The Big Bow Mystery quotes

There are mornings when King Fog masses his molecules of carbon in serried squadrons in the city, while he scatters them tenuously in the suburbs; so that your morning train may bear you from twilight to darkness. But today the enemy’s maneuvering was more monotonous.

From Bow even unto Hammersmith there draggled a dull, wretched vapor, like the wraith of an impecunious suicide come into a fortune immediately after the fatal deed.

The barometers and thermometers had sympathetically shared its depression, and their spirits (when they had any) were low. The cold cut like a many-bladed knife.

Drabdump’s next gas bill when they predicted the weather and made “Snow” the favorite, and said that “Fog” would be nowhere. Fog was everywhere, yet Mrs. Drabdump took no credit to herself for her prescience.

Mrs. Drabdump indeed took no credit for anything, paying her way along doggedly, and struggling through life like a wearied swimmer trying to touch the horizon.

That things always went as badly as she had foreseen did not exhilarate her in the least.

Drabdump had always been a widow. Nature had given her that tall, spare form, and that pale, thin-lipped, elongated, hard-eyed visage, and that painfully precise hair, which are always associated with widowhood in low life.

It is only in higher circles that women can lose their husbands and yet remain bewitching.

The late Mr. Drabdump had scratched the base of his thumb with a rusty nail, and Mrs.

Drabdump’s foreboding that he would die of lockjaw had not prevented her wrestling day and night with the shadow of Death, as she had wrestled with it vainly twice before, when Katie died of diphtheria and little Johnny of scarlet fever.

Perhaps it is from overwork among the poor that Death has been reduced to a shadow.

Mrs. Drabdump was lighting the kitchen fire. She did it very scientifically, as knowing the contrariety of coal and the anxiety of flaming sticks to end in smoke unless rigidly kept up to the mark. Science was a success as usual; and Mrs.

She could not bear to see him eat things unbefitting his station. Arthur Constant opened his mouth and ate what his landlady gave him, not first deliberately shutting his eyes according to the formula, the rather pluming himself on keeping them very wide open.

But it is difficult for saints to see through their own halos; and in practice an aureola about the head is often indistinguishable from a mist.

The tea to be scalded in Mr. Constant’s pot, when that cantankerous kettle should boil, was not the coarse mixture of black and green sacred to herself and Mr. Mortlake, of whom the thoughts of breakfast now reminded her. Poor Mr.

Most of them had committed other offenses for which the police had not arrested them. One bewildered-looking gentleman gave himself up (as if he were a riddle), but the police would have none of him, and restored him forthwith to his friends and keepers.

The number of candidates for each new opening in Newgate is astonishing.

The full significance of this tragedy of a noble young life cut short had hardly time to filter into the public mind, when a fresh sensation absorbed it.

His parents were dead, perhaps luckily for them; his relatives had seen little of him, and had scarce heard as much about him as the outside world.

No man is a prophet in his own country, and, even if he migrates, it is advisable for him to leave his family at home.

His friends were a motley crew; friends of the same friend are not necessarily friends of one another. But their diversity only made the congruity of the tale they had to tell more striking.

There is nothing for it, therefore, gentlemen, but to return a verdict tantamount to an acknowledgment of our incompetence to come to any adequately grounded conviction whatever as to the means or the manner by which the deceased met his death.

It is the most inexplicable mystery in all my experience.

” (Sensation.)

The narrow oval of his face sloped to a pointed, untrimmed beard. His linen was reproachable, his dingy boots were down at heel, and his cocked hat was drab with dust.

Such are the effects of a love for the Beautiful.

Peter Crowl was impressed with Denzil’s condemnation of flippancy, and he hastened to turn off the joke.

In lower circles it is customary to call your wife your mother; in somewhat superior circles it is the fashion to speak of her as “the wife” as you speak of “the Stock Exchange,” or “the Thames,” without claiming any peculiar property.

Instinctively men are ashamed of being moral and domesticated.

Denzil puffed his cigarette, unembarrassed. Peter bent attentively over his work, making nervous stabs with his awl. There was a long silence. An organ-grinder played a waltz outside, unregarded; and, failing to annoy anybody, moved on. Denzil lit another cigarette.

What the operatic villain did with these plots, and who bought them, Cantercot never knew nor cared to know.

Brains are cheap today, and Denzil was glad enough to find a customer.

“Surely you’ve known me long enough to trust me,” he cried.

He adored his wife, who thought poorly of his intellect, but highly of his heart. In domestic difficulties Wimp was helpless. He could not even tell whether the servant’s “character” was forged or genuine. Probably he could not level himself to such petty problems.

He was like the senior wrangler who has forgotten how to do quadratics, and has to solve equations of the second degree by the calculus.

“How much money do you want?” he asked.

“The world is itself a trifle,” said the pensive poet. “

The Beautiful alone is deserving of our regard.

”

When Wimp invited Grodman to eat his Christmas plum-pudding at King’s Cross Grodman was only a little surprised. The two men were always overwhelmingly cordial when they met, in order to disguise their mutual detestation.

When people really like each other, they make no concealment of their mutual contempt.

In his letter to Grodman, Wimp said that he thought it would be nicer for him to keep Christmas in company than in solitary state. There seems to be a general prejudice in favor of Christmas numbers, and Grodman yielded to it.

Was it a prophecy? Wimp accepted it as such; as an oracle from the gods bidding him mistrust Grodman.

Out of the mouths of little children issueth wisdom; sometimes even when they are not saying their lessons.

“When I was in my cradle, a century ago,” said Wimp’s grandmother-in-law, “men were hanged for stealing horses.”

Mrs. Drabdump liked to see the fine folks keep their place, and not contaminate their skirts by contact with the lower castes. “It’s set wet, it’ll rain right into the new year,” she announced. “And they say a bad beginnin’ makes a worse endin’.”

Mrs. Drabdump was one of those persons who give you the idea that they just missed being born barometers.

“But what are you doing in this miserable spot, so far from home?” queried the detective.

“Press,” he said, majestically. All the glories and grandeurs of the Fourth Estate were concentrated in that haughty monosyllable.

Heaven itself is full of journalists who have overawed St. Peter.

But the doorkeeper was a veritable dragon.

The great reception arranged outside was a fiasco; the evening banquet was indefinitely postponed.

Wimp had won; Grodman felt like a whipped cur.

Can a mother see her babe’s ugliness, or a lover his mistress’ shortcomings, though they stare everybody else in the face? Can we see ourselves as others see us? No; habit, prepossession changes all. The mind is a large factor of every so-called external fact.

The eye sees, sometimes, what it wishes to see, more often what it expects to see.

You follow me, sir?”

On the other hand, when you see a standing ring of fire produced by whirling a burning stick, you do not believe in its continuous existence. It is the same when witnessing a legerdemain performance.

Seeing is not always believing, despite the proverb; but believing is often seeing.

It is not to the point that in that little matter of the door Wimp was as hopelessly and incurably wrong as he has been in everything all along.

And he did. That Mrs. Drabdump, failing to rouse him, would cry ‘Murder!’ I took for certain. She is built that way. As even Sir Charles Brown-Harland remarked, she habitually takes her prepossessions for facts, her inferences for observations.

She forecasts the future in gray.

Most women of Mrs. Drabdump’s class would have behaved as she did. She happened to be a peculiarly favorable specimen for working on by ‘suggestion,’ but I would have undertaken to produce the same effect on almost any woman under similar conditions.

The only uncertain link in the chain was: Would Mrs. Drabdump rush across to get me to break open the door?

Women always rush for a man.

I was well-nigh the nearest, and certainly the most authoritative man in the street, and I took it for granted she would.”