The Thirty-Nine Steps (5 page)

About six in the evening I came out of the moorland to a white ribbon of road which
wound up the narrow vale of a lowland stream. As I followed it, fields gave place
to bent, the glen became a plateau, and presently I had reached a kind of pass where
a solitary house smoked in the twilight. The road swung over a bridge, and leaning
on the parapet was a young man.

He was smoking a long clay pipe and studying the water with spectacled eyes. In his
left hand was a small book with a finger marking the place. Slowly he repeated—

‘As when a Gryphon through the wilderness

With winged step, o’er hill and moory dale

Pursues the Arimaspian.’

He jumped round as my step rung on the keystone, and I saw a pleasant sunburnt boyish
face.

‘Good evening to you,’ he said gravely. ‘It’s a fine night for the road.’

The smell of peat smoke and of some savoury roast floated to me from the house.

‘Is that place an inn?’ I asked.

‘At your service,’ he said politely. ‘I am the landlord, Sir, and I hope you will
stay the night, for to tell you the truth I have had no company for a week.’

I pulled myself up on the parapet of the bridge and filled my pipe. I began to detect
an ally.

‘You’re young to be an innkeeper,’ I said.

‘My father died a year ago and left me the business. I live there with my grandmother.
It’s a slow job for a young man, and it wasn’t my choice of profession.’

‘Which was?’

He actually blushed. ‘I want to write books,’ he said.

‘And what better chance could you ask?’ I cried. ‘Man, I’ve often thought that an
innkeeper would make the best story-teller in the world.’

‘Not now,’ he said eagerly. ‘Maybe in the old days when you had pilgrims and ballad-makers
and highwaymen and mail-coaches on the road. But not now. Nothing comes here but motor-cars
full of fat women, who stop for lunch, and a fisherman or two in the spring, and the
shooting tenants in August. There is not much material to be got out of that. I want
to see life, to travel the world, and write things like Kipling and Conrad. But the
most I’ve done yet is to get some verses printed in
Chambers’s Journal
.’ I looked at the inn standing golden in the sunset against the brown hills.

‘I’ve knocked a bit about the world, and I wouldn’t despise such a hermitage. D’you
think that adventure is found only in the tropics or among gentry in red shirts? Maybe
you’re rubbing shoulders with it at this moment.’

‘That’s what Kipling says,’ he said, his eyes brightening, and he quoted some verse
about ‘Romance bringing up the 9.15’.

‘Here’s a true tale for you then,’ I cried, ‘and a month from now you can make a novel
out of it.’

Sitting on the bridge in the soft May gloaming I pitched him a lovely yarn. It was
true in essentials, too, though I altered the minor details. I made out that I was
a mining magnate from Kimberley, who had had a lot of trouble with I.D.B. and had
shown up a gang. They had pursued me across the ocean, and had killed my best friend,
and were now on my tracks.

I told the story well, though I say it who shouldn’t. I pictured a flight across the
Kalahari to German Africa, the crackling, parching days, the wonderful blue-velvet
nights. I described an attack on my life on the voyage home, and I made a really horrid
affair of the Portland Place murder. ‘You’re looking for adventure,’ I cried; ‘well,
you’ve found it here. The devils are after me, and the police are after them. It’s
a race that I mean to win.’

‘By God!’ he whispered, drawing his breath in sharply, ‘it is all pure Rider Haggard
and Conan Doyle.’

‘You believe me,’ I said gratefully.

‘Of course I do,’ and he held out his hand. ‘I believe everything out of the common.
The only thing to distrust is the normal.’

He was very young, but he was the man for my money.

‘I think they’re off my track for the moment, but I must lie close for a couple of
days. Can you take me in?’

He caught my elbow in his eagerness and drew me towards the house. ‘You can lie as
snug here as if you were in a moss-hole. I’ll see that nobody blabs, either. And you’ll
give me some more material about your adventures?’

As I entered the inn porch I heard from far off the beat of an engine. There silhouetted
against the dusky West was my friend, the monoplane.

He gave me a room at the back of the house, with a fine outlook over the plateau,
and he made me free of his own study, which was stacked with cheap editions of his
favourite authors. I never saw the grandmother, so I guessed she was bedridden. An
old woman called Margit brought me my meals, and the innkeeper was around me at all
hours. I wanted some time to myself, so I invented a job for him. He had a motor-bicycle,
and I sent him off next morning for the daily paper, which usually arrived with the
post in the late afternoon. I told him to keep his eyes skinned, and make note of
any strange figures he saw, keeping a special sharp look-out for motors and aeroplanes.
Then I sat down in real earnest to Scudder’s note-book.

He came back at midday with the
Scotsman
. There was nothing in it, except some further evidence of Paddock and the milkman,
and a repetition of yesterday’s statement that the murderer had gone North. But there
was a long article, reprinted from
The Times
, about Karolides and the state of affairs in the Balkans, though there was no mention
of any visit to England. I got rid of the innkeeper for the afternoon, for I was getting
very warm in my search for the cypher.

As I told you, it was a numerical cypher, and by an elaborate system of experiments
I had pretty well discovered what were the nulls and stops. The trouble was the key
word, and when I thought of the odd million words he might have used I felt pretty
hopeless. But about three o’clock I had a sudden inspiration.

The name Julia Czechenyi flashed across my memory. Scudder had said it was the key
to the Karolides business, and it occurred to me to try it on his cypher.

It worked. The five letters of ‘Julia’ gave me the position of the vowels. A was J,
the tenth letter of the alphabet, and so represented by X in the cypher. E was XXI,
and so on. ‘Czechenyi’ gave me the numerals for the principal consonants. I scribbled
that scheme on a bit of paper and sat down to read Scudder’s pages.

In half an hour I was reading with a whitish face and fingers that drummed on the
table.

I glanced out of the window and saw a big touring-car coming up the glen towards the
inn. It drew up at the door, and there was the sound of people alighting. There seemed
to be two of them, men in aquascutums and tweed caps.

Ten minutes later the innkeeper slipped into the room, his eyes bright with excitement.

‘There’s two chaps below looking for you,’ he whispered. ‘They’re in 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.

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.