The Clue of the New Pin quotes

… houses where innumerable milliners, modistes and dentists had their signs before the doors and their workrooms and clinics on divers landings, to the howling wilderness of Bennet Street, and in this particular case the description often applied so lightly is aptly and faithfully affixed, for

Bennet Street howled by day and howled in a shriller key by night.

Its roadway was a playground for the progeny of this prolific neighbourhood, and a “ring” in which all manner of local blood-feuds were settled by waist-bare men, whilst their slatternly women squealed their encouragement or vocalized their apprehensions.

“The reporter? Yes, I remember you. You had an article in your rag that was all wrong, sir—all wrong! You made me say that I had a respect for municipal laws and that’s a lie!

I have no respect for municipal laws or lawyers. They’re thieves and grafters!

”

Mr. Carver shook his head.

“A medical student was once asked by a professor whether Adam was ever a baby, and he replied: ‘God knows’⁠—that is my answer to you!”

he said. “We will leave the other boxes until tomorrow, Tab.”

“I’ll certainly carry out your wishes,” he said, “but it is a weighty lot of money to give away.”

“It is a weighter lot of money to keep,” she said quietly.

“There is another favour I ask—you must not write that I am the donor. You can describe me as a society woman, a retired trades-woman, or as anything you like, except as an actress, and of course my name must not even be hinted.

“And you are disappointed. My poor old Carver,” said Tab, pityingly. “You think too much!”

“We all think too much,” said Carver, relapsing into his natural gloom.

The next morning the tenant who occupied the flat below came up whilst Tab was dressing and Mr. Holland was a little taken aback to see one who so seldom put in an appearance on any day. He was a red-faced gentleman, somewhat sportily attired.

It would be such a relief to swoon sometimes.” Her tone was half-jesting, but there was a whole lot of seriousness in her face. “I am coming to live at the Central again,” she said, “though I really cannot afford that extravagance.”

“Stone Cottage is haunted,” was the staggering reply.

She nodded and a momentary smile came into her eyes, only to fade as quickly as it came.

Tab saw tears in her eyes and wished that he, and not this uninteresting Chinaman, had been the person who excited her gratitude.

“Kindness is a relative term,” said Yeh Ling.

He had brought his feet up on a chair and was rolling a cigarette;

Late in the afternoon he felt hungry and went to a refreshment kiosk in the park. Finishing his meal he found the nearest bench and continued his pleasant occupation of doing nothing.

Mr. Wellington Brown was a born loafer; it is a knack which would prolong many lives in this strenuous age, if it could be acquired.

The stars were coming out in a velvet blue sky when, with a shiver, he aroused himself and made instinctively for the lights.

“All right,” he said despondently as they snapped the steel handcuffs on his wrists, “but I didn’t do it, Mr. Carver. I know nothing about the murder. I am as innocent as a babe unborn.”

“What I like about you,” said Carver unpleasantly, “is your originality.”

He followed behind the two men who held the arms of their manacled prisoner and Tab joined him. As they came off the ship, Tab asked:

Here every one of the business men at the long table was in complete agreement.

They shared a common faith that a man who can make money by selling sugar, or can acquire a competence by trading in margins, must necessarily be the best type of mind to tackle every problem, however obscure.

It was their wont to shake their heads sadly at every mistake the administration made, and hypothesize the same situation if business men had been in control.

“No,” snapped Mr. Stott, “in the plot, man! Anyway I’ve washed my hands of the whole affair.”

Mr. Stott was in the habit of washing his hands of the whole affair twice a day, once at lunch and once after dinner.

He washed his hands that night to his placid wife, not only of the Trasmere case, but of Eline’s tooth, and he washed them with such effect on Eline herself, that she reluctantly agreed to have the offending ivory extracted on the following morning.

“

Better be cheerful than dead,

” said the detective cryptically, and left him to puzzle it out.

“He said other things—I am puzzled. It is not a simple matter to make a decision. Some day I must give you a translation of everything. I know that; it troubles me—what is best to do.

We Chinese have a word for indecision. Literally it means a straw moving in cross currents⁠—first this way, then that way.

My mind is like that. I owe Shi Soh—Trasmere—much—how can I pay him? He was a hard man but our words, one to the other, have been more binding than sealed papers and once I said that I would serve his blood.

“I am a believer in God,” he said, “in ‘x’ in something beyond definition. Churches and sects, religions of all kinds are monopolies. God is like the water that flows down the mountainside and fills the brooks and the rivers.

There come certain men who bottle the waters, some in ugly bottles, some in beautiful bottles, and these bottles they sell, saying that ‘only this water will quench your thirst.’

That it does quench thirst we will not deny, but the water is often a little stale and flat, and the sparkle has gone out of it. You can drink better from the hollow of your hands kneeling by a brook.

You can drink better from the hollow of your hands kneeling by a brook. In China we bottle it with mystic writings and flavour it with cinnamon and spices.

Here it is bottled without any regard to the water, but with punctilious care as to the shape of the bottle! I go always to the brook.

”

“He said you are a danger to life and property,” said Tab gravely, and she laughed.

“You would manage your bicycle better if you used both hands,”

she said, releasing her own. “I want you to see my heliotrope. I have to keep it in a garden by itself; it is a cannibal plant, it kills all the other flowers. How could you spare time to come down?”

“We will walk home. You don’t take enough exercise,” he said. “

Lack of exercise is bad for the old, but it is fatal for the young.

”

“Whiskey,” said Mr. Stott in a strangled voice, “neat whiskey! It is nothing.”

Eline had never drunk neat whiskey before. It seemed to her, as whiskey, distinctly untidy. It had sharp edges.

She could only look upon her employer with a new born respect.