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He floated out,
A glance up and down the passage having apparently satisfied him that it was, for the
moment, Spodeless, he slipped out and was gone.
He looked like an annoyed turbot.
It is about time,” I proceeded, “that some public-spirited person came along and told you where you got off. The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting ‘Heil, Spode!’ and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: ‘Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?’ ”
looking back, I can see that where I went wrong was in pausing to hit the bulge which, from the remarks that were coming through at that spot, I took to be Spode’s head, with a china vase that stood on the mantelpiece not far from where the Infant Samuel had been. It was a strategical error.
“What on earth have you got that thing round your neck for?” she asked. Then, in more tolerant vein: “Wear it if you like, of course, but it doesn’t suit you.”
churned him up like an egg-whisk.
when the girl, waiting till she saw the whites of its eyes, with extraordinary presence of mind suddenly opened a coloured Japanese umbrella in the animal’s face. Upon which, it did three back somersaults and retired into private life.
I wouldn't have believed it possible for so tough an egg to sidle obsequiously, but that was how he now sidled up to me.
she snorted like a bison at the water-trough.
I had come upon a significant passage.
“I have come upon a significant passage.”
an odd, gargling sort of noise, something like static and something like distant thunder, and to cut a long story short this proved to proceed from the larynx of the
dog Bartholomew.
It was plain that for some reason the soul had got a flat tyre,
Here, with a sniff like the tearing of a piece of calico, she buried the bean in her hands, and broke into what are called uncontrollable sobs.
perched on the dome of Constable Eustace Oates.
he in tweeds and a dirty look.
pince-nezing me coldly.
He seemed to have aged quite a lot.
He became silent, except for a soft, groaning noise. I remembered another good one. “You will not be losing a niece. You will be gaining a nephew.”
uttered a sound like the death-rattle of a dying duck.
drooping on her stem a goodish deal,
In the absence of these food stuffs, we were thrown back a good deal on straight staring, and this always tends to embarrass.
She was breathing emotionally, like the dog Bartholomew just after he had finished eating the candle.
pointing a banana-like finger over my shoulder.
When he saw me slip the volume into my pocket, I sensed the feeling of bereavement.
and what the ordinary, normal person with a couple of ounces more brain than a cuckoo clock would do were two vastly different things,
to shed the upholstery.
His spectacles were glittering in a hunted sort of way, and there was more than a touch of the fretful porcupine about his hair.
I raised a third hand.
a trembling handkerchief.
you ghastly goggle-eyed piece of gorgonzola,
she could make her wishes respected across two ploughed fields and a couple of spinneys.
A moment before, I had been dully conscious that nothing could save me from the soup. Already I had seemed to hear the beating of its wings.
One peers into the future, and shudders at what one sees there.
He had his helmet again, but you could see that he was beginning to ask himself if helmets were everything.
