Mycroft Holmes 03 - The Notched Hairpin

by H. F. Heard

  But if Mycroft represents Sabrina, the question remains of who represents Comus, the tempter who brings about the dissolution of the decadent. Without giving too much away, such a role is clearly played in The Notched Hairpin by O. K. Johnstone, the Islamic slave master to whom Sankey and Millum fall victim through their own decadence. Johnstone is the most problematic aspect of the novel, and certainly where the novel shows its age; modern readers may baulk at the description of his “black presence” (57). Yet it should also be noted that Johnstone appears in the context of subtle and epigrammatic jokes at the expense of colonialist hypocrisy: Johnstone notes that “Education is said to be liked by the white, but only if it leads the black to serve him. Well, we have learned the lesson” (61). Likewise, he remarks of his cocoa plantation that “For some reason, that rather cloying drink wrung from black labor always appeals to the Quaker and nonconformist conscience” (60); the supposedly Christian pleasures of temperance are enjoyable only because their exploitative conditions of production are forgotten.

  It is these, and similar, moral questions that are the real mystery of The Notched Hairpin. They are, for instance, at the heart of Mycroft’s criticism of the police (which, if we pursue the Miltonian analogy to its conclusion, stand in for the well meaning but ultimately ineffectual brothers). Mycroft argues that the police “can’t prevent [crime] because they are not really interested in the great problems of all detection-human motive, human desire, and the greatest of all tragedies, our vast desires and our mean, inadequate, hopeless means” (90) (and since Heard puts us firmly in the English Midlands, we might also note the echo here of George Eliot’s Middlemarch [1871–2] and its explorations of “spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity” [Eliot 3]). Whereas Hercule Poirot’s frequent invocation of the psychology of crime often ultimately appears as little more than window dressing for the working out of a more materialistic puzzle, Mycroft’s mention of the psychology of motive and desire is central to The Notched Hairpin. This is not to say that Christie’s novels were literary puzzles without characters (they were far from that) or indeed that Heard’s fiction is based on detailed psychological portraiture, since it is more interested in wider philosophical questions than in a particular criminal psychology. On that basis, another historical cotext for The Notched Hairpin is Bertrand Russell’s Authority and the Individual, published in the same year (developed from Russell’s Reith lectures for the BBC in 1948). Although Heard and Russell belong to very different philosophical perspectives, The Notched Hairpin and Authority and the Individual address similar questions; where does individual morality intersect with social responsibility, and with wider concepts of civilization itself? Put another way, how are individuals meant to respond to the rules and interdictions presented by society, civilization, and authority? And who represents that authority? Who is it who commands, “Don’t touch”?

  Dr. Christopher Pittard

  University of Portsmouth, UK

  Christopher Pittard is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth, UK. He has published articles and books on Victorian literature and culture and detective fiction, including articles for Victorian Periodicals Review, Women: A Cultural Review, and Clues: A Journal of Detection. His latest book is Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction (Ashgate 2011). Dr Pittard is also a member of the faculty of the Dickens Project at the University of California Santa Cruz and is on the editorial advisory boards of The Journal of Popular Fiction and Clues: A Journal of Detection.

  Works Cited

  Boucher, Anthony. “Who? Why? How?” New York Times Book Review October 16 1949. 35.

  Conan Doyle, Arthur. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. (1891) London: Penguin, 1981.

  ——. The Sign of Four. (1890) London: Penguin, 1982.

  ——. A Study in Scarlet. (1887) London: Penguin, 1981.

  Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. (1966) London: Routledge, 2004.

  Eliot, George. Middlemarch. (1871–2) London: Penguin, 1994.

  Gagnier, Regenia. Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public. Aldershot: Scolar, 1987.

  Housman, A. E. A Shropshire Lad. (1896) New York: Dover, 1990.

  Milton, John. Comus. (1637) In Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed Merritt Y. Hughes. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1957.

  Ousby, Ian. Bloodhounds of Heaven: The Detective in English Fiction from Godwin to Doyle. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976.

  Pittard, Christopher. Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011.

  Trotter, David. ‘Theory and Detective Fiction.’ Critical Quarterly 33.2 (1991): 66–77.

  Stashower, Daniel. Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle. London: Allen Lane, 1999.

  Van Dine, S. S. ‘Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.’ (1928) In Howard Haycraft, ed. The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1974. 189–93.

  Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. (1890) New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.

  THE NOTCHED HAIRPIN

  Chapter I

  THE RED BRICK TWINS

  “Don’t touch.”

  “I wasn’t going to! And if tact means touch, then I don’t think you’d be the worse for a little of it!”

  “I’m ready to apologize in advance for being so guarded, but, you see, this is quite a peculiar treasure.”

  “I don’t see. What I do see is a very commonplace object. But I am ready to accept your apology.”

  Yes, it was one of the usual Silchester-Mycroft squabble-sallies. The gauge of battle had arrived by the breakfast mail. I’d paid no attention to it until Mr. M., having finished all his letters, came to the small box—the kind of thing in which you sent a wrist watch. As I had finished the paper, I let myself enjoy his attack on it—rather like the cautious behavior toward some new sort of fly in its web. When he had opened it and peered inside for a while, out came the professional lens, and then at last I was called in. I couldn’t help being amused by all that preliminary ritual of inspection. For when I took a single glance, I could only conclude that the lens-play was either a mere reflex or a piece of semiconscious acting. What lay in the little casket, all dolled up with cotton wool, was a commonplace little paper knife of some dingy kind of metal. It was the sort of thing which, when Spanish was all the mode with second-rate interior decorators (a tribe which, at best, I care for very little), was described as a suitable objet d’art to go with stamped-and-gilded leather furniture and twisted iron fittings! Perhaps I had made some courtesy attempt to express an act of interest I couldn’t honestly feel, and this, my gesture of sympathy, had simply been snubbed. And when you have labored to pretend attention, it is irritating to be accused of precipitate meddling. Therefore Mr. M.’s further defense, “But it is very interesting!” did nothing to mollify my feelings.

  The play with so light a weapon as the lens having failed to draw me, heavy artillery was now brought to bear and provoke my curiosity. The portentous microscope was hauled into position and, to teach me procedure with treasures, the “object,” certainly not “of art,” was picked out of its case with tweezers and examined slowly from head to foot. Finally, while it lay in the microscope’s sacred and pure grips, Mr. M. did permit himself the liberty of poking at its handle end with a pin and examining, with special care, whatever piece of dust the pin could have picked up before it was raised to the rank of becoming an “exhibit.” Then, to see if by this time and all this play I had become agog with curiosity, he looked up and nodded. I saw no reason to nod back. And evidently seeing I was not to be soothed, he shut the box with a snap, carried it off like the reliquary of a newly interred saint, and locked it in his desk. Then at last, apparently becoming aware he had really been quite cavalier with my offer of courtesy, he remarked in his most ingratiating voice:

  “Do you know, I believe we both may need a small summer vacation. I
have lately been scanning the advertisements of houses to be let for August, and I believe I now have a couple in view, either of which might suit us very well.”

  At that I “perked up,” as my nurse used to phrase it. And when the cunning old bird added, “The two which I am hoping you might come with me to look at are, as far as I can understand, twins—that is to say, they were both built by the same architect in the same year—built as a pair, I presume. The date, I am told, has been placed on each of them by the builder—1760.” Then I couldn’t help relaxing into the quite neat reply: “Perfect! Set between the French and the English Regencies, between the severity of Queen Anne and the sparse elegance of the Brothers Adam—they should be a perfect balance of taste.”

  Indeed, I was so mollified I was quite ready to run on with a really entertaining little impromptu essay on “1760 as the Balance of English Architectural Style.” And Mr. M. actually seemed inclined to listen, when, at my saying again my key word, “balance,” he spun round, went back to his desk, whisked out the little case from where he’d locked it and, disregarding all the instruction he might have had, turned over the little sarcophagus reverently, rolling out of it onto the tablecloth the object it had immured. Then, picking up a knife, he began to play an awkward game of giant spilikins, with table knife and paper knife, trying to pick up the latter on the edge of the former. He proved quite clumsy at this rather silly pastime. But at last, after a number of trials, he did get his present-by-post teeter-tottering on the blade of the table piece.

  “Look,” he said.

  Of course there was nothing to see, or at least to applaud.

  “Do you notice anything?” followed, and to my honest antiphon, “No,” all he replied was, “It would be convenient, I have often thought, if only cutlers would think to make table knives and forks that way, wouldn’t it?”

  To my perfunctory, “Which way?” he replied, “Properly balanced; so that they wouldn’t fall off the plate, because their center of gravity would lie not at the handle end but forward.”

  The whole subject was so trivial and dull and, I could not help feeling, done maybe to spoil my really rather generous attempt to turn his offer to be agreeable into a little piece of conversation that would have been truly instructive, that my patience again began to ebb sharply, and to avoid further provocation I asked, “May I hear more about those two houses?”

  And to show that I meant what I said, when he replied, “Yes, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t go and see them today,” I again showed perfect cooperation.

  As a result we were off in the train within an hour. For when Mr. M. chooses to act, he can do so with a speed and precision I can often envy. When we were comfortably seated and had half an hour before lunch would be served, he took from his bag a Milton and handed me a nice little edition of Housman’s Poems.

  “We are going into country which these two poets illustrated. So, while I read ‘Comus’ and, being so much the elder, brood on the dreaming water of Sabrina fair, you, being of his age, can climb Tredon Hill’ with the Shropshire Lad,

  ‘And hear the larks so high

  About us in the sky.’”

  It was perhaps forty minutes after lunch—the right time for digestion to have reached that stage when it suggests mild exercise—that Mr. M. rose and, taking down his suitcase, said, “We shall be met at the station by a house investigator.”

  “Investigator?” I questioningly exclaimed. “Why go so far to avoid the obvious and not call him in common parlance an agent?”

  He smiled at my rally and replied in equally good vein, “Don’t you think that ‘agent’ sounds a little secretive, anyhow too committal, almost perhaps sinister? While ‘investigator,’ after all, commits us to nothing? We need not take the house if in any way you should feel that it might not suit you.”

  This was graciousness itself, and I hastened to assure him that all I had been told made me very much inclined to close the negotiations without further trouble.

  “Well,” he said as the train began to slow, “anyhow, we shall have seen an interesting piece, as museum authorities call anything that is more of the past than the present.”

  At the station a quiet-looking man came up to Mr. M. As only two obvious farmers and three ladies of uncertain age got off the train with us, the man did not have to use much acumen to recognize us. He ushered us out to where a delightful museum piece of a landau was waiting for us—all complete, with faded, moth-eaten cushions once royal-blue, and old stamped and tasseled leather window straps for hauling up the glass windowpanes when the cracked leather-japanned top hamper should be put up against the rain.

  But today was glorious and, imagining myself the Grand Duke of Baden driving to take “the cure” with my equerry and physician, I thoroughly enjoyed it as we bowled along through the streets of the quaint little town. Mr. Mycroft, unconsciously playing up to the role of court physician in which I had cast him, entertained me, the Royal Highness, with, “Twibury is a delightful little town. It has a medicinal warm spring. On your left you see the tower of the largely Saxon church, with the characteristic ‘long-and-short’ work of the quoins and the ‘midwall shafting’ of the tower windows, while round the town itself are some peculiarly happy examples of mid-eighteenth-century domestic architecture.”

  All this, which would have bored me had I been listening to it “out of character,” now that I was daydreaming of being a German princelet fell in so well with the whole fancy that I was already more than half in love with the place.

  When, then, through orchards in bloom, we drew up by a fine, stately brick house with a flight of mellow stone steps leading up to the fanlighted and column-flanked door, I did not need to decipher, in the finely wreathed ironwork which arched over the steps and made a nest for the doorlamp to rest, the date “1760.”

  I turned to Mr. M. as we came to a standstill and said, “I’m won already. We may stay here as long as you please.”

  I should have judged that he would then fail me, and his “Well, wait,” I felt, was meant to bring me down from a dream which, like enough, he saw I was enjoying. Certainly there seemed less and less to wait for, or to delay us from getting out of the small and rather stuffy quarters in which we’d cooped ourselves up in London to be in this—to quote somebody I’ve forgotten—“larger, serener air.” For as our attendant fell in behind us as we mounted the steps, the door opened. A most efficient maid stood by it—I could see at a glance, for I am a judge of maids. And my judgment was confirmed with every step we took over the threshold: the brass was like gold; the mahogany like tortoise shell; the pieces of silver bright as mercury; not a speck of dust anywhere, still less the thread of a spider; the chintzes lately calendered, bright-stiff but not repellent.

  As we passed through from the hall to the dining room, even Mr. M. was impressed and had the courtesy to say, “What a lovely polish all the woodwork has.” The maid bridled with pleasure; and then, not content with having given pleasure, he must overload the whole thing and begin taking that rather absurd overinterest. He bent and looked at the grand piano we were passing.

  “You use one of the new waxes, don’t you?”

  “Oh, yes, Sir! Sheen is just wonderful!”

  “None of the old oils and resins now!”

  “Oh, no, Sir, they was ever so much trouble, and when you’d done all your best, there they were, and never could you be sure whether the gloss would last; I’d never go back to those old things, would never let them in the house again, never!”

  He had, as usual, when casually and by habit of fidget picking at the dike of some special and really boring interest, unloosed a flow of utterly irrelevant technicalities. He gave no further encouragement, but it was too late—the technician had tasted blood, or rather resin or wax or whatever it was that whetted her appetite and loosed her tongue. She followed the three of us as we moved through the dining room to a stately, tall window at the end that opened out to another short flight of steps leading
into the garden. We went down these, I supposed to get a general view of the house from the back.

  The garden was as charming as the house. It was of the period and as unspoiled. There were pleached alleys of beech just coming into leaf, these, with their light green, framed against a solid background of close-clipped yew, and behind that again, closing in the whole, a fine, tall brick wall and some most promising peach trees covered with bloom. At the end I thought I saw a fish pond with a statue or two, while on the right this lovely enclosure had the only outer entrance, a fine green door, serenely shut.

  I was still at the top of the steps surveying this, which I already saw as my privy garden for the summer, when I noticed that Mr. M., the man he would call the house investigator, and the maid, still hoping to impart further technical tips on the polishing of furniture, had paused at the foot. There the pleached alleys met and made a kind of arbor. They went into this little bower, and I followed. It certainly was charming inside, and I became even more deeply rooted—for here, clearly, was the actual spot where I would sit, working at that very suggestive essay on “1760 as the Acme of English Taste.” The place was made for such work, for in the little enclosed bay which it formed, screened from the house, screened from almost all the garden, was a sort of sanctum sanctorum fitted as a kind of shrine. I felt the owner must have used it thus, for there was a beautiful stone chair carved in lovely half-marble Hopton Wood stone that time and a small bloom of lichens had deepened, so that it was more like moss agate. This noble seat was flanked on both sides by two stone tables of the same material, and looking down on each side were marble busts, now too gone a decent duck-egg green, of two Greek worthies. I felt in my bones that I had arrived. Here was a spot so manifestly prepared that, as little as a bird can fail to lay an egg in a properly finished nest, so little need I doubt that here was the inevitable environment so apposite to my genius that I must produce a masterpiece!