The Thirty-Nine Steps | Page 5

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