The Notched Hairpin (10 page)

“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 was 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.'

“From that he modulated into an account of the secret arms traffic—no names, but just a hint of what great causes of freedom were being sustained, and how. And here again, for the second time, and with a somewhat firmer emphasis, the money theme appeared. It was a gallant trade but expensive, but, thank heaven (yes, heaven was thanked in our hearing, and again we delighted in this worst of taste), if you sowed in such a gallant trade and with a right agricultural adviser—he was gutteral in his pleasure at his little simile—you reaped. Of course, you had denied yourself recognition; you did not expect gratitude, even if the side to which you gave the help won. Hence, you had to be content just with what he would call coverage—and coverage, we discovered, was not less than two hundred per cent profit.

“I believe he would have collected our subscriptions to his crusade—for he saw we had more money than we knew what to do with—if we had not been so green that we hadn't been thinking of the money line of our jingle couplet. We had been wanting to prove we couldn't be shocked, and here we were, overlooking hot money. When he was gone, someone raised the point, but most of us were really timid rats and afraid of the police, and so decided that he wouldn't have let us in on anything anyway.”

Mr. M. shook his head. “A nice point, and a good point at which to stop and reflect on a remarkable tale, if I may say so, and I have heard a few in my time. So Jane, who is now in the offing, is ‘nicking the minute with a happy tact.'”

And we had a delightful lunch which whetted my appetite for more of this odd tale that somehow—I could not make out how, but Mr. M. already seemed to suspect—led to us all being here in this place and in the spot where either a suicide or a murder had so lately been the latest incident.

“I think,” resumed Millum, “that our Alsatian big-scale assassin thought we were soft, so that when he rose he said, ‘I expect you find my kind of trade a bit humdrum and really almost aboveboard. I own it is; profit and patriotism are really my only interests. But you're more of the
jeunesse dorée
, so you'd really like the oddities of a luxury trade more than my straightforward hard-as-steel stuff.'

“He said it with sufficient mockery so that Sankey, who was, I think, the cleverest and toughest of us, replied, ‘Well, you are really always in danger of being recognized,' and, as the other got ready to seize the opportunity to enlarge his sneer at our expense, Sankey ended rather neatly, ‘and of being made the hero of the new nation, whatever it is, and of appearing with your bosom covered with its brand-new orders, and no doubt of acting as its chief ambassador!'

“Our guest saw that the laugh might be turned on him, so he shot out, ‘If you are so keen on trying to put your noses right up on what the world still rates as the worst smell, ask your own countryman Crofts, here! I mix with all if there's profit in it. And, as I see it, it's just the tough unders getting at the tough overs. That's life, it's a struggle. But beside us who do the tiger business, there are hyenas. As you want to see—as in the fairy tale—whether you can shudder, maybe you would like to see what I think to be a human hyena.'

“Perhaps he thought we'd back down. Even if we'd wished to, we couldn't. We couldn't have him leave with all the trumps. We had to get back our initiative. Sankey again spoke for us.

“‘We like our zoo to have all the contents of the Ark. With our dear vulgarian, Kipling, we call “nothing common or unclean” until it bores us.'

“‘All right,' our guest shot out as he turned to the door, ‘if you have the guts, ask Crofts—here's his address. He's always wanting to use my lines for his filthy freight, but I'm not hard enough up yet to let him in on my tracks. In my world we have got to let live in order to be able to get the profits which belong to us unrecognized patriots, called by the mincing liberals “merchants of death.” But I still have a nose, and I don't like Crofts near me.'

“We tittered at our guest's sudden adoption of high moral tone, and he, now quite angry, threw a card at us and left, remarking, ‘Well, I hope he'll get you into a mess, as he certainly can.'

“When he was gone we snatched up the billet-doux. It was a simple
carte de visite
on which was written Mr. William Crofts and a quietly good address in Mayfair. I couldn't think why the name seemed somehow to be familiar, but we decided, on the strong recommendation we had received, to ask him to be our next guest.

“His appearance was not unpromising. His clothes were good and quiet—Saville Row without a doubt. But the face and hands that emerged from the quiet cloth were delightfully unassuring. He was heavy and no doubt brutal, but the eyes, which were large, were very vigilant—dead and at the same time extremely wary. The mouth, too, though coarse, had round it a pleasant disconcerting tension of humor. Yes, he was undoubtedly a very callous man who, under the appearance of being a simple brute, was peculiarly cunning. He was just our dish, and he seemed quite ready to amuse us.

“He began with the usual coarse stories, told with ease and a certain finish; then introduced a slightly more varied flavor as we applauded. Finally, remarking that we were evidently adult, he began to talk of real underlife. As he began to illustrate, I remembered—and at once doubted whether his name was Crofts, and was simultaneously pleased with the quiet effrontery of the man. He had dropped the baronetcy, for that might be too obvious, but he had picked the name—or maybe the name had picked him—from the still grimmer partner of Shaw's otherwise grimmest character, Mrs. Warren. He began to talk with a lovely mixture of sentiment, business, and lechery of his ‘hotels.' And before we knew it, he was offering to let us stay at one.

“‘We have to pick our clientele,' he said, airily waving his cigar like a bookie. ‘Personal service, personal introduction; everything in the best taste—the apartments, the cuisine, down to the girls' dresses and conversation; perfect gentlemen on one side, and perfect ladies provided on the other. It's a large, exhaustive piece of work. There's nothing that can make for the comfort of the one and the rightful profit of the other that is not thought of by our firm.'

“We were half delighted at the disgusting hypocrisy of the man mixed with the cunning and brutality, and half feeling that we had had nearly enough. But then, none of us dared to show his lily liver to the mockery of the rest.

“Finally, as he saw we were hanging back, he remarked with a banter that nearly turned our flank, ‘Well, perhaps you're too modern to care for the standard honest commodity I trade in. I ought to have guessed—being myself really only the type of man that would be happiest as an English squire, if taxes let me—that your taste would be rather too sickly for my palate,' and he took a big swig of whisky, raw. ‘So, as you have your own idea of candy, and it certainly isn't mine and I don't cater in it, perhaps you'd be more interested in the capital and cash side. You could make quite a lot on quite a little.'

“He looked around to see if avarice would work where he feared lust had failed, I think someone made an appointment with him. But I did not feel, I am sure, the slightest moral prejudice, only that this cad was too near home, and that if he once got one in his hands one might find one was being squeezed by a most capable blackmailer. I'm sure that was my only reason for not going on in the direction in which now I see my tendency and events were forcing me.