The Valley of Fear quotes

“I should do so,” Sherlock Holmes remarked impatiently.

I believe that I am one of the most long-suffering of mortals; but I’ll admit that I was annoyed at the sardonic interruption.

“Really, Holmes,” said I severely, “you are a little trying at times.”

He is sure—‘confidence’ was as near as he could get to ‘confident’—that it is pressing. There is our result—and a very workmanlike little bit of analysis it was!”

Holmes had the impersonal joy of the true artist in his better work, even as he mourned darkly when it fell below the high level to which he aspired.

He was still chuckling over his success when Billy swung open the door and Inspector MacDonald of Scotland Yard was ushered into the room.

For this reason the affection and respect of the Scotchman for his amateur colleague were profound, and he showed them by the frankness with which he consulted Holmes in every difficulty.

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius

, and MacDonald had talent enough for his profession to enable him to perceive that there was no humiliation in seeking the assistance of one who already stood alone in Europe, both in his gifts and in his experience.

It was one of those dramatic moments for which my friend existed.

It would be an overstatement to say that he was shocked or even excited by the amazing announcement. Without having a tinge of cruelty in his singular composition, he was undoubtedly callous from long over-stimulation.

“Your thoughts move a bit too quick for me, Mr. Holmes. You leave out a link or two, and I can’t get over the gap. What in the whole wide world can be the connection between this dead painting man and the affair at Birlstone?”

“All knowledge comes useful to the detective,” remarked Holmes.

“Even the trivial fact that in the year 1865 a picture by Greuze entitled La Jeune Fille à l’Agneau fetched one million two hundred thousand francs—more than forty thousand pounds—at the Portalis sale may start a train of reflection in your mind.”

Everything comes in circles—even Professor Moriarty. Jonathan Wild was the hidden force of the London criminals, to whom he sold his brains and his organization on a fifteen percent commission.

The old wheel turns, and the same spoke comes up. It’s all been done before, and will be again.

I’ll tell you one or two things about Moriarty which may interest you.”

“Then, with your permission, we will leave it at that, Mr. Mac.

The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession.

I can see only two things for certain at present—a great brain in London, and a dead man in Sussex. It’s the chain between that we are going to trace.”

As we approached it, there was the wooden drawbridge and the beautiful broad moat as still and luminous as quicksilver in the cold, winter sunshine.

Three centuries had flowed past the old Manor House, centuries of births and of homecomings, of country dances and of the meetings of fox hunters.

Strange that now in its old age this dark business should have cast its shadow upon the venerable walls! And yet those strange, peaked roofs and quaint, overhung gables were a fitting covering to grim and terrible intrigue.

Mrs. Douglas’s face lit with a quick smile. “

Can a husband ever carry about a secret all his life and a woman who loves him have no suspicion of it?

I knew it by his refusal to talk about some episodes in his American life. I knew it by certain precautions he took. I knew it by certain words he let fall. I knew it by the way he looked at unexpected strangers.

“

There was romance. There is always romance. There was nothing mysterious.

”

“

Dear me, Watson, is it possible that you have not penetrated the fact that the case hangs upon the missing dumbbell?

Well, well, you need not be downcast; for between ourselves I don’t think that either Inspector Mac or the excellent local practitioner has grasped the overwhelming importance of this incident. One dumbbell, Watson! Consider an athlete with one dumbbell!

Well, well, you need not be downcast; for between ourselves I don’t think that either Inspector Mac or the excellent local practitioner has grasped the overwhelming importance of this incident.

One dumbbell, Watson! Consider an athlete with one dumbbell!

Picture to yourself the unilateral development, the imminent danger of a spinal curvature. Shocking, Watson, shocking!”

“

And yet there should be no combination of events for which the wit of man cannot conceive an explanation.

Simply as a mental exercise, without any assertion that it is true, let me indicate a possible line of thought. It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?

“And yet there should be no combination of events for which the wit of man cannot conceive an explanation. Simply as a mental exercise, without any assertion that it is true, let me indicate a possible line of thought.

It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?

“We will suppose that there was a guilty secret, a really shameful secret in the life of this man Douglas. This leads to his murder by someone who is, we will suppose, an avenger, someone from outside.

“Is it not? Is it not?

Breadth of view, my dear Mr. Mac, is one of the essentials of our profession.

The interplay of ideas and the oblique uses of knowledge are often of extraordinary interest. You will excuse these remarks from one who, though a mere connoisseur of crime, is still rather older and perhaps more experienced than yourself.”

Holmes laughed. “Watson insists that I am the dramatist in real life,” said he. “Some touch of the artist wells up within me, and calls insistently for a well-staged performance.

Surely our profession, Mr. Mac, would be a drab and sordid one if we did not sometimes set the scene so as to glorify our results.

The blunt accusation, the brutal tap upon the shoulder—what can one make of such a denouement?

At the present moment you thrill with the glamour of the situation and the anticipation of the hunt.

Where would be that thrill if I had been as definite as a timetable?

I only ask a little patience, Mr. Mac, and all will be clear to you.”

“I have no more notion than you how long it is to last,” Holmes answered with some asperity. “

If criminals would always schedule their movements like railway trains, it would certainly be more convenient for all of us.

As to what it is we—Well, that’s what we are watching for!”

It all comes down to this: That there are some men that have good cause to hate me and would give their last dollar to know that they had got me.

So long as I am alive and they are alive, there is no safety in this world for me.

They hunted me from Chicago to California, then they chased me out of America; but when I married and settled down in this quiet spot I thought my last years were going to be peaceable.

“

The English law is in the main a just law.

You will get no worse than your deserts from that, Mr. Douglas. But I would ask you how did this man know that you lived here, or how to get into your house, or where to hide to get you?”

It is with this man that we are concerned.

Take a good look at him, for he is worth it.

He is a fresh-complexioned, middle-sized young man, not far, one would guess, from his thirtieth year. He has large, shrewd, humorous gray eyes which twinkle inquiringly from time to time as he looks round through his spectacles at the people about him.

Against their lurid background dark figures were bending and straining, twisting and turning, with the motion of winch or of windlass, to the rhythm of an eternal clank and roar.

“I guess hell must look something like that,” said a voice.

McMurdo turned and saw that one of the policemen had shifted in his seat and was staring out into the fiery waste.

“

I’m new to the place; but I’m not new to you and your kind!

” cried McMurdo in cold fury. “I guess you’re the same in all places, shoving your advice in when nobody asks for it.”

There was a chorus of friendly “Good nights” from the other miners as they passed from the platform.

Before ever he had set foot in it, McMurdo the turbulent had become a character in Vermissa.

The country had been a place of terror; but the town was in its way even more depressing.

Framed in the bright light of the open doorway, it seemed to McMurdo that he had never seen a more beautiful picture; the more attractive for its contrast with the sordid and gloomy surroundings.

A lovely violet growing upon one of those black slag heaps of the mines would not have seemed more surprising.

So entranced was he that he stood staring without a word, and it was she who broke the silence.

“

It’s a murder society, that’s vat it is.

”

A struggle passed for a moment over McMurdo’s face; but it ended by setting like granite. “No, here,” he said. “

I’ll hold you against the world, Ettie, right here where we are!

”

“Well, it’s early days.

If your heart is as big as your body, and your soul as fine as your face, then I’d ask for nothing better

,” said McMurdo.

“Faith, I’d be slow to do that,” said McMurdo. He held out his hand to Baldwin. “

I’m quick to quarrel and quick to forgive. It’s my hot Irish blood, they tell me.

But it’s over for me, and I bear no grudge.”

“Well, well, we won’t argue about that,” said the police officer good-humouredly. “

I expect we all do our duty same as we see it; but we can’t all see it the same.

” He had drunk off his glass and had turned to go, when his eyes fell upon the face of Jack McMurdo, who was scowling at his elbow. “Hullo! Hullo!” he cried, looking him up and down. “Here’s an old acquaintance!”

“Faith, it is wiser not to ask.

If you know nothing, you can testify nothing, and no trouble can come of it.

But they are men who will make a clean job when they are about it.”

“It is my advice,” the speaker continued, “that we go easier upon the small men. On the day that they have all been driven out the power of this society will have been broken.”

Unwelcome truths are not popular.

There were angry cries as the speaker resumed his seat. McGinty rose with gloom upon his brow.

“One has to be cautious, mister. One never knows in times like these how a thing may come back to one.

One never knows either who to trust or who not to trust.

”

“If that is the view you take,” said Morris sadly, “I can only say that I am sorry I gave you the trouble to come and meet me.

Things have come to a bad pass when two free citizens cannot speak their thoughts to each other.

”

“

I had a conscience and a religion; but they made me a criminal among them.

I was chosen for a job. If I backed down I knew well what would come to me. Maybe I’m a coward. Maybe it’s the thought of my poor little woman and the children that makes me one. Anyhow I went.

“Too much! Wait till you have lived here longer. Look down the valley! See the cloud of a hundred chimneys that overshadows it!

I tell you that the cloud of murder hangs thicker and lower than that over the heads of the people.

It is the Valley of Fear, the Valley of Death. The terror is in the hearts of the people from the dusk to the dawn. Wait, young man, and you will learn for yourself.”

“Too much! Wait till you have lived here longer. Look down the valley! See the cloud of a hundred chimneys that overshadows it! I tell you that the cloud of murder hangs thicker and lower than that over the heads of the people.

It is the Valley of Fear, the Valley of Death.

The terror is in the hearts of the people from the dusk to the dawn. Wait, young man, and you will learn for yourself.”

McGinty had instruments enough already; but he recognized that this was a supremely able one.

He felt like a man holding a fierce bloodhound in leash.

There were curs to do the smaller work; but some day he would slip this creature upon its prey. A few members of the lodge, Ted Baldwin among them, resented the rapid rise of the stranger and hated him for it;

“Sit here by me, then.

It’s a queer throne for such a queen; but it’s the best your poor lover can find.

He’ll do better for you some of these days, I’m thinking. Now your mind is easy once again, is it not?”

His companion Andrews was little more than a boy, frank-faced and cheerful, with the breezy manner of one who is out for a holiday and means to enjoy every minute of it.

Both men were total abstainers, and behaved in all ways as exemplary members of the society, with the one simple exception that they were assassins who had often proved themselves to be most capable instruments for this association of murder.

Lawler had already carried out fourteen commissions of the kind, and Andrews three.

The killing of the elder Jenkins, shortly followed by that of his brother, the mutilation of James Murdoch, the blowing up of the Staphouse family, and the murder of the Stendals all followed hard upon one another in the same terrible winter.

Darkly the shadow lay upon the Valley of Fear.

The spring had come with running brooks and blossoming trees. There was hope for all Nature bound so long in an iron grip; but nowhere was there any hope for the men and women who lived under the yoke of the terror.

McMurdo sat in silence for some time, with the letter in his listless hands.

The mist had lifted for a moment, and there was the abyss before him.

“Does anyone else know of this?” he asked.

“

The less you know, Friend Morris, the easier your conscience will be, and the better you will sleep.

Ask no questions, and let these things settle themselves. I have hold of it now.”

but a judge of faces would have read little hope for Birdy Edwards in those hard mouths and remorseless eyes. There was not a man in the room whose hands had not been reddened a dozen times before.

They were as hardened to human murder as a butcher to sheep.

Foremost, of course, both in appearance and in guilt, was the formidable Boss.

“He’ll come, never fear,” McMurdo answered. “He is as eager to come as you can be to see him. Hark to that!”

They all sat like wax figures, some with their glasses arrested halfway to their lips.

Three loud knocks had sounded at the door.