Page 133 - the-thirty-nine-steps

tery and darkness had hung about the men who hunted me
over the Scotch moor in aeroplane and motor-car, and no-
tably about that infernal antiquarian. It was easy enough
to connect those folk with the knife that pinned Scudder
to the floor, and with fell designs on the world’s peace. But
here were two guileless citizens taking their innocuous ex-
ercise, and soon about to go indoors to a humdrum dinner,
where they would talk of market prices and the last cricket
scores and the gossip of their native Surbiton. I had been
making a net to catch vultures and falcons, and lo and be-
hold! two plump thrushes had blundered into it.
Presently a third figure arrived, a young man on a bi-
cycle, with a bag of golf-clubs slung on his back. He strolled
round to the tennis lawn and was welcomed riotously by the
players. Evidently they were chaffing him, and their chaff
sounded horribly English. Then the plump man, mopping
his brow with a silk handkerchief, announced that he must
have a tub. I heard his very words ‘I’ve got into a proper
lather,’ he said. ‘This will bring down my weight and my
handicap, Bob. I’ll take you on tomorrow and give you a
stroke a hole.’ You couldn’t find anything much more Eng-
lish than that.
They all went into the house, and left me feeling a pre-
cious idiot. I had been barking up the wrong tree this time.
These men might be acting; but if they were, where was
their audience? They didn’t know I was sitting thirty yards
off in a rhododendron. It was simply impossible to believe
that these three hearty fellows were anything but what they
seemed three ordinary, game-playing, suburban English-

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