The Thirty-Nine Steps (6 page)

The second thing was that this war was going to come as a mighty surprise to Britain.
Karolides’ death would set the Balkans by the ears, and then Vienna would chip in
with an ultimatum. Russia wouldn’t like that, and there would be high words. 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.

But all this depended upon the third thing, which was due to happen on June 15th.
I would never have grasped this if I hadn’t once happened to meet a French staff officer,
coming back from West Africa, who had told me a lot of things. One was that, in spite
of all the nonsense talked in Parliament, there was a real working alliance between
France and Britain, and that the two General Staffs met every now and then, and made
plans for joint action in case of war. Well, in June a very great swell was coming
over from Paris, and he was going to get nothing less than a statement of the disposition
of the British Home Fleet on mobilization. At least I gathered it was something like
that; anyhow, it was something uncommonly important.

But on the 15th day of June there were to be others in London—others, at whom I could
only guess. Scudder was content to call them collectively the ‘Black Stone’. They
represented not our Allies, but our deadly foes; and the information, destined for
France, was to be diverted to their pockets. And it was to be used, remember—used
a week or two later, with great guns and swift torpedoes, suddenly in the darkness
of a summer night.

This was the story I had been deciphering in a back room of a country inn, overlooking
a cabbage garden. This was the story that hummed in my brain as I swung in the big
touring-car from glen to glen.

My first impulse had been to write a letter to the Prime Minister, but a little reflection
convinced me that that would be useless. Who would believe my tale? I must show a
sign, some token in proof, and Heaven knew what that could be. Above all, I must keep
going myself, ready to act when things got riper, and that was going to be no light
job with the police of the British Isles in full cry after me and the watchers of
the Black Stone running silently and swiftly on my trail.

I had no very clear purpose in my journey, but I steered east by the sun, for I remembered
from the map that if I went north I would come into a region of coalpits and industrial
towns. Presently I was down from the moorlands and traversing the broad haugh of a
river. For miles I ran alongside a park wall, and in a break of the trees I saw a
great castle. I swung through little old thatched villages, and over peaceful lowland
streams, and past gardens blazing with hawthorn and yellow laburnum. The land was
so deep in peace that I could scarcely believe that somewhere behind me were those
who sought my life; ay, and that in a month’s time, unless I had the almightiest of
luck, these round country faces would be pinched and staring, and men would be lying
dead in English fields.

About midday I entered a long straggling village, and had a mind to stop and eat.
Half-way down was the Post Office, and on the steps of it stood the postmistress and
a policeman hard at work conning a telegram. When they saw me they wakened up, and
the policeman advanced with raised hand, and cried on me to stop.

I nearly was fool enough to obey. Then it flashed upon me that the wire had to do
with me; that my friends at the inn had come to an understanding, and were united
in desiring to see more of me, and that it had been easy enough for them to wire the
description of me and the car to thirty villages through which I might pass. I released
the brakes just in time. As it was, the policeman made a claw at the hood, and only
dropped off when he got my left in his eye.

I saw that main roads were no place for me, and turned into the byways. It wasn’t
an easy job without a map, for there was the risk of getting on to a farm road and
ending in a duck-pond or a stable-yard, and I couldn’t afford that kind of delay.
I began to see what an ass I had been to steal the car. The big green brute would
be the safest kind of clue to me over the breadth of Scotland. If I left it and took
to my feet, it would be discovered in an hour or two and I would get no start in the
race.

The immediate thing to do was to get to the loneliest roads. These I soon found when
I struck up a tributary of the big river, and got into a glen with steep hills all
about me, and a corkscrew road at the end which climbed over a pass. Here I met nobody,
but it was taking me too far north, so I slewed east along a bad track and finally
struck a big double-line railway. Away below me I saw another broadish valley, and
it occurred to me that if I crossed it I might find some remote inn to pass the night.
The evening was now drawing in, and I was furiously hungry, for I had eaten nothing
since breakfast except a couple of buns I had bought from a baker’s cart. Just then
I heard a noise in the sky, and lo and behold there was that infernal aeroplane, flying
low, about a dozen miles to the south and rapidly coming towards me.

I had the sense to remember that on a bare moor I was at the aeroplane’s mercy, and
that my only chance was to get to the leafy cover of the valley. Down the hill I went
like blue lightning, screwing my head round, whenever I dared, to watch that damned
flying machine. Soon I was on a road between hedges, and dipping to the deep-cut glen
of a stream. Then came a bit of thick wood where I slackened speed.

Suddenly on my left I heard the hoot of another car, and realized to my horror that
I was almost up on a couple of gate-posts through which a private road debouched on
the highway. My horn gave an agonized roar, but it was too late. I clapped on my brakes,
but my impetus was too great, and there before me a car was sliding athwart my course.
In a second there would have been the deuce of a wreck. I did the only thing possible,
and ran slap into the hedge on the right, trusting to find something soft beyond.

But there I was mistaken. My car slithered through the hedge like butter, and then
gave a sickening plunge forward. I saw what was coming, leapt on the seat and would
have jumped out. But a branch of hawthorn got me in the chest, lifted me up and held
me, while a ton or two of expensive metal slipped below me, bucked and pitched, and
then dropped with an almighty smash fifty feet to the bed of the stream.

Slowly that thorn let me go. I subsided first on the hedge, and then very gently on
a bower of nettles. As I scrambled to my feet a hand took me by the arm, and a sympathetic
and badly scared voice asked me if I were hurt.

I found myself looking at a tall young man in goggles and a leather ulster, who kept
on blessing his soul and whinnying apologies. For myself, once I got my wind back,
I was rather glad than otherwise. This was one way of getting rid of the car.

‘My blame, Sir,’ I answered him. ‘It’s lucky that I did not add homicide to my follies.
That’s the end of my Scotch motor tour, but it might have been the end of my life.’

He plucked out a watch and studied it. ‘You’re the right sort of fellow,’ he said.
‘I can spare a quarter of an hour, and my house is two minutes off. I’ll see you clothed
and fed and snug in bed. Where’s your kit, by the way? Is it in the burn along with
the car?’

‘It’s in my pocket,’ I said, brandishing a toothbrush. ‘I’m a Colonial and travel
light.’

‘A Colonial,’ he cried. ‘By Gad, you’re the very man I’ve been praying for. Are you
by any blessed chance a Free Trader?’

‘I am,’ said I, without the foggiest notion of what he meant.

He patted my shoulder and hurried me into his car. Three minutes later we drew up
before a comfortable-looking shooting box set among pine-trees, and he ushered me
indoors. He took me first to a bedroom and flung half a dozen of his suits before
me, for my own had been pretty well reduced to rags. I selected a loose blue serge,
which differed most conspicuously from my former garments, and borrowed a linen collar.
Then he haled me to the dining-room, where the remnants of a meal stood on the table,
and announced that I had just five minutes to feed. ‘You can take a snack in your
pocket, and we’ll have supper when we get back. I’ve got to be at the Masonic Hall
at eight o’clock, or my agent will comb my hair.’

I had a cup of coffee and some cold ham, while he yarned away on the hearth-rug.

‘You find me in the deuce of a mess, Mr—by-the-by, you haven’t told me your name.
Twisdon? Any relation of old Tommy Twisdon of the Sixtieth? No? Well, you see I’m
Liberal Candidate for this part of the world, and I had a meeting on tonight at Brattleburn—that’s
my chief town, and an infernal Tory stronghold. I had got the Colonial ex-Premier
fellow, Crumpleton, coming to speak for me tonight, and had the thing tremendously
billed and the whole place ground-baited. This afternoon I had a wire from the ruffian
saying he had got influenza at Blackpool, and here am I left to do the whole thing
myself. I had meant to speak for ten minutes and must now go on for forty, and, though
I’ve been racking my brains for three hours to think of something, I simply cannot
last the course. Now you’ve got to be a good chap and help me. You’re a Free Trader
and can tell our people what a wash-out Protection is in the Colonies. All you fellows
have the gift of the gab—I wish to Heaven I had it. I’ll be for evermore in your debt.’

I had very few notions about Free Trade one way or the other, but I saw no other chance
to get what I wanted. My young gentleman was far too absorbed in his own difficulties
to think how odd it was to ask a stranger who had just missed death by an ace and
had lost a 1,000-guinea car to address a meeting for him on the spur of the moment.
But my necessities did not allow me to contemplate oddnesses or to pick and choose
my supports.

‘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 was an orphan, and his uncle
had brought him up—I’ve forgotten the uncle’s name, but he was in the Cabinet, and
you can read his speeches in the papers. He had gone round the world after leaving
Cambridge, and then, being short of a job, his uncle had advised politics. I gathered
that he had no preference in parties. ‘Good chaps in both,’ he said cheerfully, ‘and
plenty of blighters, too. I’m Liberal, because my family have always been Whigs.’
But if he was lukewarm politically he had strong views on other things. He found out
I knew a bit about horses, and jawed away about the Derby entries; and he was full
of plans for improving his shooting. Altogether, a very clean, decent, callow young
man.

As we passed through a little town two policemen signalled us to stop, and flashed
their lanterns on us.

‘Beg pardon, Sir Harry,’ said one. ‘We’ve got instructions to look out for a car,
and the description’s no unlike yours.’

‘Right-o,’ said my host, while I thanked Providence for the devious ways I had been
brought to safety. After that he spoke no more, for his mind began to labour heavily
with his coming speech. His lips kept muttering, his eye wandered, and I began to
prepare myself for a second catastrophe. I tried to think of something to say myself,
but my mind was dry as a stone. The next thing I knew we had drawn up outside a door
in a street, and were being welcomed by some noisy gentlemen with rosettes. The hall
had about five hundred in it, women mostly, a lot of bald heads, and a dozen or two
young men. The chairman, a weaselly minister with a reddish nose, lamented Crumpleton’s
absence, soliloquized on his influenza, and gave me a certificate as a ‘trusted leader
of Australian thought’. There were two policemen at the door, and I hoped they took
note of that testimonial. Then Sir Harry started.

I never heard anything like it. He didn’t begin to know how to talk. He had about
a bushel of notes from which he read, and when he let go of them he fell into one
prolonged stutter. Every now and then he remembered a phrase he had learned by heart,
straightened his back, and gave it off like Henry Irving, and the next moment he was
bent double and crooning over his papers. It was the most appalling rot, too. He talked
about the ‘German menace’, and said it was all a Tory invention to cheat the poor
of their rights and keep back the great flood of social reform, but that ‘organized
labour’ realized this and laughed the Tories to scorn. He was all for reducing our
Navy as a proof of our good faith, and then sending Germany an ultimatum telling her
to do the same or we would knock her into a cocked hat. 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 per cent better than Sir Harry.