The Notched Hairpin (9 page)

Mr. M. answered as quietly, with no drama or even emphasis now, but just like a fellow worker on a common problem. “No, it's just on that point that I'm unsure. And indeed, throughout my life this is the issue on which I've become increasingly unsure. If we now just go on according to the conventional plan in this business, then all that really happens is that, just as you took over the responsibility of terminating another life, I, in turn, take over the same kind of futile control over yours. I don't think that means balance. On the contrary, surely it means that in point of fact we have failed to stop the real thing that is running everything down and running all of us into bankruptcy, doesn't it? Granted that Sankey was in the grip of it, and that you in turn were also caught, and that you tried to cut the losses by cutting short the life …?”

He paused, and it was clear that he was asking a real question of the other. And the other responded with equal detachment.

“I see your point. No doubt it is the real issue. But granted that, now what are we to do about it?”

“The first thing,” Mr. Mycroft resumed, as with his usual tidiness, even in the midst of what I think I may call the most delicate of negotiations, he proceeded to cover up his queer cards which had certainly taken the trick, “the first thing would be to know the ‘Why?', wouldn't it? One thing I have learned about Detection. Though it is often easy enough to get at the ‘How?', our science, like all the other sciences, is sadly incomplete. Very often it tends to get into stalemates because it can't get past the ‘How?' on to the ‘Why?'”

He stopped, and then suddenly his tone changed, became bright and sharp and certain.

“Well, then, let's start where we are. First and foremost, what do we know?” And not waiting for Millum to answer, but turning on him and watching him narrowly, Mr. M. said, with a certain lightness but with emphasis on the last word: “You see, there's no
proof!
”

Millum looked up at him, but Mr. M. sailed on: “Remember, the inspector, the official inquirer, has dismissed and dispatched his first notion and slight suspicion—it was never, I believe, strong—as quite false. His new assurance and seemingly clear proof have killed the old fancy. Theories, once they have been killed by their own parents, are very hard to resuscitate—no easier than dead men. Logical conclusions, when they have replaced false deductions, are seldom re-examined by practical minds. It takes a foot-loose amateur with all the time at his disposal to go back over his tracks. Busy men always have to go on and let bygones be bygones and mark bypaths as blind alleys. Even if I thought I could make another case, I expect I should fail to move this expert who alone can set the process moving again. Still less could I hope to persuade a good jury, faced by a good defense, to give a conviction.”

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 characteristics 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.”