【英文原著类】The Thirty-Nine Steps(三十九级台阶).pdf

THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS
THE THIRTY-NINE
STEPS
JOHN BUCHAN
1
THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS
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.
.
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THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS
CHAPTER ONE 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