Chapter One. The Man Who Died

The Thirty-Nine Steps

by John Buchan

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 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 Leipsic. 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 mortiary. 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.

I did not give him very close attention. The fact is, I was
more interested in his own adventures than in his high politics. I
reckoned that Karolides and his affairs were not my business, leaving
all that to him. So a lot that he said slipped clean out of my
memory. I remember that he was very clear that the danger to
Karolides would not begin till he had got to London, and would come
from the very highest quarters, where there would be no thought of
suspicion. He mentioned the name of a woman - Julia Czechenyi - as
having something to do with the danger. She would be the decoy, I
gathered, to get Karolides out of the care of his guards. He talked,
too, about a Black Stone and a man that lisped in his speech, and he
described very particularly somebody that he never referred to
without a shudder - an old man with a young voice who could hood his
eyes like a hawk.

He spoke a good deal about death, too. He was mortally anxious
about winning through with his job, but he didn't care a rush for his
life.

'I reckon it's like going to sleep when you are pretty well
tired out, and waking to find a summer day with the scent of hay
coming in at the window. I used to thank God for such mornings way
back in the Blue-Grass country, and I guess I'll thank Him when I
wake up on the other side of Jordan.'

Next day he was much more cheerful, and read the life of
Stonewall Jackson much of the time. I went out to dinner with a
mining engineer I had got to see on business, and came back about
half-past ten in time for our game of chess before turning in.

I had a cigar in my mouth, I remember, as I pushed open the
smoking-room door. The lights were not lit, which struck me as odd.
I wondered if Scudder had turned in already.

I snapped the switch, but there was nobody there. Then I saw
something in the far corner which made me drop my cigar and fall into
a cold sweat.

My guest was lying sprawled on his back. There was a long knife
through his heart which skewered him to the floor.