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THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS

by JOHN BUCHAN

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.

CONTENTS

1. The Man Who Died

2. The Milkman Sets Out on his Travels

3. The Adventure of the Literary Innkeeper

4. The Adventure of the Radical Candidate

5. The Adventure of the Spectacled Roadman

6. The Adventure of the Bald Archaeologist

7. The Dry-Fly Fisherman

8. The Coming of the Black Stone

9. The Thirty-Nine Steps

10. Various Parties Converging on the Sea

CHAPTER ONE

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 the Cafe 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