The Circular Staircase quotes

This is the story of how a middle-aged spinster lost her mind, deserted her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house for the summer out of town, and found herself involved in one of those mysterious crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agencies happy and prosperous.

For twenty years I had been perfectly comfortable; for twenty years I had had the window-boxes filled in the spring, the carpets lifted, the awnings put up and the furniture covered with brown linen;

As it is, I show the wear and tear of my harrowing experiences. I have turned very gray—Liddy reminded me of it, only yesterday, by saying that a little bluing in the rinse-water would make my hair silvery, instead of a yellowish white.

I hate to be reminded of unpleasant things and I snapped her off.

“No,” I said sharply, “I’m not going to use bluing at my time of life, or starch, either.”

The first night passed quietly enough. I have always been grateful for that one night’s peace; it shows what the country might be, under favorable circumstances.

Never after that night did I put my head on my pillow with any assurance how long it would be there; or on my shoulders, for that matter.

On the following morning Liddy and Mrs. Ralston, my own housekeeper, had a difference of opinion, and Mrs. Ralston left on the eleven train.

“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” I snapped.

Liddy and I often desire to part company, but never at the same time.

“If you are afraid, I will go with you, but for goodness’ sake don’t try to hide behind me.”

“Let me stay in your dressing-room, Miss Rachel,” she begged. “If you don’t, I’ll sit in the hall outside the door. I’m not going to be murdered with my eyes shut.”

“If you’re going to be murdered,” I retorted, “it won’t make any difference whether they are shut or open. But you may stay in the dressing-room, if you will lie on the couch: when you sleep in a chair you snore.”

She was too far gone to be indignant, but after a while she came to the door and looked in to where I was composing myself for sleep with Drummond’s Spiritual Life.

“There’s going to be a death!” she wailed. “Oh, Miss Rachel, there’s going to be a death!”

“There will be,” I said grimly, “if you don’t keep quiet, Liddy Allen.”

And so we sat there until morning, wondering if the candle would last until dawn, and arranging what trains we could take back to town. If we had only stuck to that decision and gone back before it was too late!

The sounds had come from the east wing, and not without some qualms I began there. At first I found nothing. Since then I have developed my powers of observation, but at that time I was a novice. The small cardroom seemed undisturbed.

I looked for footprints, which is, I believe, the conventional thing to do, although my experience has been that as clues both footprints and thumbmarks are more useful in fiction than in fact.

But the stairs in that wing offered something.

The four steps had been skipped. I reasoned that an iron bar, for instance, would do something of the sort—strike two or three steps, end down, then turn over, jumping a few stairs, and landing with a thud.

Iron bars, however, do not fall downstairs in the middle of the night alone.

Coupled with the figure on the veranda the agency by which it climbed might be assumed.

“Thomas,” I said, when he was sheepishly mopping the floor, “smoking is a filthy and injurious habit. If you must smoke, you must; but don’t stick a lighted pipe in your pocket again.

Your skin’s your own: you can blister it if you like.

But this house is not mine, and I don’t want a conflagration. Did you ever see this cufflink before?”

Halsey threw up both hands despairingly.

“If that isn’t like a girl!” he said.

“Why didn’t you do what I asked you to, Gertrude? You send Bailey off with an empty gun, and throw mine in a tulip bed, of all places on earth! Mine was a thirty-eight caliber.

I gathered that Thomas was as relieved as I at the turn events had taken. No, she did not know of either of the deaths in the family.

Taken all around, I had only substituted one mystery for another.

If I knew now why Rosie had taken the basket of dishes, I did not know who had spoken to her and followed her along the drive. If I knew that Louise was in the lodge, I did not know why she was there.

in depth the space extended only to the flooring. The breach had been made about four feet from the floor, and inside were all the missing bits of plaster.

It had been a methodical ghost.

It was very much of a disappointment. I had expected a secret room, at the very least, and I think even Mr. Jamieson had fancied he might at last have a clue to the mystery. There was evidently nothing more to be discovered:

“Nonsense!” I said brusquely. “I might have known enough to leave them. It’s a long time since you and I were in love, Liddy, and—we forget.”

“No man ever made a fool of me,” she replied virtuously.

“Well, something did,” I retorted.

“No man ever made a fool of me,” she replied virtuously.

“Well, something did,” I retorted.

It was the day of Thomas’ funeral in the village, and Alex and I were in the conservatory cutting flowers for the old man’s casket.

Liddy is never so happy as when she is making herself wretched, and now her mouth drooped while her eyes were triumphant.

“I always said there were plenty of things going on here, right under our noses, that we couldn’t see,” she said, holding out her apron.

“I always said there were plenty of things going on here, right under our noses, that we couldn’t see,” she said, holding out her apron.

“I don’t see with my nose,” I remarked. “What have you got there?”

Liddy pushed aside a half-dozen geranium pots, and in the space thus cleared she dumped the contents of her apron—a handful of tiny bits of paper. Alex had stepped back, but I saw him watching her curiously.

“Mother, of course. What’s your mother’s name?” And he pointed to me!

I am going to stop wearing black: it doubles a woman’s age.

“And where did you live before you came here?” The detective was polite enough not to smile.

I put the candle on the floor at the top of the staircase and took off my bedroom slippers. Then I crept down the stairs, going very slowly, and listening with all my ears.

I was keyed to such a pitch that I felt no fear: like the condemned who sleep and eat the night before execution, I was no longer able to suffer apprehension.

I was past that. Just at the foot of the stairs I stubbed my toe against Halsey’s big chair, and had to stand on one foot in a soundless agony until the pain subsided to a dull ache. And then—I knew I was right.

“I shall be only too happy,” he said. “I understand you have had a fire up there, too. A fire and shooting in one night is rather lively for a quiet place like that.”

“It is as quiet as a boiler-shop,” I replied, as I turned to go.

“And you are still going to stay?”

“Exactly.” The detective smiled.

“Every man who cuts grass isn’t a gardener, Miss Innes, and just now it is our policy to believe every person around here a rascal until he proves to be the other thing.”

Warner came up with the car then, and the conversation stopped. As he helped me in, however, the detective said something further.

“Toothache?” I asked, not too gently. “You deserve it. A woman of your age, who would rather go around with an exposed nerve in her head than have the tooth pulled! It would be over in a moment.”

“So would hanging,” Liddy protested, from behind the hot-water bottle.

I was hunting around for cotton and laudanum.

“I never expected to come to this,” he said once. “There’s one thing sure—I’ll not be suspected of complicity.

A doctor is generally supposed to be handier at burying folks than at digging them up.

”

At this point in my story, Halsey always says:

“Trust a woman to add two and two together, and make six.”

To which I retort that if two and two plus X make six, then to discover the unknown quantity is the simplest thing in the world.