Mycroft Holmes 03 - The Notched Hairpin

by H. F. Heard

  “Never mind,” smiled back Mr. M. “It will be worth a dirty hand or two to see the landscape.”

  She led us up to where at last the grand staircase shrank to attic stairs and these in turn dwindled to what was little more than an enclosed loft ladder. Mrs. Sprigg then paused, for the ascent had become steep and the way narrow. Neither her kindly but laboring heart nor her copious periphery could make the final grade.

  “You’ll find it ever so stuffy up there,” she called as a panting farewell.

  And to my surprise, when we reached the final stage and were about like chicks to break free, Mr. M. also paused and panted. Going ahead of me, he had reached the very top of the loft ladder and was about to push open the skylight door when he breathed deeply several times and bent his head. Then, recovering his wind, he pushed back the miniature glazed door-panel. A breeze came down, relieving the Mot, still air which, almost like a gas, had gathered in this pocket of unventilation and no doubt was the cause of the catch in his breath.

  I followed quickly, and we emerged onto as seemly a panorama as I’ve seen in its mild spaciousness. The Severn flowed in the distance—long stitches of silver threaded across the green. Blue Welsh hills closed the farther view, and all about was dale and orchard flowering and burgeoning, with silver-gray church towers and russet roofs of comfortable, seemly houses punctuating this easy, flowing picture-poetry of garden and field wealth.

  But, after Mr. M. had hummed Sabrina fair and then a bar or two from the Shropshire Lad’s “Bredon Hill,” he turned back and began to peer over at the other house we had so shortly left and which I thought we had certainly viewed with sufficient thoroughness, at least for the time being. Mr. M., however, seemed in a brown study as he leaned looking over the cornice, he himself appearing not wholly unlike one of those brooding gargoyles which, with their chins in their hands, stand on the top of Notre Dame and look out over Paris. Perhaps he was thinking up some notion as to how we might possibly still get the house for our summer stay. As I wasn’t quite sure whether I would like it if we could—murder is not my metier—and anyhow thought it very unlikely that even such a crafty person as my friend could really manage any such thing, I didn’t pay much attention to him. The view out over the countryside was wonderfully refreshing, and I was determined to enjoy it and let the sunlight, the gentle breeze, and the obvious security and comfort of the view brush from my mind the impressions of the morning.

  After a few minutes, Mr. M. came across to me proposing that, if I had taken in the topography, we go down. I agreed, but could gladly have spent half an hour dreamily gazing at that bright and reassuring landscape. I seconded him heartily when he told Mrs. Sprigg how much he had enjoyed the view. She took a motherly credit for the whole countryside as much as for her master’s house.

  “Shropshire born and bred,” she remarked. “And though we don’t take much count of those clever folk that never come back home but write clever rhymes about us, still, if I was a poet, I’d never fail for themes looking over this, our land.”

  We were now on such good terms because of our joint admiration that, when Mr. M. said, “Do you think I might come back tomorrow and have a second glimpse from this Pisgah? Today I didn’t know this treat was in store and so did not bring my field glasses with me,” she was all welcome. I must say, I felt that to peer with field glasses at a view which, if you had a real sense of landscape, should be taken in all as one—with a single stroke of the eye, as the French put it—showed, alas, in my old friend how much the scientist, with his passion for taking things to pieces, dominated over the artist, content to contemplate and become himself part of the beauty of the place.

  We walked back to the little town. At the inn, where we had had rooms engaged by our inspector friend, we found him packed and ready to catch the evening express back to London. Mr. M. explained that we’d be staying a day or perhaps two more, for we were, he remarked, if not killing two birds with one stone, trying to see whether one house could prove to be not merely a neat problem but a commodious perch. I remember particularly noting his repetition of that faint pleasantry. Perhaps he himself saw that it was so thin that it required “to be applied in two coats,” as house painters say. Its interest for me lay in the fact that such feeble little quips, as clearly as facial tics, prove (and I am quite as observant and able to build up a proof as he) that great power of penetration necessarily denies men like Mr. M. of a delicacy of surface touch, that sense of nuance and style which are the natural endowment of the man of taste and tact—in fine, the artist.

  Our inspector simply remarked, “Well, thank you for confirming me in my second thoughts. Though less dramatic, they are, I am sure, not only better but final, and not only final but happier. I must own to you privately, as you are really a colleague, I always feel not a little relief when what could be a suicide but may be a murder reverts to its first promise! Indeed, I often wonder whether we men of skill aren’t serving, in the judges and the lawyers, men who are really behind us in real understanding of crime. We should be thinking, I often think, not how it must be punished but how it may be understood and so prevented.”

  Mr. M. didn’t seem at all surprised at this confidential outburst. All he remarked was, “I’m glad we agree, Mr. Sark, on basic principles. Even if we should ever differ on detail, I shall feel, however I think or act; we mean au fond the same thing, and are aiming at the same goal.”

  The inspector was obviously pleased at thus being treated as a cher confrere and after a hard handshake went off.

  When he was gone, Mr. M. remarked, “A man who is not ashamed of knowing something about Impressionist painting, and also of modern theories of light and shade and the psychophysical problems of perception, is always a much wiser fellow than his professional cleverness would lead you to expect. He can ask questions, not merely find answers; open issues, not merely close cases; and, if you have to choose and have time to watch, you will find it is the clever who do the latter and the wise who do the former.”

  We dined quietly (and none too poorly), he with his thoughts and I with my impressions, and a roast duck in common. The day had certainly been a queer one. But through the rather sordid story, the quiet background seemed to be re-emerging, and I began to believe that, if I could obtain the house, I might find it, in spite of the incident-accident, as pleasant, after all, as I had first taken it to be.

  The next day, after breakfast, I heard Mr. M. ordering our lunch to be made up for us. As we set out on the two-mile walk he told me, “I believe that good Mistress Sprigg will let us lunch quietly in her master’s garden. It will be nice to have a day out of doors.”

  It was. Mr. M. had his fine field glasses with him, and we took our time viewing this and that as we went, and he picked a number of points that kept me entertained. When we arrived, Mrs. Sprigg asked us to take ourselves onto the roof, and we spent a considerable time appreciating at our leisure a view that showed no signs of palling—at least for me.

  But gradually Mr. M.’s unbalanced interest in the close-up—his master passion for microscopic investigation—began to draw him over to the side on which the other house blocked our full sweep of landscape. He took the glasses with him, and when I followed I actually found him looking through them down into the next garden! On my asking whether he was wishing to read the name labels on the flowers in the herbaceous border down, there, he remarked, “I was studying, The allys trim and pleached walks: The laurelled triumphs of the topiarist: Who carves his will, but not through carnage wrought: Whose bays, themselves, yield him his victories!’ Yes, yes, ‘As if his only plot, To plant the Bergamot!’ A garden should keep one innocent, shouldn’t it?”

  And then, as we had climbed so high, seeing it was obviously ridiculous that we should employ the long-distance glasses we had brought only to pore on a garden we had already viewed on the spot, he read my thoughts and offered the binoculars with, “Would you not like these, further to study the larger view? That may be Pershore Abbey in
the distance, and possibly you could get a glimpse of Malvern’s, too. If we come here for the summer, both, I believe, warrant a visit.” And with that, leaving me to roam the leagues, he went back to brood on the narrow-bound which so long had been his real perspective.

  When I came back at last, having taken in quite a good deal, he had given up even this peering into the next garden. As I came toward him, he scrambled up from his knees. For a moment I suffered a twinge of alarm. Was this another attack of breathlessness, like that which had taken him just before we had completed our climb up to this, our present airy station? As I found him now, he had just risen from kneeling with his elbows resting on the parapet. But to my sympathetic question, he simply replied in that Mycroft manner, “Kneeling is today a neglected way of resting and clearing the mind. And look at this odd object I’ve found, actually by kneeling on it where it lay just under this coving of the breastwork. What do you think it can be?”

  To that question, did I know what it was, he no doubt expected from me a refreshingly vacant but interested “No.” But I was able quite quickly, and with no little pleasure at my not being at a loss, to say I did.

  “It’s what is called a stretcher,” I remarked. “I’ve watched gardeners—when I’ve been sitting in gardens—using such things when putting up wire fences for creeping plants to grow on. It’s really a jointed lever—works on the principle of a spring shoetree.”

  His further, “What do you think it’s doing here?” didn’t find me at a loss either. Looking round, I saw that the mellow old tiles, assaulted by equinoctial gales, showed the signs that Mrs. Sprigg had told us about below. They had been defended and held fast by wires stretched along their courses. Pointing at them, I remarked, “It was used for that job, I feel sure.” An then, beginning to feel hungry, I suggested that we might take a real close-up and see what the hotel had given us.

  “It’s a bit drafty and at the same time hot up here,” he replied. “Let’s go down into the garden.”

  It was a right suggestion and I fell in with it. For a moment Mr. M. fingered the stretcher and I thought he was going to take it along with him. But finally he seemed to have decided to leave it where it was in no one’s way. For when we assembled ourselves, after our climb down had brought us to the top of the proper stairs and we could go abreast, only that portfolio, without which he would feel himself as undressed as would I without my necktie, was in his hand.

  When we came into the presence of Mrs. Sprigg, she was graciousness itself as he asked if we might eat in her garden, and insisted on adding to our solids a magnum bottle of the local cider to keep our liquid balance, as bankers say, on the right side. Yes, the day was going well.

  But of course Mr. M. couldn’t settle at once to eat in the obvious place which my eye had picked out immediately as the picnic spot. Though there was no bower, this place, like its twin over the way, had grass banks and seats set under the warm side of the yew hedges. Almost as though he were a game dog, he must smell and poke about before he could come to rest. So naturally in the end he did succeed—and serve him right—in coming on the seamy side of even this seemly place. He ferreted out the incinerator, nicely concealed behind the thickest yew hedge at the very bottom of the garden and set against the terminal brick wall. And then? Now that you know him, you will believe it, so I needn’t ask, “Could you?” He poked about in the debris, “just to reconstruct,” as he used to say, “the life of the place”—that horrid archaeological passion that never can see the thing as it is but always wants to pull it to pieces to see how it came to be as nice as it is, and is far more interested in fossilized refuse than in living beauty. “Dissecting the fairest complexion, To see how the blushes arrive!”

  I had just thought of that rather pretty couplet—which made me less inclined to be satirical, as I myself had just produced a spray of loveliness—when Mr. M. turned to me, “Find a place in the sun. I know you can always do that, and I’ll join you in a moment.”

  I was certainly ready to be dismissed to a happier spot. As I left him I saw that, as he had succeeded in finding nothing that even for a moment took his fancy but some old packages which had contained that far too virile tobacco, Gold Flake, he had taken up the big pronged stoker’s fork and, like a medieval devil, had begun to poke in the depths of the still smoldering furnace.

  I had, however, only had time to settle myself in, spread the lunch out, select a wing of chicken, a couple of slices of tongue and some salad, and pour myself a glass of the cider, when he appeared round the corner from his shabby retirement. Need I say, he was with a find. And once more my luck held up under the routine sentry-challenge.

  “What do you think this is?”

  As promptly as on the roof, I answered.

  “It is what is called a laminated spring. Further, I would venture to say, with high probability that amounts to practical certainty, that it comes from one of those old wheelchairs which were so sprung—those chairs in which late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century gout victims and apoplectics, who had had their first port-invoked strokes, were hauled about by what were called Bath-chair men. Not only do I know my cartoonists, my Gilray and Rowlandson, but, as it happens, my grandmother, though she never took port, was, if I may pun, towed to her port and final berth—like that ancient, demoded battleship, The Fighting Téméraire,’ in Turner’s somewhat hackneyed picture—in just such a Bath chair. Often, in that devious departure, I, as dutiful child and potential, if then distant, residual legatee, walked clad in sailor costume beside her equipage, at the funeral pace at which that kind of vehicle proceeded, and wiled away the boredom by fancying how I might use one of those small but tough springs that bounced her bulk up and down over the cobbles.”

  Again I think Mr. M. was taken aback at my luck, which twice in succession had balked him of his wish to explain, because in advance I knew. I added, taking another glass of the really excellent cider, “No doubt, one of the earlier owners of this gracious spot was eighteenth century in all his ways and, as a ‘three bottle man’ when bottles meant port and were crusted, himself became somewhat crusted in old age; had his first stroke; took to his Bath chair; and so made, a little later, his final journey to the parish church, where he settled down for good behind a fine slab of imported Carrara marble. The Bath chair hung about until some tidy person in this age of tidiness kindly cremated it, and sent it, Chinese-wise, to carry the old ancestor in state through the courts and gardens of the other world. This, without doubt, is its relic.”

  I was pleased with the élan of my counterattack.

  Mr. M. was so rebuffed that he had to remark to cover his retreat, “Perhaps if you could spare me a little of that cider I might become almost as eloquent and your walk home possibly less devious.”

  But when he had drunk his share and we had munched in the silence of content till there was nothing left of our supplies but the paper that had wrapped them, all he said was, “I think I’d better take these traces of our fête champêtre and, like a good detective, conceal our tracks.”

  I stayed while he loped off round the corner to dispose of what to his mind was a possible clue.

  After the incinerator had received its due, he reappeared and we ambled back to the house. We were met by a beaming Mrs. Sprigg, who, after hoping we had enjoyed our lunch and obviously registering pleasure as the five shillings passed silently from the lean detective fingers to the round fine hand that I felt sure was light with pastry and firm with kitchen maids, broke out with, “Just had a telegram and Mr. Millum is coming back! He took it so hard, you know, Sir. Just shows what a good heart he has. Not an eye in the whole neighborhood was the dimmer, I’ll warrant, when our over-the-way took himself off. A good riddance, I say, and they seldom do, but this did!”

  The syntax of that sentence is obscure, but I have faithfully remembered it, and its sense was not really cryptic.

  “Even Jane, whom I will own is a worker, if a bit on the garulious side, and doesn’t mind who she wor
ks for, as long as they lets her work as she likes—I was never that sort myself—but even Jane had her views and feels her reliefs. But Mr. Millum is that softhearted and sensitive, as you might say, that he felt it just like a shock. There he was, always running over to that side of the road, though that side, of all my time, and that’s in years now, never set foot here, and that I’m glad to say. You’d have thought he’d be relieved; for Jane has so often told me that I was near tired of hearing it, that Mr. Millum would be treated as though he wasn’t there, while all the while he was all interest and niceness, until something wanted being done, and then he could do it and just whistle for any thanks. Indeed, time and again he’d suggest doing some little thing and would grudgingly be let. It’s all the wrong way, anyone who has brought up a brat knows that; but there, he has such a kind heart, and thank Heaven he lives with such as can appreciate a real gentleman when they sees it.”

  We took our leave, feeling that such a homecoming shouldn’t run any risk of being run into by strangers. Besides, quite possibly the unknown Millum might prefer that strangers had not been using his house.

  As we walked home through the pleasant afternoon light, although my steps were far from unsteady, I was in that ruminative mood in which enough good cider can put the mind. I did not feel inclined to interrupt Mr. M.’s silence, and evidently, as I had so successfully countered his two attempts to stump me, he had no wish to talk to me.

  After dinner he was silent and went off to bed. I had thought he would suggest our going back to town; but I myself proposed nothing, partly because I was drowsy, and partly because I hadn’t made up my mind about the house now without an owner. I was very much taken with it, and to discover such a place untenanted was a find. Perhaps, as Mr. M. said, since the late occupant had removed himself while outside the actual building, the unconventionality of the method ought to be overlooked in favor of the convenience of the results. If I worked in that bower, I would work there during the day and not at night.