Mycroft Holmes 03 - The Notched Hairpin

by H. F. Heard

  The question was in my mind for some days, partly because at every meal I was reminded of it by seeing my honey stock run lower and partly because when I went to do shopping in the village I couldn’t avoid hearing—like a sort of Handel chorus—the same phrases over and over again till I had the whole story. Ours is a compact little village, almost a townlet, so you can get most of the things you want and, indeed, quite a number I’ve no wish for. So I can do most of my shopping without having to send away for things. The story interlined my own business questions and answers.

  “Dr. Able knew a case just like that before.” “Dr. Able and the coroner talked it over in court.” “Heregrove said the bees had been cross and quarrelsome with him lately and he’d told his wife.”

  “The coroner said it was a plain, sad case, an accident.” “The coroner said the bees should be destroyed and Heregrove said he’d be doing that anyhow.”

  Well, that settled my concern, such as it was. I’d have to find another supply-source. That led to the second accident, my second honey hazard, which I now see was needed to bring the first, which I had already taken quite unconsciously, into play.

  Chapter II

  THE NEW BEEKEEPER

  I had to find another honey seller. Beekeepers were evidently very scarce, though I did not know how scarce. And, further, my dread of business dealings leading, if made with amateurs, to social entanglements, meant that I couldn’t seek in the village itself asking all and sundry if any hive fanciers were known. I was determined to find a retailer who would not involve me in village life. And luck, as I thought, came my way at my first cast. But luck is a neutral word; it can be bad, just as well as good. This, after all, was bad. But perhaps I’d better leave luck alone. I don’t like the word much. It has a superstitious flavor and I’m just superstitious enough, and clever enough, to know what a lot we don’t know, and to leave superstitions severely alone. I’m not yet out of this wood or I wouldn’t be so carefully retracing my steps in this account. Heaven only knows where it may all end. So I’ll be cautious and say it was Destiny which took me along Waller’s Lane.

  It’s a pretty walk, anyhow, and one of the least frequented. There are one or two houses along it, but they stand so well back and are so well screened that you would hardly notice them. I never had, beyond being vaguely aware that there must be some dwellings thereabouts. You couldn’t avoid knowing that, for a small gate or two open through the high overgrown hedges here and there. I was wandering along, so much enjoying the quiet that I’d forgotten any purpose in my walk but the pleasure of taking it. For the lane dips after half a mile and there you are in a mossy sunken road which at that time of year, full summer, is like a garden. I don’t care for big views. They somehow make me yawn. Perhaps I’m not long-sighted enough. But high, sloping banks covered with flowering wild plants seem to me the best possible scenery. Just at the right range, changing all the time and at the right angle.

  I had, as it happened, actually stopped to look at half a dozen uncommonly tall snapdragon spires in full bloom, when, following their stalks to the top, my eye was caught by something beyond and above them. It was a small notice poking its head through the hedge at the bank’s top. Seeing it, I noticed that there was a footpath gate beside it. The lettering of the notice was too small for me to read from where I stood, so, almost involuntarily, I mounted the steps which I found set in tussocks of grass. It was with nothing but amusement and pleasure, with no foreboding at all, that I read in quite beautifully spaced and shaped Roman letters: “The Proprietor has at present a certain amount of surplus honey of which he would be willing to dispose.”

  I think I’ve said that, although I’m not a writer and correspond as little as possible, I rather pride myself on my calligraphy. A scrambling age sees no discourtesy in illegibility and no gain in penmanship. But I do. I saw at a glance that the hand that wrote that notice saw more in handwriting than the surface sense of the words. “The style is the man”; very well, the hand is the gentleman. The lettering was, as all notices should be, based on the incomparable capitals of the Trajan Column, but anyone whose “caps” were so sensitive and whose serifs so assured would certainly command, I thought, an excellent italic. Then there was the intriguing fact that a notice, written with such care, should be posted in a moss-grown lane and, moreover, almost out of sight. And, finally, here was my honey—a supply as sequestered as I could require.

  Three things like these coming together are some explanation—if the whole thing seems inexcusable—for my unprecedented precipitancy. Almost without reflecting what reception I might meet and what involvements I might incur, I lifted the latch, walked up a path which wound through a hazel thicket, and suddenly found myself, to quote “poor, dear” Mr. Yeats, in a “bee-loud glade.” A lawn on three sides had dense herbaceous borders sloping up to thick yew hedges, over the top of which a fringe of hazel sprays could be seen. On the fourth side the lawn ended in a low white house with french windows opening onto the grass.

  On the lawn itself, in tidy ranks, stood those miniature Swiss chalets which have taken the place of the romantic but I understand insanitary skep. The air was dense with the chalets’ population. After our village tragedy, I stood with some apprehension wondering where these queer socialists might rule that trespass began, honey-making must stop, and all workers must unite to attack the exploiter. I was keeping my eye so carefully cocked to judge whether an air attack might be impending that I started with surprise when a quiet voice at my elbow remarked, “They are not militant workers, these. I get quite good enough results up till now, at least for my purposes, from the Dutch queens, so I don’t continually disturb the poor things’ temperament. They are nervous enough anyhow, without making them more excitable with Italian blood.”

  I turned to see beside me a serene face, a sort of unpolitical Dante, if I may so put it and not seem high-brow. It was cold, perhaps; or maybe it would be juster to say it was super-cooled, cooled by thought until the moods and passions which in most of us are liquid or even gaseous had become set and solid—a face which might care little for public opinion but much for its opinion of itself.

  But I mustn’t run on like this. I expect it is the fault of a bad writer—can’t keep down to facts. Perhaps I didn’t notice all this at once. But I was impressed, I know, because I remember saying to myself, “How like Dante,” and then having to check myself (for my mind is always flighty, as anyone will see who has got as far as this) because I began to speculate whether if Dante were reincarnated today what he would do to get in his visit to Hell. Where would he find the cave opening? In modern war, maybe, or in a city slum, but hardly in the country or in a village.

  “You are my first purchaser,” he went on, evidently seeing that my mind was wandering and wishing to put me at my ease. “It is good of you to walk over so far from your place—”

  “You know me, then?” I interrupted. “I don’t go much into the village and have no friends there and don’t remember catching sight of your face. You are a newcomer, aren’t you? I often come down the lane but don’t remember seeing before the notice which explains my call.”

  “No one else has,” he replied. “It has been there a little while and considerable numbers of the village ‘quality’ have come down the lane, but none has troubled to go up the steps to see what is written on it.”

  That remark surprised me. It seemed out of character, somehow. I couldn’t resist, therefore, saying, though it was perhaps a little impertinent, “You keep as close a watch on your lane and your notice as a fisherman on his stream and float.”

  “In a way, yes and no,” he smiled, evidently not at all put out by my personal remark.

  I thought, however, that it would be polite to put myself back into the picture.

  “You come up to our end of the village and have seen my house?” I questioned.

  “I must confess, no,” he answered, again smiling. “You see,” he added, “I have been busy settling in for some time
and, like yourself, my reason for coming to the country was not for company but to be busy with all these incessant interests which the town, with its distractions, never really tolerates.”

  “But how, then—”

  “Well,” he kindly forestalled me, “there are so many ways of being wise after the event that I have sometimes thought during my life that if we would only act on that rather despised motto we would need to ask far fewer questions—which you and I agree are always, if only the slightest, infringement of that privacy we both prize so highly.”

  I could not help smiling at the way he had read my thoughts and he smiled, at least with the muscles round his keen eyes if not with his thin lips.

  “No one,” he continued, “who has taken some little care not to disregard things can fail to notice how much of our past and our settled environment we carry about with us wherever we go. I’m not a geologist, but soils always repay a little attention. This village, like many another in England, is a jigsaw puzzle of earths. That, by the way, tells us something about the past. Our ancestors planted these settlements in order to live off the soil, not to retire from town. So there have to be water and woodland and tilth: woods for fuel and the hogs’ pfannage; good soil for harvests and, above all, good water. To get all that means living where the layers of soil have been cut by water so as to give man a selvaged slice of each of the qualities he wants.

  “Now you live up at what was the clay end of the village. I’m nearer the light heath soil. You have tiny patches of dried clay on your trousers. One clue helps another. I probably should not have been able to pick up that first clue which tells me where you live if it had not been able to give me the second indication—that you live alone and don’t like being looked after too rigorously—in fact, can entertain yourself best when alone.”

  “But why—”

  “The notice,” he intervened, “which is well written, asking the passer-by to purchase and yet put just out of ordinary eye-range? An experiment. Village life, we agree, is a problem. Free, yes, but apt to lose its freedom even more quickly than town. A researcher does not need absolute solitude. Indeed, when I was working, I often found that it helped to talk over a problem with an interested if less absorbed mind. Some steps of reasoning can be run through and checked more quickly in speech than by writing them down, and often the listener, however inexpert, will see a slip oneself has overlooked.”

  A curiously simple and neat Naturally Selective trap, I thought.

  “You’ll be thinking I treat my neighbors as prey and you sprung the gin. But I may want help on a problem which should interest the right man as much as it intrigues me. I’m not an apiarist and don’t want to meet such specialists. You remember Henry Ford’s dictum: ‘A specialist is someone who is always telling you what can’t be done.’ In pure, as well as in applied science, I have found that to be true—someone who tells you that it has all been found out, that there is no further mystery, there is nothing more to discover.”

  “You’re doing research in bees,” I interrupted, “but I only want to eat their honey!”

  “You shall; but hear me out. Then, if you become my customer and not my acquaintance, I can have the parcel of honey left on you regularly and you need not risk any further conversation. I came down here to study bees. Honey to me is simply a by-product I must dispose of. I’m not a Maeterlinckist! I believe he greatly overrates the intelligence of bees. Anyhow, I’m not interested in what intelligence they may have. All my life I have been estimating human intelligence not by its books or words but by its tracks. Now I want to study something else, but still by its tracks. I want to know about bees’ reactions. After all, they are social beings given to living in dense towns. But, though like us, how different! There are no end of problems to be studied. There are the particular flowers they go to, the peculiar vision they have so as to pick out such blooms, and so the particular sort of honey they yield. We might get special brands of honey from certain broods—”

  I was faintly interested, but began to feel much more strongly that I wanted to get my honey and get away.

  “Yes,” I said vaguely. “I expect a market could be found for super-honey just as for special proprietary jams and marmalades.”

  He saw my restlessness.

  “If you will step inside I will make up a parcel for you,” he remarked, leading me toward the house.

  We entered a room on the left of the hall. It was evidently his laboratory.

  “I will bring you the combs and the jars in a moment,” he said. “I apologize for boring you. Yes, yes, and it was not—I must again beg your pardon—unintentional. You remember Oscar Wilde’s silly remark, ‘A gentleman is one who is never rude unintentionally?’ I think, however, it may be more truly said that a trained mind is one which never bores unintentionally.”

  The boredom which had been growing vanished, and again I felt a not altogether pleasant surprise. One gets stiff when faintly startled.

  “I’m afraid I don’t quite understand, Mr.—?”

  “Mycroft, if you will,” he answered, with that quiet smile of his which was certainly disarming. “The truth is,” he added, “I did first put up my notice as a sort of wager with myself as to whether in this village I should find a fellow curioso—not a specialist, not a conventionalist. I own I discovered, almost before you did, that I had lost my bet.”

  “Why, then,” I acidly remarked, “did you continue?”

  “Please step over here,” came the quick reply, almost an order. He was standing with his hand on a down-turned glass bell jar. It covered a square of white paper on which lay a small object. The step I took, almost involuntarily at his command, brought me where I could see what it was.

  “A dead bee?” I asked, somewhat challengingly. He lifted the glass bulb and handed me a large magnifying glass. As soon as I took it, with a pair of forceps, he lifted another dead bee off the window sill and placed it beside the first on the square of paper.

  “Would you, please, examine these two bodies through the lens?”

  “They don’t look very different to me,” I was just replying, when under the lens a forceps point advanced and pressed on the abdomen of one of the dead bees. The body cockled a little and quite clearly the saber-curved sting was thrust out, and retracted as soon as the pressure was released. Before I could ask what such an unilluminating experiment showed, however, the forceps point darted onto the abdomen of the second bee, depressed it in the same way, and out came the sting—but what a sting! It curved round until it seemed it would pierce through the chitin mail of the dead insect’s own thorax.

  The voice at my shoulder said, “There’s a pretty problem here. The last is, of course, an Italian—fierce bees, anyhow, but I think, from comparing the body with some care with standard Italians, that this is a special variety. Certainly it was psychologically remarkable, even if the rest of it, except for that sting, is physiologically normal. It had the temper of a hornet. It attacked until it was killed. Of course, it came in a troop, so I dissected a number of them. They all had these super-stings. That was remarkable enough to an amateur apiarist; but what was even more remarkable was the result of a small biochemical experiment.”

  Turning to a shelf, he took out of a rack a glass phial not thicker than a knitting needle.

  “There are hardly half a dozen drops of venom in this tube,” he remarked. “I have had to gather it from the stings of these bees. Perhaps I would have overlooked the necessity of doing so if it had not been that when my colonies were attacked—when I saw what was on, I myself donned bee-veils and gloves and got ready to defend myself with a special bee-smoker—my poor mastiff ran out. The invaders were not really attending to us, any more than we human beings, in a battle, waste our ammunition on the crows and vultures. But one of these miniature monsters swooped past us, caught the dog’s smell, dived, struck, and my poor Rollo gave one howl and fell over. He struggled for some time when I carried him inside. I thought a camphor injection was going
to bring him through, though his pain was obviously so great that I thought of putting a bullet in his brain if it did not cease. But suddenly rigors seized him, his tongue lolled out, and he was dead.

  “I have had the opportunity of studying toxicology for some years. The only venom I can compare this with in strength—though, of course, its chemical base is the formic acids group—is the incomparably virulent secretion of two spiders—the small yellow which is found in northern Queensland and the so-called black widow of southern California. Even the giant ant lately found in Guiana, Paraponera Clavata, though one sting of it can paralyze a limb for some hours, does not approach the toxicity of this poison.”

  “But,” I said, “what does all this mean?”

  I felt, rather than fully recognized, a growing sinisterness in the atmosphere. I wanted to get away, wished I’d never come, but felt somehow that to go off now with the problem all vague and pervasive was only to carry it with me, like a swarm of bees trailing a man who can’t shake them off his track! His next words confirmed my doubts and made my misgivings all too unpleasantly definite.

  “I told you I put up my notice because, first, I wanted to carry out a casual experiment in seeing whether I could select a possible confrère, and then, after I had a more remarkable visit than I had counted on by what I think I may call in every sense of the word inhuman visitors, I saw I must signal for someone who had two characteristics—that he was a bit of a recluse, so that he might not gossip about what even then seemed as though it might turn out to be a business both ugly and easily driven out of reach, and also that he was a honey lover.”

  “Why the honey part?” I said, rather feebly and vaguely. My whole thought was bent on the unpleasant realization of how, like a fly limed on flypaper, I was getting every moment more firmly embedded in this beastly business.

  “Because you certainly have noticed that the Heregroves were the only people who sold honey in this place. They may not do well. It is hardly a millionaire’s occupation, but they have had no other. So anyone who was a honey fancier and so would not buy the shop’s stuff, could tell me about the Heregroves, for he would certainly be their customer.”