The Poisoned Chocolates Case quotes

Blast ’em! I’ll complain to the blasted committee. That sort of blasted thing can’t blasted well be allowed here.” For the Rainbow Club, as everyone knows, is a very proud and exclusive club indeed, with an unbroken descent from the Rainbow Coffeehouse, founded in 1734.

Not even a family founded by a king’s bastard can be quite so exclusive today as a club founded on a coffeehouse.

“Well, it’s an ill wind so far as I’m concerned,” Bendix soothed him. “It’s reminded me of something. I’ve got to get some chocolates myself, to pay an honourable debt.

They hunted, and so did Sir Eustace, with avidity; but the country squires confined their hunting to foxes, and Sir Eustace was far more catholic in his predatory tastes.

Sir Eustace in short, without doubt, was a thoroughly bad baronet.

But his vices were all on the large scale, with the usual result that most other men, good or bad, liked him well enough (except perhaps a few husbands here and there, or a father or two), and women openly hung on his husky words.

To make no bones about it, the Bendixes had apparently succeeded in achieving that eighth wonder of the modern world, a happy marriage.

And into the middle of it there dropped, like a clap of thunder, the box of chocolates.

“After depositing the box of chocolates with the porter,” Moresby continued, shuffling his papers to find the right one, “Mr. Bendix followed Sir Eustace into the lounge, where he was reading the Morning Post.”

Her last words to him were that they were making her mouth burn again so much that she was afraid she would not be able to manage any more.

“Mr. Bendix remembers that conversation very clearly,” said Moresby, looking round at the intent faces, “because it was the last time he saw his wife alive.”

The conversation in the drawing-room had taken place approximately between a quarter-past and half-past two. Bendix kept his appointment in the City at three, where he stayed for about half-an-hour, and then took a taxi back to his club for tea.

“She had another bet, that she knew nothing about,” chanted in solemn tones Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, who was already pondering the dramatic possibilities of the situation. “Not a trifling one: a grim one. It was with Death, and she lost it.”

Mrs. Fielder-Flemming was regrettably inclined to carry her dramatic sense into her ordinary life. It did not go at all well with her culinary aspect.

She eyed Alicia Dammers covertly, wondering whether she could get in with a play before that lady cut the ground away from under her with a book.

She smiled back appreciatively.

The art of the written word is not that of the spoken one.

“I formed my theory,” announced Sir Charles, with surprising simplicity. Perhaps he was still a little short of breath.

Roger did not particularly like either the bull or the gadfly, but both amused him in their different ways; he certainly disliked neither. Mr. Bradley on the other hand disliked both Roger and Sir Charles.

He disliked Roger the more of the two because Roger was a gentleman and pretended not to be, whereas he himself was not a gentleman and pretended he was. And that surely is cause enough to dislike anyone.

“I’m glad you raised that point, Sir Charles,” Roger now said smoothly. “It’s one we must consider. Personally I don’t see how we’re to progress at all unless we come to some arrangement concerning the law of slander, do you?”

… are apt to go brilliant purple with emotion disguise the tint with appropriate grease paints), heedless of the chair overturning behind her with a dull, doom-like thud, her quivering finger pointing across the table, she confronted Sir Charles with every inch of her five-foot nothing.

“Thou!” shrilled Mrs. Fielder-Flemming. “Thou art the man!”

Her outstretched finger shook like a ribbon on an electric fan. “The brand of Cain is on your forehead! Murderer!”

Fielder-Flemming—and perhaps, from the look of him, Sir Charles himself. As that outraged gentleman had pointed out, such an idea, looked at in sober reflection, was plainly the most preposterous nonsense.

Sir Charles could not be guilty because⁠—well, because he was Sir Charles, and because such things don’t happen, and because he obviously couldn’t be.

On the other hand Mrs. Fielder-Flemming had very neatly proved that he was. And Sir Charles had not even attempted yet to prove that he wasn’t.

The motion was carried unanimously.

Mrs. Fielder-Flemming would have liked to vote against it, but she had never yet belonged to any committee where all motions were not carried unanimously and habit was too strong for her.

The meeting then adjourned, rather oppressed.

Bradley, “I should think the real odds must be somewhere about four billion, seven hundred and ninety thousand million, five hundred and sixteen thousand, four hundred and fifty-eight to one. In other words, it’s a snip. Does everyone agree?”

Everyone was far too stunned to disagree.

“Right; then we’re all of one mind,” said Mr. Bradley cheerfully. “So I’ll read you my list.”

“The only possible person, so far as I can see, who could ever be expected to fulfil all those twelve conditions?” said this harassed version of Mr. Bradley, dishevelling his carefully flattened hair.

“Why, dash it, not my sister at all, but⁠—but⁠—but me, of course!”

There was a stupefied silence.

I told you nothing but the truth. But I didn’t tell you the whole truth. Artistic proof is, like artistic anything else, simply a matter of selection.

If you know what to put in and what to leave out you can prove anything you like, quite conclusively.

I do it in every book I write, and no reviewer has ever hauled me over the coals for slipshod argument yet. But then,” said Mr. Bradley modestly, “I don’t suppose any reviewer has ever read one of my books.”

The salesman most obligingly proceeded to identify his customer without hesitation. He then went on, just as obligingly, to sell Roger the secondhand Hamilton No. 4 which that enthusiastic detective felt he had not the face to refuse to buy.

Detecting, Roger was discovering, is for the person without official authority to back him, a singularly expensive business.

But like Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, he did not grudge money spent in a good cause.

“Oh, yes; in its way. But absurdly simple once one had grasped the really essential factor. Quite ridiculously so. I’ll let you have that report some time. So long, then.” And he strolled out.

One cannot conceal the fact that Roger had his annoying moments.

“

A perfect murder makes me feel lyrical.

If I was this particular criminal I should have been writing odes to myself for the last fortnight.”

Roger had been looking forward to Miss Dammers’s exposition more than to that of anyone else.

Alicia Dammers was so very much a reflection of the age.

Had she been born fifty years ago, it is difficult to see how she could have gone on existing.

“Really, Mr. Sheringham, your faith in human nature is altogether too great, you know,” Miss Dammers mocked him without mercy. “

Whatever anybody chooses to tell you, you believe.

A confirmatory witness never seems necessary to you. I’m sure that if someone had come to your rooms and told you he’d seen the Shah of Persia injecting the nitrobenzene into those chocolates you would have believed him unhesitatingly.”

“Oh, undoubtedly, undoubtedly,” rumbled Sir Charles, in high embarrassment.

Sir Charles was always exceedingly embarrassed when women used words like “adultery” and “sexual perversions” and even “mistress” to him, out of business hours.

Sir Charles was regrettably old-fashioned.