The Eye of Osiris quotes

“Do you smoke much?” I inquired diplomatically.

He looked at me slyly and chuckled. “That’s a very delicate way to approach the subject, Doctor,” he said.

“No, I don’t smoke much, and I don’t crook my little finger. I saw you look at my shaky hand just now—oh, it’s all right; I’m not offended. It’s a doctor’s business to keep his eyelids lifting.

“That’s all very well,” he grumbled, “but supposing people come here and excite me?”

“Disregard them,” said I, “and read Whitaker’s Almanac.”

And with this parting advice I passed out into the other room.

“Life is made up of strange coincidences,” said Thorndyke. “

Nobody but a reviewer of novels is ever really surprised at a coincidence.

But what is yours?”

“How disappointingly simple,” said Jervis. “We were hoping for something abstruse and telepathic.”

“Simplicity is the soul of efficiency, sir,” replied Polton as he checked the tea-service to make sure that nothing was forgotten, and with this remarkable aphorism he silently evaporated.

“To return to the Bellingham case,” said Thorndyke, when he had poured out the tea. “Have you picked up any facts relating to the parties—and facts, I mean, of course, that it would be proper for you to mention?”

“Neither do I,” Thorndyke admitted. “

There are no hospitals for impecunious litigants; it is assumed that only persons of means have a right to go to law.

Of course, if we knew the man and the circumstances we might be able to help him; but for all we know to the contrary, he may be an arrant scoundrel.”

“It’s no use your trying to pump him, Berkeley,” said Jervis. “

He is fitted with an information valve that opens inward. You can pour in as much as you like, but you can’t get any out.

”

“Horrible discovery in a watercress-bed!”

Now, let prigs deny it if they will, but there is something very attractive in a “horrible discovery.”

It hints at tragedy, at mystery, at romance. It promises to bring into our gray and commonplace life that element of the dramatic which is the salt that our existence is savored withal. “In a watercress-bed,” too!

Now, let prigs deny it if they will, but there is something very attractive in a “horrible discovery.” It hints at tragedy, at mystery, at romance.

It promises to bring into our gray and commonplace life that element of the dramatic which is the salt that our existence is savored withal.

“In a watercress-bed,” too! The rusticity of the background seemed to emphasize the horror of the discovery, whatever it might be.

Holborn was even as the Elysian Fields; the omnibus that bore us westward was a chariot of glory; and the people who swarmed verminously on the pavements bore the semblance of the children of light.

Love is a foolish thing judged by workaday standards, and the thoughts and actions of lovers foolish beyond measure.

But the workaday standard is the wrong one, after all; for the utilitarian mind does but busy itself with the trivial and transitory interests of life, behind which looms the great and everlasting reality of the love of man and woman.

But the workaday standard is the wrong one, after all; for the utilitarian mind does but busy itself with the trivial and transitory interests of life, behind which looms the great and everlasting reality of the love of man and woman.

There is more significance in a nightingale’s song in the hush of a summer night than in all the wisdom of Solomon (who, by the way, was not without his little experiences of the tender passion).

The janitor in the little glass box by the entrance to the library inspected us and passed us on, with a silent benediction, to the lobby, whence (when I had handed my stick to a bald-headed demigod and received a talismanic disc in exchange) we …

A worthy priest who came to look at our dissecting-room expressed surprise to me that the students, thus constantly in the presence of relics of mortality, should be able to think of anything but the resurrection and the life hereafter. He was a bad psychologist.

There is nothing so dead as a dissecting-room ‘subject’; and the contemplation of the human body in the process of being quietly taken to pieces⁠—being resolved into its structural units like a worn-out clock or an old engine in the scrapper’s yard⁠—is certainly not conducive to a vivid realization of the doctrine of the resurrection.

”

Short, however, as had been the period of our collaboration, it had been long enough to produce a great change in our relations to one another.

For there is no friendship so intimate and satisfying as that engendered by community of work, and none⁠—between man and woman, at any rate⁠—so frank and wholesome.

Every day had arrived to find a pile of books with the places duly marked and the blue-covered quarto notebooks in readiness.

I smiled feebly.

The operation of pumping Mr. Jellicoe was rather like the sport of boxing with a porcupine, being chiefly remarkable as a demonstration of the power of passive resistance.

I determined, however, to make one more effort, rather, I think, for the pleasure of witnessing his defensive maneuvers than with the expectation of getting anything out of him. I accordingly “opened out” on the subject of the “remains.”

“It doesn’t seem to be of much importance, since he undoubtedly came back,” I remarked; but to this Thorndyke demurred.

“It is impossible to estimate the importance of the unknown,” said he.

“Well, how does the matter stand,” asked Jervis, “on the evidence that we have? John Bellingham disappeared on a certain date. Is there anything to show what was the manner of his disappearance?”

I say, isn’t it very funny that, after finding the remains in Kent some twenty miles from here, with the River Thames between, you should come here to look for the bones and go straight to Staple’s Pond, where they happen to be—and find ’em?”

“It would have been more funny,” Badger replied sourly, “if we’d gone straight to a place where they happened not to be⁠—and found them.”

A gratified snigger arose from the other eleven good men and true, and the cobbler grinned savagely; but before he could think of a suitable rejoinder the coroner interposed.

“But yet you are quite sure about the scarab?”

“No, I didn’t. How could I when it wasn’t there?”

Mr. Loram paused and looked helplessly at the witness; a suppressed titter arose from the body of the Court, and a faint voice from the bench inquired:

“I congratulate you, Berkeley.

There is not one man in twenty who would have had the sense to make a careful note of what he considers an unimportant or irrelevant fact; and the investigator who notes only those things that appear significant is perfectly useless.

He gives himself no material for reconsideration. But you don’t mean that these egg-patches and worm-tubes appeared to you to have no significance at all?”

“It won’t be necessary,” he answered, with the same quiet smile.

“When you have fitted the puzzle together you don’t need to be told you have done it.”

It was most infernally tantalizing. I pondered on the problem with a scowl of such intense cogitation that Thorndyke laughed outright.

“You would appear to be a disciple of Herbert Spencer,” I remarked.

“I am a disciple of Arthur Jellicoe, sir,” he retorted. And I believed him.

By the time we had reached the Museum he had become almost genial;

“No, I think not. When I am conducting a case I mention my surmises to nobody—not even to Jervis. Then I can say confidently that there has been no leakage. Don’t think I distrust you.

Remember that my thoughts are my client’s property, and that the essence of strategy is to keep the enemy in the dark.

”

The next few days were a very nightmare of horror and gloom. Of course, I repudiated my acceptance of the decree of banishment that Ruth had passed upon me.

I was her friend, at least, and in time of peril my place was at her side.

Tacitly—though thankfully enough, poor girl!—she had recognized the fact and made me once more free of the house.

He held the door open and as we passed out his face softened into a smile of infinite kindness. “You won’t mind my locking you out,” said he; “this is a photographic darkroom at present.”

The key grated in the lock and we turned away into the dim gallery.

It was not quite dark, for a beam of moonlight filtered in here and there through the blinds that covered the skylights. We walked on slowly, her arm linked in mine, and for a while neither of us spoke.

Reverently I folded her in my arms; gathered her to the heart that worshiped her utterly. Henceforth no sorrows could hurt us, no misfortune vex; for we should walk hand in hand on our earthly pilgrimage and find the way all too short.

Time, whose sands run out with such unequal swiftness for the just and the unjust, the happy and the wretched, lagged, no doubt, with the toilers in the room that we had left.

But for us its golden grains trickled out apace, and left the glass empty before we had begun to mark their passage. The turning of a key and the opening of a door aroused us from our dream of perfect happiness.

“Don’t let us disparage them,” said Thorndyke. “They have played a useful part. They represent the inevitable mistake that every criminal makes sooner or later.

The murderer will always do a little too much. If he would only lie low and let well alone, the detectives might whistle for a clue.

But it is time we are starting.”

“

Suspicion, however, is one thing and proof is another;

I had not nearly enough evidence to justify me in laying an information, and I could not approach the Museum officials without making a definite accusation. The great difficulty of the case was that I could discover no motive.

“The evidence, then, being insufficient to act upon,” Thorndyke resumed, “there was nothing for it but to wait for some new facts. Now, the study of a large series of carefully conducted murders brings into view an almost invariable phenomenon.

The cautious murderer, in his anxiety to make himself secure, does too much; and it is this excess of precaution that leads to detection.

It happens constantly; indeed, I may say that it always happens—in those murders that are detected; of those that are not we say nothing—and I had strong hopes that it would happen in this case. And it did.