The Man from the Clouds quotes

“My God,” said Rutherford, “the cable has broken!”

In an instant I was craning over the side of the basket.

So I shook his hand, and over he went; I had one glimpse of something dark below me, and then the mist swallowed him up. Rutherford was gone, and I may as well say now that not a sign of him was ever seen again.

If you want to know what loneliness⁠—real horrifying loneliness⁠—is like, I know no better recipe than drifting through a fog in a balloon, with your only companion gone, and not the faintest belief in your heart that you are within a hundred miles of any square inch of earth.

I almost think the fact that the balloon was steadily sinking and that sooner or later I should have to leap from it too was the one thing that kept my spirits anyways up to the mark.

We entered the little church and I shall never forget my surprise.

It was the year 1914 without; it became the year 1514 (or perhaps some centuries earlier still) within.

On one side two minute windows pierced a wall quite four feet thick. The other wall was broken only by a great empty niche whence an image once adored had vanished.

“By the way, what are we supposed to be looking for?” I enquired presently.

“Chiefly periscopes, I think,” said she.

I stopped short and gazed over the inky sea.

I stopped short and gazed over the inky sea.

“Do they light them up for us?” I asked.

“That is what I’ve been wondering myself,” said she.

Being an optimist has compensations. Indeed, it would need to have, for no virtue has ever landed anyone in more damnable scrapes than optimism has landed me.

But before the crash comes it does help to keep one happy.

“It must have been the weather,” I said lightly,

“I’m never drunk before lunch;”

“And be damned if I get the chance at any time of day! You’ve heard of my sad complaint, eh?”

“Well,” said he, “let’s be off then. Don’t you even want to say goodbye?”

“I’ll send them a Christmas card,” I said.

“What, after all the trouble they’ve taken to round you up?”

“I shouldn’t take the responsibility myself, but I daresay if I were lunatic enough to back him up, the powers that be might agree.”

“Jack!” I exclaimed, “I’ll be the alcoholic patient!”

For a moment I thought my cousin’s eyes were going to start out of his head. Then they subsided and a grin began to steal over his face instead.

“Miss Rendall,” I said, “you arrive at solutions by such brilliant shortcuts that I feel like an old cart horse stumbling along out of sight behind you. My models hitherto have been the classical detectives—”

“Tuts!” she laughed, “they were only men!”

“Yes,” I agreed, “we are not much of a sex. And now, guess again please, it’s a very simple conundrum this time—for you. Who was the man behind the wall—or the rocks?”

Unlike the suspicious stranger, Thomas Sylvester Hobhouse had not been given to singing, whistling, or humming as he walked, but he broke loose now. I had instinctively dreaded a too close acquaintance with that girl while the case was doubtful.

I felt in my bones she would be dangerous. Now I was enraptured to discover she was fatal.

“And yet,” I said to myself, “it’s a great thing to have tested the other hypothesis.”

In fact, if one is not built to be easily dispirited, well, it is not easy to dispirit one.

I looked at the doctor, and something in my expression seemed to make him smile. When he smiled he looked so pleasant that my conscience smote me. I told myself he certainly deserved some reparation for the ordeal I had put him through.