Library / Literature & Fiction
The Sleuth of St. James's Square
- Pages
- about 289
- Category
- Literature & Fiction
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 5.3 h at 250 wpm
From the opening
“THE first confirmatory evidence of the thing, Excellency, was the print
of a woman's bare foot.”
He was an immense creature. He sat in an upright chair that seemed to
have been provided especially for him. The great bulk of him flowed out
and filled the chair. It did not seem to be fat that enveloped him. It
seemed rather to be some soft, tough fiber, like the pudgy mass making
up the body of a deep-sea thing. One got an impression of strength.
The country was before the open window; the clusters of cultivated shrub
on the sweep of velvet lawn extending to the great wall that inclosed
the place, then the bend of the river and beyond the distant mountains,
blue and mysterious, blending indiscernibly into the sky. A soft sun,
clouded with the haze of autumn, shone over it.
“You know how the faint moisture in the bare foot will make an
impression.”
He paused as though there was some compelling force in the reflection.
It was impossible to say, with accuracy, to what race the man belonged.
He came from some queer blend of Eastern peoples. His body and the
cast of his features were Mongolian. But one got always, before him, a
feeling of the hot East lying low down against the stagnant Suez. One
felt that he had risen slowly into our world of hard air and sun out of
the vast sweltering ooze of it.
He spoke English with a certain care in the selection of the words, but
with ease and an absence of effort, as though languages were instinctive
to him--as though he could speak any language. And he impressed one with
this same effortless facility in all the things he did.
It is necessary to try to understand this, because it explains the
conception everybody got of the creature, when they saw him in charge of
Rodman.
A short sample. Read the whole book
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