down.'Pardon,' he said, 'I'm a bit rattled tonight. You see, I
happen at this moment to be dead.'I sat down in an armchair and lit my pipe.'What does it feel like?' I asked. I was pretty certain that
I had to deal with a madman.A smile flickered over his drawn face. 'I'm not mad— yet.
Say, Sir, I've been watching you, and I reckon you're a cool
customer. I reckon, too, you're an honest man, and not afraid of
playing a bold hand. I'm going to confide in you. I need help worse
than any man ever needed it, and I want to know if I can count you
in.''Get on with your yarn,' I said, 'and I'll tell
you.'He seemed to brace himself for a great effort, and then
started on the queerest rigmarole. I didn't get hold of it at
first, and I had to stop and ask him questions. But here is the
gist of it:He was an American, from Kentucky, and after college, being
pretty well off, he had started out to see the world. He wrote a
bit, and acted as war correspondent for a Chicago paper, and spent
a year or two in South-Eastern Europe. I gathered that he was a
fine linguist, and had got to know pretty well the society in those
parts. He spoke familiarly of many names that I remembered to have
seen in the newspapers.He had played about with politics, he told me, at first for
the interest of them, and then because he couldn't help himself. I
read him as a sharp, restless fellow, who always wanted to get down
to the roots of things. He got a little further down than he
wanted.I am giving you what he told me as well as I could make it
out. Away behind all the Governments and the armies there was a big
subterranean movement going on, engineered by very dangerous
people. He had come on it by accident; it fascinated him; he went
further, and then he got caught. I gathered that most of the people
in it were the sort of educated anarchists that make revolutions,
but that beside them there were financiers who were playing for
money. A clever man can make big profits on a falling market, and
it suited the book of both classes to set Europe by the
ears.He told me some queer things that explained a lot that had
puzzled me—things that happened in the Balkan War, how one state
suddenly came out on top, why alliances were made and broken, why
certain men disappeared, and where the sinews of war came from. The
aim of the whole conspiracy was to get Russia and Germany at
loggerheads.When I asked why, he said that the anarchist lot thought it
would give them their chance. Everything would be in the
melting-pot, and they looked to see a new world emerge. The
capitalists would rake in the shekels, and make fortunes by buying
up wreckage. Capital, he said, had no conscience and no fatherland.
Besides, the Jew was behind it, and the Jew hated Russia worse than
hell.'Do you wonder?' he cried. 'For three hundred years they have
been persecuted, and this is the return match for the pogroms. The
Jew is everywhere, but you have to go far down the backstairs to
find him. Take any big Teutonic business concern. If you have
dealings with it the first man you meet is Prince von und zu
Something, an elegant young man who talks Eton-and-Harrow English.
But he cuts no ice. If your business is big, you get behind him and
find a prognathous Westphalian with a retreating brow and the
manners of a hog. He is the German business man that gives your
English papers the shakes. But if you're on the biggest kind of job
and are bound to get to the real boss, ten to one you are brought
up against a little white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye
like a rattlesnake. Yes, Sir, he is the man who is ruling the world
just now, and he has his knife in the Empire of the Tzar, because
his aunt was outraged and his father flogged in some one-horse
location on the Volga.'I could not help saying that his Jew-anarchists seemed to
have got left behind a little.'Yes and no,' he said. 'They won up to a point, but they
struck a bigger thing than money, a thing that couldn't be bought,
the old elemental fighting instincts of man. If you're going to be
killed you invent some kind of flag and country to fight for, and
if you survive you get to love the thing. Those foolish devils of
soldiers have found something they care for, and that has upset the
pretty plan laid in Berlin and Vienna. But my friends haven't
played their last card by a long sight. They've gotten the ace up
their sleeves, and unless I can keep alive for a month they are
going to play it and win.''But I thought you were dead,' I put in.'Mors janua vitae,' he smiled. (I recognized the
quotation: it was about all the Latin I knew.) 'I'm coming to that,
but I've got to put you wise about a lot of things first. If you
read your newspaper, I guess you know the name of Constantine
Karolides?'I sat up at that, for I had been reading about him that very
afternoon.'He is the man that has wrecked all their games. He is the
one big brain in the whole show, and he happens also to be an
honest man. Therefore he has been marked down these twelve months
past. I found that out—not that it was difficult, for any fool
could guess as much. But I found out the way they were going to get
him, and that knowledge was deadly. That's why I have had to
decease.'He had another drink, and I mixed it for him myself, for I
was getting interested in the beggar.'They can't get him in his own land, for he has a bodyguard
of Epirotes that would skin their grandmothers. But on the 15th day
of June he is coming to this city. The British Foreign Office has
taken to having International tea-parties, and the biggest of them
is due on that date. Now Karolides is reckoned the principal guest,
and if my friends have their way he will never return to his
admiring countrymen.''That's simple enough, anyhow,' I said. 'You can warn him and
keep him at home.''And play their game?' he asked sharply. 'If he does not come
they win, for he's the only man that can straighten out the tangle.
And if his Government are warned he won't come, for he does not
know how big the stakes will be on June the 15th.''What about the British Government?' I said. 'They're not
going to let their guests be murdered. Tip them the wink, and
they'll take extra precautions.''No good. They might stuff your city with plain-clothes
detectives and double the police and Constantine would still be a
doomed man. My friends are not playing this game for candy. They
want a big occasion for the taking off, with the eyes of all Europe
on it. He'll be murdered by an Austrian, and there'll be plenty of
evidence to show the connivance of the big folk in Vienna and
Berlin. It will all be an infernal lie, of course, but the case
will look black enough to the world. I'm not talking hot air, my
friend. I happen to know every detail of the hellish contrivance,
and I can tell you it will be the most finished piece of
blackguardism since the Borgias. But it's not going to come off if
there's a certain man who knows the wheels of the business alive
right here in London on the 15th day of June. And that man is going
to be your servant, Franklin P. Scudder.'I was getting to like the little chap. His jaw had shut like
a rat-trap, and there was the fire of battle in his gimlety eyes.
If he was spinning me a yarn he could act up to it.'Where did you find out this story?' I asked.'I got the first hint in an inn on the Achensee in Tyrol.
That set me inquiring, and I collected my other clues in a fur-shop
in the Galician quarter of Buda, in a Strangers' Club in Vienna,
and in a little bookshop off the Racknitzstrasse in Leipzig. I
completed my evidence ten days ago in Paris. I can't tell you the
details now, for it's something of a history. When I was quite sure
in my own mind I judged it my business to disappear, and I reached
this city by a mighty queer circuit. I left Paris a dandified young
French-American, and I sailed from Hamburg a Jew diamond merchant.
In Norway I was an English student of Ibsen collecting materials
for lectures, but when I left Bergen I was a cinema-man with
special ski films. And I came here from Leith with a lot of
pulp-wood propositions in my pocket to put before the London
newspapers. Till yesterday I thought I had muddied my trail some,
and was feeling pretty happy. Then... 'The recollection seemed to upset him, and he gulped down some
more whisky.'Then I saw a man standing in the street outside this block.
I used to stay close in my room all day, and only slip out after
dark for an hour or two. I watched him for a bit from my window,
and I thought I recognized him ... He came in and spoke to the
porter... When I came back from my walk last night I found a card
in my letter-box. It bore the name of the man I want least to meet
on God's earth.'I think that the look in my companion's eyes, the sheer naked
scare on his face, completed my conviction of his honesty. My own
voice sharpened a bit as I asked him what he did next.'I realized that I was bottled as sure as a pickled herring,
and that there was only one way out. I had to die. If my pursuers
knew I was dead they would go to sleep again.''How did you manage it?''I told the man that valets me that I was feeling pretty bad,
and I got myself up to look like death. That wasn't difficult, for
I'm no slouch at disguises. Then I got a corpse—you can always get
a body in London if you know where to go for it. I fetched it back
in a trunk on the top of a four-wheeler, and I had to be assisted
upstairs to my room. You see I had to pile up some evidence for the
inquest. I went to bed and got my man to mix me a sleeping-draught,
and then told him to clear out. He wanted to fetch a doctor, but I
swore some and said I couldn't abide leeches. When I was left alone
I started in to fake up that corpse. He was my size, and I judged
had perished from too much alcohol, so I put some spirits handy
about the place. The jaw was the weak point in the likeness, so I
blew it away with a revolver. I daresay there will be somebody
tomorrow to swear to having heard a shot, but there are no
neighbours on my floor, and I guessed I could risk it. So I left
the body in bed dressed up in my pyjamas, with a revolver lying on
the bed-clothes and a considerable mess around. Then I got into a
suit of clothes I had kept waiting for emergencies. I didn't dare
to shave for fear of leaving tracks, and besides, it wasn't any
kind of use my trying to get into the streets. I had had you in my
mind all day, and there seemed nothing to do but to make an appeal
to you. I watched from my window till I saw you come home, and then
slipped down the stair to meet you... There, Sir, I guess you know
about as much as me of this business.'He sat blinking like an owl, fluttering with nerves and yet
desperately determined. By this time I was pretty well convinced
that he was going straight with me. It was the wildest sort of
narrative, but I had heard in my time many steep tales which had
turned out to be true, and I had made a practice of judging the man
rather than the story. If he had wanted to get a location in my
flat, and then cut my throat, he would have pitched a milder
yarn.'Hand me your key,' I said, 'and I'll take a look at the
corpse. Excuse my caution, but I'm bound to verify a bit if I
can.'He shook his head mournfully. 'I reckoned you'd ask for that,
but I haven't got it. It's on my chain on the dressing-table. I had
to leave it behind, for I couldn't leave any clues to breed
suspicions. The gentry who are after me are pretty bright-eyed
citizens. You'll have to take me on trust for the night, and
tomorrow you'll get proof of the corpse business right
enough.'I thought for an instant or two. 'Right. I'll trust you for
the night. I'll lock you into this room and keep the key. just one
word, Mr Scudder. I believe you're straight, but if so be you are
not I should warn you that I'm a handy man with a
gun.''Sure,' he said, jumping up with some briskness. 'I haven't
the privilege of your name, Sir, but let me tell you that you're a
white man. I'll thank you to lend me a razor.'I took him into my bedroom and turned him loose. In half an
hour's time a figure came out that I scarcely recognized. Only his
gimlety, hungry eyes were the same. He was shaved clean, his hair
was parted in the middle, and he had cut his eyebrows. Further, he
carried himself as if he had been drilled, and was the very model,
even to the brown complexion, of some British officer who had had a
long spell in India. He had a monocle, too, which he stuck in his
eye, and every trace of the American had gone out of his
speech.'My hat! Mr Scudder—' I stammered.'Not Mr Scudder,' he corrected; 'Captain Theophilus Digby, of
the 40th Gurkhas, presently home on leave. I'll thank you to
remember that, Sir.'I made him up a bed in my smoking-room and sought my own
couch, more cheerful than I had been for the past month. Things did
happen occasionally, even in this God-forgotten
metropolis.I woke next morning to hear my man, Paddock, making the deuce
of a row at the smoking-room door. Paddock was a fellow I had done
a good turn to out on the Selakwe, and I had inspanned him as my
servant as soon as I got to England. He had about as much gift of
the gab as a hippopotamus, and was not a great hand at valeting,
but I knew I could count on his loyalty.'Stop that row, Paddock,' I said. 'There's a friend of mine,
Captain—Captain' (I couldn't remember the name) 'dossing down in
there. Get breakfast for two and then come and speak to
me.'I told Paddock a fine story about how my friend was a great
swell, with his nerves pretty bad from overwork, who wanted
absolute rest and stillness. Nobody had got to know he was here, or
he would be besieged by communications from the India Office and
the Prime Minister and his cure would be ruined. I am bound to say
Scudder played up splendidly when he came to breakfast. He fixed
Paddock with his eyeglass, just like a British officer, asked him
about the Boer War, and slung out at me a lot of stuff about
imaginary pals. Paddock couldn't learn to call me 'Sir', but he
'sirred' Scudder as if his life depended on it.I left him with the newspaper and a box of cigars, and went
down to the City till luncheon. When I got back the lift-man had an
important face.'Nawsty business 'ere this morning, Sir. Gent in No. 15 been
and shot 'isself. They've just took 'im to the mortuary. The police
are up there now.'I ascended to No. 15, and found a couple of bobbies and an
inspector busy making an examination. I asked a few idiotic
questions, and they soon kicked me out. Then I found the man that
had valeted Scudder, and pumped him, but I could see he suspected
nothing. He was a whining fellow with a churchyard face, and
half-a-crown went far to console him.I attended the inquest next day. A partner of some publishing
firm gave evidence that the deceased had brought him wood-pulp
propositions, and had been, he believed, an agent of an American
business. The jury found it a case of suicide while of unsound
mind, and the few effects were handed over to the American Consul
to deal with. I gave Scudder a full account of the affair, and it
interested him greatly. He said he wished he could have attended
the inquest, for he reckoned it would be about as spicy as to read
one's own obituary notice.The first two days he stayed with me in that back room he was
very peaceful. He read and smoked a bit, and made a heap of
jottings in a note-book, and every night we had a game of chess, at
which he beat me hollow. I think he was nursing his nerves back to
health, for he had had a pretty trying time. But on the third day I
could see he was beginning to get restless. He fixed up a list of
the days till June 15th, and ticked each off with a red pencil,
making remarks in shorthand against them. I would find him sunk in
a brown study, with his sharp eyes abstracted, and after those
spells of meditation he was apt to be very despondent.Then I could see that he began to get edgy again. He listened
for little noises, and was always asking me if Paddock could be
trusted. Once or twice he got very peevish, and apologized for it.
I didn't blame him. I made every allowance, for he had taken on a
fairly stiff job.It was not the safety of his own skin that troubled him, but
the success of the scheme he had planned. That little man was clean
grit all through, without a soft spot in him. One night he was very
solemn.'Say, Hannay,' he said, 'I judge I should let you a bit
deeper into this business. I should hate to go out without leaving
somebody else to put up a fight.' And he began to tell me in detail
what I had only heard from him vaguely.
