The Three Taps quotes

The man who is insured with the Indescribable walks the world in armour of proof; those contrary accidents and mortifications which are a source of spiritual profit to the saint are a source of material advantage to him.

No east wind but flatters him with the prospect of a lucrative cold; no dropped banana skin but may suddenly hurl him into affluence.

The chicken-farmer whose henhouses are fitted with the company’s patent automatic egg-register can never make a failure of his business. The egg is no sooner laid than it falls gently through a slot which marks its passage on a kind of taximeter;

The wildest voluptuousness of an Eastern tyrant is less magnificent in its architectural scheme than the hardheaded efficiency of the American business man.

Chatting in the waiting-room of some such edifice, Sardanapalus might have protested that it stumped him how they did it, and Kublai Khan might have registered the complaint that it was all very well but the place didn’t feel homey.

Indescribable House is an enormously high building with long, narrow windows that make it look like an Egyptian tomb.

He was a good cross-country runner, but in the middle of a run he would usually catch sight of some distraction which made him wander three miles out of his course and come in last.

It was his nature to be in love with the next thing he had to do, to shrink in loathing from the mere thought of the next but one.

The war came in time to solve the problem of his career; and more fortunate than some he managed to hit on a métier in the course of it. He became an intelligence officer; did well, then did brilliantly;

The influence which saved him on these occasions was that of—how shall I say it?—his wife. I know—

I know it is quite wrong to have your detective married until the last chapter, but it is not my fault.

It is the fault of two mocking eyes and two very capable hands that were employed in driving brass-hats to and fro in London at the end of the war. Bredon surrendered to these, and made a hasty but singularly fortunate marriage.

There is a story of some Bishop, or important person, who got his way at Rome rather unexpectedly over an appeal, and, when asked by his friends how he did it, replied,

“Fallendo infallibilem.”

It might have been the motto of Angela’s mastery over her husband;

“

How often am I to tell you that the memory and the attention function inversely?

I remember all you said, precisely because I wasn’t paying attention to it.

“Well, I couldn’t think of anything else to say at the moment.

I couldn’t tell him you were playing patience, or he might have thought we were unhappily married.

Go on, Sherlock.”

“From the way you said ‘Oh’—besides, you said he’d died in his bed, or implied it. And there’s some question of half a million insurance—Euthanasia, I suppose?

Really, the Euthanasia’s been responsible for more crimes than psychoanalysis.

”

“Chilthorpe?” said the old gentleman. “All the world seems to be coming to Chilthorpe.

The County Council does not appear to have allowed for the possibility of its becoming such a centre of fashion.

If you are fond of scenery, you should take the road to the left; it goes over the hill. If you like your tea weak, you had better take the valley road to the right.

“About luncheon time. They are understood to have a clue. I am only afraid, myself, that they will want to drag the river.

The police always drag the river if they can think of nothing else to do.

”

“

It must be a privilege to die under such auspices.

But I am afraid I have gone beyond my book: when I say poor Mottram committed suicide I am giving you theory not fact.”

“

She is in the seventh heaven of lamentation.

You could knock her down, she tells me, with a feather. She insists that her custom is ruined forever;

“Yes, if he’s a successful manufacturer. The idea that one wears special clothes when one is going to take exercise is an upper-class theory.

I tell you, I’ve seen a farmer getting in the hay in a dickey, merely to show that he was a farmer, not a farm labourer.

”

“

The law ought to compel people to smoke.

In bed, especially—we should have got some very nice indications of what he was really up to if he had smoked in bed. But I see he wasn’t a bedroom smoker in any case;

Mrs. Davis’s cuisine, if it did not quite justify all the ironic comments of the old gentleman, lent some colour to them.

With the adjectival trick of her class she always underestimated quantity, referring to a large tureen as “a drop of soup,” and overestimated quality, daily suggesting for her guests’ supper “a nice chop.” The chop always appeared;

“A strange taste,” pursued the old gentleman, harping on the unwelcome subject, “to want to come and lay your bones among your ancestors. It causes so much fuss and even scandal.

For myself, if I ever decided to put a term to my own existence, I should go to some abominable place⁠—Margate, for example⁠—and try to give it a bad name by being washed up just underneath the pier.

”

“You would fail, sir,” objected Brinkman; “I mean, as far as giving it a bad name was concerned.

You do not give things a good name or a bad name nowadays; you only give them an advertisement.

I honestly believe that if a firm advertised its own cigarettes as beastly it would draw money from an inquisitive public.”

“

Well, it makes it so dashed awkward to find somebody listening and catch them at it.

In some ways it’s much better to know that somebody has been listening and for them not to know whether you know or not. It’s confoundedly awkward, all the same.”

Pulteney tells me that there was a strong east wind blowing most of the night, and you can trust a fisherman to be accurate in these matters.

The window, then, like the gas, had been deliberately arranged in an artificial position

between Mottram’s death and the arrival of the rescue party. If the death had been accidental, the window would have been shut and remained shut all night. You do not leave a window half open, with nothing to fix it, on a windy night.

that was his atmosphere. And here, unfrocked by his own conscience, he was living as a hired servant, almost a pensioner, in this gaunt house, these cheerless rooms. … You wondered less at his silent habit, and his melancholy airs of speech.

Nothing creates intimacy like a common background discovered among strangers.

They belonged, it seemed, to the same university, the same college; their periods were widely different, but dons and scouts, the milestones of short-lived undergraduate memory, were recalled, and their mannerisms discussed;

“Not necessarily.

It’s astonishing what a lot of theoretical interest a man can take in the faith and yet be miles away from it practically.

Why, Mottram himself, about three weeks ago, was pestering us all about the old question of ‘the end justifying the means.’ Being a Protestant, of course he meant by that doing evil in order that good may come.

“See then the penalty of too great riches.

Only one man in a thousand can express his personality in his surroundings if he has a million of money to do it with.

It wasn’t Mottram, of course, who did this; but he would have built the same sort of horror if he hadn’t taken it over from a predecessor like himself. And the rooms are as bad as the house.”

the crude work of local artists hung on the walls; bulging goddesses supported unnecessary capitals; velvet and tarnished gilding and multicoloured slabs of marble completed the resemblance to a large station restaurant. Mottram had possessed no private household gods, had preserved no cherished knickknacks.

The house was the fruit of his money, not of his personality.

He had given the architect a free hand, and in the midst of all that barbaric splendour he had lived a homeless exile.

velvet and tarnished gilding and multicoloured slabs of marble completed the resemblance to a large station restaurant. Mottram had possessed no private household gods, had preserved no cherished knickknacks. The house was the fruit of his money, not of his personality.

He had given the architect a free hand, and in the midst of all that barbaric splendour he had lived a homeless exile.

The housekeeper had little to add to what Bredon already knew. Her master usually went away for a holiday about that time in the year, and Mr. Brinkman always went with him. He had expected to be away for a fortnight, or perhaps three weeks.

But I do remember, only a short time ago, his seeming rather excited one evening when he was round with us. Or am I imagining it?

Memory and imagination are such close neighbours.

But I do think that when he asked the Bishop to go and stay down at Chilthorpe he seemed unnaturally insistent about it. He was fond of the Bishop, of course, but I shouldn’t have thought he was as fond of him as all that.

“To young Simmonds, as he let himself in by the ground-floor casement into the Load of Mischief, only one fear presented itself—the fear of a false verdict. He was of the type that cannot commit cold-blooded murder.

The more civilization advances the more ingenious does crime become; meanwhile, it becomes more and more difficult for one man to kill another with his hands.

Simmonds might have been a poisoner; as it was, he had discovered a safer way: he would be a gasser. But there was this defect about the weapon he was using—it might create a false impression on the jury.

“

What a poor compliment that word ‘genial’ is,

” put in the old gentleman. “I would sooner be called well-meaning, myself. You have no grounds for saying that a man is really kind or charitable; you have not personally found him attractive;

“No, they are too human to be called merely genial.

Mr. Pickwick genial! It is like calling the day of judgment a fine sight.

How did Pusey, by the way, ever have the wit to light upon such a comparison?”

“I think ‘witty’ is rather a dreadful thing to be called,” said Angela. “I always think of witty people as people who dominate the conversation with long anecdotes.

How glad I am to have been born into a world in which the anecdote has gone out of fashion!

”

and the two functions are nearly akin. Who threw the butter at the ceiling, which boy cribbed from which, where the missing postage-stamp has got to—these are the problems which agitate my inglorious old age.

I do not know why headmasters allow boys to collect postage-stamps; they are invariably stolen.

”

“I am hardly professional enough for that. I leave that to the philatelist.

A philatelist, by the way, means one who loves the absence of taxes.

It hardly seems to mark out the stamp-lover from his fellows.”

No, if he will go and hide in the arras he must take what he gets, like Polonius. And, after all, if he does come to you afterward, and wants to sob on your bosom, you can always refuse to promise secrecy.

The world would be such a much happier place if people wouldn’t make promises.

”

The sun rose bright the next morning, as if it had heard there was a funeral in contemplation and was determined to be there.

The party at the Load of Mischief rose considerably later, and more or less coincided at the breakfast table. “I am afraid we shall be losing you,” said Mr. Pulteney to Angela. “A fortunate crime privileged us with your presence;

And I’m sure it hasn’t escaped your observation that whereas burning papers is a natural way to get rid of them in winter, when there’s a fire in the grate, one doesn’t do it in summer unless one’s absolutely put to it.

Nothing burns more ill-temperedly than a piece of paper when you have to set light to it with a match.

You can’t even burn it whole, without great difficulty, for you must either keep hold of it, and so leave a corner unburnt, or else leave it lying about in a grate or somewhere, and then the flame generally dies down before it is finished.

I have eaten sparingly in order to pretend that the food provided by our establishment is satisfying when it is not; I have pretended to sentiments of patriotism, of rugged sportsmanship, of moral approval or indignation, which I did not feel.

There is little to choose, believe me, between the fakir and the schoolmaster; either must spend days of wearisome mortification, because that is the way in which he gets his living.

And now, for one crowded hour of glorious old age, I have been mistaken for a guilty intriguer. The blood flows richer in my veins; I am overcome with gratitude. If only I could have kept it up!”

And the fir-trees kept off a little of the rain, which was now driving fiercely upon his overcoat, and clogging the knees of his trousers with damp. Never mind, he had his orders.

Any kind of scenery achieves dignity in a thunderstorm; but rocky scenery in particular is ennobled by the combination.

Under those quivering flashes, the two sides of the valley with the river running in between looked like the wings of a gigantic butterfly shaking off the pitiless dew that was falling on them.

Davis the poorer for his visit.

We are men, you see, and we are not made all in one piece.

”

Then, with the walking-stick, he shut the window again, except for a mere crack which was needed to let the tube through. Then he turned on the guide-tap which fed his standard lamp, and the gas began to flow through into Mottram’s room.

That coil of tube was a venomous serpent, which could poison Mottram in his sleep, behind locked doors, and be removed again without leaving any trace when its deadly work was done.

“Whether it was through carelessness on Brinkman’s part, or whether it was owing to the wind, that the window swung right open and became fixed there, I don’t know. In any case, it did not make much difference to his plans.

“No, he waited until he thought he wasn’t watched.

It’s a rum business, shadowing a man; you don’t want him to see exactly who is shadowing him, or where the man is who is shadowing him; but you do, very often, want him to know that he is shadowed, because that makes him lose his head and give himself away.

Now, Brinkman didn’t know what I suspected and didn’t, I think, know about my two men at the Swan. But I contrived to let him see that he was under observation, and that it wasn’t safe for him to go far out of my sight.

it was difficult not to be affected by the laborious efforts of a pen untrained in language to do justice to the writer’s friendly intentions. “I’m very sorry indeed for the poor fellow,” the Bishop said. “

The older we grow, the more tender we must become toward the strange vagaries of the human conscience.

That’s not the letter of a man, whose mind is unhinged. And yet, what is one to make of a conscience so strangely misformed? However, I didn’t come here to talk about all that.