The Thirty-Nine Steps
the dining-room having whiskies-and-sodas. They asked about you and
said they had hoped to meet you here. Oh! and they described you jolly
well, down to your boots and shirt. I told them you had been here last
night and had gone off on a motor bicycle this morning, and one of the
chaps swore like a navvy.”
I made him tell me what they looked like. One was a dark-eyed thin
fellow with bushy eyebrows, the other was always smiling and lisped in
his talk. Neither was any kind of foreigner; on this my young friend
was positive.
I took a bit of paper and wrote these words in German as if they were
part of a letter—
... “Black Stone. Scudder had got on to this, but he could not act for
a fortnight. I doubt if I can do any good now, especially as Karolides
is uncertain about his plans. But if Mr T. advises I will do the best
I....”
I manufactured it rather neatly, so that it looked like a loose page of
a private letter.
“Take this down and say it was found in my bedroom, and ask them to
return it to me if they overtake me.”
Three minutes later I heard the car begin to move, and peeping from
behind the curtain caught sight of the two figures. One was slim, the
other was sleek; that was the most I could make of my reconnaissance.
The innkeeper appeared in great excitement. “Your paper woke them up,”
he said gleefully. “The dark fellow went as white as death and cursed
like blazes, and the fat one whistled and looked ugly. They paid for
their drinks with half-a-sovereign and wouldn’t wait for change.”
“Now I’ll tell you what I want you to do,” I said. “Get on your bicycle
and go off to Newton-Stewart to the Chief Constable. Describe the two
men, and say you suspect them of having had something to do with the
London murder. You can invent reasons. The two will come back, never
fear. Not tonight, for they’ll follow me forty miles along the road,
but first thing tomorrow morning. Tell the police to be here bright and
early.”
He set off like a docile child, while I worked at Scudder’s notes. When
he came back we dined together, and in common decency I had to let him
pump me. I gave him a lot of stuff about lion hunts and the Matabele
War, thinking all the while what tame businesses these were compared to
this I was now engaged in! When he went to bed I sat up and finished
Scudder. I smoked in a chair till daylight, for I could not sleep.
About eight next morning I witnessed the arrival of two constables and
a sergeant. They put their car in a coach-house under the innkeeper’s
instructions, and entered the house. Twenty minutes later I saw from my
window a second car come across the plateau from the opposite
direction. It did not come up to the inn, but stopped two hundred yards
off in the shelter of a patch of wood. I noticed that its occupants
carefully reversed it before leaving it. A minute or two later I heard
their steps on the gravel outside the window.
My plan had been to lie hid in my bedroom, and see what happened. I had
a notion that, if I could bring the police and my other more dangerous
pursuers together, something might work out of it to my advantage. But
now I had a better idea. I scribbled a line of thanks to my host,
opened the window, and dropped quietly into a gooseberry bush.
Unobserved I crossed the dyke, crawled down the side of a tributary
burn, and won the highroad on the far side of the patch of trees. There
stood the car, very spick and span in the morning sunlight, but with
the dust on her which told of a long journey. I started her, jumped
into the chauffeur’s seat, and stole gently out on to the plateau.
Almost at once the road dipped so that I lost sight of the inn, but the
wind seemed to bring me the sound of angry voices.
Chapter IV.
The Adventure of the Radical Candidate
You may picture me driving that 40 h.p. car for all she was worth over
the crisp moor roads on that shining May morning; glancing back at
first over my shoulder, and looking anxiously to the next turning; then
driving with a vague eye, just wide enough awake to keep on the
highway. For I was thinking desperately of what I had found in
Scudder’s pocket-book.
The little man had told me a pack of lies. All his yarns about the
Balkans and the Jew-Anarchists and the Foreign Office Conference were
eyewash, and so was Karolides. And yet not quite, as you shall hear. I
had staked everything on my belief in his story, and had been let down;
here was his book telling me a different tale, and instead of being
once-bitten-twice-shy, I believed it absolutely.
Why, I don’t know. It rang desperately true, and the first yarn, if you
understand me, had been in a queer way true also in spirit. The
fifteenth day of June was going to be a day of destiny, a bigger
destiny than the killing of a Dago. It was so big that I didn’t blame
Scudder for keeping me out of the game and wanting to play a lone hand.
That, I was pretty clear, was his intention. He had told me something
which sounded big enough, but the real thing was so immortally big that
he, the man who had found it out, wanted it all for himself. I didn’t
blame him. It was risks after all that he was chiefly greedy about.
The whole story was in the notes—with gaps, you understand, which he
would have filled up from his memory. He stuck down his authorities,
too, and had an odd trick of giving them all a numerical value and then
striking a balance, which stood for the reliability of each stage in
the yarn. The four names he had printed were authorities, and there was
a man, Ducrosne, who got five out of a possible five; and another
fellow, Ammersfoort, who got three. The bare bones of the tale were all
that was in the book—these, and one queer phrase which occurred half a
dozen times inside brackets. (“Thirty-nine steps”) was the phrase; and
at its last time of use it ran—(“Thirty-nine steps, I counted them—high
tide 10.17 p.m.”). I could make nothing of that.
The first thing I learned was that it was no question of preventing a
war. That was coming, as sure as Christmas: had been arranged, said
Scudder, ever since February 1912. Karolides was going to be the
occasion. He was booked all right, and was to hand in his checks on
June 14th, two weeks and four days from that May morning. I gathered
from Scudder’s notes that nothing on earth could prevent that. His talk
of Epirote guards that would skin their own grandmothers was all
billy-o.
The second thing was that this war was going to come as a mighty
surprise to Britain. Karolides’ death would set the Balkans by the
ears, and then Vienna would chip in with an ultimatum. Russia wouldn’t
like that, and there would be high words. But Berlin would play the
peacemaker, and pour oil on the waters, till suddenly she would find a
good cause for a quarrel, pick it up, and in five hours let fly at us.
That was the idea, and a pretty good one too. Honey and fair speeches,
and then a stroke in the dark. While we were talking about the goodwill
and good intentions of Germany our coast would be silently ringed with
mines, and submarines would be waiting for every battleship.
But all this depended upon the third thing, which was due to happen on
June 15th. I would never have grasped this if I hadn’t once happened to
meet a French staff officer, coming back from West Africa, who had told
me a lot of things. One was that, in spite of all the nonsense talked
in Parliament, there was a real working alliance between France and
Britain, and that the two General Staffs met every now and then, and
made plans for joint action in case of war. Well, in June a very great
swell was coming over from Paris, and he was going to get nothing less
than a statement of the disposition of the British Home Fleet on
mobilization. At least I gathered it was something like that; anyhow,
it was something uncommonly important.
But on the 15th day of June there were to be others in London—others,
at whom I could only guess. Scudder was content to call them
collectively the “Black Stone”. They represented not our Allies, but
our deadly foes; and the information, destined for France, was to be
diverted to their pockets. And it was to be used, remember—used a week
or two later, with great guns and swift torpedoes, suddenly in the
darkness of a summer night.
This was the story I had been deciphering in a back room of a country
inn, overlooking a cabbage garden. This was the story that hummed in my
brain as I swung in the big touring-car from glen to glen.
My first impulse had been to write a letter to the Prime Minister, but
a little reflection convinced me that that would be useless. Who would
believe my tale? I must show a sign, some token in proof, and Heaven
knew what that could be. Above all, I must keep going myself, ready to
act when things got riper, and that was going to be no light job with
the police of the British Isles in full cry after me and the watchers
of the Black Stone running silently and swiftly on my trail.
I had no very clear purpose in my journey, but I steered east by the
sun, for I remembered from the map that if I went north I would come
into a region of coalpits and industrial towns. Presently I was down
from the moorlands and traversing the broad haugh of a river. For miles
I ran alongside a park wall, and in a break of the trees I saw a great
castle. I swung through little old thatched villages, and over peaceful
lowland streams, and past gardens blazing with hawthorn and yellow
laburnum. The land was so deep in peace that I could scarcely believe
that somewhere behind me were those who sought my life; ay, and that in
a month’s time, unless I had the almightiest of luck, these round
country faces would be pinched and staring, and men would be lying dead
in English fields.
About midday I entered a long straggling village, and had a mind to
stop and eat. Half-way down was the Post Office, and on the steps of it
stood the postmistress and a policeman hard at work conning a telegram.
When they saw me they wakened up, and the policeman advanced with
raised hand, and cried on me to stop.
I nearly was fool enough to obey. Then it flashed upon me that the wire
had to do with me; that my friends at the inn had come to an
understanding, and were united in desiring to see more of me, and that
it had been easy enough for them to wire the description of me and the
car to thirty villages through which I might pass. I released the
brakes just in time. As it was, the policeman made a claw at the hood,
and only dropped off when he got my left in his eye.
I saw that main roads were no place for me, and turned into the byways.
It wasn’t an easy job without a map, for there was the risk of getting
on to a farm road and ending in a duck-pond or a stable-yard, and I
couldn’t afford that kind of delay. I began to see what an ass I had
been to steal the car. The big green brute would be the safest kind of
clue to me over the breadth of Scotland. If I left it and took to my
feet, it would be discovered in an hour or two and I would get no start
in the race.
The immediate thing to do was to get to the loneliest roads. These I
soon found when I struck up a tributary of the big river, and got into
a glen with steep hills all about me, and a corkscrew road at the end
which climbed over a pass. Here I met nobody, but it was taking me too
far north, so I slewed east along a bad track and finally struck a big
double-line railway. Away below me I saw another broadish valley, and
it occurred to me that if I crossed it I might find some remote inn to
pass the night. The evening was now drawing in, and I was furiously
hungry, for I had eaten nothing since breakfast except a couple of buns
I had bought from a baker’s cart.
Just then I heard a noise in the sky, and lo and behold there was that