The Black Mask quotes

All this, and more, my least distant relative could tell a poor devil to his face; could ring for his man, and give him his brutal instructions on the spot; and then relent to the tune of this telegram!

I have no phrase for my amazement.

I literally could not believe my eyes. Yet their evidence was more and more conclusive: a very epistle could not have been more characteristic of its sender. Meanly elliptical, ludicrously precise, saving halfpence at the expense of sense, yet paying like a man for “Mr.”

“But surely, old fellow, you’re not awfully fit, are you?”

“Fit? My dear Bunny, I’m dead⁠—I’m at the bottom of the sea⁠—and don’t you forget it for a minute.”

“But are you all right, or are you not?”

I tell you I am dead; and my one terror is of coming to life again by accident. Can’t you see? I simply dare not show my nose out of doors—by day.

You have no idea of the number of perfectly innocent things a dead man daren’t do.

I can’t even smoke Sullivans, because no one man was ever so partial to them as I was in my lifetime, and you never know when you may start a clue.”

Besides, that brings you up against the Fence once more, and I’m done with the beggars for good and all. You talk about your editors and publishers, you literary swine.

Barabbas was neither a robber nor a publisher, but a six-barred, barbed-wired, spike-topped Fence.

What we really want is an Incorporated Society of Thieves, with some public-spirited old forger to run it for us on business lines.”

Raffles was soon clinking his glass against mine.

“The Queen,” said he. “God bless her!”

So I had come to that! But one reflection makes many. I had not recognized myself; who on earth would recognize me? London called me—and here I am.

Italy had broken my heart⁠—and there it stays.

”

“

I have an eye at the back of each ear, Bunny.

”

It was a question of principle with him, and one that I like to remember.

“Never give a woman away, Bunny,”

he used to say; and he said it again tonight, but with a heavy cloud upon him, as though his chivalry was sorely tried.

and now what do you think? I owe it to you to tell you, Bunny, though it goes against the grain. She would take me ‘to the dear, warm underworld, where the sun really shines,’ and she would ‘nurse me back to life and love!’

The artistic temperament is a fearsome thing, Bunny, in a woman with the devil’s own will!

”

The doctor’s tone was so conciliatory that I remembered in an instant what a humbug the man was, and became suddenly possessed with the vague conviction that he was imposing upon me now.

“Are you sure it was typhoid at all?” I cried fiercely to his face. “Are you sure it wasn’t suicide⁠—or murder?”

I confess that I can see little point in this speech as I write it down, but it was what I said in a burst of grief and of wild suspicion; nor was it without effect upon Dr.

“Shall I tell you something else?” said he.

“He’s not even at the bottom of that grave! He’s no more dead than you or I, and a sham burial is his latest piece of villainy!”

I doubt whether I could have spoken if I had tried. I did not try. I had no use for speech. I did not even ask him if he was sure, I was so sure myself.

… alarms, his unscrupulous venality, the simulated illness, my own dismissal, each fitted in its obvious place, and not even the last had power as yet to mar my joy in the one central fact to which all the rest were as tapers to the sun.

“He is alive!” I cried. “Nothing else matters⁠—he is alive!”

At last I did ask whether they had got him too; but thankful as I was for the greater knowledge, I confess that I did not much care what answer I received.

I glanced at Raffles, and in the white light of his torch he was doing it all with his ankles, exactly as though he had been riding in a Gymkhana.

“It’s the most sporting chase I was ever in,” said he.

“My dear Bunny, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world!”

“It’s the most sporting chase I was ever in,” said he.

“My dear Bunny, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world!”

Nor would he forge ahead of me, though he could have done so in a moment, he who from his boyhood had done everything of the kind so much better than anybody else.

there is none other like it for me to tell; it is my one ewe-lamb in all these annals. But Raffles had a ruder name for it.

“It was the Apotheosis of the Bunny,” said he, but in a tone I never shall forget.

“I hardly knew what I was doing or saying,” I said. “The whole thing was a fluke.”

“The worst of this war,” said Raffles, “is the way it puts a fellow off his work.”

It was, of course, the winter before last, and we had done nothing dreadful since the early autumn. Undoubtedly the war was the cause. Not that we were among the earlier victims of the fever.

“I know what you are thinking, and you’ve got to stop,” said he.

“It’s on the knees of the gods, Bunny, whether we do or we don’t, and thinking won’t make us see over their shoulders.”

Now I made as bad a soldier (except at heart) as Raffles made a good one, and I could not say a harder thing of myself. My ignorance of matters military was up to that time unfathomable, and is still profound.

The average Tommy may be my intellectual inferior, but he must know some part of his work better than I ever knew any of mine.

I never even learnt to be killed.

I do not mean that I ever ran away. The South African Field Force might have been strengthened if I had.