Tracks in the Snow quotes

I believe that no one, upon whom any like loss has come suddenly, will wonder if I take up my tale in a dry-eyed fashion.

I can use no other art in telling it but that of letting the facts become known as strictly as may be in the order in which they became known to me.

Eustace Peters, then, was a retired official of the Consular Service, and a man of varied culture and experience—too much varied, I may say. He had been at Oxford shortly before my time.

… his interrupted career and his somewhat desultory pursuits appeared inadequate to the reputation which he had somehow gained for ability, he certainly gave me the impression of preserving an uncompromisingly high standard, a keenly if fitfully penetrating mind and a latent capacity for decisive action.

As I write these words it occurs to me that he would be living now if this impression of mine had not been shared by a much cleverer man than I.

On the 28th my wife was away from home, and I had supper at Grenvile Combe, going there about seven o’clock. There were three other guests at supper, James Callaghan, C.I.E., William Vane-Cartwright, and one Melchior Thalberg.

He said that he had more sympathy with them than he ought to have, and that in any case they should not disturb him. Very likely, he added, he would soon be asleep past rousing.

And so, about a quarter to eleven, I parted from him, little dreaming that no friendly eyes would ever meet his again.

Of course I had often interviewed him on parish matters, and having got him settled into the armchair in my study, in which I could usually put him at his ease, I fired upon him the question,

“Sergeant, were those tracks, which we found, really there when you came to Mr. Peters’ house in the morning?”

Now Sergeant Speke was a very honest man, but he was (most properly, I am sure) a creature of discipline, and his answer threw, for me, a flood of light on the problem how it is that the very best of the police are so …

When I asked for the reasons why she scouted the idea of his guilt, she seemed to consider the request quite frivolous; but at last I extracted from her a sentence which expressed what I think was at the root of my own thought.

“Mr. Callaghan,” she said, “is violent enough to commit a murder and cunning enough to conceal anything, but I cannot imagine his violence and his cunning ever working together.”

Of course we both thought of him as sane, though he was just one of those people to whose doings one constantly applies the epithet “mad.”

“Mr. Callaghan,” she said, “is violent enough to commit a murder and cunning enough to conceal anything, but I cannot imagine his violence and his cunning ever working together.”

Of course we both thought of him as sane, though he was just one of those people to whose doings one constantly applies the epithet “mad.”

It is not, I think, that the picturesque circumstances, like the guttering candle whose image got on my nerves that night, affect me profoundly.

It is, I believe, that, while many men, most if you like, are middling, the distinctly bad are really much worse and the distinctly good are really much better than the world of middling people is at all ready to allow.

When I looked at the whole circumstances of the crime, as I now conceived them, a great hatred of Vane-Cartwright possessed my soul.

But (not to mention that I had no reason, so far, to set great store upon Callaghan’s observations and theories) it must be remembered that I had received a very grave warning as to his possible character.

It is a serious matter for a father of a family to enter into intimate relations with a gentleman who, according to an eminent specialist, is a homicidal lunatic.

So I made first a few enquiries from acquaintances of his in regard to his character and recent proceedings.

With most of them I will not trouble the reader, but in one passage in particular Peters had pointed out the mistake of thinking that a man who commits glaring inaccuracies is necessarily on that account not worth listening to.

Ludicrous inaccuracies, even glaring falsehoods as they may seem, spring often, he insisted, from the peculiar abundance and vivacity of the impressions which a man receives from what passes before his eyes.

A person with this gift may frequently in his memory put something that he has truly noticed into a wrong connection, or combine two scattered fragments of observation, true in themselves, into a single totally erroneous recollection of fact.

I conjectured that Vane-Cartwright had an understanding with the Mafia, and had obtained through them the services of some villain. Well, here was a wire: “Regret to acquaint respected sir, Mrs. Driver suddenly unwell.—Direttore Hôtel Brunswick.”

There is one advantage about being tired. It prevents the mind from wandering away on so many sidetracks.

But with all that advantage, whatever it may be worth, it took me a full half-hour to make up my mind how to regard this;

I woke with a horrid start as someone in my dream pronounced the word “poison.” Thank God, it was a dream. I assured myself of that and slept again to dream more pleasantly.

I dreamed I was a boy and I was swimming in a clear river. Cool, cool river!

There was a fish in the river, and I was swimming after the fish. Cool, cool river!

I pursued him over a great mountain. Burning, burning hot!

I leapt to my feet calling “Fire!”

In waking fact, the thatched cottage was in a blaze.

I leapt to my feet calling “Fire!”

In waking fact, the thatched cottage was in a blaze.

I called with all my might to Mrs. Trethewy. I told her to run out while I brought out her daughter, and she answered.

still he did not enter it till the driver of an invalid carriage which had been waiting in the rank of cabs appeared to give up the expectation that the person for whom he waited was coming, and drove away.

“Do you see that invalid carriage?” said Callaghan to me. “It was ordered for you.”

“Are you certain,” I said, “that both of them were latched?” “Certain,” he answered; “they were both latched when I came into the room, and they were latched when I went out, for I happened to have looked again.

You see that, once one has the habit of noticing a certain kind of thing, one always notices it and remembers it easily, however little else one may see.

” I asked him then whether he happened to remember the order in which the persons who had then been in the room left it.

Callaghan must in the course of it have produced on a person, who knew him only slightly, the impression of a good-natured, eccentric fellow, wholly without cunning and altogether unformidable. This was one point gained, but moreover,

Mr. Thalberg was rapidly falling into that nervous and helpless condition into which a weak man of business can generally be thrown by the unkind expedient of wasting his time.

It now appeared that the real subject on which Mr. Thalberg and I were to be consulted was the disposal of Callaghan’s papers in the event of his death.

None of the games, none of the sport that other boys get; no rubbing shoulders with my equals at school; no comradeship but only the company of my elders, mostly invalids.

Few people know what it is to be brought up soft.

But there was worse than that. You” (he was addressing Callaghan) “were piously brought up. Oh, yes, you were really.

But in my childhood nothing appealed to the heart, nothing was incontrovertible, above all, nothing was tacit.

Everlasting discussion, reaching back to the first principles of the universe, and branching out into such questions as whether children should be allowed popguns.

That was my moral training, and that was all my moral training.

none of the dry heat and bracing winters you have in Northern India); still I hope I did not bear him malice so much for that as for other things.

I have said I have no scruples, but I have no liking for ruffianism and cruelty.

I hate them for the same reason for which I hate some pictures and some architecture, because they are not to my taste.

still I hope I did not bear him malice so much for that as for other things. I have said I have no scruples, but I have no liking for ruffianism and cruelty.

I hate them for the same reason for which I hate some pictures and some architecture, because they are not to my taste.

But I had, in out-of-the-way places, among weak savages, where law and order had not come, to put up with seeing deeds done which people here at home would not believe were done by their countrymen, and which a man who has served his days …