The Thirty-Nine Steps
servants were kept, a cook, a parlour-maid, and a housemaid, and they
were just the sort that you would find in a respectable middle-class
household. The cook was not the gossiping kind, and had pretty soon
shut the door in his face, but Scaife said he was positive she knew
nothing. Next door there was a new house building which would give good
cover for observation, and the villa on the other side was to let, and
its garden was rough and shrubby.
I borrowed Scaife’s telescope, and before lunch went for a walk along
the Ruff. I kept well behind the rows of villas, and found a good
observation point on the edge of the golf-course. There I had a view of
the line of turf along the cliff top, with seats placed at intervals,
and the little square plots, railed in and planted with bushes, whence
the staircases descended to the beach. I saw Trafalgar Lodge very
plainly, a red-brick villa with a veranda, a tennis lawn behind, and in
front the ordinary seaside flower-garden full of marguerites and
scraggy geraniums. There was a flagstaff from which an enormous Union
Jack hung limply in the still air.
Presently I observed someone leave the house and saunter along the
cliff. When I got my glasses on him I saw it was an old man, wearing
white flannel trousers, a blue serge jacket, and a straw hat. He
carried field-glasses and a newspaper, and sat down on one of the iron
seats and began to read. Sometimes he would lay down the paper and turn
his glasses on the sea. He looked for a long time at the destroyer. I
watched him for half an hour, till he got up and went back to the house
for his luncheon, when I returned to the hotel for mine.
I wasn’t feeling very confident. This decent common-place dwelling was
not what I had expected. The man might be the bald archaeologist of
that horrible moorland farm, or he might not. He was exactly the kind
of satisfied old bird you will find in every suburb and every holiday
place. If you wanted a type of the perfectly harmless person you would
probably pitch on that.
But after lunch, as I sat in the hotel porch, I perked up, for I saw
the thing I had hoped for and had dreaded to miss. A yacht came up from
the south and dropped anchor pretty well opposite the Ruff. She seemed
about a hundred and fifty tons, and I saw she belonged to the Squadron
from the white ensign. So Scaife and I went down to the harbour and
hired a boatman for an afternoon’s fishing.
I spent a warm and peaceful afternoon. We caught between us about
twenty pounds of cod and lythe, and out in that dancing blue sea I took
a cheerier view of things. Above the white cliffs of the Ruff I saw the
green and red of the villas, and especially the great flagstaff of
Trafalgar Lodge. About four o’clock, when we had fished enough, I made
the boatman row us round the yacht, which lay like a delicate white
bird, ready at a moment to flee. Scaife said she must be a fast boat
for her build, and that she was pretty heavily engined.
Her name was the _Ariadne_, as I discovered from the cap of one of the
men who was polishing brasswork. I spoke to him, and got an answer in
the soft dialect of Essex. Another hand that came along passed me the
time of day in an unmistakable English tongue. Our boatman had an
argument with one of them about the weather, and for a few minutes we
lay on our oars close to the starboard bow.
Then the men suddenly disregarded us and bent their heads to their work
as an officer came along the deck. He was a pleasant, clean-looking
young fellow, and he put a question to us about our fishing in very
good English. But there could be no doubt about him. His close-cropped
head and the cut of his collar and tie never came out of England.
That did something to reassure me, but as we rowed back to Bradgate my
obstinate doubts would not be dismissed. The thing that worried me was
the reflection that my enemies knew that I had got my knowledge from
Scudder, and it was Scudder who had given me the clue to this place. If
they knew that Scudder had this clue, would they not be certain to
change their plans? Too much depended on their success for them to take
any risks. The whole question was how much they understood about
Scudder’s knowledge. I had talked confidently last night about Germans
always sticking to a scheme, but if they had any suspicions that I was
on their track they would be fools not to cover it. I wondered if the
man last night had seen that I recognized him. Somehow I did not think
he had, and to that I had clung. But the whole business had never
seemed so difficult as that afternoon when by all calculations I should
have been rejoicing in assured success.
In the hotel I met the commander of the destroyer, to whom Scaife
introduced me, and with whom I had a few words. Then I thought I would
put in an hour or two watching Trafalgar Lodge.
I found a place farther up the hill, in the garden of an empty house.
From there I had a full view of the court, on which two figures were
having a game of tennis. One was the old man, whom I had already seen;
the other was a younger fellow, wearing some club colours in the scarf
round his middle. They played with tremendous zest, like two city gents
who wanted hard exercise to open their pores. You couldn’t conceive a
more innocent spectacle. They shouted and laughed and stopped for
drinks, when a maid brought out two tankards on a salver. I rubbed my
eyes and asked myself if I was not the most immortal fool on earth.
Mystery and darkness had hung about the men who hunted me over the
Scotch moor in aeroplane and motor-car, and notably about that infernal
antiquarian. It was easy enough to connect those folk with the knife
that pinned Scudder to the floor, and with fell designs on the world’s
peace. But here were two guileless citizens taking their innocuous
exercise, and soon about to go indoors to a humdrum dinner, where they
would talk of market prices and the last cricket scores and the gossip
of their native Surbiton. I had been making a net to catch vultures and
falcons, and lo and behold! two plump thrushes had blundered into it.
Presently a third figure arrived, a young man on a bicycle, with a bag
of golf-clubs slung on his back. He strolled round to the tennis lawn
and was welcomed riotously by the players. Evidently they were chaffing
him, and their chaff sounded horribly English. Then the plump man,
mopping his brow with a silk handkerchief, announced that he must have
a tub. I heard his very words—“I’ve got into a proper lather,” he said.
“This will bring down my weight and my handicap, Bob. I’ll take you on
tomorrow and give you a stroke a hole.” You couldn’t find anything much
more English than that.
They all went into the house, and left me feeling a precious idiot. I
had been barking up the wrong tree this time. These men might be
acting; but if they were, where was their audience? They didn’t know I
was sitting thirty yards off in a rhododendron. It was simply
impossible to believe that these three hearty fellows were anything but
what they seemed—three ordinary, game-playing, suburban Englishmen,
wearisome, if you like, but sordidly innocent.
And yet there were three of them; and one was old, and one was plump,
and one was lean and dark; and their house chimed in with Scudder’s
notes; and half a mile off was lying a steam yacht with at least one
German officer. I thought of Karolides lying dead and all Europe
trembling on the edge of earthquake, and the men I had left behind me
in London who were waiting anxiously for the events of the next hours.
There was no doubt that hell was afoot somewhere. The Black Stone had
won, and if it survived this June night would bank its winnings.
There seemed only one thing to do—go forward as if I had no doubts, and
if I was going to make a fool of myself to do it handsomely. Never in
my life have I faced a job with greater disinclination. I would rather
in my then mind have walked into a den of anarchists, each with his
Browning handy, or faced a charging lion with a popgun, than enter that
happy home of three cheerful Englishmen and tell them that their game
was up. How they would laugh at me!
But suddenly I remembered a thing I once heard in Rhodesia from old
Peter Pienaar. I have quoted Peter already in this narrative. He was
the best scout I ever knew, and before he had turned respectable he had
been pretty often on the windy side of the law, when he had been wanted
badly by the authorities. Peter once discussed with me the question of
disguises, and he had a theory which struck me at the time. He said,
barring absolute certainties like fingerprints, mere physical traits
were very little use for identification if the fugitive really knew his
business. He laughed at things like dyed hair and false beards and such
childish follies. The only thing that mattered was what Peter called
“atmosphere”.
If a man could get into perfectly different surroundings from those in
which he had been first observed, and—this is the important part—really
play up to these surroundings and behave as if he had never been out of
them, he would puzzle the cleverest detectives on earth. And he used to
tell a story of how he once borrowed a black coat and went to church
and shared the same hymn-book with the man that was looking for him. If
that man had seen him in decent company before he would have recognized
him; but he had only seen him snuffing the lights in a public-house
with a revolver.
The recollection of Peter’s talk gave me the first real comfort that I
had had that day. Peter had been a wise old bird, and these fellows I
was after were about the pick of the aviary. What if they were playing
Peter’s game? A fool tries to look different: a clever man looks the
same and is different.
Again, there was that other maxim of Peter’s which had helped me when I
had been a roadman. “If you are playing a part, you will never keep it
up unless you convince yourself that you are _it_.” That would explain
the game of tennis. Those chaps didn’t need to act, they just turned a
handle and passed into another life, which came as naturally to them as
the first. It sounds a platitude, but Peter used to say that it was the
big secret of all the famous criminals.
It was now getting on for eight o’clock, and I went back and saw Scaife
to give him his instructions. I arranged with him how to place his men,
and then I went for a walk, for I didn’t feel up to any dinner. I went
round the deserted golf-course, and then to a point on the cliffs
farther north beyond the line of the villas.
On the little trim newly-made roads I met people in flannels coming
back from tennis and the beach, and a coastguard from the wireless
station, and donkeys and pierrots padding homewards. Out at sea in the
blue dusk I saw lights appear on the _Ariadne_ and on the destroyer
away to the south, and beyond the Cock sands the bigger lights of
steamers making for the Thames. The whole scene was so peaceful and
ordinary that I got more dashed in spirits every second. It took all my
resolution to stroll towards Trafalgar Lodge about half-past nine.
On the way I got a piece of solid comfort from the sight of a greyhound
that was swinging along at a nursemaid’s heels. He reminded me of a dog
I used to have in Rhodesia, and of the time when I took him hunting
with me in the Pali hills. We were after rhebok, the dun kind, and I
recollected how we had followed one beast, and both he and I had clean
lost it. A greyhound works by sight, and my eyes are good enough, but
that buck simply leaked out of the landscape. Afterwards I found out
how it managed it. Against the grey rock of the kopjes it showed no
more than a crow against a thundercloud. It didn’t need to run away;
all it had to do was to stand still and melt into the background.