The Thirty-Nine Steps quotes

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.”

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;

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.

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 pothouse, which took in Colonial members. I had a long drink, and read the evening papers.

The crowd surged past me on the pavements, busy and chattering, and I envied the people for having something to do. These shopgirls 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 bluegrass 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.

You may think this ridiculous for a man in danger of his life, but that was the way I looked at it.

I am an ordinary sort of fellow, not braver than other people, but I hate to see a good man downed, and that long knife would not be the end of Scudder if I could play the game in his place.

It took me an hour or two to think this out, and by that time I had come to a decision. I must vanish somehow, and keep vanished till the end of the second week in June.

It was going to be a giddy hunt, and it was queer how the prospect comforted me. I had been slack so long that almost any chance of activity was welcome.

When I had to sit alone with that corpse and wait on Fortune I was no better than a crushed worm, but if my neck’s safety was to hang on my own wits I was prepared to be cheerful about it.

My next thought was whether Scudder had any papers about him to give me a better clue to the business. I drew back the tablecloth and searched his pockets, for I had no longer any shrinking from the body.

The sailor morosely agreed, and I started my new life in an atmosphere of protest against authority.

I reminded myself that a week ago I had been finding the world dull.

As we moved away from that station my companion woke up. He fixed me with a wandering glance, kicked his dog viciously, and inquired where he was. Clearly he was very drunk.

“That’s what comes o’ bein’ a teetotaller,” he observed in bitter regret.

I expressed my surprise that in him I should have met a blue-ribbon stalwart.

“And that’s a’ I get,” he moaned.

“A heid better than hell fire, and twae een lookin’ different ways for the Sabbath.”

“What did it?” I asked.

Then from my shelter I peered back, and saw the guard and several passengers gathered round the open carriage door and staring in my direction.

I could not have made a more public departure if I had left with a bugler and a brass band.

Happily the drunken herd provided a diversion. He and his dog, which was attached by a rope to his waist, suddenly cascaded out of the carriage, landed on their heads on the track, and rolled some way down the bank towards the water.

“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.

“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?”

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.

“All right,” I said. “I’m not much good as a speaker, but I’ll tell them a bit about Australia.”

At my words the cares of the ages slipped from his shoulders, and he was rapturous in his thanks.

He lent me a big driving coat—and never troubled to ask why I had started on a motor tour without possessing an ulster—and, as we slipped down the dusty roads, poured into my ears the simple facts of his history.

He said that, but for the Tories, Germany and Britain would be fellow-workers in peace and reform.

I thought of the little black book in my pocket! A giddy lot Scudder’s friends cared for peace and reform.

Yet in a queer way I liked the speech. You could see the niceness of the chap shining out behind the muck with which he had been spoon-fed. Also it took a load off my mind.

He said that, but for the Tories, Germany and Britain would be fellow-workers in peace and reform. I thought of the little black book in my pocket! A giddy lot Scudder’s friends cared for peace and reform.

Yet in a queer way I liked the speech. You could see the niceness of the chap shining out behind the muck with which he had been spoon-fed.

Also it took a load off my mind. I mightn’t be much of an orator, but I was a thousand percent better than Sir Harry.

He watched me with a smile. “I don’t want proof.

I may be an ass on the platform, but I can size up a man.

You’re no murderer and you’re no fool, and I believe you are speaking the truth. I’m going to back you up. Now, what can I do?”

As the day advanced it was flooded with soft fresh light till it had the fragrant sunniness of the South African veld. At other times I would have liked the place, but now it seemed to suffocate me.

The free moorlands were prison walls, and the keen hill air was the breath of a dungeon.

I tossed a coin—heads right, tails left—and it fell heads, so I turned to the north. In a little I came to the brow of the ridge which was the containing wall of the pass.

He had just arrived, and was wearily flinging down his hammer. He looked at me with a fishy eye and yawned.

“Confoond the day I ever left the herdin’!” he said, as if to the world at large.

“There I was my ain maister. Now I’m a slave to the Goavernment, tethered to the roadside, wi’ sair een, and a back like a suckle.”

My toilet complete, I took up the barrow and began my journeys to and from the quarry a hundred yards off.

I remember an old scout in Rhodesia, who had done many queer things in his day, once telling me that the secret of playing a part was to think yourself into it.

You could never keep it up, he said, unless you could manage to convince yourself that you were it. So I shut off all other thoughts and switched them on to the road-mending.

Turnbull indoors, but if he appeared on the scene there would be trouble. I had a notion that the cordon was still tight round the glen, and that if I walked in any direction I should meet with questioners. But get out I must.

No man’s nerve could stand more than a day of being spied on.

I stayed at my post till five o’clock. By that time I had resolved to go down to Turnbull’s cottage at nightfall and take my chance of getting over the hills in the darkness.

There he showed off at a great rate, and pattered about his duchesses till the snobbery of the creature turned me sick.

I asked a man afterwards why nobody kicked him, and was told that Englishmen reverenced the weaker sex.

Anyhow there he was now, nattily dressed, in a fine new car, obviously on his way to visit some of his smart friends. A sudden daftness took me, and in a second I had jumped into the tonneau and had him by the shoulder.

“Marmie” was a familiar figure, I understood, at balls and polo-weeks and country houses.

He was an adroit scandalmonger, and would crawl a mile on his belly to anything that had a title or a million.

I had a business introduction to his firm when I came to London, and he was good enough to ask me to dinner at his club.

As I sat on the hillside, watching the taillight dwindle, I reflected on the various kinds of crime I had now sampled.

Contrary to general belief, I was not a murderer, but I had become an unholy liar, a shameless impostor, and a highwayman with a marked taste for expensive motorcars.

Then he looked steadily at me, and that was the hardest ordeal of all.

There was something weird and devilish in those eyes, cold, malignant, unearthly, and most hellishly clever.

They fascinated me like the bright eyes of a snake.

I thought he probably had some kind of graft with the constabulary. Most likely he had letters from Cabinet ministers saying he was to be given every facility for plotting against Britain.

That’s the sort of owlish way we run our politics in the Old Country.

The three would be back for lunch, so I hadn’t more than a couple of hours to wait. It was simply waiting on destruction, for I could see no way out of this mess.

“No,” I said. “I mean to say, Yes.” I had forgotten all about my alias.

“It’s a wise conspirator that knows his own name,” he observed, grinning broadly at a moorhen that emerged from the bridge’s shadow.

I stood up and looked at him, at the square, cleft jaw and broad, lined brow and the firm folds of cheek, and began to think that here at last was an ally worth having. His whimsical blue eyes seemed to go very deep.

The grave being withdrew, and I sat down in a chintz-covered easy-chair and gaped.

It was like a pantomime, to come suddenly out of beggardom into this orderly comfort.

Obviously Sir Walter believed in me, though why he did I could not guess.

He was half crank, half genius, but he was wholly honest. The trouble about him was his partiality for playing a lone hand. That made him pretty well useless in any Secret Service—a pity, for he had uncommon gifts.

I think he was the bravest man in the world, for he was always shivering with fright, and yet nothing would choke him off.

I had a letter from him on the 31st of May.”

That is ugly enough in itself. But all this about war and the Black Stone—it reads like some wild melodrama. If only I had more confidence in Scudder’s judgement. The trouble about him was that he was too romantic.

He had the artistic temperament, and wanted a story to be better than God meant it to be.

He had a lot of odd biases, too. Jews, for example, made him see red. Jews and the high finance.

I fairly wrenched the constable off his feet, floored the man who was gripping my collar, and set off at my best pace down Duke Street. I heard a whistle being blown, and the rush of men behind me.

I have a very fair turn of speed, and that night I had wings.

In a jiffy I was in Pall Mall and had turned down towards St. James’s Park.

He nodded, and presently there was a noise of voices in the street, and a furious ringing at the bell.

I never admired a man more than that butler.

He opened the door, and with a face like a graven image waited to be questioned. Then he gave them it. He told them whose house it was, and what his orders were, and simply froze them off the doorstep.

I never saw the kill, for I was accustomed to the mare’s fretting, and I never marked her absence, for my consciousness of her was only of something tawny, and the lion filled that part.

If I could blunder thus, gentlemen, in a land where men’s senses are keen, why should we busy preoccupied urban folk not err also?

”

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.

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.

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.

Suddenly as these memories chased across my brain I thought of my present case and applied the moral. The Black Stone didn’t need to bolt. They were quietly absorbed into the landscape.