THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS
thous 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
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