by John Buchan
I looked at my watch again. “You have ample time to catch the night express to Paris.”
“And if not?”
“Then I am afraid there may be trouble with the police between ten and eleven o’clock.”
“Which, for all our sakes, would be a pity. Do you know you interest me uncommonly, for you confirm the accuracy of my judgment. I have always had a notion that some day I should run across, to my sorrow, just such a man as you. A man of very great intellectual power I can deal with, for that kind of brain is usually combined with the sort of high-strung imagination on which I can work. The same with your over-imaginative man. Yes, Pitt-Heron was of that type. Ordinary brains do not trouble me, for I puzzle them. Now, you are a man of good commonplace intelligence. Pray forgive the lukewarmness of the phrase; it is really a high compliment, for I am an austere critic. If you were that and no more you would not have succeeded. But you possess also a quite irrelevant gift of imagination. Not enough to upset your balance, but enough to do what your mere lawyer’s talent could never have done. You have achieved a feat which is given to few — you have partially understood me. Believe me, I rate you high. You are the kind of foursquare being bedded in the concrete of our civilisation, on whom I have always felt I might some day come to grief.... No, no, I am not trying to wheedle you. If I thought I could do that I should be sorry, for my discernment would have been at fault.”
“I warn you,” I said, “that you are wasting precious time.”
He laughed quite cheerfully.
“I believe you are really anxious about my interests,” he said. “That is a triumph indeed. Do you know, Mr Leithen, it is a mere whimsy of fate that you are not my disciple. If we had met earlier, and under other circumstances, I should have captured you. It is because you have in you a capacity for discipleship that you have succeeded in your opposition.”
“I abominate you and all your works,” I said, “but I admire your courage.”
He shook his head gently.
“It is the wrong word. I am not courageous. To be brave means that you have conquered fear, but I have never had any fear to conquer. Believe me, Mr Leithen, I am quite impervious to threats. You come to me to-night and hold a pistol to my head. You offer me two alternatives, both of which mean failure. But how do you know that I regard them as failure? I have had what they call a good run for my money. No man since Napoleon has tasted such power. I may be willing to end it. Age creeps on and power may grow burdensome. I have always sat loose from common ambitions and common affections. For all you know I may regard you as a benefactor.”
All this talk looks futile when it is written down, but it was skilful enough, for it was taking every atom of exhilaration out of my victory. It was not idle brag. Every syllable rang true, as I knew in my bones. I felt myself in the presence of something enormously big, as if a small barbarian was desecrating the colossal Zeus of Pheidias with a coal hammer. But I also felt it inhuman, and I hated it, and I clung to that hatred.
“You fear nothing and you believe nothing,” I said. “Man, you should never have been allowed to live.”
He raised a deprecating hand. “I am a sceptic about most things,” he said, “but, believe me, I have my own worship. I venerate the intellect of man. I believe in its undreamed-of possibilities, when it grows free like an oak in the forest and is not dwarfed in a flower-pot. From that allegiance I have never wavered. That is the God I have never forsworn.”
I took out my watch.
“Permit me again to remind you that time presses.”
“True,” he said, smiling. “The continental express will not wait upon my confession. Your plan is certainly conceivable. There may be other and easier ways. I am not certain. I must think.... Perhaps it would be wiser if you left me now, Mr Leithen. If I take your advice there will be various things to do.... In any case there will be much to do....”
He led me to the door as if he were an ordinary host speeding an ordinary guest. I remember that on my way he pointed out a set of Aldines and called my attention to their beauty. He shook hands quite cordially and remarked on the fineness of the weather. That was the last I saw of this amazing man.
It was with profound relief that I found myself in Piccadilly in the wholesome company of my kind. I had carried myself boldly enough in the last hour, but I would not have gone through it again for a king’s ransom. Do you know what it is to deal with a pure intelligence, a brain stripped of every shred of humanity? It is like being in the company of a snake.
I drove to the club and telephoned to Macgillivray, asking him to take no notice of my statement till he heard from me in the morning. Then I went to the hospital to see Chapman.
That Leader of the People was in a furious temper, and he was scarcely to be appeased by my narrative of the day’s doings. Your Labour Member is the greatest of all sticklers for legality, and the outrage he had suffered that morning had grievously weakened his trust in public security. The Antioch Street business had seemed to him eminently right; if you once got mixed up in melodrama you had to expect such things. But for a Member of Parliament to be robbed in broad daylight next door to the House of Commons upset the foundations of his faith. There was little the matter with his body, and the doctor promised that he would be allowed up next day, but his soul was a mass of bruises.
It took me a lot of persuasion to get him to keep quiet. He wanted a public exposure of Lumley, a big trial, a general ferreting out of secret agents, the whole winding up with a speech in Parliament by himself on this latest outrage of Capitalism. Gloomily he listened to my injunction to silence. But he saw the reason of it, and promised to hold his tongue out of loyalty to Tommy. I knew that Pitt-Heron’s secret was safe with him.
As I crossed Westminster Bridge on my way home, the night express to the Continent rumbled over the river. I wondered if Lumley was on board, or if he had taken one of the other ways of which he had spoken....
CHAPTER IX.
RETURN OF THE WILD GEESE.
I DO not think I was surprised at the news I read in ‘The Times’ next morning.
Mr Andrew Lumley had died suddenly in the night of heart failure, and the newspapers woke up to the fact that we had been entertaining a great man unawares. There was an obituary in “leader” type of nearly two columns. He had been older than I thought — close on seventy — and ‘The Times’ spoke of him as a man who might have done anything he pleased in public life, but had chosen to give to a small coterie of friends what was due to the country. I read of his wit and learning, his amazing connoisseurship, his social gifts, his personal charm. According to the writer, he was the finest type of cultivated amateur, a Beckford with more than a Beckford’s wealth and none of his folly. Large private charities were hinted at, and a hope was expressed that some part at least of his collections might come to the nation.
The halfpenny papers said the same thing in their own way. One declared he reminded it of Atticus, another of Mæcenas, another of Lord Houghton. There must have been a great run on biographical dictionaries in the various offices. Chapman’s own particular rag said that, although this kind of philanthropist was a dilettante and a back number, yet Mr Lumley was a good specimen of the class and had been a true friend to the poor. I thought Chapman would have a fit when he read this. After that he took in the ‘Morning Post.’
It was no business of mine to explode the myth. Indeed I couldn’t even if I had wanted to, for no one would have believed me unless I produced proofs, and these proofs were not to be made public. Besides, I had an honest compunction. He had had, as he expressed it, a good run for his money, and I wanted the run to be properly rounded off.
Three days later I went to the funeral. It was a wonderful occasion. Two eminent statesmen were among the pall-bearers, Royalty was represented, and there were wreaths from learned societies and scores of notable people. It was a queer business to listen to that stately service, which was never read over stranger dust. I was thinking all the time of t
he vast subterranean machine which he had controlled, and which now was so much old iron. I could dimly imagine what his death meant to the hosts who had worked blindly at his discretion. He was a Napoleon who left no Marshals behind him. From the Power-House came no wreaths or newspaper tributes, but I knew that it had lost its power....
De mortuis, &c. My task was done, and it only remained to get Pitt-Heron home.
Of the three people in London besides myself who knew the story — Macgillivray, Chapman, and Felix — the two last might be trusted to be silent, and Scotland Yard is not in the habit of publishing its information. Tommy, of course, must some time or other be told; it was his right; but I knew that Tommy would never breathe a word of it. I wanted Charles to believe that his secret died with Lumley, for otherwise I don’t think he would have ever come back to England.
The thing took some arranging, for we could not tell him directly about Lumley’s death without giving away the fact that we knew of the connection between the two. We had to approach it by a roundabout road. I got Felix to arrange to have the news telegraphed to and inserted by special order in a Russian paper which Charles could not avoid seeing.
The device was successful. Calling at Portman Square a few days later, I learned from Ethel Pitt-Heron’s glowing face that her troubles were over. That same evening a cable to me from Tommy announced the return of the wanderers.
It was the year of the Chilian Arbitration, in which I held a junior brief for the British Government, and that and the late sitting of Parliament kept me in London after the end of the term. I had had a bad reaction from the excitements of the summer, and in these days I was feeling pretty well hipped and overdone. On a hot August afternoon I met Tommy again.
The sun was shining through my Temple chambers, much as it had done when he started. So far as I remember, the West Ham brief which had aroused his contempt was still adorning my table. I was very hot and cross and fagged, for I had been engaged in the beastly job of comparing half a dozen maps of a despicable little bit of South American frontier.
Suddenly the door opened, and Tommy, lean and sunburnt, stalked in.
“Still at the old grind,” he cried, after we had shaken hands. “Fellows like you give me a notion of the meaning of Eternity.”
“The same uneventful, sedentary life,” I replied. “Nothing happens except that my scale of fees grows. I suppose nothing will happen till the conductor comes to take the tickets. I shall soon grow fat.”
“I notice it already, my lad. You want a bit of waking up or you’ll get a liver. A little sensation would do you a pot of good.”
“And you?” I asked. “I congratulate you on your success. I hear you have retrieved Pitt-Heron for his mourning family.”
Tommy’s laughing eyes grew solemn.
“I have had the time of my life,” he said. “It was like a chapter out of the Arabian Nights with a dash of Fenimore Cooper. I feel as if I had lived years since I left England in May. While you have been sitting among your musty papers we have been riding like mosstroopers and seeing men die. Come and dine to-night and hear about our adventures. I can’t tell you the full story, for I don’t know it, but there is enough to curl your hair.”
Then I achieved my first and last score at the expense of Tommy Deloraine.
“No,” I said, “you will dine with me instead, and I will tell you the full story. All the papers on the subject are over there in my safe.”
THE END
THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS
Widely regarded as Buchan’s masterpiece, this adventure novel first appeared as a serial in Blackwood’s Magazine in August and September 1915, before being published in book format in October by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh. Commercially successful at the time of first publication, The Thirty-Nine Steps is the first of five novels featuring Richard Hannay, now famed for his stiff upper lip and a miraculous knack for getting himself out of difficult situations.
Reportedly, Buchan wrote the novel while he was in bed suffering from a duodenal ulcer, an illness which remained with him throughout his life. The novel became what Buchan later regarded as his first “shocker” — a story combining personal and political dramas, marking a turning point in his literary career. The author described a “shocker” as an adventure where the events in the story are unlikely and the reader is only just able to believe that they really happened.
Buchan’s son later wrote that the name of the novel originated when the author’s daughter was counting the stairs at a private nursing home in Broadstairs, where Buchan was convalescing. “There was a wooden staircase,” he explained, “leading down to the beach. My sister, who was about six, and who had just learnt to count properly, went down them and gleefully announced: there are thirty-nine steps.” Some time later the house was demolished and a section of the stairs, complete with a brass plaque, was sent to Buchan.
Set during May and June 1914; when Europe is close to war and spies are everywhere, the novel introduces the character Richard Hannay, who has just returned to London from Rhodesia to begin a new life, when a freelance spy called Franklin P. Scudder calls on him for help. Scudder reveals to Hannay that he has uncovered a German plot to murder the Greek Premier and steal British plans for the outbreak of war. Scudder claims to be following a ring of German spies called the Black Stone.
A few days later, Hannay returns to his flat to find Scudder murdered. If Hannay goes to the police, he will be arrested for Scudder’s murder. Hannay decides to continue Scudder’s work and his adventure begins. He escapes from the German spies watching the house and makes his way to Scotland, pursued both by the spies and by the police. The mysterious phrase Thirty-Nine Steps first mentioned by Scudder becomes the title of the novel and the solution to its meaning is a thread that runs throughout the whole novel.
The first edition
The original title page
St Cuby, Cliff Promenade, Broadstairs, where Buchan wrote the novel, while convalescing in a private nursing home.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1. THE MAN WHO DIED
CHAPTER 2. THE MILKMAN SETS OUT ON HIS TRAVELS
CHAPTER 3. THE ADVENTURE OF THE LITERARY INNKEEPER
CHAPTER 4. THE ADVENTURE OF THE RADICAL CANDIDATE
CHAPTER 5. THE ADVENTURE OF THE SPECTACLED ROADMAN
CHAPTER 6. THE ADVENTURE OF THE BALD ARCHAEOLOGIST
CHAPTER 7. THE DRY-FLY FISHERMAN
CHAPTER 8. THE COMING OF THE BLACK STONE
CHAPTER 9. THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS
CHAPTER 10. VARIOUS PARTIES CONVERGING ON THE SEA
The 1935 film adaptation
The 1959 film adaptation
The 1978 film adaptation
A comic theatrical adaptation by Patrick Barlow opened in London’s Tricycle Theatre, and after a successful run transferred to the Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly. Although drawing inspiration from Buchan’s novel, it is chiefly influenced by Hitchcock’s 1935 film adaptation.
Hannay (Penry-Jones) being chased by a 1916 biplane in the 2008 British television feature-length adaptation of the novel.
DEDICATION
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.
CHAPTER 1. 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.
