The House of the Arrow quotes

“No,” he said to himself.

“No! With the Boris Waberskis one never knows,”

and he locked the letter away on a ledge of his private safe.

But all through that interview, though his advice was just the precise, clear advice for which the firm was quietly famous, Mr. Haslitt’s mind was still playing hide-and-seek with a memory, catching glimpses of the fringes of its skirt as it gleamed and vanished.

“Memory is a woman,” he said to himself. “If I don’t run after her she will come of her own accord.”

But he was in the common case of men with women: he could not but run after her. Towards the end of the interview, however, his shoulders and head moved with a little jerk, and he wrote a word down on a slip of paper.

He saw nothing, however, but a grimy corridor lit with artificial light in which men were patiently waiting. Hanaud closed the door again, with an air of intense relief.

“The Prime Minister has not overheard us. We are safe,”

he hissed, and he crept back to Frobisher’s side. He stooped and whispered in the ear of that bewildered man:

“The little towns, my friend, where life is not very gay and people have the time to be interested in the affairs of their neighbours, have their own crimes, and perhaps the most pernicious of them all is the crime of anonymous letters.

Suddenly out of a clear sky they will come like a pestilence, full of vile charges difficult to refute and⁠—who knows?⁠—sometimes perhaps true.

For a while these abominations flow into the letter-boxes and not a word is said. If money is demanded, money is paid. If it is only sheer wickedness which drives that unknown pen, those who are lashed by it none the less hold their tongues.

If money is demanded, money is paid. If it is only sheer wickedness which drives that unknown pen, those who are lashed by it none the less hold their tongues. But each one begins to suspect his neighbour.

The social life of the town is poisoned.

A great canopy of terror hangs over it, until the postman’s knock, a thing so welcome in the sane life of every day, becomes a thing to shiver at, and in the end dreadful things happen.”

“Don’t make too much of me, my friend, lest you be disappointed,” he said in all seriousness. “

We are the servants of Chance, the very best of us. Our skill is to seize quickly the hem of her skirt, when it flashes for the fraction of a second before our eyes.

”

“It is nothing,” said Hanaud with a smile.

“After all, we are⁠—the gentlest of us⁠—disturbing guests.”

He took a chair from the side of the table and drew it up close so that he faced Betty. But whatever advantage was to be gained from the positions he yielded to her.

“One can easily see that this is the library of Simon Harlowe, the collector,” he said.

“I have always thought that if one only had the time to study and compare the books which a man buys and reads, one would more surely get the truth of him than in any other way. But alas! one never has the time.”

He turned towards Jim Frobisher regretfully. “Come and stand with me, Monsieur Frobisher. For even a glance at the backs of them tells one something.”

“I do, at all events, Monsieur Hanaud,” she said. “But alas! I was born to be an old maid.

A chair out of place, a book disarranged, a clock not keeping time, or even a pin on the carpet⁠—I cannot bear these things.

I notice them at once and I must put them straight. Yes, it was precisely eleven o’clock when the Commissaire of Police rang the bell.”

“No. There is a passage at the end of the house under the reception-rooms from the courtyard which the gardeners use. The only other entrance is through the hall behind us.

This old house was built in days when your house really was your castle and the fewer the entrances, the more safely you slept.

”

The only other entrance is through the hall behind us. This old house was built in days when your house really was your castle and the fewer the entrances, the more safely you slept.”

The clocks of that city of Clocks clashed out the hour of eleven, throwing the sounds of their strokes backwards and forwards above the pinnacles and rooftops in a sort of rivalry.

Betty rose to her feet.

“There’s a day gone, at all events,” she said, and Ann Upcott agreed with a breath of relief.

To Jim it seemed a pitiful thing that these two girls, to whom each day should be a succession of sparkling hours all too short, must be rejoicing quietly, almost gratefully, that another of them had passed.

“It should be the last of the bad days,” he said, and Betty turned swiftly towards him, her great eyes shining in the darkness.

“Yes, and so I reasoned too,” Waberski interposed quickly. “As I told you, I could not believe my eyes. But I made sure—oh, there was no doubt, Monsieur Hanaud. And I thought to myself this.

Crimes are discovered because criminals, even the acutest, do sooner or later some foolish thing. Isn’t it so?

Sometimes they are too careful; they make their proofs too perfect for an imperfect world. Sometimes they are too careless or are driven by necessity to a rash thing. But somehow a mistake is made and justice wins the game.”

“As I told you, I could not believe my eyes. But I made sure—oh, there was no doubt, Monsieur Hanaud. And I thought to myself this. Crimes are discovered because criminals, even the acutest, do sooner or later some foolish thing. Isn’t it so?

Sometimes they are too careful; they make their proofs too perfect for an imperfect world.

Sometimes they are too careless or are driven by necessity to a rash thing. But somehow a mistake is made and justice wins the game.”

“It wasn’t that,” Ann replied. “But Betty and I had—I won’t say a rule, but a sort of working arrangement which I think had been in practice ever since I came to the Maison Grenelle. We didn’t encroach upon each other’s independence.”

The two girls had recognised from their first coming together that privacy was the very salt of companionship.

Each had a sanctuary in her own sitting-room.

It was the three-quarter length portrait of a woman, slender with the straight carriage of youth, in whose face a look of character had replaced youth’s prettiness.

It was a face made spiritual by suffering, the eyes shadowed and wistful, the mouth tender, and conveying even in the hard medium of a photograph some whimsical sense of humour.

It made Jim Frobisher, gazing over Hanaud’s shoulder, exclaim not “She was beautiful,” but “I would like to have known her.”

I flung the door open wide. For a moment I stood back from it, but once the door was open I heard nothing. I stole out to the head of the great staircase. Below me the hall was as silent as an empty church.

I think that I should have heard a spider stir.

I suddenly realised that the light was streaming from my room and that some of it must reach me. I cried at once, ‘Who’s there?’ And then I ran back to my room and locked myself in.

I was so scared out of my wits that I had lost all sense of direction. I couldn’t find the switch of the electric light. I stumbled along a wall feeling with my hands.

I heard myself sobbing as though I was a stranger.

At last I knocked against a chest of drawers and came a little to myself. I found my way then to the switch and turned on the light. The room was empty.

She was too quick and elusive for Jim Frobisher.

She had something of Ariel in her conception⁠—a delicate creature of fire and spirit and air.

She was across the courtyard and out of sight in the street of Charles-Robert before he had quite realised that she was going. He turned doubtfully towards the library, where Ann Upcott stood in the doorway.

Jim looked and saw, and his face lit up.

Far away on the horizon’s edge, unearthly in its beauty, hung the great mass of Mont Blanc; white as silver, soft as velvet, and here and there sparkling with gold as though the flame of a fire leaped and sank.

“Oho!” said Hanaud as he watched Jim’s face. “So we have that in common. You perhaps have stood on the top of that mountain?”

“I did not want that question asked,” he said.

“Because it was unnecessary, and unnecessary questions are confusing things which had best be avoided altogether.”

Jim did not believe one word of that explanation. He had too clear a recollection of the swift movement and the look with which Hanaud had checked him. Both had been unmistakably signs of alarm.

Hanaud shook a protesting hand in the air.

“I believe nothing,” he said. “I am looking for a criminal.”

“Ann Upcott!” Jim spoke the name in amazement. “Ann Upcott!” Then he remembered the look of her as she had told her story, her face convulsed with terror, her shaking tones. “Oh, it’s impossible that she was lying.

It was not an expression of amazement. On the other hand interest was too weak a word. Suddenly Jim Frobisher understood and comprehension brought with it a sense of discomfort.

Hanaud’s look, very bright and watchful and more than a little inhuman, was just the look of a good retriever dog when his master brings out a gun.

Jim looked again at the high ridge of the house. The slates were broken at intervals by little gabled windows, but at none of them could he see a figure. From none of them a signal was waved.

“A pretty world for rich people, Monsieur Frobisher,” he said.

“What pictures of fine ladies in billowy skirts and fine gentlemen in silk stockings! And what splashings of mud for the unhappy devils who had to walk!”

He turned his back to the chair and looked across the room. “That is the clock which marked half-past ten, Mademoiselle, during the moment when you had the light turned up?” he asked of Ann.

It was clearly, however, fancy upon his part, for Hanaud noticed nothing at all. Jim pulled himself up with an unspoken remonstrance. “Take care!” he warned himself.

“For once you begin to suspect people, they can say and do nothing which will not provide you with material for suspicion.”

Hanaud was without doubt satisfied. The clock was a beautiful small gilt clock of the Louis Quinze period, shaped with a waist like a violin;

“There are men like that,” Monsieur Bex agreed.

Like all Frenchmen, he was easy in his mind if he could place a man in a category.

“But he is doing something which is quite important,” Jim continued, swelling a little with pride. He felt that he had been quite fifteen minutes in the bullring. “He is searching for something somewhere. I told him about it. He had overlooked it altogether.

The eternal ambition of the provincial was tormenting the eager youth.

To get to Paris⁠—all was in that! Fortune, reputation, a life of colour.

A word from Monsieur Hanaud and a way would open. He would work night and day to justify that word.

Indeed, the whole valley had a sort of doll’s-house effect—it was so shallow and narrow and stunted.

It tried to be a valley and succeeded in being a depression.

When the little two-seater car swooped round the shoulder of the hill and descended, the white ribbon of road was empty but for one tiny speck at the far end, behind which a stream of dust spurted and spread like smoke from the funnel of …

The small company penetrated into the town by the backways and narrow alleys. Daunay going on ahead, Patinot the last by some thirty yards, and Moreau keeping upon the opposite side of the street.

Once they had left behind them the lights of the station square, they walked amongst closed doors and the blind faces of unlit houses.

Frobisher’s heart raced within his bosom. He strained his eyes and ears for some evidence of spies upon their heels. But no one was concealed in any porch, and not the stealthiest sound of a pursuit was borne to their hearing.

at the back of the terrace were shuttered windows. But in the corner of the house, on a level with the garden, there was a door. Once more Moreau stooped, and once more a door swung inwards without a sound.

But whereas the garden door had let through some gleam of twilight, this door opened upon the blackness of the pit.

Jim Frobisher shrank back from it, not in physical fear but in an appalling dread that some other man than he, wearing his clothes and his flesh, would come out of that door again.

Jim Frobisher under such a strain of dread and expectancy that each second seemed an hour, and he wondered at the immobility of his companions.

The only sound of breathing that he heard came from his own lungs.

In a while Hanaud laid a hand upon his sleeve, and the clasp of the hand tightened and tightened. Motionless though he stood like a man in a seizure, Hanaud too was in the grip of an intense excitement.

“All that she needed? No,” answered Hanaud with a shake of the head. “

The blackmailer never has enough money. For no one is so blackmailed.

”

So I say to myself: ‘My good Hanaud, this young lady has been rearranging her ornaments.’ But do I guess why? No, my friend. I told you once, and I tell you again very humbly, that we are the servants of Chance.

Chance is a good mistress if her servants do not go to sleep; and she treated me well that afternoon.

See! I am standing in the hall, in great trouble about this case. For nothing leads me anywhere. There is a big old-fashioned barometer like a frying-pan on the wall behind me and a mirror on the opposite wall in front of me.

… From the Hôtel de Brebizart Espinosa went to the Rue Gambetta and waited for Jean Cladel. It was a busy night, that one, my friends.

That old wolf, the Law, was sniffing at the bottom of the door.

They could hear him. They had no time to waste!”

But they were a little too careful. Our friend Boris said a shrewd thing, didn’t he?

Some crimes are discovered because the alibis are too unnaturally perfect.

Oh, there was no doubt they meant to bring back Mademoiselle Ann! But suppose they brought her back dead! It wasn’t likely—no! It would be so much easier to finish her off with a dose of the arrow-poison.