The Thirty-Nine Steps
by John Buchan
Contents
Chapter I The Man Who Died
Chapter II The Milkman Sets Out on his Travels
Chapter III The Adventure of the Literary Innkeeper
Chapter IV The Adventure of the Radical Candidate
Chapter V The Adventure of the Spectacled Roadman
Chapter VI The Adventure of the Bald Archaeologist
Chapter VII The Dry-Fly Fisherman
Chapter VIII The Coming of the Black Stone
Chapter IX The Thirty-Nine Steps
Chapter X Various Parties Converging on the Sea
TO
THOMAS ARTHUR NELSON
(LOTHIAN AND BORDER HORSE)
My Dear Tommy,
You and I have long cherished an affection for that elemental type of
tale which Americans call the “dime novel” and which we know as the
“shocker”—the romance where the incidents defy the probabilities, and
march just inside the borders of the possible. During an illness last
winter I exhausted my store of those aids to cheerfulness, and was
driven to write one for myself. This little volume is the result, and I
should like to put your name on it in memory of our long friendship, in
the days when the wildest fictions are so much less improbable than the
facts.
J.B.
Sept. 1915
Chapter I.
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 Buluwayo. 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 to 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 the Café 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 Tsar, 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 vitæ_,” 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