The Notched Hairpin

by H. F. Heard

  He stopped again and then said slowly, “You are really free if you choose to tell me now, to my face, that the ‘No’ you said just now did not apply to the question I asked, and that when you said you were cornered, you were not referring to what I thought you were.”

  He waited, and there was a dead silence in which I held my breath for fear they would hear it.

  Then Millum said slowly, again, “No, no, I don’t want to go back on that. I don’t want to go back at all. What I’ve said, I repeat: I did it, I’m sorry, but I did it. I know enough now to know that just by keeping quiet I shan’t have ended this. It’s got to end, to be finished. It is for you to decide how. I’ll face the music if that will stop this tragic play in which I’ve played Hamlet and half a dozen other futile parts.”

  Mr. M. said nothing for a moment. He smiled slowly, and then what he did say surprised Millum and me equally. For all he did was to call out quite clearly, “Mr. Silchester! Mr. Silchester!!”

  Millum whipped around, but I was so on edge that I had scuttled round just as quickly and appeared—a very dramatic entrance—at the door of the arbor before he could move.

  We looked at each other for a moment and then Mr. M. said, “Mr. Millum, you see my little test. Had you denied and gone back on what you first said, you see I had a witness.”

  Then, before the other could speak, he went on, “Believe me, this was not done to trap you. No, even then, had you denied that you knew anything, I had made up my mind. I would not have given you over, though I think my evidence is stronger and could have been put with greater power of conviction than I have suggested. What I can now tell you is that I had decided to test you. And had you broken under the first test—why, then, I would have given you a second chance of facing the music, Mr. Silchester, you see—not at his wish, but on my instruction—was concealed behind the hedge as the necessary second witness. Had you failed, all that I would have done would have been to use this second fact to re-strengthen what I had concluded was your true will, but which, for a moment, might well have wavered and broken when it saw, even at this late hour, a door of possible escape. Then, I repeat, I would have asked you again whether you would face the issue, and I feel sure you would. But I am glad,” and he held out his hand, which the other took, “I am glad you took the right way out when it looked far more likely that you could still go on taking what is really only the way further down. You answered my first bid, as I judged you would from what I had heard and then from what I’ve seen of you. Now let me introduce you to my colleague, Mr. Silchester. He may often have to play what seem to be rather side-line parts, as now. That does not mean that they are not essential to the play. And it does mean that because of his position he often sees most of the game.”

  Mr. Millum turned and held out his hand to me. His face was certainly worn. But, if I may put it sartorially and, I think, aptly, it was worn the right way. I could see in a moment that it wasn’t a strong face. But that, to me, was rather a relief than otherwise—my own rather indecisive contours always have to live, as it were, cut across by Mr. M.’s shearing profile. Mr. Millum was middle-aged, and the years had given him some grinding. But on the whole he had stood up to the pressure and taken a kindly, if not a steel-hard, polish. I was, then, prepossessed by him. Of course, it is rather a shock suddenly to be asked to take a hand which, as novelists have it, has on it someone else’s blood. But I took it, for hadn’t I just been called a colleague? And it was clear to me that if my partner did not show or evidently feel repugnance, neither must I. So we shook, as Americans say, and the grasp I was given added to my reassurance. Touch, as I hope I made clear at the start of this tale, tells for a great deal.

  We had hardly done more than resume our places, when our conclave was added to by a fourth—Jane. Any slight sense of disturbance was allayed by her annunciation:

  “Cook would like to say good morning and to ask would you three gentlemen like to stay for a small garden lunch? She would be very pleased to make it up for you, if you so cared.”

  Mr. M., from his consular chair, bowed finely and accepted for us. When, with her embassage successfully effected, she had withdrawn back to the authority that sent her out, Mr. M. remarked:

  “That is splendid. Now we will have plenty of time. We shall need it. So now, Mr. Millum, as I said, I think we have the ‘How.’ But, I repeat, I have not the ‘Why.’ And until I have that, the case has no more than a purely legal significance; and that we have decided to leave aside in favor of the real meaning. The ‘How?’ can tell us nothing about the real mystery here and everywhere; the real mystery, without which we shall never understand where we are or what we are, is the mystery of motive. Will you let us know that? For until we do, we three”—it was nice of him to keep me in the team—“we can’t see what we should do and how we are really to close this matter. For I agree with you, Mr. Millum, that, though we are agreed it will serve no purpose to put on this thing the false ending which the law attempts to do, we cannot leave it open. We must really try to find the true conclusion. And, I would add, when we found that, we shall know not merely more about why this happened; we shall know, if we wish, something more about why any and all of us behave as we do and become what we are.”

  The other merely nodded, offered me his seat, and, seating himself at Mr. M.’s feet, where the old man magisterially presided, began. He spoke as quietly and with as clear and orderly a recollection as a good witness will begin an account of a long scene, every detail of which may be of vital importance to the court.

  Chapter III

  MR. MILLUM’S “WHY?”

  “We met, Sankey and I, twenty-three years ago. We were both then still undergoing that lengthy and rather pointless thing called a thorough education, and were supposed, in a way, to be doing what is sometimes dignified as postgraduate work. We came across several other fellow pretenders—young, well-off people beginning to dabble in art or to play with the more refined journalism. We were, we told ourselves—I mean our loosely gathered group—the third and final flower of highbrow Londoners. The first flowering had been out in Chelsea, that western riverside suburb originally given its Bohemian tone by Turner, with his crimson sunsets and his alcohol; then retinted with Whistler’s silver and lapis, his ‘Battersea Bridge’ and other ‘River Nocturnes,’ and his hydrochloric wit; and finally seared with the fin de siècle stylisms of the Yellow Book and the scandals of Wilde in Tite Street, till it was sent to its winter quarters in Reading Gaol.”

  I sniggered a little at this epitome of West London cultural history. Mr. Millum, I saw at once, must in his past have been a wag, and I never can but be grateful for a little humorous relief. It helps revive my easily fatigued appetite for seriousness. Mr. M. did not need that apéritif, and, being for all intents and purposes judge, only bowed the narrative on.

  “Well,” continued Mr. Millum in his quiet, detached tone, almost as though he were reading aloud to us from a volume of memoirs, “there followed, soon after the First World War, a move out from Chelsea, a floating off of the self-styled cream from the more common human milk of talent. This trek of a self-chosen people settled right away in another corner of London, Bloomsbury—a district which once had been the home of respectability. That was part of the pose—to live as Bohemians in what had been the very center of Victorian repression.

  “And then we came, the third and final phase of acidulated good taste and undercut culture. We determined we would provincialize these ‘second thoughts’ that thought themselves the last and best, and show that their claim to be metropolitans was merely suburban. They were only London crossed with Cambridge—a fairly good French accent, a Braque or a Picasso on their walls, and perhaps a flat in Paris and a George Moore style. We were really almost cosmopolitan. Our lot chose then as the new migration point another sad little district which we might culturize—Notting Hill. We called ourselves the Notting Hill Nucleus.

  “We made a group of ourselves. We selected the peculiar character
istics which would give us distinction from those earlier efforts of clever coteries at singularity and exclusiveness. We had all been, as Who’s Who phrases it, ‘educated abroad.’ We had not been to the big public schools, and we’d nearly all had part of our education at one or two of the big Continental universities. We found London delightfully stuffy. Its dreary streets and drearier hotels had for us something of the foreign-flavored squalor that a tumble-down insanitary bazaar in Istanbul has for the average globe-trotter. We lived not by action but by reaction. Our point was always to enjoy what the vulgar public liked—but always for the ‘wrong,’ esoteric reasons. We decorated our rooms with the taste of the Edwardians—stuff which hadn’t yet become antique and was simply out of date. We were delighted that we could be amused by this melange, which, as clean bad taste, startled and shocked our clever visitors whom, to add to our sense of satire, we occasionally brought over from Bloomsbury to view us, express their disgust, and give us a further sense of our superiority. Not for us Baroque and Rococo, but the latest Gothic revival or ‘Jacobethan.’ We bought Alma-Tademas instead of Dalis. Our triumphs were replicas of ‘The Soul’s Awakening’ by Sant and ‘The Doctor’s Verdict’ by Sir Luke Fildes, which we hung on our walls instead of Modigliani nudes or dainty Duncan Grants. We shocked even the shockers. They, at least, revered their last and latest anemic, mannered art. We revered nothing, and treated aesthetics with the amused contempt and the same kind of sneers with which they treated ethics and theology. ‘To find the grotesque in everything, that is the secret of life,’ was one of our mottoes. We were sure we could trump everything with a laugh.”

  The younger Mr. M. looked up and paused. The older smiled slowly. But now, as this introduction grew, I was beginning to find it a bit overrich. The humor was turning a trifle uncanny. A note of what might be called madness was surely creeping in and tainting everything. As Mr. Millum went on, my uneasiness showed that it had strong grounds for its misgiving—rather an Irish phrase, I fear, but true.

  “As such little groups will,” he continued, “we felt we had the need for each other’s ‘moral support’—much as we would have despised ourselves for putting such a weakness into words. The fact remains that we put it into acts. We made our society quite an exclusive and definite thing. We had four rules: everyone must be at home in at least four languages; he must have no prejudices; he must have perfect manners; and, finally, he must have shockless taste. On the whole, I think we practiced what, in this queer creed of four clauses, we preached. We were rich—generally ‘only’ children, and most of us with dead parents: rootless creatures with really little grip or grasp but almost too good brains. Like balloons cut from their moorings. Naturally we were bored, bored stiff. Yes, to use the other old tired cliche, we were bored literally to tears when we were by ourselves. We had no emotional repressions, no financial limitations. As far as we knew, we had little sense of origin and descent, less of a way of living, and none of a goal.”

  “And so, to quote an author you have lately mentioned and who certainly (whatever one may think of him as a writer) did what he said: ‘Who can tell to what red hell the sightless soul may stray.’

  “Before I’ve finished, Mr. Mycroft, I shall have given my evidence for the truth, if not the elegance, of that statement. So naturally,” Millum sighed and went on, “naturally as we were bored we soon exhausted our own atmosphere as far as it could be replenished by our poor vitality. We certainly did not conserve ourselves, and we had about as much knowledge of mental hygiene or, for that matter, of physical, as most slum dwellers.

  “We could, I need hardly add, only enjoy our sex life, even if it could always be seen as one more exhibition of ridiculous bad taste. It, too, had to be perfectly in keeping with the art we collected as raw material for those sneers which gave us our only purchase on life. Our sense of superiority (and without that we would have collapsed) depended solely on the fact that we could laugh at any and every feeling, however high, however low—and always prevent others laughing at us by taking care, quite a lot of anxious care, to be the first to laugh at ourselves—from our wits to our lusts.

  “Hence, we had really come to the end of all our own resources. For when everything, without exception, is ridiculous, there is nothing left that has any real interest—one is on the frontier of insanity. Having no zest, we had to have more excitement. But where on earth were we to get it? I think it was Sankey himself who suggested that we should have a dining club for queer guests. Once a month each member of our group must pledge himself to find a really original character who came from a really original underworld. And he should be the guest of the evening. By telling us about his life, he might, for an hour or two, take us out of our dead end, of collecting Tademas, Poynters, Fildes, and Stones that were no longer funny, of playing Balfe and Sousa and trying to feel how exquisitely absurd and abominably futile they were.

  “We had, in the room where we used to dine, a motto written on the old gilt ceiling—it had been a second-rate dance place in the nineties. We sprawled the words in pseudo-Kufic lettering round the stucco mooring from which the chandelier depended. ‘Do almost anything if it’s sufficiently funny; Do absolutely anything if it’s sufficient money.’

  “This new idea did, for the first half year, succeed in giving a kick to our jaded life. That queer thing, luck, held, and we turned up odd find after odd find without ourselves—as we should have been—getting nipped by the kind of deep-sea fish we wanted to handle.”

  “Yes,” Mr. M. remarked almost to himself, “it does run through its phases, I’ve noticed. Further, I’ve observed the phases are three and are definitely spaced: Luck, Fate, Doom.”

  The other nodded and went on. “The first fish we landed was undeniably, from our point of view, a promisingly queer one, from a sufficient depth and quite up to our expectations of blackguardism. He called himself by the generic name Limey. He’d been taken up by one of the meaner weeklies that live on dubious advertisements and more dubious competitions, sailing nearer and nearer to the wind till they are prosecuted and suppressed. He’d been writing weekly what he claimed were straight autobiographical sketches of his adventures. He asserted that he was an Englishman. Limey, I understand, is the American underworld slang for what otherwise is called a Britisher. And his boasted record was that he had made a lucrative trade as a professional killer. He was technically a highjacker, and whether or no he was the bravo he made out, he had, without doubt, striven to live up to the second line of our ceiling motto. We had read his articles—or what was ‘ghosted’ for him—and were delighted by their bad style and worse morality. But, however mendacious, some flavor of authentic blackguardism did get through. We looked forward to a really entertaining evening.”

  “He was lanky in build, acned of skin, and with a palate that rejected our wines. We were still old-fashioned as far as our taste buds went and clung to sound vintages; had we been consistent, we should have served nothing but gin and ginger beer, raw spirits, and syrups. Still, we had plenty of hard liquor for guests, and this he took plentifully. When he was sufficiently relaxed, he showed us his armory, and on the butts—for he was a two-gun man—his record of kills. Maybe they were exaggerated, but it seemed to us that here was a firm and sound basis of positive murders. No doubt he would have returned our hospitality in the way we deserved, by holding us up at his next uninvited call. But the police got him the week after. He had forgotten that in Great Britain two guns as part of standard smart dressing are considered to be in too bad taste for a young man to be allowed to go about in public so sprigged out.

  “Before he left us that evening, he gave us a reference to his next possible employer. That was an Armenian who trafficked drugs into Egypt and thence into Europe. We brought him along as our next guest. He entertained us with the ingenuity of the methods—the camels whose beehive throats could be made to hold whole cargoes of heroin packages, and all the conjuror’s costumes of false boots and hats and umbrellas and walking canes. He w
as the first to mention not merely the scandalous fun of taking in the puritan police and all the official hypocrites—many of whom, he said, were in on his ring and took his stuff—but the other little enticement: money, big money. He certainly was well-off, coming in a fine car and an astrakhan coat.

  “‘Of course,’ he said, ‘mine’s the small and respectable side of the under-the-customs trade, almost what you’d call a ladylike occupation, everything done on the petite side. The big shots carry big cargoes—not drugs for the dopees, but guns—big guns for the toughs, the big toughs. I could give you boys some names! You’d like to meet the men who have guts and laugh at the mollycoddles who bow to bishops! Well, I could arrange an introduction to one of those if you liked—if you were really wanting to dine a man without prejudices. As for me,’ and he raised his flat hands palm out to the shoulders, ‘what am I but what my parents were? A poor old peddler, trying to get to poor worn people a little chemical peace—the only peace there is, after all.’ And he actually sighed and looked, as all Near Easterners suddenly can, more ancient and tired than the most desiccated Pharaoh.

  “He went soon after, but not before we had got the name of our next guest—an Alsatian, he claimed to be. He was very discreet, and when he talked he talked with a wonderful front of emotion which we found exquisite—it was in such perfect ill-taste. He spoke of his own dear Alsatia, and hummed The Blue Alsatian Mountains,’ of little people struggling to be free, of their need of a friend, of how easy it was for liberals to print pamphlets and shed tears and have meetings and do nothing. ‘Acts,’ he said, ‘gentlemen, deeds—they alone show sympathy.’