Money for Nothing quotes

Colonel Wyvern continued. Whether, if in a condition to give the matter careful thought, he would have selected Chas. Bywater as a confidant, one cannot say. But he was not in such a condition.

The stoppered bottle does not care whose is the hand that removes its cork—all it wants is the chance to fizz: and Colonel Wyvern resembled such a bottle.

Owing to the absence from home of his daughter, Patricia, he had had no one handy to act as audience for his grievances, and for two weeks he had been suffering torments. He told Chas. Bywater all.

To-day, hurrying on as usual, she had just reached the door and begun to sniff when it suddenly opened and hit her sharply on the nose. And, as she shot back with a yelp of agony, out came Colonel Wyvern carrying his bottle of Brophy.

There is an etiquette in these matters on which all right-minded dogs insist.

When people trod on Emily, she expected them immediately to fuss over her, and the same procedure seemed to her to be in order when they hit her on the nose with doors.

"Who the devil are you calling Sir?"

Emily had the Twentieth Century girl's freedom of speech and breadth of vocabulary.

"It's people like you that cause all this modern unrest and industrial strife. I know your sort well. Robbers and oppressors. And let me tell you another thing...."

He had excellent lungs, and he used them to the last ounce of their power.

A young man who sees the father of the girl he loves being swallowed alive by a Welsh terrier does not spare his voice.

The word came out of him like the note of the Last Trump, and Colonel Wyvern, leaping spasmodically, dropped his bottle of Brophy.

But since then her attitude had changed.

Her manner toward him nowadays alternated between that of a nurse toward a child who is not quite right in the head and that of the owner of a clumsy but rather likable dog.

Nevertheless, he loved her. And she was coming home....

If he could convince her that he was whole-heartedly pro-Colonel and regarded his uncle Lester as the logical successor to Doctor Crippen and the Brides-in-the-Bath murderer, things might straighten themselves.

Once the brain gets working, there is no knowing where it will stop.

The very next instant there had come to John Carroll a thought so new and breathtaking that he uttered an audible gasp.

However, all this was not the visitor's business.

If a man wishes to wax his moustache, it is a matter between himself and his God.

"My name's Carmody," he said. "Hugo Carmody."

"

From what I have seen of Mr. Carmody, I shouldn't say that parting was the thing he does best.

"

"

The whole thing," he said, "was an unfortunate misunderstanding, and, if you ask me, the verdict of posterity will be that the policeman was far more to blame than I was.

They're letting a bad type of men into the force nowadays. I've noticed it on several occasions. Besides, it won't happen again."

he would have made the round of his friends, confiding in them; and, when the supply of friends had given out, would have buttonholed the gardener. But John was different.

To hear his aspirations put into bald words like this made him feel as if he were being divested of most of his more important garments in a crowded thoroughfare.

"Well, that settles it," said Hugo briskly. "Such being the case, of course you must take me along. I will put in a good word for you. Pave the way."

"I try to be, John," said Hugo modestly. "I try to be.

I don't think we ought to leave it all to the Boy Scouts.

"

"Well, Johnnie. How nice to see you again. You're looking very brown and rural. Where's Hugo?"

It takes two to hoist a conversation to an emotional peak.

John choked, and became calmer.

John felt depressed. The picture she had conjured up was not a flattering one; and, as for this "Poor Old Johnnie!" stuff, it struck just the note he most wanted to avoid.

If one thing is certain in the relations of the sexes, it is that the Poor Old Johnnies of this world get nowhere.

But before he could put any of these feelings into words Pat had changed the subject.

"But how can you want me to marry you? We know each other too well. I've always looked on you as a sort of brother."

There are words in the language which are like a knell.

Keats considered "forlorn" one of them. John Carroll was of opinion that "brother" was a second.

The respite afforded to their patrons' ear drums by the sudden cessation of activity on the part of the Buddies proved of brief duration.

Men like these ex-collegians, who have really got the saxophone virus into their systems, seldom have long lucid intervals between the attacks.

Very soon they were at it again, and Mr. Molloy, rising, led Pat gallantly out onto the floor. His daughter, following them with a bright eye as she busied herself with a lip stick, laughed amusedly.

"

Never tell them why. It's no use.

Let us talk of pleasanter things. John, I have brought off the coup of a lifetime. Not that it was my idea. It was Ronnie Fish who suggested it. There's a fellow with a brain, John.

"I feared as much. There was something about her manner when I was paving the way that I didn't quite like. Cold. Not responsive. A bit glassy-eyed.

What an amazing thing it is," said Hugo, tapping a philosophical vein, "that in spite of all the ways there are of saying Yes, a girl on an occasion like this nearly always says No.

An American statistician has estimated that, omitting substitutes like 'All right,' 'You bet,' 'O.K.,' and nasal expressions like 'Uh-huh,' the English language provides nearly fifty different methods of replying in the affirmative, including Yeah, Yeth, Yum, Yo, Yaw, Chess, Chass, Chuss, Yip, Yep, Yop, Yup, …

"Anywhere, once you got it over to the other side.

New York's full of rich millionaires who'll buy anything and ask no questions, just so long as it's antiques.

"

"Too dangerous, baby. If all that stuff left the house same time as we did, we'd have the bulls after us in ten minutes. Besides, it's not in my line. I've got my line, and I like to stick to it.

Nobody ever got anywhere in the long run by going outside of his line.

"

"Ah! Well then, I'm not saying. All I'm against is risks.

If something's handed to you on a plate, naturally no one wouldn't ever want to let it get past them.

"

As day followed day her resentment grew, until now she had reached the stage when she was telling herself that this was simply what from a knowledge of his character she might have expected. John—she had to face it—was a jellyfish.

And if a man is a jellyfish, he will behave like a jellyfish, and it is at times of crisis that his jellyfishiness will be most noticeable.

It was conscience that had brought Pat to the High Street this morning. Her father had welcomed her with such a pathetic eagerness, and had been so plainly pleased to see her back that she was ashamed of herself for not feeling happier.

From the days of her childhood, John had always been her stand-by.

Men might come and men might go, but John went on for ever.

He had never been too old, like Mr.

John ran the Hall's dairy farm, and he was always coming to Mr. Carmody for money to buy exotic machinery which could not, the latter considered, be really necessary.

To Mr. Carmody a dairy farm was a straight issue between man and cow. You backed the cow up against a wall, secured its milk, and there you were.

John always seemed to want to make the thing so complicated and difficult, and only the fact that he also made it pay induced his uncle ever to accede to his monstrous demands.

Even Mr. Carmody, anxious though he was to find flaws in the other's reasoning, could see that this might well be so.

Try harrowing without harrows, and you are handicapped from the start.

But why harrow at all? That was what seemed to him superfluous and wasteful. Still, he supposed it was unavoidable. After all, John had been carefully trained at an agricultural college after leaving Oxford and presumably knew.

Understand,' he said, 'I'm not knocking Steel. But Oil's the stuff, and if you want to part with any of that Silver River of yours, Tom,' he said, 'pass it across this desk and write your own ticket.' That'll show you."

There is no anguish like the anguish of the man who is trying to extract cash from a fellow human being and suddenly finds the fellow human being trying to extract it from him.

Mr. Carmody laughed a bitter laugh.

He was startled, as any man might be who had this sort of idea sprung suddenly on him in his own garden, but he was not shocked. A youth and middle age spent on the London Stock Exchange had left Lester Carmody singularly broad-minded.

He had to a remarkable degree that specious charity which allows a man to look indulgently on any financial project, however fishy, provided he can see a bit in it for himself.

"It's money for nothing," urged Dolly, misinterpreting his silence. "The stuff isn't doing any good, just lying around the way it is now. And it isn't as if it didn't really belong to you.

She said she was Boadicea. And she wasn't. That's the point, old boy," said Mr. Fish earnestly. "She wasn't. We must get you out of this as quickly as possible, or before you know where you are you'll find yourself being murdered in your bed.

It's this living in the country that does it. Six consecutive months in the country is enough to sap the intellect of anyone.

Looking for swallows' nests, was he?"

He hesitated for a moment, then came bravely to a decision. After all, whatever the cost in petrol, oil, and depreciation of tires, it was for a good object. More working expenses. "I will send my car for him," he said.

If you wish to accumulate, you must inevitably speculate, felt Mr. Carmody.

The strange depression which had come upon Pat in the shop of Chas. Bywater did not yield, as these gray moods generally do, to the curative influence of time.

Truby and Gaunt for Fixing Gas Engine, or the claim of the Country Gentlemen's Association for eight pounds eight and fourpence for seeds.

Add drains, manure, and feed of pigs, and you find yourself immediately in an atmosphere where Romeo himself would have let his mind wander.

John, as he worked, was conscious of a distinct easing of the strain which had been on him since his return to the Hall.

John was finding in his work these days a good deal of consolation.

There is probably no better corrective of the pangs of hopeless love than real, steady application to the prosaic details of an estate.

The heart finds it difficult to ache its hardest while the mind is busy with such items as Sixty-one pounds, eight shillings and fivepence, due to Messrs.

John's first impulse, as always when his cousin paid him a visit, was to tell him to get out.

People who, when they saw Hugo, immediately told him to get out generally had the comfortable feeling that they were doing the right and sensible thing.

But to-night there was in his demeanour something so crushed and forlorn that John had not the heart to pursue this admirable policy.

Hugo uttered a short, bitter laugh, and, sinking into a chair, stared bleakly before him. His eyelids, like those of the Mona Lisa, were a little weary.

He looked like the hero of a Russian novel debating the advisability of murdering a few near relations before hanging himself in the barn.

"I was," he said. "Oh yes, I was down at the concert all right."

She was trying to make up her mind whether it was rats or the ghost of a long-lost bone when the skies suddenly started raining heavy bodies on her.

Emily was a dog who, as a rule, took things as they came, her guiding motto in life being the old Horatian nil admirari, but she could lose her poise.

She lost it now. A startled oath escaped her, and for a brief instant she was completely unequal to the situation. In this instant, Chimp, equally startled but far too busy to stop, had disengaged himself and was vanishing into the darkness.

It was not an ideal haven, but he was in no position to pick and choose. The interior of the tank from which the gardeners drew ammunition for their watering cans had, for one who from childhood had always disliked bathing, a singularly repellent air.

Those dark, oily looking depths suggested the presence of frogs, newts, and other slimy things that work their way down a man's back and behave clammily around his spine.

But it was most certainly a place of refuge.

he had a round, shiny face at which it was agony for a sick man to look, and Chimp was aware that when he spoke it would be in a rolling, barrack-square bellow which would go clean through him like a red-hot bullet through butter.

One has to be in rude health and at the top of one's form to bear up against the Sergeant-Major Flannerys of this world.

He broke off to sniff at a steaming jug which stood beside his bed, and the Sergeant-Major, gazing down at him with the offensive superiority of a robust man in the presence of an invalid, fingered his waxed moustache. The action intensified Chimp's dislike.

And gradually the magic of the night began to soften John's annoyance. The grounds of Rudge Hall, he should have remembered, were at their best at this hour and under these conditions.

Shy little scents were abroad which did not trust themselves out in the daytime, and you needed stillness like this really to hear the soft whispering of the trees.

London had been stiflingly hot, and this sweet coolness was like balm.

He came back on his heels as if he had received a blow.

It was the voice of Pat, sounding in the warm silence like moonlight made audible.

John broke into a little run. His heart was jumping, and all the happiness which had been glowing inside him had leaped up into a roaring flame. That mysterious premonition had meant something, after all.

They walked in silence down the yew-hedged path that led to the boathouse.

The tranquil beauty of the night wrapped them about as in a garment.

It was very dark here, and even the gleam of white that was Pat had become indistinct.

"Push on, then," said Pat. "Only do go slowly. I want to enjoy this. I don't want to whizz by all the old landmarks. How far to Ghost Corner?"

The moat proper was a narrow strip of water which encircled the Hall and had been placed there by the first Carmody in the days when householders believed in making things difficult for their visitors.

With the gradual spread of peace throughout the land its original purposes had been forgotten, and later members of the family had broadened it and added to it and tinkered with it and sprinkled it with little islands with the view of converting it into …

"And you went and did it? What a good influence I've been in your life, haven't I? Oh, dear!

It's funny to think of you and me as kids on this very bit of water and here we are again now, old and worn and quite different people, and the water's just the same as ever.

"

"All right. That's splendid. I'll expect you at one."

The Skirme rippled about the boat, chuckling to itself. It was a kindly, thoughtful river, given to chuckling to itself like an old gentleman who likes to see young people happy.

"We used to have some topping picnics in the old days," said Pat dreamily.

The nose of the boat bumped against the bank, and he sprang ashore. He stood there, listening. But there was nothing to hear.

Silence had fallen on an empty world.

A little sound came to him in the darkness. The Skirme was chuckling again.

"Didn't you hear, Mr. John, we had a burglary last night?"

The world being constituted as it is, with Fate waiting round almost every corner with its sandbag, it is not often that we are permitted to remain for long undisturbed in our moods of exaltation.

John came down to earth swiftly.

Probably, if he only knew, there were clues lying about all over the place, shouting to him to pick them up. But how to recognize them?

Sherlock Holmes can extract a clue from a wisp of straw or a flake of cigar ash. Doctor Watson has to have it taken out for him and dusted and exhibited clearly with a label attached.

John was forced reluctantly to the conclusion that he was essentially a Doctor Watson. He did not rise even to the modest level of a Scotland Yard Bungler.

Mopping his fine forehead, for it had been warm in the cupboard with the door shut, he stood for a while and mused, sketching out in his mind a plan of campaign.

The prudent man, before embarking on any enterprise which may at a moment's notice necessitate his skipping away from a given spot like a scalded cat, will always begin by preparing his lines of retreat.

Mr. Molloy's first act was to go to the stable yard in order to ascertain with his own eyes that the Dex-Mayo was still there.

Lester Carmody. And little by little, chilling his enthusiasm, there crept upon Soapy the realization that he had not a notion how the deuce this was to be done.

The whole question of administering knock-out drops to a fellow creature is a very delicate and complex one. So much depends on the co-operation of the party of the second part.

Before you can get anything in the nature of action, your victim must first be induced to start drinking something. At Healthward Ho, Soapy had gathered from the recent telephone conversation, no obstacles had arisen.

He continued to think, and to such effect that before long he had begun to see daylight.

There is no doubt that in time of stress the human mind has an odd tendency to take off its coat and roll up its sleeves and generally spread itself in a spasm of unwonted energy.

Probably if this thing had been put up to Mr. Molloy as an academic problem over the nuts and wine after dinner, he would have had to confess himself baffled.

The thing began to look good. It only remained to ascertain whether Sturgis was the right recipient for this kind of statement.

The world may be divided broadly into two classes—men who will believe you when you suddenly inform them at half-past eleven on a summer morning that you propose to start making rabbit hutches, and men who will not.

Sturgis looked as if he belonged to the former and far more likeable class. He looked, indeed, like a man who would believe anything.

A dull despair settled upon Soapy. It was plain to him now that he had unwittingly delivered himself over into the clutches of a bore who had probably been pining away for someone on whom to pour out his wealth of stored-up conversation.

Words had begun to flutter out of this butler like bats out of a barn.

He had become a sort of human Topical Talk on rabbits. He was speaking of rabbits he had known in his hot youth—their manners, customs, and the amount of lettuce they had consumed per diem.

It induced in Soapy a feverishness that touched the skirts of homicidal mania. The thought came into his mind that there are other uses to which a hatchet may be put besides the making of rabbit hutches.

England trembled on the verge of being short one butler.

Sturgis had now become involved in a long story of his early manhood, and even had Soapy been less distrait he might have found it difficult to enjoy it to the full.

No bag, box, portmanteau, or suitcase of any kind or description whatsoever.

Hope does not readily desert the human breast.

After the first numbing impact of any shock, we most of us have a tendency to try to persuade ourselves that things may not be so bad as they seem.

He felt that he had had all he wanted of the butler's conversation.

Even of the most stimulating society enough is enough, and to Soapy about half a minute of Sturgis seemed a good medium dose for an adult.

He would have fled, but there was nowhere to go. He remained where he was, making his expression as forbidding as possible. A motion-picture director could have read that expression like a book. Soapy was registering deep disinclination to talk about rabbits.

He climbed onto the machine, and after one majestic wobble passed through the gates into the park, pedalling bravely. As he disappeared from view, there floated back to Bolt, standing outside the stable yard, a single, agonized "Ouch!"

Chauffeurs do not laugh, but they occasionally smile.

Bolt smiled. He had been bitten by that bicycle himself.

and he was able to turn his mind to other matters. Having found and swallowed a lump of sugar which had got itself overlooked under a fold of the napkin, he returned to the bed and lay down.

A man who wishes to think can generally do so better in a horizontal position.

So John lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling, pondering.

"Chimpie," said Mr. Molloy, "

I wouldn't trust you as far as a snail could make in three jumps. I wouldn't believe you not even if I knew you were speaking the truth.

"

In spite of the fact that he had not succeeded in getting to sleep till well on in the small hours, Mr. Carmody woke early.

There is no alarm clock so effective as a disturbed mind.

And Mr. Carmody's mind was notably disturbed. On the previous night he had received shock after shock, each more staggering than the last. First, Bolt, the chauffeur, had revealed the fact that he had given the fateful ticket to John.

He supposed in a vague sort of way that he ought to be feeling grateful to the young man for not heaping him with reproaches and recrimination, but the agony of what he was about to do prevented any such emotion.

All he could feel was that dull, aching sensation which comes to most of us when we sit down to write cheques for the benefit of others.

It was as if some malignant fate had brooded over him, he felt, ever since this business had started. From the very first, life had been one long series of disbursements.

John remained for a moment without speaking.

He searched his mind for care-free, debonair remarks, and found it singularly short of them.

"Hugo's a splendid chap," he contrived to say at length.

John found that he had exhausted the subject of Hugo's qualities.

He relapsed into a gray silence and half thought of treading on an offensively cheerful worm which had just appeared beside his shoe and seemed to be asking for it.

Pat stifled a little yawn.

Pat's mouth had opened, and she was staring at him wide-eyed. And if she had ever looked more utterly beautiful and marvellous, John could not remember the occasion.

Something seemed to clutch at his throat, and the garden, seen indistinctly through a mist, danced a few steps in a tentative sort of way, as if it were trying out something new that had just come over from America.

And then, as the mist cleared, John found that he and Pat were not, as he had supposed, alone.

"But of course I'll do it," said John. It astonished him that she should have contemplated any other course.

Naturally, when the great strong man becomes engaged to the timid, fluttering little girl he takes over all her worries and handles in his efficient, masculine way any problem that may be vexing her.

"I don't feel I can look him in the face."

Hugo was not in the Carmody Arms. He was standing on the bridge over the Skirme, his elbows resting on the parapet, his eyes fixed on the flowing water. For a suitor recently accepted by—presumably—the girl of his heart, he looked oddly downcast.

His eye, when he turned at the sound of his name, was the eye of a fish that has had trouble.

"Hullo, John, old man," he said in a toneless voice.

"Well, you know how it is, John, old man.

There's something about a wedding, even the wedding of a gargoyle like Bessemer, that seems to breed sentimentality.

It may have been the claret cup. I warned Ronnie from the first against the claret cup. A noxious drink.

"Well, a sort of aching, poignant feeling.

All the sorrows of the world seemed to be laid out in front of me in a solid mass.

"