JOHN BUCHAN Ultimate Collection: Spy Classics, Thrillers, Adventure Novels & Short Stories, Including Historical Works and Essays (Illustrated) E-Book
John Buchan
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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
In the "JOHN BUCHAN Ultimate Collection: Spy Classics, Thrillers, Adventure Novels & Short Stories, Including Historical Works and Essays (Illustrated)," readers are immersed in a compendium of Buchan's most compelling narratives that traverse the realms of espionage and adventure. This anthology is not merely a collection but a literary tapestry woven from the threads of early 20th-century concerns, such as national identity and imperialism. Buchan's eloquent prose and gripping storytelling style'—characterized by vivid descriptions and sharp characterizations'—draw the reader into the psyche of his protagonists as they navigate treacherous landscapes both literal and metaphorical, such as in the acclaimed novel, "The Thirty-Nine Steps." John Buchan, a Scottish author and statesman, was profoundly influenced by his own experiences, including his time as a war correspondent during World War I and his tenure in politics. His knowledge of geographies and cultures, combined with a deep understanding of human nature, fueled his narratives that often reflect the anxieties of his era, including the inter-war period's socio-political turbulence. Notably, Buchan's background in law and history imbues his writings with a rich historical context that enhances their depth and authenticity. This comprehensive collection is a must-read for enthusiasts of classic literature, espionage, and adventure. Whether you are familiar with Buchan's work or new to his profound narratives, this illustrated anthology offers insights into both the genre and the historical moment from which it arose. It is an essential addition to any literary library and an engaging journey through the mind of one of the early masters of the spy thriller. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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JOHN BUCHAN Ultimate Collection: Spy Classics, Thrillers, Adventure Novels & Short Stories, Including Historical Works and Essays (Illustrated)
Table of Contents
Introduction
This single-author omnibus brings together many of John Buchan’s signal achievements across fiction, verse, and nonfiction. Framed as an Ultimate Collection and presented in an illustrated edition, it balances celebrated spy adventures with early romances, frontier tales, uncanny short fiction, and substantial historical writings. The aim is both breadth and coherence: to show how one imagination shaped popular storytelling while also recording the pressures of its age. By assembling landmark narratives alongside lesser-known pieces and reflective essays, the volume invites new readers to encounter Buchan’s range in one place and offers seasoned admirers a compact survey of his recurring concerns, tonal shifts, and evolving craft.
Readers will find multiple forms represented. The novels range from spy thrillers and romances to frontier adventures, including The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle, Mr Standfast, Huntingtower, The Power-House, Sir Quixote of the Moors, John Burnet of Barns, A Lost Lady of Old Years, The Half-Hearted, A Lodge in the Wilderness, Prester John, Salute to Adventurers, and The Path of the King. Short fiction is gathered in Grey Weather, The Moon Endureth: Tales, The Far Islands, Fountainblue, The Keeper of Cademuir, No-Man’s-Land, Basilissa, and The Watcher by the Threshold. Poetry appears in To the Adventurous Spirit of the North, The Pilgrim Fathers, The Moon Endureth: Fancies, and Poems, Scots and English, alongside histories and essays from The Battle of Jutland to The African Colony.
Across this spectrum runs a unifying appetite for peril, endurance, and duty under strain. The thrillers pursue conspiracies and invasions through flight-and-pursuit frames, pitting resourceful civilians against shadowy designs in a Europe on the brink of total war. The romances and frontier adventures test character against harsh landscapes, from Scottish hills and Border country to distant settlements. The short stories often step across thresholds into superstition or metaphysical dread, while the poems distill stoic courage, loss, and the call of the North. The nonfiction studies confront the same realities head-on, treating conflict, administration, and recovery with sober attention to causes and consequences.
Buchan’s style favors economy, momentum, and clarity. Scenes are grounded in topography and weather, with crisp transitions and a steady accretion of tension. The thrillers build through set-pieces that marry landscape to action, while the prose never loses its cool, reportorial poise. In the uncanny tales, suggestion carries more weight than explicit shock, and folklore shades into psychological unease. The verse combines ballad energy with reflective cadence, alternating Scots inflections and tempered classicism. Throughout, tone remains courteous and restrained even at moments of crisis, a hallmark that allows adventure, wonder, and moral seriousness to coexist without bombast or sentimentality.
The historical writings and essays deepen the collection’s resonance. The Battle of Jutland and the two phases of The Battle of the Somme register the immediacy of industrial war, while Nelson’s History of the War traces campaigns and policy across volumes with an eye to strategy and national endurance. The African Colony: Studies in the Reconstruction considers governance and development in a changing imperial landscape. A Book of Escapes and Hurried Journeys records real episodes of evasion and travel, illuminating the lure of risk that animates the fiction. Scholar Gipsies gathers reflective pieces, drawing out lines of learning, tradition, and public life.
The poetry and short prose enrich one another. To the Adventurous Spirit of the North and The Moon Endureth: Fancies affirm a stoic, exploratory temperament that pulses beneath the novels. Poems, Scots and English reveals a flexible ear for cadence and idiom, while the shorter tales refine atmosphere and symbolic patterning. Recurrent figures of shorelines, thresholds, and uplands pass between forms, binding lyric feeling to narrative urgency. War and remembrance, youth and vocation, art and action: these pairings recur without reducing into slogans, giving the collection a tonal palette that moves from ballad simplicity to meditative poise.
Taken together, these works show why Buchan remains a pivotal figure in modern popular literature and cultural commentary. The thrillers helped set patterns for espionage and pursuit fiction; the romances and adventures extend an older tradition into new terrains; the essays and histories preserve the texture of events that shaped a century. The selection’s range allows readers to trace continuities of outlook and technique across altered subjects and forms. It invites fresh comparisons, contextual reading, and pure narrative pleasure, while the illustrations provide visual accompaniment to settings and episodes. This is both an introduction and a compact, enduring companion.
Historical Context
John Buchan (1875–1940), a Scottish novelist, historian, and statesman, built his fiction and non-fiction upon landscapes and loyalties formed in the Borders and at Oxford. The son of a Free Church minister, he spent youth in Fife and Peeblesshire near the Tweed, then studied at the University of Glasgow and Brasenose College, Oxford, winning the Newdigate Prize in 1898 for The Pilgrim Fathers. His early apprenticeship with William Blackwood and later work at Thomas Nelson and Sons in Edinburgh placed him within the late Victorian and Edwardian print boom, where serial publication and cheap reprints shaped Border romances, weird tales, patriotic verse, and the brisk cadence of his thrillers.
Empire was Buchan’s laboratory and archive. From 1901 to 1903 he served in Johannesburg and Pretoria as private secretary to High Commissioner Lord Milner, part of the Milner Kindergarten with Lionel Curtis and Philip Kerr reconstructing the Transvaal after the Second Boer War (1899–1902). Out of these years came The African Colony (1903) and the roman-a-clef A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906), but also imaginative geographies that underwrite Prester John and later colonial adventures. Kimberley, Rhodesia, and the Reef mining towns offered names, races, and frictions—Cecil Rhodes, Uitlanders, Afrikaners—through which he examined frontier charisma, racial panics, and the politics of federation that resonate across novels, tales, and essays.
The modern British spy thriller coalesced between 1903 and 1916, and Buchan stood at its center. The Secret Service Bureau (later MI6) formed in 1909 under Mansfield Cumming, the Entente faced Wilhelmine Germany, and new technologies—telegraph, railway, and motorcar—enabled the chase. The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) introduced Richard Hannay; Greenmantle (1916) turned on German-Ottoman propaganda and the charisma of jihad amid Constantinople and Erzerum; Mr Standfast (1919) probed home-front pacifism and infiltration. Earlier, The Power-House anticipated a borderless conspiracy. These plots refract invasion-literature anxieties after Erskine Childers and show how the amateur patriot could answer professional espionage in the accelerating tempo of total war.
As a wartime narrator Buchan joined policy, reportage, and pedagogy. In 1916 he published The Battle of the Somme: First Phase and Second Phase, and The Battle of Jutland, addressing July to November attrition on the Somme and the 31 May to 1 June North Sea clash led by Admirals Jellicoe and Beatty. His serial Nelson’s History of the War (from 1915) followed campaigns from Ypres and Gallipoli to Palestine, shaped by official information work when he became Director of Information in 1917 and visited the Western Front under Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig. Essays and tales such as The King of Ypres translate staff maps into civic memory.
Buchan’s historical romances return to Scotland’s seventeenth-century crises and the Borders’ moral topography. Sir Quixote of the Moors, John Burnet of Barns, A Lost Lady of Old Years, and Salute to Adventurers draw on Covenanting wars, the dragoons of John Graham of Claverhouse, and the rebellions around Bothwell Bridge in 1679, translating archival reading into swift narrative. The cadence and imagery owe as much to Walter Scott and the Border ballads as to Stevenson. This antiquarian energy also informs short stories set around Cademuir, Ettrick, and the Lammermuirs, while Scots and English poems revive dialect, psalmody, and ballad metres to link modern characters to ancestral loyalties.
The late nineteenth-century fascination with folklore and comparative religion—Andrew Lang’s essays and James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890)—suffuses Buchan’s supernatural and colonial tales. No-Man’s-Land and The Watcher by the Threshold adapt Border legends and Pictish survivals; The Grove of Ashtaroth and other African pieces translate ritual theory into imperial anxiety; Basilissa and classical-tinged lyrics such as Spirit of Art rework Hellenic archetypes learned at Oxford. Blackwood’s Magazine and allied periodicals provided the milieu for this weird mode, where rational Scots protagonists confront psychic residues. The Moon Endureth gathers such fancies and tales, balancing ethnographic curiosity with Calvinist reserve and the crisp craft of magazine storytelling.
After 1918 Britain’s widened franchise (1918 and 1928), labour unrest on Red Clydeside in Glasgow (1919), and the shock of the Russian Revolution (1917) reshape Buchan’s settings. Huntingtower (1922) stages Glaswegian solidarity—the Gorbals Die-Hards—against émigré intrigue, while A Book of Escapes and Hurried Journeys (1922) canonizes resourceful individuals from Charles II after Worcester in 1651 to Napoleonic fugitives, aligning adventure with civic resilience. The Path of the King (1921) threads power across epochs toward Abraham Lincoln. Poems like To the Adventurous Spirit of the North and the short story The Far Islands echo polar and northern quests, anticipating Buchan’s later Dominion outlook as Canada’s Governor General from 1935 to 1940.
Across genres Buchan worked inside an Edwardian publishing ecosystem that rewarded speed, clarity, and seriality. Thomas Nelson in Edinburgh, London weeklies, and the circulating libraries shaped his audience; his interlocutors ranged from imperial federalists such as Lionel Curtis to popular romancers after H. Rider Haggard. The Newdigate Prize of 1898 and Scholar Gipsies signal classical and Arnoldian tastes, even as thrillers reached a mass readership later magnified by cinema, notably Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps in 1935. Novels, stories, poems, and histories together reveal a writer mediating modernity’s technologies and terrors through older virtues—stoicism, courtesy, duty—mapping Britain’s turbulent world from the 1890s to the 1930s.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Thirty-Nine Steps
Mining engineer Richard Hannay is thrust into a deadly spy conspiracy and races across Scotland to stop a foreign plot against Britain.
Greenmantle
Hannay and his comrades traverse wartime Europe and the Near East to uncover and thwart a German-backed movement centered on a prophetic figure.
Mr Standfast
Working undercover among home-front radicals, Hannay hunts a master agent across Britain and into the closing campaigns of the Great War.
Huntingtower
A retired Glasgow grocer stumbles into a rescue of a stranded Russian noblewoman on the Scottish coast, rediscovering courage with the help of streetwise boys.
The Power-House
Edward Leithen uncovers a charismatic nihilist’s network that threatens the fragile fabric of modern society in a taut urban thriller.
Sir Quixote of the Moors
Set in Covenanting-era Scotland, a soldier’s chivalry collides with stern faith and forbidden love on the lonely moors.
John Burnet of Barns
A 17th-century laird is dispossessed and exiled by treachery, fighting across borders and years to reclaim his name and estate.
A Lost Lady of Old Years
Amid the ’45 Jacobite Rising, a restless young man is captivated by a mysterious woman and the romance of rebellion, only to face hard reckonings.
The Half-Hearted
An indecisive gentleman seeks redemption after a failure of nerve, facing a final test of courage on a remote imperial frontier.
A Lodge in the Wilderness
A novel of ideas in which statesmen and magnates debate the aims, methods, and limits of British imperial policy, especially in Africa.
Prester John
A young Scot in South Africa uncovers a secret movement led by a messianic leader and is swept into a struggle over diamonds, loyalty, and revolt.
Salute to Adventurers
A 17th-century swashbuckler following a young Scot through commerce, courtly intrigue, and clashes on the colonial frontier in the New World.
The Path of the King
A chain of linked tales traces a legacy of leadership across centuries, showing how quiet inheritances of character shape history.
Short Stories — Grey Weather (collection)
Early Scottish tales of romance, peril, and Border life, where weather and landscape mold human fortunes.
Short Stories — The Moon Endureth: Tales (collection)
A varied set of adventures and eerie pieces that blend Scottish settings with far-flung locales and the mystical.
Short Stories — Supernatural and Weird Tales (No-Man’s-Land; The Watcher by the Threshold; The Grove of Ashtaroth; Basilissa; Space; Fullcircle; The Far Islands)
Encounters with the uncanny—ancient survivals, haunted minds, and forbidden rites—test rational men at the margins of the Highlands and the empire.
Short Stories — Scottish Border and Coastal Tales (The Keeper of Cademuir; The Outgoing of the Tide; A Journey of Little Profit; At the Article of Death; Comedy in the Full Moon; The Company of the Marjolaine)
Compact dramas and adventures of honor, love, and hazard set among farms, glens, and sea-roads of Scotland.
Short Stories — War, Memory, and Satire Sketches (The King of Ypres; Fountainblue; ‘Divus’ Johnston; Politics and the Mayfly; At the Rising of the Waters)
Brief portraits and fables on wartime leadership and remembrance alongside academic and political satire about the fragility of fame.
Poetry — Prize and Patriotic Poems (To the Adventurous Spirit of the North; The Pilgrim Fathers: The Newdigate Prize Poem 1898)
Occasional and celebratory verses that honor exploration, endurance, and the founding struggles of communities.
Poetry — Ballads for Grey Weather (The Ballad for Grey Weather I; The Ballad for Grey Weather II)
Ballads of storm, superstition, and hard country life delivered with rhythmic vigor and folk color.
Poetry — The Moon Endureth: Fancies
Brief lyrical interludes of myth, mood, and memory that echo themes of endurance and change.
Poetry — Poems, Scots and English
A miscellany of lyrics in both tongues ranging from pastoral and love pieces to reflective meditations.
Poetry — Sequences and Meditations (Th’ Immortal Wanderer; Youth I & II; Spirit of Art I & II)
Linked poems reflecting on the questing self, youth and desire, and the timeless claims of art.
Poetry — Selected Lyrics: Love and Lament ("Oh, if my love were sailor-bred"; "A' are gane, the gude, the kindly")
Intimate songs of longing and elegy, shifting between clear English and tender Scots voices.
The Battle of Jutland
A concise narrative and appraisal of the 1916 North Sea clash, explaining aims, maneuvers, and outcomes of the war’s largest naval battle.
The Battle of the Somme, First Phase
An on-the-spot chronicle of the opening stages of the 1916 offensive, outlining objectives, terrain, and the early course of operations.
The Battle of the Somme, Second Phase
A continuation of the Somme account, tracing the later thrusts, tactical adaptations, and cumulative pressures of the campaign.
Nelson’s History of the War Volume I–V
A multi-volume narrative of the First World War that integrates military, naval, diplomatic, and home-front developments from outbreak through successive campaigns.
The African Colony: Studies in the Reconstruction
Analytical essays on South Africa after the Boer War, covering governance, race and labor, economics, and the prospects of imperial reconstruction.
Scholar Gipsies
Reflective essays that celebrate the ideal of the learned wanderer, linking scholarship, outdoor life, and character.
A Book of Escapes and Hurried Journeys
True tales of perilous flights and rescues across history, highlighting ingenuity, endurance, and the will to freedom.
JOHN BUCHAN Ultimate Collection: Spy Classics, Thrillers, Adventure Novels & Short Stories, Including Historical Works and Essays (Illustrated)
NOVELS
THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS
Richard Hannay’s First Adventure
Table of Contents
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.
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 theCafé 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 Leipzig. 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 mortuary. 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.
CHAPTER 2 THE MILKMAN SETS OUT ON HIS TRAVELS
I sat down in an armchair and felt very sick. That lasted for maybe five minutes, and was succeeded by a fit of the horrors. The poor staring white face on the floor was more than I could bear, and I managed to get a table-cloth and cover it. Then I staggered to a cupboard, found the brandy and swallowed several mouthfuls. I had seen men die violently before; indeed I had killed a few myself in the Matabele War; but this cold-blooded indoor business was different. Still I managed to pull myself together. I looked at my watch, and saw that it was half-past ten.
An idea seized me, and I went over the flat with a small-tooth comb. There was nobody there, nor any trace of anybody, but I shuttered and bolted all the windows and put the chain on the door. By this time my wits were coming back to me, and I could think again. It took me about an hour to figure the thing out, and I did not hurry, for, unless the murderer came back, I had till about six o’clock in the morning for my cogitations.
I was in the soup—that was pretty clear. Any shadow of a doubt I might have had about the truth of Scudder’s tale was now gone. The proof of it was lying under the table-cloth. The men who knew that he knew what he knew had found him, and had taken the best way to make certain of his silence. Yes; but he had been in my rooms four days, and his enemies must have reckoned that he had confided in me. So I would be the next to go. It might be that very night, or next day, or the day after, but my number was up all right. Then suddenly I thought of another probability. Supposing I went out now and called in the police, or went to bed and let Paddock find the body and call them in the morning. What kind of a story was I to tell about Scudder? I had lied to Paddock about him, and the whole thing looked desperately fishy. If I made a clean breast of it and told the police everything he had told me, they would simply laugh at me. The odds were a thousand to one that I would be charged with the murder, and the circumstantial evidence was strong enough to hang me. Few people knew me in England; I had no real pal who could come forward and swear to my character. Perhaps that was what those secret enemies were playing for. They were clever enough for anything, and an English prison was as good a way of getting rid of me till after June 15th as a knife in my chest.
Besides, if I told the whole story, and by any miracle was believed, I would be playing their game. Karolides would stay at home, which was what they wanted. Somehow or other the sight of Scudder’s dead face had made me a passionate believer in his scheme. He was gone, but he had taken me into his confidence, and I was pretty well bound to carry on his work.
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. Then I must somehow find a way to get in touch with the Government people and tell them what Scudder had told me. I wished to Heaven he had told me more, and that I had listened more carefully to the little he had told me. I knew nothing but the barest facts. There was a big risk that, even if I weathered the other dangers, I would not be believed in the end. I must take my chance of that, and hope that something might happen which would confirm my tale in the eyes of the Government.
My first job was to keep going for the next three weeks. It was now the 24th day of May, and that meant twenty days of hiding before I could venture to approach the powers that be. I reckoned that two sets of people would be looking for me—Scudder’s enemies to put me out of existence, and the police, who would want me for Scudder’s murder. 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 table-cloth and searched his pockets, for I had no longer any shrinking from the body. The face was wonderfully calm for a man who had been struck down in a moment. There was nothing in the breast-pocket, and only a few loose coins and a cigar-holder in the waistcoat. The trousers held a little penknife and some silver, and the side pocket of his jacket contained an old crocodile-skin cigar-case. There was no sign of the little black book in which I had seen him making notes. That had no doubt been taken by his murderer.
But as I looked up from my task I saw that some drawers had been pulled out in the writing-table. Scudder would never have left them in that state, for he was the tidiest of mortals. Someone must have been searching for something—perhaps for the pocket-book.
I went round the flat and found that everything had been ransacked—the inside of books, drawers, cupboards, boxes, even the pockets of the clothes in my wardrobe, and the sideboard in the dining-room. There was no trace of the book. Most likely the enemy had found it, but they had not found it on Scudder’s body.
Then I got out an atlas and looked at a big map of the British Isles. My notion was to get off to some wild district, where my veldcraft would be of some use to me, for I would be like a trapped rat in a city. I considered that Scotland would be best, for my people were Scotch and I could pass anywhere as an ordinary Scotsman. I had half an idea at first to be a German tourist, for my father had had German partners, and I had been brought up to speak the tongue pretty fluently, not to mention having put in three years prospecting for copper in German Damaraland. But I calculated that it would be less conspicuous to be a Scot, and less in a line with what the police might know of my past. I fixed on Galloway as the best place to go. It was the nearest wild part of Scotland, so far as I could figure it out, and from the look of the map was not over thick with population.
A search in Bradshaw informed me that a train left St Pancras at 7.10, which would land me at any Galloway station in the late afternoon. That was well enough, but a more important matter was how I was to make my way to St Pancras, for I was pretty certain that Scudder’s friends would be watching outside. This puzzled me for a bit; then I had an inspiration, on which I went to bed and slept for two troubled hours.
I got up at four and opened my bedroom shutters. The faint light of a fine summer morning was flooding the skies, and the sparrows had begun to chatter. I had a great revulsion of feeling, and felt a God-forgotten fool. My inclination was to let things slide, and trust to the British police taking a reasonable view of my case. But as I reviewed the situation I could find no arguments to bring against my decision of the previous night, so with a wry mouth I resolved to go on with my plan. I was not feeling in any particular funk; only disinclined to go looking for trouble, if you understand me.
I hunted out a well-used tweed suit, a pair of strong nailed boots, and a flannel shirt with a collar. Into my pockets I stuffed a spare shirt, a cloth cap, some handkerchiefs, and a tooth-brush. I had drawn a good sum in gold from the bank two days before, in case Scudder should want money, and I took fifty pounds of it in sovereigns in a belt which I had brought back from Rhodesia. That was about all I wanted. Then I had a bath, and cut my moustache, which was long and drooping, into a short stubbly fringe.
Now came the next step. Paddock used to arrive punctually at 7.30 and let himself in with a latch-key. But about twenty minutes to seven, as I knew from bitter experience, the milkman turned up with a great clatter of cans, and deposited my share outside my door. I had seen that milkman sometimes when I had gone out for an early ride. He was a young man about my own height, with an ill-nourished moustache, and he wore a white overall. On him I staked all my chances.
I went into the darkened smoking-room where the rays of morning light were beginning to creep through the shutters. There I breakfasted off a whisky-and-soda and some biscuits from the cupboard. By this time it was getting on for six o’clock. I put a pipe in my pocket and filled my pouch from the tobacco jar on the table by the fireplace.
As I poked into the tobacco my fingers touched something hard, and I drew out Scudder’s little black pocket-book…
That seemed to me a good omen. I lifted the cloth from the body and was amazed at the peace and dignity of the dead face. ‘Goodbye, old chap,’ I said; ‘I am going to do my best for you. Wish me well, wherever you are.’
Then I hung about in the hall waiting for the milkman. That was the worst part of the business, for I was fairly choking to get out of doors. Six-thirty passed, then six-forty, but still he did not come. The fool had chosen this day of all days to be late.
At one minute after the quarter to seven I heard the rattle of the cans outside. I opened the front door, and there was my man, singling out my cans from a bunch he carried and whistling through his teeth. He jumped a bit at the sight of me.
‘Come in here a moment,’ I said. ‘I want a word with you.’ And I led him into the dining-room.
‘I reckon you’re a bit of a sportsman,’ I said, ‘and I want you to do me a service. Lend me your cap and overall for ten minutes, and here’s a sovereign for you.’
His eyes opened at the sight of the gold, and he grinned broadly. ‘Wot’s the gyme?’he asked.
‘A bet,’ I said. ‘I haven’t time to explain, but to win it I’ve got to be a milkman for the next ten minutes. All you’ve got to do is to stay here till I come back. You’ll be a bit late, but nobody will complain, and you’ll have that quid for yourself.’
‘Right-o!’ he said cheerily. ‘I ain’t the man to spoil a bit of sport. ‘Ere’s the rig, guv’nor.’
I stuck on his flat blue hat and his white overall, picked up the cans, banged my door, and went whistling downstairs. The porter at the foot told me to shut my jaw, which sounded as if my make-up was adequate.
At first I thought there was nobody in the street. Then I caught sight of a policeman a hundred yards down, and a loafer shuffling past on the other side. Some impulse made me raise my eyes to the house opposite, and there at a first-floor window was a face. As the loafer passed he looked up, and I fancied a signal was exchanged.
I crossed the street, whistling gaily and imitating the jaunty swing of the milkman. Then I took the first side street, and went up a left-hand turning which led past a bit of vacant ground. There was no one in the little street, so I dropped the milk-cans inside the hoarding and sent the cap and overall after them. I had only just put on my cloth cap when a postman came round the corner. I gave him good morning and he answered me unsuspiciously. At the moment the clock of a neighbouring church struck the hour of seven.
There was not a second to spare. As soon as I got to Euston Road I took to my heels and ran. The clock at Euston Station showed five minutes past the hour. At St Pancras I had no time to take a ticket, let alone that I had not settled upon my destination. A porter told me the platform, and as I entered it I saw the train already in motion. Two station officials blocked the way, but I dodged them and clambered into the last carriage.
Three minutes later, as we were roaring through the northern tunnels, an irate guard interviewed me. He wrote out for me a ticket to Newton-Stewart, a name which had suddenly come back to my memory, and he conducted me from the first-class compartment where I had ensconced myself to a third-class smoker, occupied by a sailor and a stout woman with a child. He went off grumbling, and as I mopped my brow I observed to my companions in my broadest Scots that it was a sore job catching trains. I had already entered upon my part.
‘The impidence o’ that gaird!’ said the lady bitterly. ‘He needit a Scotch tongue to pit him in his place. He was complainin’ o’ this wean no haein’ a ticket and her no fower till August twalmonth, and he was objectin’ to this gentleman spittin’.’
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.
