The Man Who Knew quotes

“I know of nobody more of a disciplinarian than Sergeant Smith,” said the other sarcastically, “particularly when he is getting over a jag.

The keenest sense of duty is that possessed by a man who has broken the law and has not been found out.

I think I will go to bed,” he added, looking at the clock on the mantelpiece. “I am going up to town tomorrow. I want to see May.”

I didn’t use to worry about it very much, but I suppose I’m growing old now, and living surrounded by the law, as it were, I am too law-abiding.

A law-abiding man is one who is afraid of people who are not law-abiding, and I am getting to that stage.

You laugh at me because I’m jumpy whenever I see a stranger hanging around the house, but I have got more enemies to the square yard than most people have to the county.

Those practiced readers who begin this narrative with the weary conviction that they are merely to see the workings out of a conventional record of crime, of love, and of mystery may be urged to pursue their investigations to the end.

Truth is stranger than fiction, and has need to be, since most fiction is founded on truth.

There is a strangeness in the story of “The Man Who Knew” which brings it into the category of veracious history.

“The Man Who Knows?” repeated Frank, with a puzzled frown. “What an extraordinary person! What does he know?” he asked suddenly.

“Everything,” said the constable comprehensively.

A few minutes later Frank was walking slowly toward Holborn.

“He is one of those sly, soft-footed sneaks you can never get to the bottom of. He is worming his way into my uncle’s confidence to an extraordinary extent. Why, he is more like a son to Uncle John than a beastly secretary.”

“He has made himself necessary,” said the girl, “and that is halfway to making yourself wealthy.”

The little frown vanished from Frank’s brow, and he chuckled.

Frank Merrill was at once a comfort and the cause of a certain half-ashamed resentment, since she was of the age which resents dependence.

The woman who spends any appreciable time in the discussion with herself as to whether she does or does not love a man can only have her doubts set at rest by the discovery of somebody whom she loves better.

She liked Frank, and liked him well enough to accept the little ring which marked the beginning of a new relationship which was not exactly an engagement, yet brought to her friendship a glamour which it had never before possessed.

She liked him well enough to want his love. She loved him little enough to find the prospect of an early marriage alarming. That she did not understand herself was not remarkable.

Twenty-one has not the experience by which the complexities of twenty-one may be straightened out and made visible.

She sat at breakfast, puzzling the matter out, and was a little disturbed and even distressed to find, in contrasting the men, that of the two she had a warmer and a deeper feeling for Jasper Cole.

His eyes were blue and cold, his hair a thick and unruly mop of gray. At a distance he conveyed a curious illusion of refinement. Nearer at hand, his pink face repelled one by its crudities.

He reminded the commissioner of a piece of scene painting that pleased from the gallery and disappointed from the boxes.

“You see, Mr. Minute,” said Sir George suavely, “we are rather limited in our opportunities and in our powers.

“Why not?” asked the other suspiciously.

“Because he will know,” said the commissioner.

“The devil he will!” growled John Minute, and stumped down the broad stairs on to the Embankment, a greatly mystified man.

Report said that the woman had died of malaria. A more popular version of the story was that John Minute had relentlessly followed his erring wife to Pieter Maritzburg and had shot her and had thereupon served seven years on the breakwater for his sin.

About a man who is rich, powerful, and wholly unpopular, hated by the majority, and feared by all, legends grow as quickly as toadstools on a marshy moor.

Some were half true, some wholly apocryphal, deliberate, and malicious inventions. True or false, John Minute ignored them all, denying nothing, explaining nothing, and even refusing to take action against a Cape Town weekly which dealt with his career in a spirit of unpardonable frankness.

He still lingered, and the chauffeur, feeling that some encouragement to conversation was called for, ventured the view that a car ought to be a good one if one spent eight hundred pounds on it.

“Everything that is good costs money,” said Mr. Rex Holland sententiously

, and then continued: “Correct me if I am mistaken, but as we came through Putney did I not see you nod to the driver of another car?”

“You were well paid,” said John Minute shortly.

“Five hundred pounds isn’t much for the surrender of your soul’s salvation,” said Sergeant Smith.

He slowly replaced his cape on his broad shoulders and walked to the window.

“You are not going to satisfy me much longer with a few pounds a week. You have got to do the right thing by me, or I am going to blow.”

“Let me know when your blowing starts,” said John Minute, “and I’ll send you a bowl of soup to cool.”

“You’re funny, but you don’t amuse me,” were the last words of the sergeant as he walked into the rain.

“Let me know when your blowing starts,” said John Minute, “and I’ll send you a bowl of soup to cool.”

“You’re funny, but you don’t amuse me,” were the last words of the sergeant as he walked into the rain.

As before, he avoided the drive and jumped over the low wall on to the road, and was glad that he had done so, for a motor car swung into the drive and pulled up before the dark doorway of the house.

If you had been a woman, traveling with women, every one of your five fellow passengers would have remembered you and would have recalled your hat.”

“There are certain disadvantages in being a man,” he said.

“How do you think the case is going?”

“I understand you were a man of curious habits, Mr. Cole.”

“We are all people of curious habits,” smiled the witness.

“But you in particular. You were an Orientalist, I believe?”

“We are probably doing him a horrible injustice,” he smiled. “Poor old Jasper!”

“You are not cut out for police work,” snapped Saul Arthur Mann; “you’ve too many sympathies.”

“I don’t exactly sympathize,” rejoined Frank, “but I just pity him in a way.”

“My dear friend,” he said, with a little smile,

“I am tired of supposing things. Come and dine with me.”

But Mr. Mann had another engagement. Moreover, he wanted to think things out.

“It was horrid of me, wasn’t it?” she confessed. “And yet that idea came to me. One cannot control one’s thoughts, Frank, and you must be content to know that I believe in your innocence.

There are some thoughts which flourish in one’s mind like weeds, and which refuse to be uprooted.

Don’t blame me if I recalled the lawyer’s words; it was an involuntary, hateful thought.”

“It was horrid of me, wasn’t it?” she confessed. “And yet that idea came to me.

One cannot control one’s thoughts, Frank, and you must be content to know that I believe in your innocence.

There are some thoughts which flourish in one’s mind like weeds, and which refuse to be uprooted. Don’t blame me if I recalled the lawyer’s words; it was an involuntary, hateful thought.”