The Man in Lower Ten quotes

McKnight is gradually taking over the criminal end of the business. I never liked it, and since the strange case of the man in lower ten, I have been a bit squeamish.

Given a case like that, where you can build up a network of clues that absolutely incriminate three entirely different people, only one of whom can be guilty, and your faith in circumstantial evidence dies of overcrowding.

I never see a shivering, white-faced wretch in the prisoners’ dock that I do not hark back with shuddering horror to the strange events on the Pullman car Ontario, between Washington and Pittsburg, on the night of September ninth, last.

It had been the most remarkable period of my life.

I would neither give it up nor live it again under any inducement, and yet all that I lost was some twenty yards off my drive!

It was really McKnight’s turn to make the next journey. I had a tournament at Chevy Chase for Saturday, and a short yacht cruise planned for Sunday, and when a man has been grinding at statute law for a week, he needs relaxation.

“I warned you,” he reminded me. “I told you there were queer things coming, and to be on your guard. You ought to have taken your revolver.”

“It would have been of exactly as much use as a bucket of snow in Africa,” I retorted.

“If I had never closed my eyes, or if I had kept my finger on the trigger of a six-shooter (which is novelesque for revolver), the result would have been the same.

I was not clad for dress parade. Is it because the male is so restricted to gloom in his everyday attire that he blossoms into gaudy colors in his pajamas and dressing-gowns?

It would take a Turk to feel at home before an audience in my red and yellow bathrobe, a Christmas remembrance from Mrs. Klopton, with slippers to match.

So, naturally, when I saw a feminine figure on the platform, my first instinct was to dodge. The woman, however, was quicker than I; she gave me a startled glance, wheeled and disappeared, with a flash of two bronze-colored braids, into the next car.

then he unfastened the curtains and bent forward. Behind him, I saw him stiffen, heard his muttered exclamation, saw the bluish pallor that spread over his face and neck. As he retreated a step the interior of lower ten lay open to the day.

The man in it was on his back, the early morning sun striking full on his upturned face.

But the light did not disturb him. A small stain of red dyed the front of his night clothes and trailed across the sheet; his half-open eyes were fixed, without seeing, on the shining wood above.

“Isn’t the heart around there somewhere?” I asked. The medical man turned toward me and smiled austerely.

“That’s where it belongs, just under that puncture, when it isn’t gadding around in a man’s throat or his boots.”

I had a new respect for the doctor, for anyone indeed who could crack even a feeble joke under such circumstances, or who could run an impersonal finger over that wound and those stains.

“I’m sorry,” I said idiotically. “I’m sorry, but—I’m not.” I have learned since that she has bright brown hair, with a loose wave in it that drops over her ears, and dark blue eyes with black lashes and—but what does it matter?

One enjoys a picture as a whole: not as the sum of its parts.

She saw the flask then, and her errand came back to her. “One of the ladies at the end of car has fainted,” she explained. “I thought perhaps a stimulant—”

The men standing around had drawn off a little, and I saw the absolute futility of any remonstrance.

Have you ever seen a fly, who, in these hygienic days, finding no cobwebs to entangle him, is caught in a sheet of fly paper, finds himself more and more mired, and is finally quiet with the sticky stillness of despair?

Well, I was the fly. I had seen too much of circumstantial evidence to have any belief that the establishing of my identity would weigh much against the other incriminating details.

So she gathered it up, while I held a row of little shell combs and pins, and when it was done it was vastly becoming, too.

Funny about hair: a man never knows he has it until he begins to lose it, but it’s different with a girl.

Something of the unconventional situation began to dawn on her as she put in the last hairpin and patted some stray locks to place.

This is especially true, I fancy, of people with temperament, the modern substitute for imagination.

It is a nice question whether lovers begin to love when they are together, or when they are apart.

Not that I followed any such line of reasoning at the time. I would not even admit my folly to myself.

He made no reply, but as I opened the door with my latchkey he stood looking up at me from the pavement with his quizzical smile.

“Love is like the measles,” he orated. “The older you get it, the worse the attack.”

Johnson did not appear again that day. A small man in a raincoat took his place. The next morning I made my initial trip to the office, the raincoat still on hand. I had a short conference with Miller, the district attorney, at eleven.

The girl shook her head with a sad little smile.

“I am only as unhappy as I deserve to be,” she said.

And when I protested and took a step toward her she retreated, with her hands out before her.

“I’ll tell you what to do,” Hotchkiss said cheerfully, leaning forward, “look around a little yourself before you call in the police. Somnambulism is a queer thing. It’s a question whether we are most ourselves sleeping or waking. Ever think of that?

Live a saintly life all day, prayers and matins and all that, and the subconscious mind hikes you out of bed at night to steal undermuslins!

Subliminal theft, so to speak. Better examine the roof.”

I had built up my house of life on the props of law and order, and now some unknown hand had withdrawn the supports, and I stood among ruins.

I suppose it is the maternal in a woman that makes a man turn to her when everything else fails.

The eternal boy in him goes to have his wounded pride bandaged, his tattered self-respect repaired. If he loves the woman, he wants her to kiss the hurt.

She looked like a wraith, a despondent phantom of the sea, although the adjective is redundant. Nobody ever thinks of a cheerful phantom.

Strangely enough, considering her evident sadness, she was whistling softly to herself, over and over, some dreary little minor air that sounded like a Bohemian dirge.

She glanced up quickly when I made a misstep and my dishes jingled. All considered, the tray was out of the picture:

And the said apex was at that moment in the drive below my window, resting his long legs by sitting on a carriage block, and smoking a pipe that made the night hideous.

The sense of the ridiculous is very close to the sense of tragedy.

I opened my screen and whistled, and Johnson looked up and grinned. We said nothing.