Playing Soldier

'Hand me your key,' I said, 'and I'll take a look at the corpse. Excuse my caution, but I have 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 start suspicions. The people who are after me are very smart. 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 urgency. '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.'

Lizzie Van Zyl who died at a concentration camp

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 penetrating, 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 stay 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 found 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 noises at the smoking-room door. Paddock was a fellow I had done a good turn to out on the Selakwe, and I had got him as my servant as soon as I got to England. He was as talkative 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) sleeping 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 important, 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 plagued by communications from the India Office and the Prime Minister and his cure would be ruined. I have 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 said to 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. … (Easier English, chapter 1 from The Thirty-Nine Steps)

Vocabulary

Boer War: The Boer Wars (Afrikaans: Vryheidsoorloë, literally "freedom wars") were two wars fought during 1880–1881 and 1899–1902 by the British Empire against the Dutch settlers of two independent Boer republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic.

During the later stages of the Second Boer War, the British pursued the policy of rounding up and isolating the Boer civilian population in concentration camps, one of the earliest uses of this method by modern powers. The wives and children of Boer guerrillas were sent to these camps, which had poor hygiene and little food. Many of the children in these camps died, as did some of the adults.

So thus it ends this introduction to the novel The Thirty-Nine Steps. It is up to you to decide if you are going to read the novel or not. At least we could learn a little about the cruelty of human beings (Remember the “pogroms”? and check the picture of a girl from a hospital during the Boer War).