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November 11 - November 15, 2024
“So, if I lost all my money, you’d drop me tomorrow?” “Yes, darling, I would. You can’t say I’m not honest about it! I only like successful people.
“I’m only on the make, like everyone else.” “I’m not on the make!” “For obvious reasons! You don’t have to be sordid when good-looking, middle-aged American trustees pay you over a vast allowance every quarter.”
“Enemies, my sweet. You’re so devastatingly efficient. And you’re so frightfully good at doing the right thing.” Linnet laughed. “Why, I haven’t got an enemy in the world.”
I know I’m mad, darling, but I can’t help it. Marriage will cure me, I expect. It always seems to have a very sobering effect on people.”
disadvantage: They distract the mind from food!
“How true is the saying that man was forced to invent work in order to escape the strain of having to think.”
How absurd to call youth the time of happiness—youth, the time of greatest vulnerability!
the girl’s young, fresh, arrogant, with just a trace of soft-sounding foreign R’s, and the man’s pleasant, low-toned, well-bred English.
“Une qui aime et un qui se laisse aimer. Yes, I wonder too.”
To be mistress of Charltonbury was a position unsurpassed in society. Windlesham was one of the most desirable peers in England.
Mrs. Allerton was a good-looking, white-haired woman of fifty. By imparting an expression of pinched severity to her mouth every time she looked at her son, she sought to disguise the fact of her intense affection for him.
Nowadays young people seem to think they can just go about doing anything they choose.” Tim smiled. “They don’t only think it. They do it. Vide Linnet Ridgeway!”
“You and Joanna don’t mind what you say about people; anything will do so long as it’s sufficiently ill-natured.”
Stout women oughtn’t to be allowed to bathe anyway; they look so revolting in bathing dresses.”
“Oh, no, Mrs. Robson; I shall take good care of that. I keep a very sharp look out always.” But there was still a faint shadow on Mrs. Robson’s face as she slowly continued down the stairs.
But there she was quite wrong—for a matter of life and death was exactly what it was.
Hercule Poirot made vague gestures to rid himself of this human cluster of flies. Rosalie stalked through them like a sleepwalker.
She came ashore playing a role, even though she played it unconsciously. The rich beautiful society bride on her honeymoon.
“I’m being dreadfully lazy. I really must set to. My public is getting terribly impatient—and my publisher, poor man! Appeals by every post! Even cables!”
“Then you have heard portions of the Bible read aloud in church. You have heard of King David and of the rich man who had many flocks and herds and the poor man who had one ewe lamb—and of how the rich man took the poor man’s one ewe lamb. That was something that happened, Madame.”
But that is not the way you react. No, to you this persecution is intolerable—and why? It can be for one reason only—that you feel a sense of guilt.”
Pardon me if I have been impertinent, but the psychology, it is the most important factor in a case.”
“She threatened to—well—kill us both. Jackie can be rather—hot-headed sometimes.” “I see.” Poirot’s tone was grave.
“Love is not everything, Mademoiselle,” Poirot said gently. “It is only when we are young that we think it is.”
“Look at the moon up there. You see her very plainly, don’t you? She’s very real. But if the sun were to shine you wouldn’t be able to see her at all. It was rather like that.
With a quick gesture she fumbled in a little silk bag that lay on the seat. Then she held out her hand. On the palm of it was a small pearl-handled pistol—a dainty toy it looked. “Nice little thing, isn’t it? she said. “Looks too foolish to be real, but it is real! One of those bullets would kill a man or a woman. And I’m a good shot.”
“It is deeper than that. Do not open your heart to evil.” Her lips fell apart; a look of bewilderment came into her eyes. Poirot went on gravely: “Because—if you do—evil will come . . . Yes, very surely evil will come . . . It will enter in and make its home within you, and after a little while it will no longer be possible to drive it out.”
But I’m afraid—yes, afraid sometimes—it all goes red—I want to hurt her—to stick a knife into her, to put my dear little pistol close against her head and then—just press with my finger—Oh!”
Simon Doyle was frowning a little. He belonged to that type of men of action who find it difficult to put thoughts into words and who have trouble in expressing themselves clearly.
“My dear Monsieur Poirot—how can I put it? It’s like the moon when the sun comes out. You don’t know it’s there anymore.
And then they come back and stare and stare and their eyes are simply disgusting and so are their noses,and I don’t believe I really like children—not unless they’re more or less washed and have the rudiments of manners.”
“Do people interest you too, Monsieur Poirot? Or do you reserve your interest for potential criminals?” “Madame—that category would not leave many people outside it.”
“I’m trying to imagine motives for crime suitable for everyone in the hotel. It’s quite entertaining. Simon Doyle, for instance?” Poirot said, smiling: “A very simple crime—a direct shortcut to his objective. No subtlety about it.” “And therefore very easily detected?” “Yes; he would not be ingenious.” “And Linnet?” “That would be like the Queen in your Alice in Wonderland, ‘Off with her head.’”
And the dangerous girl—Jacqueline de Bellefort—could she do a murder?” Poirot hesitated for a minute or two, then he said doubtfully, “Yes, I think she could.” “But you’re not sure?” “No. She puzzles me, that little one.”
“Take the Pyramids. Great blocks of useless masonry, put up to minister to the egoism of a despotic bloated king. Think of the sweated masses who toiled to build them and died doing it. It makes me sick to think of the suffering and torture they represent.” Mrs. Allerton said cheerfully: “You’d rather have no Pyramids, no Parthenon, no beautiful tombs or temples—just the solid satisfaction of knowing that people got three meals a day and died in their beds.” The young man directed his scowl in her direction. “I think human beings matter more than stones.” “But they do not endure as well,”
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It wasn’t as though he had the ordinary Britisher’s dislike—and mistrust—of foreigners. Tim was very cosmopolitan. Oh, well—she sighed. Men were incomprehensible!
“It looks frightfully simple to me,” said Tim. “Just a length of stuff with a kind of cord round the middle.” “Yes, darling,” said his mother. “A very nice manly description of an eighty-guinea model.” “I can’t think why women pay so much for their clothes,” Tim said. “It seems absurd to me.”
In my profession—er—I am a lawyer—I find ladies sadly unbusinesslike. Never to sign a document unless you read it through is admirable—altogether admirable.”
Mr. Ferguson sighed, stirred his legs and remarked to the world at large, “Gosh, I’d like to scrag that dame.”
“Yes. That girl in here just now, signing share transfers and throwing her weight about. Hundreds and thousands of wretched workers slaving for a mere pittance to keep her in silk stockings and useless luxuries. One of the richest women in England, so someone told me—and never done a hand’s turn in her life.”
“Ought to be shot—the lot of them!” he asserted. “My dear young man,” said Poirot, “what a passion you have for violence!” “Can you tell me of any good that can be done without it? You’ve got to break down and destroy before you can build up.”
“Good God!” The young man seemed seriously taken aback. “Do you mean that girl actually totes about a dumb dick? Is she as careful of her precious skin as that?”
Leaning over the rail Tim Allerton was saying: “Anyhow, it’s a rotten world. . . .” Rosalie Otterbourne answered: “It’s unfair; some people have everything.” Poirot sighed. He was glad that he was no longer young.
It fleeted across Poirot’s mind that it seemed to be Cornelia’s fate either to be bullied or instructed. In any case she was always the listener, never the talker.
And then, just as they reached the gangplank, Simon stopped dead. A look of amazement spread over his face. Jacqueline de Bellefort was just coming ashore. Dressed in blue gingham, she looked childish this morning. “Good God!” said Simon under his breath. “So it was an accident, after all.”
Miss Van Schuyler was slowly returning on the arm of Miss Bowers. A little farther away Mrs. Allerton was standing laughing at the little Nubian row of heads. Mrs. Otterbourne was with her. The others were nowhere in sight.
“Fey?” Mrs. Allerton put her head on one side as she considered her reply. “Well, it’s a Scotch word, really. It means the kind of exalted happiness that comes before disaster. You know—it’s too good to be true.”
It isn’t the people who ostensibly lead the rioters that we’re after. It’s the men who very cleverly put the match to the gunpowder. There were three of them. One’s dead. One’s in prison. I want the third man—a man with five or six cold-blooded murders to his credit. He’s one of the cleverest paid agitators that ever existed . . . He’s on this boat. I know that from a passage in a letter that passed through our hands.
“I shouldn’t worry. People who go about talking of what they are going to do don’t usually do it.”
“Don’t you realize—and you an American—that everyone is born free and equal?” “They’re not,” said Cornelia with calm certainty. “My good girl, it’s part of your constitution!” “Cousin Marie says politicians aren’t gentlemen,” said Cornelia. “And of course people aren’t equal. It doesn’t make sense. I know I’m kind of homely-looking, and I used to feel mortified about it sometimes, but I’ve got over that. I’d like to have been born elegant and beautiful like Mrs. Doyle, but I wasn’t, so I guess it’s no use worrying.”
